European online grooming project (Final report)

Background • The sexual abuse of young people via the Internet is an international problem, a crime without geographical boundaries. Solutions both to perpetrators’ use of the Internet and to the safety of young people online must be sought and will necessarily involve agencies working to protect young people at local, national and international levels. Action 3.1 of the Safer Internet Plus programme invited proposals for projects that aim to enhance the knowledge of the online sexual abuse of young people, with a particular focus on online grooming. • Online grooming is defined as the process by which a person befriends a young person online to facilitate online sexual contact and/or a physical meeting with them, with the goal of committing sexual abuse. Aims • The European Online Grooming Project research consortium is comprised of experts from across Europe and was tasked with meeting the following research objectives: o describe the behaviour of both offenders who groom and young people who are ‘groomed’, o describe how information, communication technology (ICT) may facilitate online grooming, o identify how young people are selected and prepared by online groomers for abuse online, o contribute to the development of prevention initiatives aimed at parents and young people. Methods • The project had three separate but interlinked phases. The first was a scoping project that involved a literature review, review of police case files and interviews with key stakeholders. Phase 2 of the research involved in-depth interviews with 33 male offenders convicted of online grooming in the UK, Belgium and Norway. Online groomers’ chat-logs were sourced from Italy. Phase 3 encompassed twelve focus groups with young people in the UK, Belgium and Italy. The aim of these groups was to understand young people’s online behaviour in the context of the groomers’ accounts, and explore young people’s view of online risks and current safety initiatives. In addition, seven dissemination events were held with teachers, parents and professionals in Belgium, Italy, Norway and the UK in order to promulgate the key findings from the project. • This report brings together findings from the main stages of the European Online Grooming Project - the in-depth interviews with online groomers, focus groups with young people, and disseminationevents with key stakeholder groups. The scoping report and literature review have been published and are available for download at the project web-site