Online child sexual grooming: Abuse and manipulation through communication

At the risk of stating the obvious, online child sexual grooming entails two-way inter-action: the groomer and their child-target engage in digital communication. Like in all communication, digital or otherwise, what one person says, and how they say it, influences what the other person says, and how they say it. In the case of online child sexual grooming, this means that groomers can, and do, alter their communicative behaviours according to how their child-targets engage and react. Groomers alternate between ‘nice’ (complimenting, giving options, etc.) and ‘nasty’ (threatening, commanding, etc.) communication styles quickly and frequently, often from the onset of an interaction. This pivoting is cognitively difficult to process, making it hard for children to see that they are being manipulated.

So, online child sexual grooming entails two-way, continually evolving communication. Crucially, that communication is inherently asymmetric, whereby groomers have power over the children they target. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, there is a pre-existing power imbalance between them: the adult is more developed, communicatively and experientially. This means that, when negotiating the terms of their digital relationship, the groomer/adult has the communicative upper hand. Secondly, groomers are very focused on their sexual objectives when communicating with children, meaning their communication is highly tactical. By contrast, children generally have less clearly defined and hence more shifting goals when interacting with grooming adults online, ranging from friendship or romantic relationship seeking through to sexual curiosity and exploration. When groomer and child-target goals clash in the course of their digital interaction, they need to be negotiated. And it is at this point that the power asymmetry characteristic of online child sexual grooming puts the child at a clear disadvantage - a disadvantage that groomers fully abuse through a sophisticated tactical communication armoury, as we see next.

Research into online child sexual grooming shows that groomers use a number of communicative tactics to achieve their sexually abusive goals. These include isolating child-targets from their support networks, desensitising child-targets to sex, seeking to build their trust, and securing further contact with them online and, in the case of so-called contact grooming, also offline. Each of these manipulation tactics can be broken down into specific sub-tactics. In the case of building trust, for instance, groomers typically pay compliments to their child-targets, seek to elicit personal information from them, spend time discussing hobbies and relationships (theirs and with others, such as boyfriends and girlfriends), and simply ‘hanging out’ online.  When it comes to isolation tactics, groomers try to gain exclusive –and often secrecy-bound - access to the children they target, be that physical (for example making sure the children are alone when they chat online to them) or affective (for instance by eroding the value of other trusted relationships in children’s lives).

Furthermore, online groomers deploy their sophisticated tactical armoury differently. We saw earlier, in the context of power abuse, that they pivot between ‘nice’ and ‘nasty’ talk. Additionally, some online groomers primarily display a coercive communicative style, making numerous threats and being very direct in their requests for personal details, including receiving sexual images from their child-targets, etc. This may make children feel scared and, given the power dynamics at play, ‘give in’, leading to a downward spiral of increasing sexual abuse and fear, which in turn makes disclosure of the abuse difficult if not altogether impossible for them. Other online groomers, however, favour an indirect or ‘polite’ style, seemingly yielding power over the interaction to their child-targets. They may, for instance, state “it’s up to you, i only want you to do what you’re ok with” when framing cyber-sex between them. This may make children feel that they are in control. If and when they realise that this was never the case, they may develop acute self-blaming feelings that in turn create powerful barriers to disclosure.

What is more, groomers’ tactical armoury is non-sequential, and the tactics exhibit considerable overlap. A compliment, such as “hot profile pic!” may be the first message a child receives in an online grooming context – even before basic personal details, such as names and ages, have been exchanged. That compliment makes the child feel liked, paving the way for trust development, and achieves a certain degree of sexual desensitisation – both within less than a minute of digital interaction. In other words, the compliment is clearly multi-tactical from the groomer’s perspective. Similarly, asking the child to talk about their relationships – about past or present boyfriends/girlfriends, typically – may lead to offers of emotional support, as in example 1, and advance groomers’ trust-building tactic. Yet, that very relationships talk may include discussion of sexual aspects of the child’s – and/or the groomer’s – lives, which activates the groomer’s sexual desensitisation tactic. It may also entail the groomer communicatively framing the child-groomer relationship – of support, trust, or (planned/actual) sex – as being better than other relationships, devaluing them, which is at the heart of groomers’ isolation tactic.