Final Report - European Online Grooming Project

With the technology understood and regular online sessions embedded in daily life, the foundations were laid
for the men to contact young people and move in and out of different phases of the grooming process to
meet their needs. These phases are explored further in the sections below.
3.3 The features of online grooming
In the section above we have illustrated that online groomers are not a homogenous group. As such, we
would not expect their patterns of offending behaviour to be identical. For example, there was evidence
of men contacting on one to two young people online at any one time, alongside other accounts where a
significant number of young people were on an online friend lists at different stages of the grooming
process.
I’d say that before I came into prison, I had about two thousand people on my MSN, about seven
hundred and fifty were young girls age 14 to 15. I didn’t obviously talk to them all on a daily basis but
would have spoken with them at some time yeah…. (UK participant, female victims age 13-15)
In chapter 5 the report sets out a typology that helps explain this behavioural diversity. But whether or
not one or a number of young people were contacted currently, a feature of online grooming shared
across the sample was that offenders tended to refine their activities on the basis of what had ‘worked
well’ in previous encounters with young people. Consequently, movement through the different features
of online grooming described below is neither unitary or linear. Instead, it is cyclical, involving a pattern
of adoption, maintenance, relapse, and readoption over time. For this reason the features are not
numbered as that would inaccurately indicate a linear process. Additionally, the actual process of online
grooming may take minutes, hours, days or months. As such, online groomers remain at different
behavioural points for various lengths of time according to a dynamic inter-relationship between their
goals and needs and the style or reactions of the young person.
Figure 3.3.1 presents the features of the online grooming process, alongside two important concurrent
features: offence maintenance and risk management. In the subsequent sections we describe each of
theses features in detail. In chapter 4, offence maintenance and risk management are explored.
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