Girls aged seven adopt designer children in new internet game

A new web craze in which young girls make their virtual characters adopt children as fashion accessories has outraged a parents' group.

My Minx also sees girls as young as seven giving their characters contraceptives and morning after pills and clothe them in lingerie and revealing outfits.

Players can buy orphans at an adoption clinic set in the virtual "Style City". It features girls called Pax and Maddox and a boy named Zahara — after Angelina Jolie's adopted children.

Maddox, three, is said to be Cambodian and a fan of eating cockroaches. There is Vietnamese noodle-lover Pax, five, and Ethiopian Zahara, four, whose favourite food is said to be guinea pig.

The adoption centre also boasts a David Banda, four, and Mercy, five, of Malawi, clearly modelled on Madonna's adopted children.
And there is a Mongolian girl called Jamiyan, based on Ewan McGregor's adopted daughter, who is said to enjoy eating rats.

Girls playing the game can adopt children from Haiti. Players are challenged to outdo rivals by amassing more adopted children to "make their family more fashionable".

My Minx was launched shortly before Christmas and has 20,000 members.
Bill Hibberd, spokesman for Parentkind, said: "Their parents will not have any idea that they are playing this game and the children will fail to appreciate its irony.

"Having them getting virtual condoms or morning after pills will not make them any less promiscuous. As regards child adoption, this game encourages them to think that they don't need to worry about morals or ethics.

"It is sending out all the wrong messages and the only reason its creators have made it is to make money. They are exploiting children for profit. Children's innocence is very precious."

My Minx was created by north London firm Blighty Arts. The website's creators are the team behind an earlier game, Miss Bimbo, which has more than two million members and was attacked for encouraging young girls to give their characters diet pills and "boob jobs".

Blighty Arts director Christopher Evans, 30, insisted that My Minx was "harmless, tongue-in-cheek entertainment", adding: "It is nonsense to suggest our game is a bad influence on young children. The game teaches children about the world while poking fun at celebrity adoptions."