Grooming Advice Please

[tama13]

Hi my 16 year old Son met a girl about a month ago & with the help of her Mother has had a complete personality change.
I have found out that the Mother has been inboxing him through facebook & talking about to him about his relationship with her daughter, she has been talking about him having a intimate relationship with her daughter & also encouraging my Son (who is a virgin) to lie to me & also arranging to meet them both & have talks to them both about their relationship (her daughter is 15 years & 11 months old). In a two week period the Mother inboxed my son 332 pages full of messages – & it only stopped as I found out about them & put a stop to it. My Son was such as lovely young lad who treated his Mam & Dad with kindness & respect, I was so proud of him, but since this woman has been involved in his life he has changed completely – to me feels like he has been brainwashes by her. If she say’s jump he will say how high. I have all the messages she sent him & I am now at the stage of going to Social Services for help, he has left our house today to go & stay with my sister in law for a few days & he has informed us that he is not coming back home – I am at my wits end, has anyone got any advice for me please.
Ps I have shown the messages the mother sent my son to a few close friends & they have all said that it looks like she was grooming him for her daughter.

Sounds a pretty weird thing to do. Any adult contacting a child secretly through fb wd ring alarm bells. Cd you show the messages to the pastoral care person at your sons school I sure they would be able to advise you.

332 pages in a fortnight definitely does not sound normal. Usually when parents have misgivings about people in our children's lives, it is just 'gut feeling', always subjective and sometimes unreliable; but this is very concrete 'evidence'. I think in your position, I would contact social services - i.e. someone with professional experience of safeguarding/child protection - and show them the pages and formally ask for their advice. If they think this is as weird as it sounds, they will then be able to advise you and perhaps take some action. If they think it's not a cause for concern, they can reassure you.

I think I would not show the messages to anyone else. Safeguarding is a higher priority than confidentiality, so I think you can legitimately read them yourself and discuss them with a safeguarding professional. But they are still your son's personal correspondence, and if you show them to people who have no formal safeguarding role, then I think you probably do invade his privacy...

This is a terribly difficult situation tama. I do feel for you.

Thank you, I have confronted this woman & she does really mess with your brain, you say something to her & she manages to twist things so much that you then start to believe you are in the wrong, at the end of me messaging her myself & my husband didn't know if we were coming or going. I never spoke to her about this in person - which in hindsight was the best thing to do as I have also got all that correspondence printed too.

Yes I agree with you flow4 my gut feeling even before I had seen the messages was that this woman was too involved & over powering.

My Son caused riots yesterday & left home because his girlfriend had bombarded him with messages that if myself or my husband don't drop this & leave him & her family get on with things she will finish with him & that her father is violent & she does not want him to take it out on my family, I know all this as before my son left (rightly or wrongly) I made him give up his contracted phone & replaced it with a pay go one - silly people just gave me more evidence against them.

For the last month my Son has begged & begged me not to spoil his first intense relationship & he has held me over a barrel as so has his girlfriend & her Mother. I have been told over & over again by them that he is 16 & can do what he wants & if I split them up I would break his heart, he would hate me forever & if he did anything stupid it was on my head (he has said there is no reason to live without this girl) & that I was a controlling Mother who would not let her Son grow up.

Sorry for sounding off - needed to get it off my chest x

We are going to contact social services today & see what they can do - we just want our Son back to the lovely young man he was even if that means he will hate me forever.