After my last post I had a conversation with my daughter about Pictochat on the DS.

Apparently her and her friend are being bugged by a user named ‘qwerty’ but only when logged on with her friend’s name. They both have seperate user names but my daughter’s is fairly non-gender specific while her friend’s is more obviously female. This ‘qwerty’ has been trying to chat to her and find out where she lives and whether she is a boy or girl (qwerty has actually assumed she’s a girl becasue of the user name). Qwerty never seems to bother when they log on with my daughter’s username.

Now this is a little concerning to both me and the other mum. We are both aware that it could just be a silly lad wanting to chat to a girl but we are also wondering if it could be something a little stranger. In the end I rang the local police to ask what I should do. They couldn’t help me at all as ‘nothing untoward had happened’ - yet. I appreciate that they are busy and it could just be two unnecessarily worried mums but I would have thought they would have shown a little concern when I explained this is not the world-wide internet but a small radius of signal, 65ft so I’ve found out (more if there’s an unobstructed area).

Obviously we can’t do anything in case we get into trouble so we’ve told the girls to change username and ignore qwerty hoping that this will be enough. They both know about ‘not talking to strangers’ in the street and online - witnessed by the fact they immediately told us once they started getting hassle from qwerty. All we can do it seems is warn them, advise them and keep open communication between mums and daughters so that this incident doesn’t escalate into something unwarranted or unwanted.

Despite all this worry neither of us mums have banned the girls from using their DS because this would be a knee-jerk reaction that is so often seen in the media. Games (and games machines) don’t hurt people, people do.