Grandmother Warns About Dangers of Kik App After Her Teenage Granddaughter Was ‘Groomed’ By Paedophile

A grandmother has claimed that her 13-year-old granddaughter was groomed by a paedophile who used the messaging app, Kik.

Deb Aitken, from Dubbo, has warned parents and guardians about the dangers of the popular messaging application and has now made an online petition that calls on the government to ban apps that allow perverts to prey on underage girls.

“Help shut down an app that enables paedophiles to groom our children and leave no evidence,” Ms Aitken wrote on a petition.

In her petition, Ms Aitken wrote that a paedophile who used the app, Kik, ‘groomed’ her granddaughter for four weeks.

She also alleges that police would not pursue the perpetrator because the app deleted all of the messages. “Police even tried to blame her for willingly entering conversations with these men. It is disgusting,” Ms Aitken said.

The petition now has over 5,900 supporters who share similar concerns. “An app that allows the “incognito facility” that protects the identity of the perverts in this world is a crime,” one New Zealand parent wrote.

The petition is set to be delivered to Kik Interactive after it has reached 5,000 signatures, according to the change.org page.

Kik’s safety pages states that parents and guardians ‘make permission for your teen to use Kik conditional on your teen giving you access to their account’. “This will give you the ability to manage the messages your teen sees,” the website said. It added that Kik will delete the accounts of under-18s who do not have their parents’ permission to be using the app.

Kik also explained that if a teen has received unwanted messages from a user, parents may ‘report’ the user sending the inappropriate messages, however, they are not allowed to see their child’s messaging history, but ‘a teen’s reported chat history is stored only for [Kik] to investigate the report and take action when necessary, which may include reporting matters to law enforcement agencies.

A spokesperson from Kik Interactive told The Daily Mail that ‘actions are taken against users found to have violated Kik’s Community Standards and TOS, including removal from the Kik platform where circumstances warrant’.

The spokesperson stressed that the company want all Kik users to be safe, and that they have a team which ‘help[s] adults and teens understand the challenges of today’s online landscape and how to avoid bad situations’.

Source: Dailymail.co.uk