After a 12-year-old girl disappeared with an American she met on the Internet, CHRIS TITLEY found out how easy is it for an adult to infiltrate

the teenage chat rooms

I HAD never been in a chat room before. Unless you count the pub. But some youngsters spend an age in Internet chat rooms, conducting cyberspace conversations with peers across the planet.

Shevaun Pennington once spent 11 hours at a stretch online. Her parents knew she visited teenage chat rooms, and assumed she was talking to people of her own age. Only when she failed to come home one night did the awful truth emerge.

The "American boyfriend" she had joked about meeting on the Internet turned out to be Toby Studabaker, an ex-US marine, aged 31. Shevaun, 12, had arranged to meet him at Manchester Airport, and they flew to Europe, sparking an international police hunt.

That shocking story prompted warnings that parents should be more aware of where their children are going, and with whom, when they journey into cyberspace. But, like most parents, I had little idea of how a chat room works. So I decided to find out.

Locating chat rooms was no problem. Internet search engine Google listed countless sites for teenagers, alongside adverts for "XXX Live Sex Chat XXX".

After struggling to make reputable chat rooms work, I discovered you need special software to operate them. It took 38 minutes to download this from the Internet, then I was away.

In a website called Teenspot all I had to do was give myself a nickname (CJ: my middle name's John) and I was inside the chat room. No need to register, give a date of birth or pass any security controls.

There was a sexual atmosphere in the chat room. Already logged on were people with nicknames like Sexplay Girl and Big Penis. The chat ranged from the banal: "Im soooo bored" (no punctuation in cyberspace) to Crazycamguy's worrying: "Any horny girls up 4 sum fun? I have a webcam".

Soon I was receiving messages that some of the others online wanted a private chat with me. I responded to Mellow, and so began my first ever Internet chat room interview.

You type in a line, and hit return; it appears in the message window. Then you wait for a response to arrive underneath. It's very easy, once you get the hang of it. At first I pretended to be a 17-year-old boy; Mellow said she was a 15-year-old British girl. Then I learned she was from Wales, and I told her I was from York.

After an exchange about the heatwave, I revealed the truth: that I was a journalist. She took this in her stride and asked what age I really was. Thirty-four, I replied: "Sorry for lying".

It's okay, you get used to it online, she said and agreed to answer my questions.

Mellow spends two or three hours a night online, although only an hour in a chat room. She wanted to talk to people her own age "or maybe a bit older".

Was she concerned about men passing themselves off as teenagers, as I had done initially? "Not really if you just be careful no harm can be done, can it?

"But it kinda worries me that younger girls come on here pretending to be older than they are. Then they could get into trouble."

She revealed that "some of the guys on here get all pervy", and that she worried "because I see all those stories on the news about like 15 year old girls going missing because of men in chat rooms". The chat rooms "arent really moderated much".

Her parents knew what she did and trusted her to be careful. Would she ever arrange to meet someone she had chatted to online? "No way unless I had met them before but I wouldn't just arrange to meet up with you, no offence, Im not that stupid."

Good, I replied, reassured. We typed our goodbyes and I logged off.

Even "talking" to a girl as level headed as Mellow was an uncomfortable experience.

As a man more than twice her age I shouldn't have been able to access a teenager's chat site, but there was nothing to stop me. And it is easy to see how others with sinister intentions could sweet talk a girl of her age - or younger - into doing something dangerous.

Nevertheless, I'm glad I did it. Now I know how easy it is to access a chat room, and how sexually charged the atmosphere is inside,

I will be on my guard when my young children are old enough to enter.

Parents can get advice about teenage chatrooms at: www.chatdanger.com

Updated: 11:13 Wednesday, July 16, 2003