‘I thought I’d met the man of my dreams on a dating app before he raped and stalked me – then I discovered his sickening past.’
“It was like flicking a switch, from Jekyll to Hyde.”
When Elaine Parker, 32, Newcastle, went on the dating site ‘Plenty of Fish’ in 2016, she met a man who made her feel like she had won the love lottery. He was charming and they clicked straight away, arranging to meet up almost immediately.
Elaine said: “If God created first dates, this would have been one of them.”
In fact, they got on so well that they met two more times that week and got engaged after eight months.
“There were no red flags at all in those initial conversations,” Elaine said, reflecting back.
But as soon as their engagement party was over, her fiancé’s behaviour suddenly, and dramatically, changed.
She said: “We were in the taxi home and out of nowhere he became angry and abusive, shouting at me and my son. When we got home, he smashed the house up. It was like flicking a switch from Jekyll to Hyde.”
From that night, things went from bad to worse, leaving Elaine terrified, and unsure what to do. He started becoming jealous of her spending time with her son, or even walking her dog. When Elaine tried to step back from the abusive relationship, her fiancé began drinking more and, horrifically, sexually assaulting and raping Elaine.
“It changed me as a person forever,” she said. “All the time I was going through this, he was already dating somebody else online.”
Sadly, Elaine’s money was also one of her partner’s targets.
She said: “He threatened me to put his name on the mortgage, and there was a huge financial gain. Living with him like that for months was horrendous.”
Elaine added: “When I finally managed to get him out of the house, he started stalking me. He turned into a monster.”
She felt such an intense sense of shame that she kept what had happened to herself. But when he tried to break into her house one night she rang the police. They put his name into their system and discovered his long history of domestic abuse, and that he used apps to look for vulnerable women. Her ex-fiancé was arrested, and jailed for nine years.
But what upsets Elaine is that a man like that was allowed to use the dating app, no matter what his criminal history was, even before he was sentenced.
“Somebody has to make a stand.”
As a result, Elaine set up the dating site, Safer Date in 2020, which is the only dating site that requires ID checks for every sign-up globally. It also carries out global criminal background checks on every member, regardless of gender.
Elaine said: “It’s a life stigma for me. But somebody has to make a stand to protect people. I feel very proud of launching this app and the more we talk about it, the more we could let people be aware of the dangers out there.”
Responding to why Plenty of Fish and Tinder don’t carry out basic criminal background checks and ID checks in the UK, the Match Group, the owner of the dating websites, said: “We believe in access to background check technology to empower people to make more informed decisions about their safety, and we have partnered with a background check platform to allow match group users to do checks in the US, but that other countries had more complex systems making this more difficult.
“These stories of violence and loss of life are horrific. Their advocacy is making an impact, and this has helped us continually improve our systems and make our apps a safer place.”
‘My Tinder account was deleted after reporting rape.’
In the UK 5 million people have a profile on Tinder, making it by far the nation’s most popular way for people to hook up.
Yet of all the sexual assault reported in the UK linked to dating apps, a third were from Tinder profiles.
Bex Kitchen, 27, is one of the victims who thinks the tech giant has failed to take action to prevent her horrifying experiences from being repeated.- she was blocked by Tinder after reporting a date rape.
Everything was fine to begin with.
She met the man in March 2020 on Tinder, and decided to meet up at her home after one week talking to each other.
Bex, from East Anglia, said: “He seemed nice and normal. But once we met in-person he was really forward and disrespectful.
“When we were upstairs he was immediately on top of me, which made me feel extremely uncomfortable. I had to make an excuse that I needed to go to the toilet to get away from him.
“When I got back, I was shaking, and he was finishing himself off. It was really disgusting, but also a huge relief for me.”
Straight after it, Bex had a complete mental breakdown.
“At that time it was also during COVID-19, he literally left me feeling suicidal and disgusted. I actually wrote a suicide note on my Facebook. It basically said: if you care about me, please come and help me.
“The fact that he messaged me the second day to ask for another meet-up made me feel worse,” Bex said.
She finally chose not to report it to the police, as she’d previously reported an assault and said they ‘did nothing’.
“I don’t really have any confidence in the police dealing with the sexual assault and rape,” Bex said.
Instead, she reported the user’s profile to Tinder. However, days later her own profile was blocked.
Bex’s Tinder account was banned
“It’s daunting to be told that I am the one who violated the terms of use,” Bex said.
“I then filled in an online complaint form, but I didn’t get a response until 9 months after, which only provided me with a few support links. I was getting over it at that point, so the email re-traumatised me a lot.
“It was really insensitive and upsetting. They should have taken that a lot more seriously. I think when people are reporting the case to the dating sites, that should also go straightforward to the police. The sexual assault is an epidemic.”
The email Tinder sent to Bex 9 months after she reported her assault experience to the platform
Match Group Holdings, which owns Tinder and Plenty of Fish, said: “We are very concerned that it took nine months for a response. We want to investigate this. We aim to respond to these types of reports as soon as possible.”
BBC Three’s latest documentary found that of the 37% of dating app users who reported the inappropriate behaviour they experienced, nearly half said they were dissatisfied with the action the platform took.
2 years on from the attack, Bex still hasn’t been able to meet anyone online.
She said: “It definitely has a long-time impact on me. Even when I’ve wanted to meet someone I’m chatting to, I’ve kind of had a sick feeling in my stomach and not gone. I don’t trust people now.
“And if I know my friends have gone to meet someone from an app, I’m the first to say: ‘Let me know where you’re going,’ ‘Let me know when you’re home’.”
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