LONDON - More than 100,000 schoolchildren are being warned by the police about the dangers of being stalked on the internet by paedophiles and receiving sexually explicit e-mails.
The growing number of children at risk from sex offenders has prompted Hampshire police's paedophile unit to issue a warning to all
secondary schools in the area.
Leaflets from the unit advise children always to tell their parents before meeting "internet friends". If they do arrange to see them they should take an adult and make sure the meeting is in a public place.
The warnings follow a series of incidents in which adults have posed as teenagers in "chat rooms" and tricked children into meeting them.
In October a paedophile who enticed a 13-year-old girl to his home for sex was jailed for five years. Patrick Green, 33, sent increasingly lurid messages to his teenage victim before abusing her at his flat in Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire.
Green was arrested on his way to meet a 14-year-old girl he had also met over the internet and had arranged to spend the weekend with. He masqueraded as a 15-year old boy to arrange the meeting.
In February a 13-year-old girl went missing from her home in Southampton for five days after becoming obsessed with internet "chat rooms".
