Online grooming is both an alarming and disturbing prospect for any parent, but taking steps towards understanding the threat and how it comes about makes it much easier to prevent. Often children and adolescents experience great feelings of shame, disgust and embarrassment with themselves when they find themselves embroiled in grooming, so it is important to understand the signs of grooming are rarely apparent to children at first.
Such grooming often begins in a friendly manner, most often undertaken by sexual predators or paedophiles who will assume a false identity in order to establish a connection with a child. Most often this is achieved by pretending to be children themselves. It is understandable that, at first, children often feel safe with their groomers as such activity is usually undertaken in seemingly public environments such as chat rooms and social networking sites. The child safety website Quib.ly can help educate you (and your child) on how to determine safe websites and also provides you with steps to ensure that your child remains protected while surfing the internet.
Befriending children in this way online is usually done with the aim of lowering the child’s inhibitions as well as instilling feelings of obligation towards the groomer. A groomer will often fish for information about the child’s age, address and school address, and attempt to initiate sexual contact by showing children examples of pornography. As things turn nasty, children can feel both helpless and trapped, unable to seek help from parents or teachers due to their own feelings of confusion, guilt and shame.
Alerting your child to the dangers
Just like in real life, you want your child to enjoy the online world without fearing what may be lurking behind every corner. However, online grooming is a very real threat, and alerting your child to the dangers in a positive way can help them to become more self-aware and discerning when it comes to who they share information with online.
Discuss social networking sites and chatrooms with your children and ensure they understand that not everyone is who they say they are. Encourage them to only make friends with people whose identity they have verified.
Ensure your child understands the dangers associated with sharing information such as addresses, schools and phone numbers and that they should always be kept private online. Explain the dangers of having their photos visible to everyone and why photos should be visible to family and real-life friends only.
Look out for changes in behaviour
If your child becomes remote or secretive, particularly if they begin hiding emails or if they start receiving gifts, talk to your child about the possibility of exploitation. At this point you will need to tread carefully, as due to the emotional trust built up between a child and their groomer, the child may not be aware that any abuse is taking place. Some children even believe they are in a relationship with their groomer due to the nature of the abuse. Flattery and suggested modelling opportunities are regular tactics employed by groomers, especially with young girls.
Keeping your child safe online will always be of paramount importance, but there is only so much you can do if children themselves are not aware of the dangers. Ensure your child is protected by letting them know how to protect themselves, and by showing them that they can talk to you about anything that occurs in their online lives.
[Note: The post is brought to you in association with Quib.ly]