It started at a slumber party when her daughter was 12. Christal Martin thought nothing about letting her daughter spend the night in a house with other girls where she knew her daughter would be safe.
What she didn’t take into account were the dangers lurking out on the internet. Technically, the rules say you have to be 13 to enter Omegle, a website enabling anonymous one-on-one video chats with strangers, though users are not required to set up an account. The site offers to pick a random person for you to chat with if you can’t find one yourself, and encourages users to remain anonymous unless you want to identify yourself, which it doesn’t recommend. A warning also lets you know that “predators have been known to use Omegle, so please be careful.”
That night, Martin’s daughter met several friends online, and soon, she was spending a lot of time on her phone. She began hiding her screen when her parents looked over her shoulder and increasingly began spending more time alone in her bedroom. Martin and her then-spouse noticed the changes in their daughter’s behavior but wrote it off as teenage moodiness.
Read the full article here: https://county17.com/2020/10/29/part-iii-grooming-victim/
