Jas is 14 and loves gaming – she plays every day. Her choice of game varies according to how she’s feeling. If she’s feeling cross, she’ll play Fortnite so she can let her “anger out” on the characters in the game. Sometimes she plays in a squad on Fortnite where you can play in a team with up to three other players. Different squads then compete against each other. She mostly plays with school friends, as well as someone she met online playing Fortnite – they were in a different squad. Her school friends don’t like playing “shooter games”, whereas this other friend does. They both checked with their parents whether they could chat with each other on WhatsApp. Their parents didn’t do any specific checks but said it was OK. Once she was playing Fortnite in a squad with three men, who she guessed were in their 20s, because of how they sounded. They’d all died in the game, and she was the last member of the squad left. The men all wanted her to win, so that she could revive them. But she died too. They called her “a fat ugly c*nt” over their headsets and told her to “go back to the kitchen where [she] belong[s]” (her avatar’s gender was female). She was surprised and disappointed about this, especially as she’s much younger than them. Since this happened, Jas has changed her avatar’s gender to male, to stop people saying these sorts of things in future.

Understanding online communications among children: Qualitative findings, Ofcom, 2023