Later, they got addicted to Korean task-based games as they tried to find emotional refuge in the virtual world,” the officer said. It seems the immediate trigger behind the extreme step was the parents' move of confiscating their phones and forcing them to quit the virtual world that had provided them emotional refuge." The girls accused their parents of trying to force them to give up what they described as their emotional refuge. They went into a shell and began living in their own world,” police sources quoted the father as saying. “It’s around this time that they became completely isolated and started taking refuge in the virtual world.

Source: The Telegraph February 06, 2026 06:48 UTC