Roblox Accused of Exposing Kids to 'Rape Game', Virtual Sexual Acts, Dangerous Predators

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) is demanding that Roblox, a popular kids gaming platform, remove a newly launched Roblox Connect feature which, enables children and adults to connect through voice call.

Roblox is already on NCOSE's 2023 Dirty Dozen List of mainstream contributors to sexual exploitation.

In March, a 40-year-old California man was arrested after traveling across the country to sexually abuse a 14-year-old he met and groomed on Roblox. 

And in April, a 14-year-old girl from Ohio was sexually assaulted by a man she met on Roblox. The man posed as a 17-year-old on the platform and convinced the girl to send him nude images before picking her up from school and sexually assaulting her.

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Although the non-profit NCOSE has called on Roblox and its CEO and founder David Baszucki to implement safety measures to protect young users, it has not. 

Instead, the company is now making it easier for sexual predators to contact children. 

"Voice chats are a known method predators use for grooming – as it is near impossible to monitor them. There have been multiple cases of predators using Roblox to sexually exploit, abuse, and even kidnap, children. Yet instead of prioritizing greater measures to safeguard kids, the company irresponsibly chose to release a feature that may very well provide predators with yet another way to reach potential victims," said Lina Nealon, Vice President and Director of Corporate Advocacy at NCOSE.

She continued, "Roblox must immediately terminate the ability for minors to use Roblox Connect until the company creates stringent safeguards across the entire platform and can demonstrate an ability to monitor voice chats for grooming. Omegle – an online chat site that facilitated conversations between children and adults – just shut down in large part due to children being sexually exploited on the platform."

"Given that the majority of Roblox's user base is comprised of kids under age 16, the company should be the gold standard for child online safety," Nealon added. 

However, NCOSE contends the gaming platform has done little to protect the more than 33 million children on its platform. Children as young as five years old can sign up and play. 

Many of the games on the site contain sexually explicit themes including strip clubs, dance clubs, and "Condo Experiences," explains a report from NCOSE.

"Many youth have reported innocently visiting 'condo experiences' only to be encouraged to visit someone's 'home,' go into the 'bedroom,' and then engage in virtual sexual acts. Other children innocently wander around the games and stumble on this activity," the report describes. 

"Thanks to the nature of the platform allowing anyone to upload content at will, as well as the lack of in-game moderation during interactive experiences, virtually anything goes during gameplay," Jeff Haynes, a senior editor with Common Sense Media, told Parents magazine. 

"Most of this is attributed to condo games, but part of the difficulty is that many of these experiences don't even appear like the stereotypical condo games from a few years ago. They look like safer games that can draw in users, only to discover that there's inappropriate content lurking inside," he continued. 

One grandparent told NCOSE that he was shocked when he found out his grandson was caught playing a "rape game." 

"I was absolutely terrified. My grandson, whom I loved—whom I thought was innocent and pure—was playing a rape game," he explained. "I cried in bed for several hours."

Although a Roblox spokesperson told Parent's Magazine in October that safety was the company's "most important priority," NCOSE is encouraging the platform to do more.

"It is past time for you to take responsibility for the harm that has been inflicted on innocent children on your platform. Ignoring the risks is not an option. We are optimistic that Roblox will make the necessary changes with the urgency commensurate to the harms your platform poses. Please take action now before another child falls victim to the dangers of Roblox," said Patrick Trueman, President of NCOSE, and Dawn Hawkins, CEO of NCOSE, in a letter to Baszucki. 
 
CBN News has reached out to Roblox to comment on the additional safeguards they are employing to protect minors with the launch of Roblox Connect. 

"Safety is foundational to everything we do at Roblox. Connect users will be able to leverage the same safety tools as the rest of the experiences on Roblox," a Roblox spokesperson told CBN News.

They told CBN News that there are safety features incorporated into Connect which include: 

• To use Connect, users must be age 13 and older and phone-verified or ID-verified. 
• To make a call, the user must already be in your Roblox friends list. If a user no longer wants to receive calls from someone, they can take action by unfriending or blocking the individual from their friend list.
• Connect is built on top of our existing moderation infrastructure. Roblox uses voice recordings for moderation purposes, including moderator evaluation of abuse reports, training and evaluating automatic safety detection systems, and measuring overall safety of the platform. 

"Our policies prohibit inappropriate content and behavior, and we take swift action against anyone found to be violating our Community Standards. We provide mechanisms for users to report situations that do not meet our Community Standards along with tools to block and mute other users if they wish," the spokesperson added.