‘My son was forced to perform sex acts over Skype’

The mother of a teenage boy who tried to take his own life after he was tricked into performing sex acts online has warned of the “devastating” impact of social media grooming.
Ben – not his real name – was 14 when he exchanged messages with what he thought was a girl of a similar age.
It was only after corresponding for a number of weeks that he discovered he was talking to a man, who then used threats and blackmail to coerce him into sending sexual images and performing sex acts live on Skype.
The material was shared with five other men who then bombarded Ben with further demands.
Ben, from Yorkshire, complied for two years before he started having panic attacks and attempted to take his own life.
His mother said she knew nothing of the abuse until police turned up at her door after arresting the perpetrator.
“I’ve never asked Ben about exactly what happened because he doesn’t want to talk about it”, she said.
“But I do know he got to know things about his family, where they work and then when Ben said he’d had enough, that he wasn’t interested, the blackmail started. The demands just got bigger…he said he’d kill Ben’s family if he didn’t do as he was told.”
The abuser was later given a nine-year extended prison sentence.
‘He’s scared to go out’
But the woman says he left a lifelong impact on her family.
“We used to do a lot of things together. That stopped,” she said. “Ben doesn’t really go out socialising. He’s just very wary of people around him.
“So it has put a big impact on his social side of life because he doesn’t do it. And that’s very sad that a young boy is scared to go out and socialise with his friends.
“I wouldn’t want this to happen to anybody else. What we as a family have gone through is devastating.”
Her warning comes after the NSPCC revealed the number of online grooming crimes recorded by police across Yorkshire and northern Lincolnshire has increased by 61% since 2017.
More than 3,000 offences have been recorded in that time.The charity said Snapchat was the most common platform used by perpetrators to target children online last year, with the messaging app cited in almost half of grooming cases across the UK.
WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram were also used.NSPCC chief executive Sir Peter Wanless said: “One year since the Online Safety Act became law and we are still waiting for tech companies to make their platforms safe for children.“We need ambitious regulation by Ofcom who must significantly strengthen their current approach to make companies address how their products are being exploited by offenders.“It is clear that much of this abuse is taking place in private messaging which is why we also need the UK Government to strengthen the Online Safety Act to give Ofcom more legal certainty to tackle child sexual abuse on the likes of Snapchat and WhatsApp.”
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