I was a victim of online grooming as a teenager. I stress a strong trigger warning on this post.
This all happened about eleven years ago when I was 14. I was on a music online forum and there was a 19 year old boy on there at the time who used to always troll me / take the mickey out of anything I posted. One day I messaged him asking him what his problem was and to stop and he agreed we should “turn over a new leaf and start again” and he gave me his MSN Messenger email address so that we could chat on there.
This started off fairly innocuous. We would just talk about music and shared interests, but then he started flirting with me and complimenting me excessively. Looking back, I think I thought this was a compliment at the time but he eventually coerced and encouraged me to begin the first of many instances of performing sexual acts on myself on webcam. During these, he would phone me and tell me what to do each time and I would always hear him “finish”. Afterwards, he would always tell me that I couldn’t tell anybody about these instances. I just thought at the time it was because he wanted to be private about it but since growing older I’ve realised that it was probably because he realised that it was wrong. Sometimes I try to protest and say I didn’t want to but he would keep pushing me to do it and I really didn’t want to get trolled again or be “in his bad books” again so I kept doing it each time.
He would often meet up with other people from the music forum we were on and he told me that he had slept with one of the other (of age) girls on there and had really “wished it was me”. I’m not sure how I felt about that at the time really.
We met in person eventually as he got tickets to go to a gig in London and asked me to go with him. My parents didn’t pick up that anything “strange” was going on and so they said yes and that I could go. I really wish they had just said no. He touched me while we were there inappropriately over my clothes that day. I freaked out and had to pretend I wasn’t when I met my parents at my home train station.
He apologised to me by text a couple of days later, through which we had no contact. We continued talking as normal and a few weeks later he went completely silent for a couple of days. I found out from someone else on the music forum that he had had a car accident and that he was now blind and suffering from memory loss. We lost touch due to this as I was young and didn’t really know how to handle this or what to say. His MSN and Facebook accounts disappeared and I didn’t hear from him for years.
When I was 18, 7 years ago, I got a friend request from him on Facebook. He reached out to me to apologise for everything that he did to me. He said he remembered some of it but not all due to the memory loss but that what he did remember didn’t show him in the best light and he regrets it now. I told him OK, he then kept trying to call me and then left me several messages asking me to call him...one of them said he wanted me to talk sexually to him again. Clearly he wasn’t sorry and so I deleted and blocked him and have had no further contact.
As I have gotten older, this has all played on my mind somewhat. I think I freaked when I got to the age of 19 myself and realised that it wasn’t necessarily normal to be attracted to school age teens. I certainly wasn’t myself! I realised how young that is and how easily influenced I was at that time.
I’ve confided in friends close to me who all say to me that I had been groomed and abused. Work recently sent me on an NSPCC Course regarding Child Abuse and it really triggered me because the “signals” of online abuse and grooming were all there.
What I am really struggling with is how my parents, who knew the age gap and that we were talking, let me spend time with him. I would never let any future child of mine do that. I have since told them the true extent of what happened, only a couple of years ago, and after a year and a half of therapy sessions. Neither of them apologised to me. They were visibly shaken. I still resent them for allowing this to happen to me. I was young and they should have protected me.
The therapy that I had also allowed me to see that in my adult romantic relationships, I had been leading with the sexual side of myself, because this is how I had “learned” to get attention from men. I have since untrained this behaviour in myself but it took some doing. I’m now in a happy relationship of three years, my partner is supportive and of course, knows all about this.
I am not sure whether it is the lockdown but I’m spending quite a lot of time in my own head about this at the moment. I’m feeling a fair bit of shame and sadness that this happened to me, combined with disappointment in my parents. Apart from going back to therapy, I’m not sure what else I can do to rid myself of these feelings.
Sorry for the long post. I wasn’t going to post it but I’m not sure who else could offer me impartial opinions.
This all happened about eleven years ago when I was 14. I was on a music online forum and there was a 19 year old boy on there at the time who used to always troll me / take the mickey out of anything I posted. One day I messaged him asking him what his problem was and to stop and he agreed we should “turn over a new leaf and start again” and he gave me his MSN Messenger email address so that we could chat on there.
This started off fairly innocuous. We would just talk about music and shared interests, but then he started flirting with me and complimenting me excessively. Looking back, I think I thought this was a compliment at the time but he eventually coerced and encouraged me to begin the first of many instances of performing sexual acts on myself on webcam. During these, he would phone me and tell me what to do each time and I would always hear him “finish”. Afterwards, he would always tell me that I couldn’t tell anybody about these instances. I just thought at the time it was because he wanted to be private about it but since growing older I’ve realised that it was probably because he realised that it was wrong. Sometimes I try to protest and say I didn’t want to but he would keep pushing me to do it and I really didn’t want to get trolled again or be “in his bad books” again so I kept doing it each time.
He would often meet up with other people from the music forum we were on and he told me that he had slept with one of the other (of age) girls on there and had really “wished it was me”. I’m not sure how I felt about that at the time really.
We met in person eventually as he got tickets to go to a gig in London and asked me to go with him. My parents didn’t pick up that anything “strange” was going on and so they said yes and that I could go. I really wish they had just said no. He touched me while we were there inappropriately over my clothes that day. I freaked out and had to pretend I wasn’t when I met my parents at my home train station.
He apologised to me by text a couple of days later, through which we had no contact. We continued talking as normal and a few weeks later he went completely silent for a couple of days. I found out from someone else on the music forum that he had had a car accident and that he was now blind and suffering from memory loss. We lost touch due to this as I was young and didn’t really know how to handle this or what to say. His MSN and Facebook accounts disappeared and I didn’t hear from him for years.
When I was 18, 7 years ago, I got a friend request from him on Facebook. He reached out to me to apologise for everything that he did to me. He said he remembered some of it but not all due to the memory loss but that what he did remember didn’t show him in the best light and he regrets it now. I told him OK, he then kept trying to call me and then left me several messages asking me to call him...one of them said he wanted me to talk sexually to him again. Clearly he wasn’t sorry and so I deleted and blocked him and have had no further contact.
As I have gotten older, this has all played on my mind somewhat. I think I freaked when I got to the age of 19 myself and realised that it wasn’t necessarily normal to be attracted to school age teens. I certainly wasn’t myself! I realised how young that is and how easily influenced I was at that time.
I’ve confided in friends close to me who all say to me that I had been groomed and abused. Work recently sent me on an NSPCC Course regarding Child Abuse and it really triggered me because the “signals” of online abuse and grooming were all there.
What I am really struggling with is how my parents, who knew the age gap and that we were talking, let me spend time with him. I would never let any future child of mine do that. I have since told them the true extent of what happened, only a couple of years ago, and after a year and a half of therapy sessions. Neither of them apologised to me. They were visibly shaken. I still resent them for allowing this to happen to me. I was young and they should have protected me.
The therapy that I had also allowed me to see that in my adult romantic relationships, I had been leading with the sexual side of myself, because this is how I had “learned” to get attention from men. I have since untrained this behaviour in myself but it took some doing. I’m now in a happy relationship of three years, my partner is supportive and of course, knows all about this.
I am not sure whether it is the lockdown but I’m spending quite a lot of time in my own head about this at the moment. I’m feeling a fair bit of shame and sadness that this happened to me, combined with disappointment in my parents. Apart from going back to therapy, I’m not sure what else I can do to rid myself of these feelings.
Sorry for the long post. I wasn’t going to post it but I’m not sure who else could offer me impartial opinions.
. That sounds so bloody horrible.
