Alone in a
hotel room
with a man she had met only half-an-hour earlier, Becky Stevens knew it
was too late to back out. For six months, the 15-year-old had been
chatting online to Stuart after meeting him on an
internet dating site.
As part of their virtual courtship, Stuart who claimed to be 24
lavished her with compliments and asked her to send increasingly
provocative photos of herself. Desperate for his approval, she complied.
Now that he had
paid Becky
train fare
to travel 200 miles to meet him, it was clear he expected her to have
sex with him. And even though she didnâ want to, she still went
ahead.

Becky says: We had been chatting for a few months and sent sexual
messages to each other a few times so, although it seems so stupid now,
real sex seemed like the obvious next step. But my first thought when I
saw him was:Oh God, he looks nothing like his picture. He
wasn't attractive and looked more like 40. But, still, we went
straight to the
hotel and had sex. I recall feeling nervous, but it was over quickly. Afterwards, he paid for the room and we said goodbye at the station.
We never saw each other again. I cried on the train going home,
because I felt so disgusted with myself. My mum thought I was over at my
friend house the whole time. It would be
easy to assume that such a degrading experience would put Becky off internet dating for ever.
But as an overweight, insecure teenager, she was desperate for the
empty compliments that were showered on her in return for sexual favors and the encounter was to mark the start of a five-year addiction to
having sex with men she met on the internet.
‘I felt degraded but, at the same time, I was hooked on the
excitement and craved attention’ Beckys story is all the more
alarming as she is not only from a loving home, but also a good student
who achieved As and Bs at GCSEs. At night, she was trawling up to seven
different dating sites, exchanging explicit messages and allowing
herself to be filmed stripping and carrying out sex acts what is
known as