The mother of a 12-year-old girl said her daughter was left “upset and very shaken” after receiving a number of creepy messages on Instagram from a 16-year-old boy she did not know.
British mother Pauline Yau shared the messages and an explanation to Twitter as a warning to other parents about social media.
She said her daughter had a private Instagram account and had to ask her for permission before accepting any friend requests, but one day received a direct message out of the blue from a complete stranger.
The conversation between 16-year-old Isaac and her daughter started out normal but her daughter was suspicious. Then, it got “pervy” despite the girl telling him she was only 12.
He called her “pretty and hot” and asked for a selfie, which the girl said she was not comfortable with.
“Then he just turned in to a giant sex pest,” Yau wrote.
“Tbh I’m thinking about playing with myself,” Isaac told her daughter.
“Do you play with yourself?”
Once again, Yau’s daughter reminded Isaac that she was 12 years old, but he continued by asking her what her bra size was.
Yau said that by this point her daughter was upset and shaken and came to her.
"Luckily we've had the chat about social media and knows to come to me when things don't seem right."
She said Instagram's reporting options didn't allow her to report him for DM content.
Yau managed to track to boy down on Facebook and found out he lived in North Carolina. She tracked down his school and reported the incident, with screenshots, to its principal and the local police, but she hasn't heard back.
"I haven't heard anything back. No apology, no sorry, no details of any sanctions or anything. But @instagram have deleted my daughter's account. So that's nice of them," she said.
She encouraged parents to talk to their children about social media.
"Trust them but let them know they absolutely have to come to you the very second anything seems wrong.
"When something does go wrong take screenshots of everything."
On Thursday morning UK time, Yau shared an update to say that four days after the incident she had received "no communication from the perpetrator’s school, the police dept I reported the crime to or @instagram."
"Nobody cares," she continued. "Well listen up because I care on behalf of kids everywhere and I’m not letting go of this."
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Top Comments
That 16 year old boy is a little twat who I hope is charged with some sort of act of soliciting pornographic material from a young person.
Also, once again, that 12 year old girl shouldn't have been on IG, even though all her friends were on the app. I hope her mother deletes the account until she is of the proper age. Being on that app that young means that she has access to all sorts of content well beyond her maturity level to deal with, and, as we have seen above, has to deal with interactions with people that are also well beyond her maturity level to deal with.