From online friends to underage sex

SEX makes babies - that was all the girl said she knew about sex when she was 11 years old, the age at which she lost her virginity.

Now 13, she recounted matter-of- factly how she met her first boyfriend on the social networking site Friendster last year.

They started exchanging messages before taking their online relationship offline, going out in groups with other people they knew from the Internet.

Then one day, weeks after their first online encounter, she found herself alone at home. Her mother and siblings were not home.

She was online, chatting with the boy, then 16, whom she laughingly described as an 'Ah Beng'. He asked her out, but she invited him to her home instead.

'He said he wanted to meet me but I didn't want to go out, so I wanted him to come to my house. My mother didn't allow me to go out,' she said.

She was worried that her mother would call home to check on her whereabouts, something her mother always did when she was out.

The girl doesn't remember the date, but thinks it was during a weekend. Court details put it at between April 10 and June 30 last year, when she was in Primary 6.

Asked if she thought they would end up having sex, she said it never crossed her mind. But as things turned out, they did. He had a condom with him, she said.

After that day, the pair drifted apart. He was busy with a part-time job as a waiter. And he was, as she put it, 'MIA' or missing in action, for a few weeks.

Then she came across him online; he had logged on to an instant chat service.

'I was shocked yet happy...I just talked to him like normal. Then he just replied (with) a long message...and it ended. It was very disappointing.'

The girl spoke to The Straits Times accompanied by her mother and a social worker on Monday. She cannot be identified because she is a minor.

The teen is believed to be one of the youngest people involved in what is known in legal parlance as 'underage carnal intercourse or sex with a child'.

Her first boyfriend was placed on one year's probation by the courts last week. A second teen is also being investigated for having sex with her.

How much did she know about sex then? 'Not very (much) I guess,' she said. After some prompting, she added, laughing nervously: 'Sex make baby lor!'

Her mother then intervened: 'She didn't know anything about it!'

The girl thought that after having sex, the relationship would last.

As for what she now thought about relationships, she said: 'Stupid relationships. How can a girl my age last with a boy until marriage?'

Until she was counselled, she apparently did not know about sexually transmitted diseases, about getting boys into trouble - or even that it was wrong.

As for friends, she found her classmates too 'childish', preferring the company of older teens she had met on the Internet.

The girl, from a broken family, did well enough in her Primary School Leaving Examination to make it into the Express stream in secondary school.

She admitted to spending a lot of time on the Internet and blamed it for her current woes.

'You'll meet people you haven't met in your whole life there, you find it amazing...It's kind of interesting to meet them (in real life) because it is for the first time,' she said.

Her mother, who described herself as strict, would not give her daughter a mobile phone and kept tabs on her whereabouts when possible.

But she didn't reckon on the Internet. The girl got to know her latest boyfriend, another teenager, on the Internet too, earlier this year. Both mother and daughter declined to talk about this.

When her mother cottoned on to the possibility that her daughter was mixing with bad company, she started checking her online activities, screened her calls and stayed home as much as possible.

'Occasionally, she became a bit rebellious, but we were still very close. Sometimes, she would still kiss me,' said the mother.

Things came to a head in the middle of this year, when the girl did not come home from school. Her mother found out she had stayed over at a friend's place. It was the first time she had done so.

When she returned, her mother felt 'insecure'. She took the girl to a hospital for a check-up and discovered she was not a virgin. Police investigated and discovered she had had sex.

It was then that the relationship between mother and daughter soured to the point where they stopped talking to each other.

The mother applied to the courts for a Beyond Parental Control order. Asked why she resorted to such a measure, she said she felt that her daughter was in 'moral danger'. The girl was sent to stay in a hostel.

Her mother said: 'I felt the bad influence was already there. The best choice was (for her) to stay confined, learn rules and regulations, learn how to discipline herself.'

At the hostel, the girl's Internet access is curtailed - it is a privilege she earns if she behaves, and is to be used only under supervision.

Despite her confinement, her new boyfriend has pledged online to wait for her. She left messages for him too.

Asked about this, she hesitated before saying: 'I'll let you know when I've a chance to use a computer again...Can I not talk about it please?'