I was going to post this to a Gaia forum, but I realized that I was putting myself at risk of cries of 'TL;DR' and 'This should be a journal post' and 'there's not enough to discuss here' and I didn't know which forum I should have posted it in anyway, so I decided not to bother with the forums at all. But, as I'd spent a little while on the post, I didn't want to delete it and move on. I get all possessive over my writing, even when it's silly stuff like this.

So, it is a journal post after all. But, as I don't use my Gaia journal because it is made of lose and fail (and, more to the point, I already have an online journal), it's here instead.

Anyway, something I'm noticing with more and more frequency in Gaia Towns is people using it as a virtual singles' bar and keeping the actual 'cybering' part of it off-site. There are still a lot of annoying little n00blets in their generic I-Want-Cyber bikinis out there, but my guess is that some people are getting wise to the fact that other users are sick of cybering and reporting it when they see it, and are looking for a 'safe space' to do it in which won't lead to account loss for a TOS breach. Unfortunately, this often leads to them becoming a lot less safe.

The problem is, a lot of them appear to be far too young and ill-informed about the inherent dangers of internet interaction to do this without putting themselves at risk of far more than an account ban.

When this kind of soliciting is restricted to exchanging MSN screennames, this doesn't strike me as too bad. Personally, I'm less free-and-easy with my IM screennames. I like to at least know a person a little before I give them my SN. The quickest turnaround between my first starting to properly talk to someone and exchanging SNs with them, outside of the people I met through Weiss Kreuz RP, was probably with pichi. I know this isn't necessarily the way everyone works when it comes to their IM buddy list, and that it's a lot easier to chat over IM than in Gaia towns, and as contact details go a screenname is one of the most anonymous. I wouldn't want to have an IM conversation with a random person just because we both used Gaia and had MSN installed, but I'm not fifteen.

It starts to get a little sketchier, to my mind, when witnessing generic n00b males - and usually it's the males who do this, or at least accounts with male avatars which where it comes to the new users is usually the same thing - standing in Towns spamming messages like 'girls with MSN and webcam type 345'. The fact they're doing this in a cyber hangout doesn't exactly make me think that they're eager to see the girl's face. A free girlie show seems more likely than a desire to see their chat partner's face.

The next rung? Asking to chat specifically with girls who have pictures of themselves online - or asking random girls to post pictures of themselves.

Of course, by 'pictures' a lot of these guys don't just mean portrait shots.

The worst example I saw of this was when I ran into a couple in an otherwise uninhabited block talking about photographs the girl was going to send her male 'friend'. It seemed bad enough to me that the girl was going to send a picture of herself to someone who was probably a total stranger; it was even worse when she mentioned that she'd posted them on a site that required its users to be eighteen or over before they uploaded them, and that she'd lied about her age there to upload them for him. She had the sense to PM him the image link, but she didn't have the sense to realize how very stupid it was to post what were most likely naked pictures of herself, an underage girl, to an adults-only website in the first place.

This isn't where it ends, either. I've seen people soliciting for phone sex. I've seen people specifically asking for people who live near them, with the intention of arranging real-world hookups. Kids are giving out contact details to total strangers who they perceive as 'safe' presumably just because they've met them on Gaia hiding behind a little pixel doll, and grown-ups don't use Gaia, right?

A lot of the people who defend cybersex on Gaia say that it's harmless, that sex is perfectly natural and that the chances of getting frisky with an Internet predator are very, very slight. Maybe so, if you the user know the risks and are savvy enough to look after yourself - but it seems to me that kids who are smart enough to look after themselves are usually smart enough not to hang around Gaia towns soliciting for pixel-sex. Factor in the people asking for peep shows via webcam and finding partners willing to give them; factor in the girls posting 'sexy' pictures and not quite realizing that once something gets online you lose a lot of control over it, and if it's online anyone can see it, not just their 'boyfriends' or cute guys their own age, but also parents and teachers and prospective employers and, yes, perverts; and factor in the people trading real-world contact details to total strangers, and it's all starting to look a lot less like the harmless fun its defenders claim it is and a lot more potentially exploitative.

Then factor in the fact a lot of kids are just plain clueless and even the smart ones often aren't exactly difficult to sucker. Kids don't fall for predators because they're stupid, but because they're kids.

Personal anecdote time: I know this from experience. When I was first online back in 19TwizzaWoorgaCoughCough, I used to be a regular on something called the LA Live chatroom. (The site, needless to say, is long gone.) While I was there, I met a man who professed an interest in me. At the time it was nothing; it was just a bit of harmless fun, and it made me - a shy, bookish and socially awkward kid - feel good and special to know that someone out there thought I was attractive. The fact that he was in his late twenties at least just didn't matter to me because I was a sixteen year old girl. Now, it could be that he genuinely did, as he told me, assume that I was older at first and genuinely did - blame Occam's Razor if you blame anything. The simplest answer is usually the right one and in this case the simplest answer is this: he was grooming me. A lot of the things he said to me I have since discovered are failrly common parlance amongst Internet predators chasing underage girls, and the girls who fall for them are usually shy, socially awkward, and likely to be perceived by adult onlookers as too intelligent to need much warning.

Fortunately, for me, it stayed utterly safe - I am of course a Brit; he lived in Minnesomethingorother. Couldn't but stay safe. It doesn't always. If we'd both lived in England, or I'd been an American girl and close enough to Minnesomethingorother to actually see him, things could have gotten very ugly. They might not have, but they could have, and looking back on the whole thing ten years on I can't believe how naive I was and can't help thinking that, courtesy of my nationality, I dodged a bullet.

These kids, and I believe from their thoughtless and irresponsible behavior that a lot of them are kids, are putting themselves in very real danger - and, because it doesn't really involve things they're doing on Gaia, I don't even feel I can report them to the website.

You can't, after all, blame the bar if a guy date-rapes the girl he met there once they get back to his.