While getting ready for dinner, I overheard a stifled cheeky chuckle followed by her younger sibling's inquisition with 'Let me have a look!' in her room, which triggered my protective alarm as a parent, I turned to the room and demanded,”What's so funny in there? Let me have a look.”
The big sister walked out of her room with a lingering smile, again followed around by her younger sibling and handed over her ipad showing an illustration that appeared to be from a children's book.
“It's just a book shared by my friend on What's App. I don't know why everyone thinks it's funny.”
I don't see you disagree with it by the smile on your face.
“Really? What's this book about?”
“It's 'Do you want to play with my balls?'”
“Pardon?”
“'Do you want to play with my balls?'” with more chuckles now, and the younger one chuckles along.
Dropping everything down to dry my hands and take over the ipad, I started to flick through this “children's book”, and the more I went through it, the more I felt sickened and disgusted.
“So where did you get the book again?”
“In a chatroom on What's app.”
Right, I should've known better considering I have personal experience on how nasty things could be in those online chat rooms from my days of online gaming.
“Okay. This is an extremely inappropriate book, especially for children.”
“Why? Everyone finds it funny.”
I looked at my12-year-old, resisting my expected order on banning this book, probably a chat room altogether.
“This is not a book for children nor about playing balls.”
“What's it about?”
How do I explain child molester, and pedophiles to them?
“It's about something very evil. As I have always told you there are evil people out there, in the real world and on the Internet trying to take advantage of children. “
“If this book is truly about playing balls, how would you have said it?”
“You would've said, 'do you want to play soccer?'”
“Or 'do you want to play basketball?'”
“You know the implication of 'balls' in the title of the book and that's what makes you chuckle. And that is also why I see this book as very inappropriate.”
“This book is written in a way to make something sickening normal and acceptable for children, so one day, the people who enjoy this book asking you the same question as the title of this book can get exactly the same responses illustrated in this book.”
“This is called 'grooming'.”
“Grooming?”
“Yes, it's the process that these evil sick people use to get kids used to these inappropriate material so they can take advantage of children. And sadly it's everywhere. We have to be very cautious.”
“How is it everywhere?”
Opening the ubiquitous YouTube app, a quick search of this book title returns with a list of videos with millions of views and approving comments.
“People seem to like this book a lot.” The older sister's observation is not wrong.
“Yes. That's how many ignorant or evil people there are. And YouTube would ban any video with information about vaccine injuries and yet YouTube is totally fine with these disgusting child molester tool books.”
“There will be so many other ways for you to get a chuckle, for example, by looking at your clueless brother being silly and I booked the tennis court on the weekend so we can actually play some tennis.”
“Yay!” cheered from both of them.
“Dinner is almost ready. Go wash your hands. And,”
“I need the name of the person who sent this book in the chat room. I will need to talk to their parents.”
Parents, are your children being groomed today?