Over the years, Safer Internet Day marked on 7 February has become a landmark event in the online safety calendar. Starting in 2004, Safer Internet Day is now celebrated in approximately 180 countries and territories worldwide.
With this Safer Internet Day we want to raise awareness of emerging online issues and current concerns, namely grooming and online sexual exploitation of children. It’s definitely a topic that brings shivers and incite fear.
About child grooming (a.k.a. enticement of children or solicitation of children for sexual purposes):
“can be described as a practice by means of which an adult ‘befriends’ a child (often online, but offline grooming also exists and should not be neglected) with the intention of sexually abusing her/him”.
(Interagency Working Group, 2016, p. 49).
Research and available data show that grooming is predominately perpetrated by males; to a lesser extent, women solicit children for sexual purposes and/or to groom them (Altamura, 2017).
In Italy:
- during 2021 there were 5,316 cases of child pornography treated by the Postal Police, with an increase of 47% compared to the previous year (3,243);
- the number of minors approached on the web by abusive adults is also growing, in 2021 the number was equal to 531, majority of them under the age of 13 (almost 64% in the 10-13 age group), but cases of online grooming of children aged 0-9 (32 cases) are also growing.
In typical cases, the grooming process proceeds in stages:
- Victim selection. Online, children participate in a variety of social media platforms and communication apps that perpetrators can utilize to gain access to children’s accounts. Perpetrators choose a victim based on the victim’s “appeal/attractiveness” (determined by the perpetrators’ desires), “ease of access” (e.g., based on whether the privacy settings on the websites, platforms, and apps children use are disabled or inadequately set), and/or “vulnerabilities” (Lanning, 2010; Mooney and Ost, 2013; Winters and Jeglic, 2017).
- Contacts with the victim to gain access to him or her. The perpetrator then seeks to form a friendship with the victim (O’Connell, 2003). The perpetrator can glean information about the victim from online sources and use this information to deceive the victim by, for example, feigning common interests and hobbies and similar family and social situations, in order to relate to the victim, build rapport, and establish trust. The perpetrator’s objective is to further develop the friendship into a relationship (O’Connell, 2003; Aitken, Gaskell, and Hodkinson, 2018).
- Before the sexual exploitation or abuse, the offender assesses the risk of being detected (e.g., asks the victim if parents or others monitor the child’s accounts and/or digital devices), communicates the exclusivity of the relationship and the need for secrecy, and isolates the child (O’Connell, 2003; Aitken, Gaskell, and Hodkinson, 2018). However, there may be exceptions to such approaches.
Research has shown that online grooming does not happen through a linear process (Black et al., 2015; Elliot, 2017); it happens through a dynamic process driven by the motivation and capabilities of the offender and the offender’s ability to manipulate and control the victim (Aitken, Gaskell, and Hodkinson, 2018).
The end goal of online grooming is to sexually exploit or abuse the victim inside the network (e.g., by manipulating or coercing the victim to take a sexually explicit image or video and send it to the perpetrator) or offline (e.g., by meeting with the victim in person to sexually abuse him or her). Online grooming is increasingly leading to child disappearances.
What do we do to ensure Safer Internet?
We have just launched CESAGRAM project, coordinated by Missing Children Europe, that aims to enhance the understanding of the process of grooming, and more particularly how it is facilitated by technology and how it can lead to child sexual abuse and missing.
Within the next 2 years we will:
- Research the links between missing and grooming for sexual purposes to advance existing knowledge on prevention and responses.
- Identify key risk indicators of grooming before, during and after a child has experienced sexual abuse and/or has gone missing for better victim identification and identification of those at risk.
- Develop tools and material to increase understanding and awareness of the grooming process for young people and their carers.
- Train frontline workers to increase their skills and knowledge to better identify and respond to victims of grooming.
- Design, pilot and evaluate an AI-based tools that will facilitate the prevention and detection of grooming content online aimed to enhance the operational prevention and detection capabilities of the relevant end users.
- Create knowledge hub to share knowledge on grooming and missing children with professionals and experts to further develop and build on existing expertise and resources.
- Develop recommendations to advise the improvement of the legal and regulatory environment to support protection systems.
Follow us and help us to contribute to make Internet a safer place and reduce those increasing and worrying numbers.
About the project
CESAGRAM – Towards a Comprehensive European Strategy Against tech-facilitated GRooming And Missing is a project financed by the program DG Home Affairs, Internal Security Fund, Call for proposals on the prevention of child sexual abuse, assistance to victims of child sexual abuse and tools to detect child sexual abuse online (ISF-2021-TF1-AG-CYBER).
Partners
- EUROPEAN FEDERATION FOR MISSING AND SEXUALLY EXPLOITED CHILDREN AISBL (Belgium, coordinator)
- KENTRO MELETON ASFALEIAS (Greece)
- CESIE (Italy)
- FONDAZIONE BRUNO KESSLER (Italy)
- KATHOLIEKE UNIVERSITEIT LEUVEN (Belgium)
- TO HAMOGELO TOU PAIDIOU (Greece)
- MINISTRY OF JUSTICE, TRANSPARENCY AND HUMAN RIGHTS (Greece)
- ETHNIKO KENTRO EREVNAS KAI TECHNOLOGIKIS ANAPTYXIS – CERTH (Greece)
- Marie Collins Foundation (United Kingdom)
- Missing persons’ families support centre (Lituania)
- HELLENIC POLICE (Greece)
For further information
Read more about CESAGRAM.
Contact Ruta Grigaliunaite: ruta.grigaliunaite@cesie.org
