Xbox live - It can be a dark place
By Stupot 43 Comments
I just felt i should share a incident that happened through my 3 years of xbox live
So my first, online shooter was Cod 4 (Call of duty 4), at the time none of my real life friends had live so i had to make friends over live which at the time wasn't as bad as it is now with drones of 12 year old "xxXiTzLegiTK1LLaHXxx" who shouted profanities down the mic constantly. I soon made friends with an american boy/man i wasn't sure who was nice enough and also had other american people to play Cod with, which was good as the game's better with a group.
So i played with this guy for a good year maybe, maybe less than that. I started to notice that alot off his xbox friends were younger american teenage boys but i didnt judge it seemed fine at the time i was sure he was about 17-18 so not weird respectively. He then eventually revealed to me that he was gay (you may be guessing the ending now) but im a very tolerant person got nothing against gays and was happy to keep playing with him, not playing with him didn't even come to mind. These kids he played cod where almost obsessed with this guy and one seemed especially "interrested" i guess.
This is where warning signs started to appear for me, i started to feel weird, at this point my real life friends got live so i played with them alot and kept my distance from this guy and the others, after a a few weeks i looked at the guys bio and it was preaching his love about his "special friend", the younger boys bio was also preaching love of a "special friend". This was were i felt i had to say something and told the old guy, Codey, that what he was doing was seriously weird and mental. They had never met in real life and said they lived in different states, i'm english so wasn't sure of the distance between them. I told him that the young boy was clearly impressionable and him saying he loves him is extremely weird and wrong. Now they hadn't met and it was only over xbox, so i guess there was no case for an arrest or something and also being on the other side of the world ment i was pretty much powerless.
So i continued to tell them to stop it because it was weird and wrong. Next day i confront Codey again and asked him why he was interrested in this boy, he told me that when he was young he had a boyfriend who was a splitting image of this young boy. Once again not a good excuse, theres never an excuse for pedophilia. At that point i cut my self off from this person (long overdue) and just tried to forget about it.
About a month later i got a message from one the guys who knew Codey and played with him and me. He told me to google his name, i endulged. I hadn't mentioned before but he added me on myspace before all this had happened which is how i knew his name.
Thats one of the links to a website about the incident but googling, "Codey Hawks" will bring up a few others. So it turns out that Codey turned up at the kids house telling the parents he was shipping off to the military and needed a place to stay for a week or so. They allowed him in and he raped the boy several times over this time period, not pleasent to think about at all.
Now this really weirded me out as i essentially talked to a rapist and could almost see it coming and be completely powerless to stop it. I felt i could have told to boy and helped him. What was worse was during the time the rapist was staying at the boys house, the boy invited me to private chats serval times, i ignored all of them as i wanted no part. But i've always wondered if he was asking for help or something. It's an extremely weird sensation knowing all of this and being so powerless about it.
Okay thats enough of me typing, congratulations if you made it this far. I hope you found this interresting and hopefully will change your perspective on meeting people over the internet, though i'm sure no one here is that dumb. There may be a few typo's ect, but i need to get up so i can't be bothered to fix them.
Edit: Some stuff i forgot, what was possibly more concerning was that the younger boys parents let the boy continue to use xbox, which i would not after that experience, as he later spoke to me in a party, it was an extremely hard conversation and i cut myself off from that point. Its surreal as i considered the rapist one of my closest friends on xbox for a very long time. Peace.