About The Author

I would like to introduce myself to you. My name is Vena McGrath, I live in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, and I am the author of Secrets, Lies & Chat, my first book, released in the USA on 18 May 2005. Welcome to my official website, ‘Secrets, Lies & Chat’.

Through my exposure to the Internet by way of chat rooms, I met some people that impacted on my life in a number of different ways, some good, some not so good, and some even dangerous.  Of course I made choices that allowed all of these people to enter my world, so as a responsible adult my actions brought whatever came into my life by consent.  I found a world that was easy to become part of.  It allowed me a kind of social life within the safety barrier of the walls of my own home.  I didn't have to dress up and go out alone or with friends, I could do all the socialising I wanted right here.  I chose the people I wanted to chat to and shunned those that approached me online that I considered weren't my type of people.  I didn't have to put up with the noise of that world outside the fence, I could sit and play my music at the volume I chose, eat whatever whenever at the desk and enjoy many moments that I still remember with some clarity.

After a few years of total addiction to chat, I began to see things through different eyes.  During those few years I had a number of adventures with men I met initially in chat, doing things I would never have thought I could, or would, do.  I entered a chat room on that first night in 1999 as a woman that had no social life other than family and my only 'social' hours really were at work.  I had a lousy marriage and once I escaped from my husband I set about to make sure that I never allowed myself to become a prisoner of a man again.  Not that I didn't like men;  far from it.  I was just very afraid that I would end up right back in the same mess again unless I built walls around me and stayed within them.  I did that for 11 years while I rebuilt my shattered life with the help of my kids, who were young adults or in their late teens at the time of the separation.

Winter 1999 found me living alone, in my lovely home that my son and I had built in 1990, and the nights were long, and lonely.   I decided to buy a computer on time payment and that's how I found chat as I learned to surf and look for things to do online.  In 1993 I decided to write about my adventures both in and out of chat and allowed a few people to read some of what I wrote.  The consensus of opinion was that I should make my stories into a book and that's exactly what I ended up doing.  My stories were not unlike those of many friends in chat and they applauded me for having the guts to say it like it was.  The fact that the book wasn't a success wasn't due to lack of committal by me, it obviously wasn't meant to become a best seller in spite of the money I threw at the project.  But at the end of the day I am an Australian published author and that's not to be sneezed at - well it is sneered at by some but, care factor zero to them :)

I met online over the years a number of young people with stories to tell about their experiences online and I became a champion for the cause of safety for kids and teens on the Internet.  Again I was sneered at by others and accused of trying to ruin chat.  Those accusations were and still are far from the truth.  Anyone with half a brain knows now, in 2007, that the Internet is fraught with danger for everyone, but most especially the youngsters.  I knew about it a few years before the stories started to appear on TV and in the press. So I am trying to do my bit by having websites for education of kids and parents at the very focal point of my website and I hope that some people have actually clicked on the links and done some research.

It is never good enough to say "my daughter is safe, she knows how to look after herself" or "my son is safe, he knows how to look after himself". Statistics show this is NOT the case at all. Since writing my book and having it published, I have been fortunate enough to gain some exposure on TV and in the press and have been contacted by concerned parents. One young son, aged 14, had been self-harming and his parents were distraught. They became tangled in a web they didn't understand. The father, and he is to be commended for his actions, took the time and used his initiative to learn about the Internet and to find out where his son had been chatting. He was astounded when he went undercover in the group at what was actually going on underneath a completely innocent cover. He found mind manipulation, children being told to self harm, told to harm others, told to commit suicide. What he uncovered even scared me. He had tried, with his wife, to get help and to bring down this group, but as I've found when I try to say it as it is, they were ridiculed and no one wanted to believe their story or even look into it.

One day however, one person did listen and spoke to another interested party who suddenly realised that what this boy's parents were talking about completed a puzzle that others had been trying to solve for some time. Apparently a faction of the group was traced to Australia, to a suburb of Sydney, and the Federal authorities were working towards closing in on the perpetrators. I hope they were successful and also hope that they did eradicate this awful group from our society. However, from what I know, I doubt it. Others will take up the challenge and keep the darkness alive. From what I learned from these very disturbed parents about how totally involved these young people are, I foresee that those that escape the law will carry on with what they are involved in because they are 'addicted' to the lifestyle they have embraced with people they think are their friends, over and above anyone in their lives, and most especially their parents. It's very easy to lose your identity on the Internet and reinvent yourself, with a new group, and only those that you wish to know about the change, will know.

So please, if you have children that use a computer, surf over to the links and do some reading. Don't say it can never happen to your family, because the odds are if your children are online unsupervised, they will eventually stumble onto things you would never want them to be involved in.

If your child starts to change attitude in a way that disturbs you, if his/her mode of dress changes dramatically, if suddenly new friends are mentioned that you don't know, if he/she goes out to meet people you don't know, be aware and beware. This is apparently how it all starts. The kids are befriended by one particular person in a totally innocent, or so it appears, way, and they make arrangements to meet for real. From then on the game changes and the danger starts. You may think I am hallucinating or being over dramatic, and that's your right, but the parents I am talking about would have said the same thing once before this website touched their lives in a dramatic and horrifying way. They have now found out that the fear is real, that children are being exposed to extremely dangerous psychological damage by being allowed to use the Internet unsupervised. 

The problem is of course, if you instil rules at home, kids will go to friends' houses and use a computer there, or to Internet Cafes. The rules have to start with the very young; guidelines must be instilled in their minds about the dangers and what they should never disclose to anyone online no matter how much of a friend they think the other person is or could be. I am so glad my family are grown ups and I don't have to face this challenge. I have a twelve year old grand-daughter and she is learning all the time from me about the dangers and hopefully she will never be faced with anything she cannot handle or walk away from easily.

Please take a moment to sign the guest book and, if you like, leave a comment or a question for me. I have provided contact details if anyone would like to touch base by email.

My wish was that the book I wrote could perhaps open the eyes of some people and that they would perhaps look carefully around them at things they were just shrugging off as being of no consequence.  The consequences in reality are huge for those that are spending countless hours sitting at a computer in chat rooms.  There are millions of people chatting every day of every year and many of those people will eventually take the relationship out of the chat room into a hotel or motel or private home.  It's life and it's time for people to realise that chat is mostly about sex, either online cyber sex, or offline skin to skin sex.  All I can do is keep plugging away and banging my head against brick walls.  But if all of us just sat back and didn't do a thing about telling it how it is, then I hate to imagine what is going to happen in time to come on the Internet as it grows in proportion way beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

On a lighter note, an expression of appreciation to Paul, an Irish photographer, www.picturesdirect.com, who graciously allowed me to display one of his beautiful pictures of Killary Harbour, Ireland, on my website. Please visit Paul’s website and view some sites to remember of the land of my heritage, Ireland. I actually did visit Killary Harbour in Ireland last year and the view was awesome.  As beautiful as photos are, they don't measure up to actually seeing the beauty of Ireland for yourself.

Take care :)

Vena