Over 18 yrs old....

Amen.

I've noticed that a trademark feature of a minor is fragmented or improper conventions of the language. Certainly, there are people who do not speak English as a first language, are not very flexible with a keyboard, or even people that simply cannot be bothered, so if you were to make a judgment of the sort on someone, definitely look beyond literacy. Nonetheless, it's helpful criteria. I've run into quite a few people on websites like deviantART who used such ill-conventions. When questioned, they turned out to be as young as thirteen... Yikes.

Yeh I know what you mean, I sometimes feel as though I put people off by interrogating them for their age every time I roleplay. Not like I force them to cough up the truth but I do question them for their age if I think they might be underage. It's breaching privacy but this is a sexual fetish, what we chat and roleplay about is itself questionable. That's why we face the risk and it's totally not fair on us. I rather roleplay or chat with those of my own age or a little older. I even feel wary around those who claim they're 18 since that'd be the most logical thing to say if they were really underage but that's not fair on those who're actually 18 and have had to wait to join a site like this one. It's because it's made us cautious.

It's the Internet though, people lie a lot and it's easy to lie about age too since most failsafes on age restriction are hardly effective. It's easy to lie about your age when setting up an email or there on the spot when you are asked, even if you don't say something like 18. I remember going on to porn sites when I was underage, all you had to click was enter or do you agree. We have reason to be sceptical since the consequences are so dire and it's something that's been troubling me mentally, I have serious trust issues online and it's hard to believe some people. It's not fair when you suddenly find out either and you're left angry but incredibly paranoid.

It's not fair and I'm afraid it's putting me off roleplaying or even chatting altogether since it's so easy to be tripped up in our digitalised world. I'll admit, I'm fairly young myself at 19 - 20 this year - but that'd still put a lot of people off since it's so close to the danger zone. It's important that we're highly cautious though because it's so easy for people to lie and the experience of paranoia caused by the Internet, not necessarily the risk of coming into contact accidentally with someone underage but overall such as even online threats, is not a very healthy thing on your state of mind.

Although I can't confirm this, I'd have a hard time believing that you could go to jail for RPing with a minor if you didn't know their true identity.

First off, you have absolutely no way of knowing the true age of anyone you meet on the internet without meeting them in person, even those people who share photos of themselves could easily be sharing photos they dragged off Facebook. Anyone you 'meet' on the internet could be absolutely anyone at all, and the police even use this to their advantage by pretending to be minors to set honey-traps for known paedophiles, so surely they're well aware that it can also work the other way.

Secondly, although this may be controversial, I'm not sure if role-playing in chat about a fetish is actually considered a sexual act; I mean you aren't grooming them (unless you are, in which case shame on you), but most RP partners have no intention of meeting up and usually both parties are equally anonymous to each other. You may not know if the person you're chatting with is a minor or not, but similarly they don't know whether you're one. Usually both parties have no intention of revealing their true identity, let along meeting up.

My fear isn't so much that I could actually go to jail... it's more that I could be outed if, say I RP with someone, they turn out to be a minor and their parents get the police involved. While I would hope that the police would see that I wasn't a paedophile, it may be too late to save my reputation, especially where a wierd fetish was involved, the local media may have gotten wind and we all know what happens to people who are suspected of paedophilia, even if they are totally cleared. People have been attacked by vigilates and forced to leave their career, their freinds and their family and go into hiding, and mob justice is scary, there was one incident in the UK where a paediatrician had her house attacked by a mob baying for blood.

This doesn't worry me so much these days... I'm pretty selective about who I actually RP with (for reasons other than fearing RPing with a minor) but it certainly did a bit in the past.

One thing I would say, which might be obvious, is that if someone's user-name ends with a number between 80 and 99 than that's usually their year of birth. If it ends with a number between 13 and 19 then it's probably their age at the time they created that account.