Lucie James* was just 10 when she received a friend request on her favourite music website from someone she believed to be a teenager.
Despite a comfortable upbringing, she had struggled to make friends, so turned to a social networking site to connect with children of a similar age interested in the same bands as her.
Innocently accepting the friend request, she had no way of knowing it had come from a man in his thirties; a man lurking anonymously in the shadows of the web.
He was patient. Over a year, he cultivated Lucie’s friendship while posing as a peer. “He would say he was interested in the same music as me, the same clothing brands. I genuinely did think he was a friend,” she says.
When...