A lawsuit filed Wednesday alleges that a 5-year-old girl in Outagamie County was sexually targeted by adult users on the popular free video game Roblox — joining more than 20 similar lawsuits around the country, according to a review by the New York Times.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports the lawsuit alleges the child was sexually exploited by several adults who presented themselves as children within the game. The suit argues that this abuse was enabled by the game lacking adequate protections from this kind of abuse.
Roblox, which has more than 110 million daily users, has faced scrutiny for years about the proliferation of child predators on the app. On Tuesday, Kentucky’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against the company, calling it a “website of choice for child predators.”
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In statements, the company said it has improved protections for children and plans to roll out additional features like AI age verification by the end of the year.
Justin Patchin is a professor in the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. He is also the co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center. Patchin told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that a game like Roblox presents unique challenges in trying to protect children online.
“It’s basically a platform that has thousands of mini games that you can play. So while Roblox has some control over these experiences, the creators create these mini games and some games have more protections than others,” Patchin said. “Roblox does have global protections that parents can use to help keep their kids safe, but there’s always going to be bad actors out there and Roblox is one of the fastest growing platforms out there.”
Patchin talked with host Rob Ferrett about safety measures in games and what parents can do to keep their kids safe online.
The following interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
Rob Ferrett: What kind of responsibility do you think Roblox or Meta or whoever’s operating this site that kids are on have to ensure those kids’ safety?
Justin Patchin: All of these platforms certainly have an obligation to provide tools to users — and when it comes to children, their parents — to make these environments as safe as possible.
Even with Roblox, you have to be over the age of 13 to have your own account on Roblox. Otherwise, parents have to set up these accounts if you’re under 13. And Roblox allows parents to block any game, any experience. They allow them to block chatting. So you can be on Roblox without interacting with other people chatting or interacting through voice chat or different tools.
That’s sort of the bare minimum though, and I think the future really is trying to provide a more viable age verification system that would help out in some of these situations.
RF: What would you say to parents to get started, given the constantly changing, ever proliferating variety of games and platforms out there?
JP: As parents, it’s really hard to keep up but we have to be tenacious in our questioning of our kids about what they’re doing online, especially young kids under the age of 16. So ask the question, “What are they doing on these apps? Who are they communicating with? Do they know how to use the tools to block people, to report people?”
I think the most important thing for parents to do is to cultivate the kind of relationship with their child where, if something bad does happen online, they feel comfortable turning to the parent. Because when the real bad things happen online like some of the nature of some of these lawsuits, these kids find themselves in these situations. They make a mistake, they do something they probably know they shouldn’t have done. They don’t feel comfortable coming to mom or dad, and then they just dig themselves a deeper hole.
So we need to tell our kids, “Look. If you make a mistake or if you go somewhere you knew you weren’t supposed to, come to me immediately and we’ll sort it out. We’ll fix it, and we’ll make it so it doesn’t get any worse.”
RF: Preparing kids to spot something that’s wrong and to be able to report that, that’s going to be a skill, right? That’s going to be there regardless of whatever the next Roblox or next platform is.
JP: Yeah. We’re not really training our kids for a particular app, because the apps will change. You might even tell them you’re not allowed to go on Roblox, and they might listen to you. But they’ll go on to some other app that you don’t know about that you didn’t prohibit, and they’ll run into similar, probably worse problems. So we need to equip them with skills that would apply to all of the online experiences, because it’s a moving target.
