Universal truth time: Brass Eye was and is, very funny. In particular, the infamous Paedogeddon special way back in 2001 - 17 years ago, that was. And now, because it’s 2017 and it appears that every single television show to ever contain a ridiculous scene has now actually predicted real life (Black Mirror and its pig-fucking PM, The Simpsons and Trump as president, etc), we now have another to add to the list. And much like the others, it didn’t predict a future that we all want to be living in.
So, to Brass Eye and its unfortunate real-life mirror. Sadly, a paedophile was recently discovered to have been posing as a road, in order to attract children. Yep, it’s essentially a repeat of this scene, where Chris Morris earnestly warned viewers about a paedophile disguised as a school, who had been ‘getting away with it for 12 years’ in Sheffield.
OK, so it’s not happened in such a literal sense, but the ‘sentiment’ is still the same.
Maureen Griffin, a forensic psychologist and leading expert on social media safety, has said that paedophiles have “come up with new and novel ways of gaining access to our children’s information”.
It turns out that sex offenders are disguising themselves as roads, ice-cream and even chicken nuggets, but all through the medium of Facebook. They’ll set up an innocent looking page, then friend-request children to get access to their photos and info.
Griffin said of one incident, that a pervert set up a Facebook page of the road on which a girls’ secondary school was located:
“Over 400 girls at the school accepted ‘the road’ as a friend. The owner of the account was a known convicted sex offender who made no effort to contact the girls, he didn’t follow them or meet them in real life or wait outside their school.
“He simply collected their photos, pictures from teenage discos, girls’ sleepovers, and a range of selfies.”
Another example was paedophiles setting up accounts on musical.ly:
“Musical.ly… was a place where children could lip sync to their favourite songs and involves short little videos of the children dancing around singing their songs and posting the videos online.
“It is for 5, 6 and 7 year olds and I dealt with a case during the summer of a girl on musical.ly who had 20 followers — she did not know four of them. One of her followers told her that he would get her more likes for her songs if she sang her song again, this time in her underwear.”
So, if you’ve got children of your own, keep tabs on their social media activities, if at all possible, or at least clue them up to the sinister ways in which sex offenders are working nowadays. Let’s just get rid of Facebook altogether eh?
(Image: Channel 4)
