Final Report - European Online Grooming Project

are clear links to the dissociative anonymity and invisibility aspects of online behaviour proposed by Suler.
Regarding Ward & Hudson’s self-regulation styles, irrespective of the degree to which the identity is adapted,
the offenders in the two groups above are describing goal-focussed approach-explicit behaviours.
The final group contained men that described not changing their identity in anyway before or during their
online encounters with either young females or males:
I said I was 28 and I was, did this job, got my own place, got a car….I wanted to be honest with her, because
I wanted her to make, to make the decision about whether to talk to me or not… (UK participant, female
victim age 13-15).
Alongside listing a legitimate age, occupation and so on, some men took this open approach further and
were also explicitly honest about listing their sexual interest in young people.
I was quite open, I wasn’t pretending to be younger to groom people that way......I said I was interested in
young girls hoping out there that might be some young teens out there that were curious….(UK participant,
female victim age 13-15).
I wasn’t trying to be them, I wasn’t trying to say ‘look I’m a cool guy and I understand all about teenagers, and
yeah, JLS is, whatever it may be. I was being honest, ‘I’m a 36 year old guy and I like young girls’. (UK
participant, female victims age 13-15).
There were also extreme examples of online disinhibition within this group, to the extent that some men
posted a picture of their flaccid penis as their avatar (online picture identification) or used a sexually explicit
online name tag such as PussyLicker69 alongside publication of their genuine name, age and occupation.
As with the two groups above, some men talked about this extreme behaviour as being underpinned by the
way the online environment facilitates openness and frank conversations.
The fact that some of these men went on to develop contacts with younger people also raises sensitive
questions about the vulnerability of some young people online. This issue is discussed in detail in chapter 6.
In addition, the motivation to retain a legitimate identity is also related to other aspects of these offender’s
grooming behaviours, to be discussed in subsequent sections and explained in detail in the chapter 5.
Contact
This report illustrates that there was not a one-size fits all approach to scanning the online environment and
developing an online identity. As such, it is not surprising that the men talked about a range of different ways
they made and sustained contact with young people online. In this section the contact process is described
in terms of: mode; number of contacts; style; and timing.
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