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Man from online chatroom meeting an actor posing as a 14 year old. - Source: ONE News
A Close Up reporter confronted men in a park after they made sexually explicit comments to a fictitious 14-year-old in an online chatroom.
Close Up senior reporter Gill Higgins caught the men in different locations across Auckland who had chatted to the girl online and had requested to meet the girl in person.
Close Up producer Chris Lynch, who has been working on the story for around four months, said he was genuinely shocked at how many approaches men made online to what they thought was a 14-year-old girl.
*Watch the story on Close Up tomorrow at 7pm.
Lynch said the girl's age was reinforced several times throughout the online chat, but "some of the comments were extremely sexually explicit".
Higgins said the request for a meeting came after around 15 to 30 minutes into the first conversation online.
"It took only a sentence or two before the "chat" became of a sexual nature, not in all cases, but in lots of them."
"Believe me you'll be left in no doubt about what these men are after. They're blatant, and that's even after they're told by our online "girl" that she's only 14."
Close Up discovered that interest increased tenfold when it was put to them online that the 14-year-old was a "virgin".
"In many instances it would take less than 20 seconds for a man to ask what "Bra size" I was," Higgins said.
Higgins said she wanted to cover the story because there is a lot of interest surrounding the impact of social media and how young people can be exposed to all sorts of things that older generations never were.
"As a mum who has a daughter about to start intermediate this is of particular interest to me. I really wanted to know if the idea of predatory men was hearsay or really existed."
The men confronted by the Close Up team were from a wide range of backgrounds.
