ban internet chat rooms

The concept of 10 year oldsbeing able to speak to complete strangers is disturbing.

I see no point in them, all they do is attract pedophiles, and waste alot of everyones time. Instead of wasting so much money on internet police, it would be so much easier to completely ban them. The concept of 10 year oldsbeing able to speak to complete strangers is disturbing.

Err, hardly. Perhaps 1 in 100,000 users of IRC are paedophiles.

Not to mention that it's be impossible to ban them

internet police do a lot more than sit in chat rooms looking for criminals. They're busy tracking the kiddie porn websites aswell.

A 10 year old can only use chat rooms if the parent lets them on the computer without any kind of oversight whatsoever.

where did you get that figure from? and what about users that are not telling the truth about their identity/gender/age? 1 in 2?

children would be unlikely IMO to go out of their way to find an 'underground' chatroom if all the main providers banned their use.

and what proportion of police funding goes on 'internet police'?

i agree, 90% of it should be down to parental control, not necessarily just banning the chatrooms.

I see no point in them, all they do is attract pedophiles, and waste alot of everyones time. Instead of wasting so much money on internet police, it would be so much easier to completely ban them. The concept of 10 year oldsbeing able to speak to complete strangers is disturbing.

I see no point in them, all they do is attract pedophiles, and waste alot of everyones time. Instead of wasting so much money on internet police, it would be so much easier to completely ban them. The concept of 10 year oldsbeing able to speak to complete strangers is disturbing.

This actually sounds pretty sensible to me.

Chatrooms are more trouble than they are worth - their instantaneous, anonymous nature coupled with the fact that people often talk to those that they don't know makes them a veritable pitfall.

MSN Messenger is less dangerous, as people usually talk to close acquaintances on here, or those with whom they have built a certain trust. This isn't the case with chatrooms.

I'm sure there are ways of banning chatrooms, if China can filter 98% of the internet superhighway from reaching their citizens, then where there is a will, there's a way.

I briefly stumbled upon Yahoo chat, but was horrified by what went on in there. I never once used MSN chat - but in shutting it down, Microsoft acknowledged that it was a cesspit for paedophiles and perverts.

Close the chatrooms.

I'm sure there are ways of banning chatrooms, if China can filter 98% of the internet superhighway from reaching their citizens, then where there is a will, there's a way.

In China you have to have a licence to access the Internet, (you also have to have a licence to practice religion). China is one big murderous nanny state, they exert control over Internet usage with military force, just like everything else.

Surely we shouldnt be going down this road???

Call me idealist, but I believe that if the major ISPs in this country were made to block the major chat sites - we would see less paedophile activity, less abductions, less murders et cetera. A lot of this activity goes unreported, Lord knows how many children end up at the hands of chatroom paedophiles every year.

Call me idealist, but I believe that if the major ISPs in this country were made to block the major chat sites - we would see less paedophile activity, less abductions, less murders et cetera. A lot of this activity goes unreported, Lord knows how many children end up at the hands of chatroom paedophiles every year.

I'm not suggesting that we should clamp down on civil liberties to anything like the extent of The People's Republic. I just think that China, as a model, demonstrates that it is possible to block (or at least hinder) access to certain material.

Call me idealist, but I believe that if the major ISPs in this country were made to block the major chat sites - we would see less paedophile activity, less abductions, less murders et cetera. A lot of this activity goes unreported, Lord knows how many children end up at the hands of chatroom paedophiles every year.

Honestly, you must live in a world of fear. The majority of child abuse is conducted by someone either in the child's family or is a close friend of the family. Abuse as a result of internet grooming is in the minority, and banning chat rooms would just make it even harder to track.

call me idealist, but I believe that if the major ISPs in this country were made to block the major chat sites - we would see less paedophile activity, less abductions, less murders et cetera. A lot of this activity goes unreported, Lord knows how many children end up at the hands of chatroom paedophiles every year.

Honestly, you must live in a world of fear. The majority of child abuse is conducted by someone either in the child's family or is a close friend of the family. Abuse as a result of internet grooming is in the minority, and banning chat rooms would just make it even harder to track.

I'm interested to hear why you think chat rooms cause murders though?

The recent case of a teenage boy persuading another teenage boy to kill him (under the pretence of a secret service agent) took place over an internet chatroom. Children have been lured to the houses of chatroom paedophiles, molested and then murdered.

But new sites can so easily spring up :/

If you are were an unwitting child, would you flit around the web for abstract sites, run and maintained by paedophiles? No, you would go on Yahoo or MSN - trusting that a chatroom operated by a major conglomerate would afford you safety and because this is the obvious place to go to.

The big players in this thing are the chatrooms hosted by the big providers e.g. Yahoo and, formerly, MSN.

If you are were an unwitting child, would you flit around the web for abstract sites, run and maintained by paedophiles? No, you would go on Yahoo or MSN - trusting that a chatroom operated by a major conglomerate would afford you safety and because this is the obvious place to go to.