Roblox, a gaming site for kids and teens, says it’s the largest user-generated online gaming platform. It calls itself “a family-friendly, immersive, 3D environment.”
A North Carolina mother is calling it something else entirely after she watched her 7-year-old’s avatar being “violently gang-raped on a playground” by two male players’ avatars… And then witnessing the female avatar of an onlooker jump on her daughter’s avatar when the virtual rapists were through.
Amber Petersen said in a 28 June Facebook post that she and her husband had thought they had done due diligence when they allowed their daughter to play the game. She noted that Roblox is rated Pan European Game Information (PEGI) 7: PEGI being a European video game content rating system that assigns age recommendations and content descriptions. Hence, a PEGI 7-rated game such as Roblox should be appropriate for those children who are at least 7 years old.
The game has a multiplayer online gaming platform in which users can create their own personal avatar and their own adventures, similar to Minecraft. Then, players can interact with each other in virtual reality.
Of particular interest to parents such as Petersen and her husband: Roblox has security settings that allow parents to block outside conversations and invitations. Moderators and automatic filters also block potentially inappropriate content.
Excellent: crank up the security! From Petersen’s post:
When my husband and I decided to allow our daughter to play this game, we adjusted the security settings to maximum privacy. Or at least we THOUGHT we did…
… but what security settings are there to prevent players from fashioning penises and using them to rape other players? Petersen, who took screen captures of what she witnessed (available in comments on her post), said that she was lying in bed with her daughter, reading aloud, while her daughter played her favorite game on her iPad.
All of a sudden, she stopped me from reading and showed me her screen.
At first, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
When the three avatars finished attacking her daughter’s avatar, they ran off, “leaving my daughter’s avatar laying on her face in the middle of the playground,” Petersen said.
Now, amidst feelings of shock, disgust and guilt, Petersen is urging other parents to delete the app, take another look at their devices and security settings, and, “better yet,” challenge their children to…
PUT AWAY THEIR SCREENS….AND READ!!! Books cannot be hacked, but sadly, I’ve learned the hard way that a child’s innocence can be just at the touch of a button.
Roblox has responded to the incident by cracking down even harder on potential “bad actors.” From a statement sent to Dailymail.com:
We were outraged to learn that Roblox’s community policies and Rules of Conduct were subverted.
We have identified how this bad actor created the offending action and are putting additional safeguards in place to reduce the possibility of this happening again in the future.
In addition, the offender was identified and has been permanently banned from the platform and we have suspended the game.
We have zero tolerance for this behavior. Our work to ensure a safe platform is always evolving and remains a top priority for us.
According to the Daily Mail, this isn’t the first time that safety on Roblox has come into question. Last month, an Australian mother reported that she saw her 6-year-old daughter invited into a virtual room to have virtual sex. Numerous pairs of avatars were having sex in the room. That mother, “Peggy,” immediately took the game away from her daughter but recorded the sexual act so that she could warn other parents.
Petersen says she too was able to shield her daughter from seeing the entire rape scene, but she says she’s shuddering to think that other kids could be exposed to this type of thing.
As such cases clearly show, protecting kids online gets tougher and tougher. Parents, unfortunately, it looks like this is just the latest in an evolving landscape, which already contains eavesdropping cuddly toys, games that double as child-stalking apps, and predators who’ll hide behind photos of your kid’s favorite celebrity, pretending to be Justin Bieber or whoever else they think will gain a child’s trust.
Got any tips for how you’re keeping your kids safe? Does it involve books and blank screens, by any chance? Do tell.
Image courtesy of Roblox.com
delayedthoughtengineering
Sadly, these children-friendly areas have always been a hunting ground for perverts and pedophiles. Almost every virtual kid-land in history has had to deal with online perverts. I personally would like to see more efforts and resources devoted to identification and life-long treatment (sadly, there is no real “cure”; it’s a lifelong issue) for the individuals who display pedophilia, as described in the secondary story about the 6-y/o invited to a private room.
As for the primary story, I hope they can develop some sort of defense against such bullying behavior, such as being able to insta-call a defense squad who would essentially be volunteers who would agree to do the right thing when called, and be given the power and authority to act on their own to virtually-jail, charge, or expel the offending players. You would have to rely on volunteer players, because if you relied on employees, there would need to be nearly as many employees as players, so that would quickly become too expensive to maintain. Eventually and inevitably, the volunteer system would fail, but it would provide the most sustainable option for community protection.
Mahhn
So the developers put stuff in the game to make this possible. Burn the code and ban the coders from computers – for life.
Anonymous
If we were to do this, science, school, so many things would change. Do you want to set us back a century? It was a mere exploit. It’s the mom’s fault for not putting her child’s age in the account. If she did, the child would not have been able to join a non-filtered enabled game (Non-filter games are very prone to exploiting.) So many things, if you ban coders, you can’t use facebook, any type of social media, etc.
Anonymous
For real though……
Epic_Null
As a former Roblox player, I’m not surprised. They rely so heavily on almost random word filters, yet I’ve seen games that have the word “Sexy” right in their name get approved (the thumbnail of the game was… bad as well). The truth is, Roblox takes a terrible approach to approval of games – the thing that’s the most vulnerable and allows the easiest aversion to restrictions.
As for the advice provided, to urge children to put away their computers and read instead, it does not address a why the children are on-line and in those games in the first place. Better advice would honestly be to take them to the park, schedule play dates, or any other activity that involves playing and talking to people, instead of an activity that involves sitting alone. Sure, reading’s good, but children need play too.
It may also be a good idea to be more careful with the type of sandbox children are exposed to at that age – Minecraft (Paid, and owned by Microsoft) and Minetest (Free, but needs modding in order to be fun) are made so you spend hours in a single world instead of hopping from world to world, so a parent can be more expected to be able to check out the environment ahead of time. For minetest in particular, a parent could even whitelist or password protect a server to keep it only available to friends in real life.
James
The government’s porn and surveillance filter protects kids with its magic wand, not need to worry. At least that is what they said.
Ash
The same thing happened to me when I was 8 years old, so 6 years ago. I was really confused and scared of what was going on, and unfortunately, I didn’t tell my mom until I was 10 or 11. Back then, things like this were more common, because there weren’t so many rules and the chat system didn’t have any filters. More incidents happened, one where someone stole my game card because I stupidly told them the code, and I never told my parents about this, and I still haven’t.
The truth is, there are a lot of corrupted people in the world, there was before and there still is. I don’t think that we can change that, unfortunately. But we can change ourselves so that we can avoid having any similar incidents occur.
Anonymous
I think kids should still play roblox just stay away from the sex roleplayers.
Anreal
“When the three avatars finished attacking her daughter’s avatar, they ran off, “leaving my daughter’s avatar laying on her face in the middle of the playground,” Petersen said.” This is so bs, I’m on roblox since 2010, although there might be exploiters on some games and some games might just be inappropriate (roblox is working on getting rid of these atm), roblox is a good game and kids should be allowed to play it, and the scene described above is obviously a lie, events like that don’t happen in roblox + exploiters don’t have scripts which would let them and 2 people rape someone and ran off leaving the victim laying on the ground. It’s just stupid. Thanks to the over-exaggerating mother’s lies, roblox had to make more games unplayable which made millions of players around the world unhappy.
Anonymous
I honestly don’t care.
My kids can do what they want.
Anonymous
Exploiters wouldn’t do that, there’s no way in hell that they might do that to any player being described like that!
This was over-exaggerated which makes people not want to play the game at all but I guess this is believable up till…
“leaving my daughter’s avatar laying on her face in the middle of the playground.”
Anonymous
Honestly its just over exaggerated and yes, exploiters can do these things. Put the child’s age on Roblox and then it will have Filtering Enabled Games. Not Non-Filtering enabled games which are more prone to these exploits. Let them play Minecraft for awhile not Roblox.
Anonymous
There are phedofiles and predator everywhere. The reason ROBLOX did want to ban them because roblox wanted money. And where is money? The answer is predator and phedofiles spending their money in the game to make them look “cool” so they can date. Literally im a 13 year old gamer that had play roblox in the past 7 years and after reading this article got me second thoughts of not quiting roblox. So should i quit roblox or continue playing but avoid predator’s hunting platform. In conclusion to this message is that I recommend your guys child that you love is not to play any role play, games including like RAISE AND ADOPT A CUT KID, BOYs AND GIRlS DANCE CLUB, ROBLOXIAN HIGHSCHOOL, and etc game related.
P.S. You can troll them by using admin command to troll them and break them up>:)