- A 42 year-old mother of four from Houston flirts with a Canadian teen, then flies to Toronto, sleeps with the 16 year-old boy
- A 49 year-old woman from Oregon is arrested by the FBI after sharing sexual photos with a 14 year-old boy from Tennessee
- A Danish man is arrested, found to have thousands of photos and videos of young boys. He purchased these in-game with virtual currency
Have we lost our collective mind? What is going on with that small minority of World of Warcraft (WoW) players who used to be content just escaping reality 16 hours per day, but now are the next wave of pedophiles online?
And what are these boys thinking when they share photos and videos of themselves masturbating with strangers they met in WoW? Where are the parents?
Some years ago, I worked with adolescent and adult sexual offenders, all of them male. I can confidently tell you that this current behaviour has me shocked, frustrated and angry despite my experience. These sexual predators are ruining World of Warcraft for the millions of normal players who view the game appropriately – as a minor diversion, an entertaining hobby.
The first case I listed is that of Andrew Kane and Lauri Price. Recently, I gave an interview for a national television newsmagazine program here in Canada. Lauri Price had to know that Andrew was underage, or at very least too damn young for her to be messing around with, but she persisted, and now faces multiple felony charges in Texas, including the possibility of federal ‘sex tourism’ charges which could land her in prison for many, many years.
What was going through her mind? Was she so desperately lonely that looking in an online game was the only option? Ms. Price apparently has (or had?) a husband and four kids, at least one of whom is older than Andrew Kane. So she’s unhappy and looking for a new love, right?
Wrong!
This relationship is as close to child sexual abuse as anything I ever saw as a professional social worker. Consider the power imbalances in any of the three scenarios I have presented. These kids have all been sexually abused, but that’s not the most disturbing part. Many of them actively participated in the abuse by providing ongoing correspondence with their abusers. In the Andrew Kane case, he slept with Lauri Price when she arrived in Toronto over the Christmas holidays.
Very disturbing indeed.
So, who’s to blame? Many are inclined to cast blame at software designers Blizzard Entertainment, but let’s have a quick reality check. All of these young people would have had multiple opportunities to report the inappropriate sexual advances of their offenders, but they didn’t. So, are parents to blame? Having spoken to Andrew Kane’s mother, I can tell you she and her husband did everything in their power to protect their son, but he became a victim anyway.
Other gamers have related stories of “parties” on certain World of Warcraft servers where they have been “cyber-ed” by sexual predators, or just people being jackasses. One person told me of walking into a bedroom in the Goldshire (Alliance) inn, discovering two avatars laying on a bed, engaged in sexual roleplaying.
So, what’s going on here? The sexual abuse of children is rarely about sex, and almost always involves the misuse of power and control to manipulate victims into doing something they normally would not do, ever! We see this most clearly with the Danish predator who offered virtual gold and items in exchange for sexual images.
The victims had to be saying something like this to themselves: “It’s just naked pictures; it’s not like I had sex with the guy…”
True, but they’ve done worse. They have joined with their offenders to create a hyper-sexualized subculture within World of Warcraft, and that should have parents, police and educators terrified for the safety of this generation of gamers.
Blizzard Entertainment did not create this dangerous climate, but with the cooperation of gamers and their loved ones, they can help bring it to an end. No sexualized image, shared online, comes without a huge cost to the welfare of the victim, but also to the gaming community. The floodgates have been opened, and sexual predators have invaded your favourite game.
It’s time for players to take back World of Warcraft, one report at a time. I have raised the issue of sexual predators in online games with a major metropolitan police force, recommending that sex crimes detectives look for predators in-game. More importantly, however, parents and educators need to rethink the real dangers of inappropriate sexual conduct online. Kids who might never share their personal information in a chat room are compromising their personal integrity in-game, with disastrous consequences.
It’s time for players of all ages to adopt a zero tolerance policy for sexual predation in World of Warcraft and other MMORPG’s. The sooner the community comes to its senses and works together to eliminate these criminals, the better.
Tags: Andrew Kane, Blizzard Entertainment, gaming industry, sexual predators, teens play video games, tips for parents, virtual worlds, world of warcraft
