Abstract

Little is known about how offenders approach, groom, or solicit children online for offline sexual encounters. In order to protect children, detect online grooming in a timely manner and to counteract the offenders’ behaviours, it is important to understand how offenders groom children online. In this seminar I will present the results of my doctoral research on the strategies that internet predators used to groom minors online. For this research I designed a detailed coding scheme to code and analyse over 100 transcripts of online conversations between convicted offenders and volunteer workers purporting to be children. This study was the first to describe grooming behaviour qualitatively and quantitatively using a large sample of convicted offenders, and to include large numbers of offenders who had approached boys as well as girls online. In this presentation I will present a detailed synthesis of how groomers behaved, and the differences between offenders’ behaviours associated with the gender of the children groomed. I will also present an online groomer typology scheme based on cluster analyses which I performed using dimensions not previously used by other authors.