Child Rescue Coalition is proud to have collaborated with the UK Border Force to produce this awareness raising video from the perspective of a parent. This is based on a real case and is the second in a series of three.

Parents everywhere are struggling to keep up with technology. Knowing what makes an online game or app dangerous allows parents to identify the dangers and to empower their children to protect themselves in the online environment.

This parent’s child became the victim of an online predator while playing Roblox, please make sure your family is not the next one to suffer from this horrific abuse.

These online video games seem fun and harmless, some even look like old arcade games. Parents assume they’re safe…it’s for kids. But the stories are very clever, seductive even, they suck kids in. And child predators are going to go where children are.

With our son, we thought we were strict. After school he had a couple hours for homework, then an hour for video games. That’s it. But the thing is, some of these games don’t have parental controls. So everything is opened up.

We started noticing he was going over his time, you know, the laptop started moving out of our view. We caught him lying a couple of times, he was avoiding our eyes, his personality changed.

We came home one night and the laptop was sitting there. That’s how we found the messages, pictures, videos – the things that were sent to him, what he was asked to do.

He had been dragged into it by one of these predators. It moved onto the dark web. You know, just horrific stuff, things I haven’t ever seen in my life. Our son had just turned 10. It was just traumatic, so unexpected, we thought we should have seen it happening, that we should have known, or been there to protect him. We felt helpless, it really is every parent’s nightmare.

We reached out to the police right away. They let our son know it wasn’t his fault. They said the guy who did this, he was able to wipe all his data. He was a ghost. So, he’s still out there.

Kids are looking for an escape into another world, and they meet people. And they think ‘this person is nice to me online, so he’s my friend.’ But we need to tell kids that this isn’t true. They’re strangers and they can be dangerous.

If I had it my way, these video games, these apps that are supposedly just for “fun”, they’re cesspools, they should be shut down. It can take as little as two minutes for a kid to be approached online.

You don’t need to police your kids, but you have to monitor their online behavior because a stranger could be talking to them at any time.  Have rules and consequences when those rules are broken. All devices, all video games, need to have parental controls on them, and if a game won’t let you, then your kid can’t play. Period.

We learned the hard way  about what it takes to protect kids out there, online. And we want to make sure parents know, so they don’t have to learn the same hard lesson we did…so we can make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Watch all of our educational videos here, and please SUBSCRIBE to our channel for more resources. This resource is available in 10 native languages, and is presented by Child Rescue Coalition, and made possible through the support of the UK Home Office. We are grateful for your support in spreading this message to protect kids across the globe.