THE TWO GIRLS at the sleepover huddled together on the bed, passing the cellphone back and forth. They took turns glancing at the screen, fascinated and unsettled by what they saw but unable to look away. Their other friend wanted no part of what was going on.
Alauna, one of the girls on the bed, was intrigued. Olive-skinned, with blond hair and blue eyes, Alauna was slight for a 12-year-old. With the tap of a finger, she found herself video chatting with a stranger. About a week later, it happened again at another sleepover, but this time, one of the other girls told her mom that her friends were “acting really weird.” She said Alauna stayed up all night talking to someone who “sounded like a man.”
After the first sleepover, Alauna became increasingly secretive and reclusive. She spent hours on her phone, disappearing into her room, and shielding her screen from her mother, Christal Martin. Finally, after hearing about the slumber parties and the person who “sounded like a man,” Martin demanded to see her daughter’s phone. There were dozens of images and a video of her child, sometimes naked in provocative positions. Alauna had shared these images with up to 30 men, most of whom she’d met on a chat platform called Omegle.
The next morning, Martin put Alauna in the car and drove her to the police station in Green River, where they lived. Martin, now 38, was raised in this dusty Wyoming frontier town (population 12,000) with majestic buttes to the north and a Union Pacific rail yard slicing through its middle.
The police took Martin’s report and Alauna’s phone. They asked Alauna a series of questions and opened an Internet Crimes Against Children investigation. Alauna was furious. She told her mother that she had sent photos to her friends, not to men. “She freaked out,” Martin says. “She was angry because I had taken away her phone, and how dare I take her away from her friends.”
That was in 2017. Looking back, Martin realizes that her anger at her daughter only exacerbated the problem. Alauna shut down. “She wouldn’t talk to me about anything,” Martin says. Never one to accept defeat, Alauna snuck into Martin’s bedroom, found an old cellphone, and got back on Omegle. After realizing this, “I just lost it,” Martin says. “You put your brothers in danger; you put this whole family in danger,” she screamed at Alauna. But Alauna had already warned one man that her mom had alerted the police, and Alauna vowed to protect him. He was in his 30s or 40s; Alauna was still going through puberty. The man told her to call him “Master Daddy.”
OMEGLE IS A WEBSITE that pairs users at random for one-on-one video chats. “The internet is full of cool people,” the company boasts; “Omegle lets you meet them.” The site was created by Leif K-Brooks in 2009 when he was 18 years old. (Chatroulette, a similar site based in Moscow, launched eight months later.)
But over the years, according to a lawsuit filed against Omegle, the “most regular and popular use” for those “cool people” on the site “is for live sexual activity, such as online masturbation.” For some men, semi-public masturbation is as far as
