Disturbing Baby Role Playing Accounts Are Freaking Us Out

A creepy and alarming social media 'trend' is happening on one of our favourite networks.

Groups of people are stealing photos, posted by parents on Instagram, and reposting them in order to 'role play', giving the infants entirely new names and back stories.

What Is Infant Role-Play?

The stolen photos are being re-captioned with a fictitious name, age and often a statement about the baby's interests or family life.

Commenters then ask questions about that baby, to which the imposter replies, using baby talk.

Innocent?

It sounds bizarre but the majority of baby and family role playing scenarios seem, on the surface, to be innocent.

Some commenters seem to be enquiring as to the baby's health, whether the baby has living parents and whether the baby needs better looking after.

The mind boggles, but it has been suggested that commenters are tween or teens with difficult family backgrounds, trying to create a perfect fantasy home life.

Sinister

However, for all the innocent role-playing going on, there are some accounts that seem to have an altogether more sinister objective.

Some of the role plays have become violent or even, horrifyingly, sexual.

With some imposters, posting in the caption of the stolen photo, that they are willing to perform "rape" or "attack" role-play.

Involving babies...

To put it bluntly, a new, weird, roundabout way of potentially inciting paedophilia or at least sexual fantasies involving babies.

What About the Parents?

Mums, many of whom have discovered photos of their own babies on these accounts, began campaigning against Instagram to have 'baby rp' accounts closed down but initially Instagram could find nothing that was against their terms and conditions, and accounts disappeared with perpetrators reopening them under different names.

Those role players who have responded to parents' comments have defended themselves, saying their behaviour is harmless and asking to be left alone. Others have simply shut down accounts (with many more popping up under new usernames).

A trawl through the #babyrp hashtag is falling into a disturbing internet hole you never knew existed. People are role playing themsleves into baby care scenarios such as breast-feeding and adoption by using the comments facility on images.

Are The Parents To Blame?

Several articles have been written on the phenomenon.

Sadly, there is a recurrent theme appearing in the comments on these articles.

And that is the idea that the parents are somehow to blame, for posting photos of their children online in the first place.

But this victim blaming misses the point. People should be allowed to share photos of their children, as long as they are careful and aren't sharing anything vile, against the law, or nude.

Switching accounts to private doesn't protect users from the followers within their midst.

We now live in an online age where internet privacy and our expectations of it are complicated and evolving.

But regardless of the settings on their Instagram accounts, parents are well within their moral rights to object to and report accounts that use photos of their children - and expect them to be removed.

On the 'innocent' side of things, the behaviour is described as 'playing digital house' and creating a perfect fantasy world of the ideal family and baby.

But the backlash against this behaviour on Instagram is growing. Groups are setting up to document and report baby role-play groups.

Diana Cha, who buys and sells children’s clothes on Instagram started the @babyrp_revealed account after a friend discovered pictures of her baby being used for role playing. She also commented on the images.

She explained to the Daily Dot: “The user commented back to me and said that they're just pretending, it's not real and for me to get a life,” she said.

“Of course I commented back but they immediately closed their account. That's when I began looking into these accounts and came across hundreds of baby roleplaying accounts.

“Initially I thought the roleplays were pretty G-rated. I was so wrong.”

But it looks like Instagram has woken up to the content, and has plans to remove it.

When asked for comment, an Instagram spokesperson said: "This type of content violates our terms. Once a parent or guardian reports it to us, we work quickly to remove it.”

So what can parents do? Well the only way to 100 per cent protect your children online is to avoid putting any images on any social networking site, however high your privacy settings.

But realistically, most parents do use social media to share images with friends and family, and have every right to do so without finding those images reappropriated for more sinister activities.

The Change.org petition parents started is now closed but if you come across any baby rp accounts or images on Instagram that you fnd disturbing, you can report the images by clicking on the icon on the right of the comment box and clicking 'Report Innapropriate'.

Here's hoping keeping the pressure on will encourage the social media giant to take notice.