Paedophile warning over teen websites bebo and MySpace

By NEIL SEARS, Daily Mail  3rd July 2006

A head teacher has warned pupils over the dangers of posting personal pictures on websites such as bebo and myspace.

Schoolgirls are putting intimate details of themselves on the internet in increasing numbers and are a high risk of falling victim to paedophiles, a headmistress has warned.

The grammar school headmistress has alerted parents to the danger of new 'online networking' websites after finding 700 pupils at her school alone had signed up to a single website, with many attaching revealing pictures of themselves and personal details.

Her warning became public yesterday, just as the Government's internet child-protection watchdog announced it was looking into the new virtual community websites such as MySpace and bebo.com, and pressurising their owners to protect youngsters.

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Yet despite the alert from Tunbridge Wells Girls Grammar School in Kent, pupils from the school were still last night showing inappropriate pictures of themselves online.

In moments our reporter found pictures of one 16-year-old girl at the school posing in a swimsuit and on her bed, and she had given enough details for her address and phone number to be discovered minutes later.

Tunbridge Wells Girls Grammar headmistress Linda Wybar wrote to all parents after investigating her pupils' use of the bebo website. Bebo specialises in creating virtual communities around particular schools, and like the similar MySpace website enables individuals to create their own webpages free of charge within minutes.

Users can write anything they like on their sites, and can post dozens of pictures of themselves for anyone in the world to see. Viewers can then write to the children anonymously, and try to arrange to meet them.

Research suggests up to 61 per cent of British 13 to 17-year-olds have personal pages on networking sites - with many of their parents remaining completely ignorant of what they are doing online.

Police have claimed more than 50,000 potential sexual predators are scouring the internet at any moment in time.

Mrs Wybar has now banned her pupils from using school computers to access bebo, but they remain free to do so from home.  Mrs Wybar wrote to parents: 'Most girls who have registered have included a potentially dangerous amount of personal detail, including full names, forms, names of friends, and perhaps most worryingly a photograph. 'Some of these photographs could only be described as soft pornography when viewed by the wrong people. We feel this lays the girls open to potential paedophiles.'

Mrs Wybar said last night: 'We've just been monitoring it, going onto the site occasionally and keeping an eye on what was going on, what girls were doing and saying and the way they were presenting themselves. 'Some were putting on photographs which had them in perhaps quite strappy tops, reasonably short skirts and so on, and they could come across really as soft pornography in the hands of the wrong person.

'What an 11-year-old girl views as being perfectly innocent isn't necessarily what some more unsavoury characters would view as innocent.'

The Government's new Internet watchdog, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, which was created two months ago, yesterday said it would be shining a spotlight on the new community websites because of their exploding popularity.

Research shows up to one in 12 of the eight million British children with internet access have gone on to meet someone in reality after they first made contact on the internet.

A spokeswoman for the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre said: 'There is phenomenal growth in social networking sites, and young people have been putting personal information there which could easily identify them.

'We don't want them to put that kind of information online - because where young people go online, so do paedophiles. 'We will be seeking new safety features from the website operators. It's not a question of closing them down, we're just trying to stay one step ahead of those who are going online to exploit children.'

Bebo UK insisted there were a number of safety features on its site - although those safety features seem to consist of simply of advice not to give full surnames, and to make web pages accessible only to friends. In practice users can say anything they like on their pages, and can lie about their age and everything else.

A fortnight ago Lee Costi, 21, a student from Haslemere, Surrey, was convicted of child grooming online after he had sex with girls aged 13 and 14 after meeting them through an internet chatroom.

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