The British Government recently launched a lb1.5 million campaign aimed at warning children and their parents about the dangers posed by paedophiles using Internet chat rooms.
In conjunction with this, a code of practice has been developed by the government, Internet bodies and child protection agencies, detailing measures youngsters and their parents can take to combat unwanted online attention.
The campaign was launched in response to increasing fears that paedophiles are using the anonymity of the Internet to trawl for potential victims, often by posing as youngsters.
Internet chat rooms are seen as areas where youngsters are most at risk of "grooming" - the term used to describe a paedophile building up a rapport with a victim.
In Britain, these fears are so great that proposals have been put forward to introduce a new offence called "sexual grooming", which will allow police to charge people who lure children into sexual games over the Internet, even before a physical offence takes place.
The big question is, just how much of a threat do Internet chat rooms really pose to children?
Aren`t the people who use chat rooms simply having some anonymous fun and using them as a kind of international school and virtual playground, or as a place to meet and make friends?
Ulterior motives
The answer, it appears, is yes in the majority, but there certainly is a minority of people out there who are using this new medium as a way of luring children into their vile clutches.
A recent UK study found that more than 900 000 British home users have chatted online - double the 487 000 surfers who had used Internet chat rooms in February 2000.
The report also found that an estimated 4.8 million children in the UK are now online, of whom over one million are under 14. Of these, around 51 500 chat regularly on the Web.
"The figures show us the scale of the problem that we face - it`s a growing interest and not a minority thing. The whole chat environment is one that appeals especially to the 11- to 15-year-old group," says Nigel Williams, director of Childnet International.
Do we really need another arena in which evil men can entice young children into their clutches?
Rodney Weidemann, journalist, ITWeb
The problem with the Internet is that it provides a safe haven for paedophiles. Nobody sees them and they don`t have to confront any other adults; everything is kept as a secret between them and the children.
Worse still, the so-called "grooming" process, which would take months in the outside world, is being condensed into weeks, thanks to the anonymity of the Internet. Children are being abused online by strangers in the "safety" of their own homes, even if a physical meeting is not set up.
Furthermore, in many instances children are visiting the chat site without parental permission, so are unlikely to tell their parents of any wrongdoing.
Action needed
Possibly the scariest thing about this is that the very industry which makes its money from these chat rooms appears loathe to do much about it.
Last year, Patrick Green was sentenced to five years in jail for having sex with a 13-year-old girl he had met in a chat room hosted by Yahoo. His was the first case of its kind in the UK, although since then, cases have been appearing in the courts with sickening regularity.
The Green case was held up as an example that should have given the Internet industry the warning it needed to get its act together. Sadly, since then, it hasn`t done nearly enough to protect children from the predators who lurk anonymously on the Internet.
UK television personality, Carol Vorderman recently collaborated with the former editor of ZDNet News UK, Richard Barry, in an investigation that proved beyond doubt that children are two clicks of the computer mouse away from a paedophile.
Posing as "Tina Bell", a 12-year-old girl living in London, they went onto chat rooms hosted through Yahoo Messenger and discovered that within one minute of entering a chat room filed under "Romance", Tina was contacted by a paedophile.
Within five minutes the screen was awash with messages from men who wanted to "chat", many of them typing messages of love and sex.
This is the terrifying truth that lurks behind the world of Internet chat rooms - a phenomenon that is gaining increasing popularity in SA as we find ourselves getting ever closer to truly bridging the digital divide.
My fear is that it will take an incident like the Green case in the UK - perhaps even several such incidents - before SA decides to enact legislation to regulate these cyber-haunts and protect our children.
When one thinks that SA already has the awful reputation for being the child rape capital of the world, do we really need another arena in which evil men can entice young children into their clutches?
I believe that it is time our government looks intently into the potential dangers these chat rooms pose and formulates binding legislation that will protect minors from the lurking paedophile threat.
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