1 Internet Safety Eu Study

Centre for Abuse and Trauma Studies
(CATS)
Child Internet Safety Event
Internet Grooming - Understanding Offender
Behaviour and Protecting Young People
House of Lords
26th March 2010
Centre for Abuse & Trauma Studies
www.cats-rp.org.uk
• New centre is collaborative venture between

Kingston University & Royal Holloway,
University of London
• Profs Davidson (Criminology) & Bifulco (Health
and Social care) are the Co-Directors
• CATS aims to incorporate research and
practice into a broad range of abuse issues.
• Focus on victims, offenders and legal issues.
• Focus on research findings and practice
applications in criminal justice, social work and
health settings.
CATS and offender research
Julia Davidson
Background research
Evaluation community sex offender programmes &
Comparison sex offender & victim accounts of offence
circumstance Funder: National Probation Service &
Home office (2001) Davidson
• Evaluation Metropolitan Police Safer Surfing internet
safety programme (2005) Funders: Metropolitan Police
Authority & Crime-stoppers with Lord Ashcroft
Davidson
• Young People’s online experience - CEOP and
national Audit Office (2009)
Practice implications – developing training
courses on internet safety for CJS
practitioners
CATS and victim research
Toni Bifulco
Background research:
• Putting children at the centre of police practice.
Metropolitan Police Child Abuse Command.
• Evaluating the use of the Childhood Experience of Care
and Abuse (CECA) interview in Child Safeguarding
Services. (Kingston Safeguarding Services).
• Evaluating attachment in abused young people in
residential care St Christopher’s Fellowship
New research planned
– To examine specific effects of internet abuse on
victims
Practice implications
– Training on abuse assessment tools for practitioners
in health and social care
The European Online
Grooming Project_
Stephen Webster (NatCen, UK)
Prof Julia Davidson (KU, UK)
Prof Antonia Bifulco (RHUL, UK)
Petter Gottschalk (BI Norwegian School Management)
Prof Thierry Pham (University Mons-Hainault, Belgium)
Prof Vincenzo Caretti (University Palermo, Italy)
The European Online Grooming
Project
• Largest study of online grooming to date
• Aims:
– to understand the different ways sexual
offenders approach, communicate and
‘groom’ young people online
– to empower policy makers, front line
professionals, teachers, carers and young
people to effectively manage online risks
• Co-funded by the European Union, through the
Safer Internet Plus Programme. Running from
June 2009 to December 2011
European Online Grooming Project
(2009-2011) - Aims
• Explore behaviour of offenders who groom online.
• Describe how different forms of information,
communication technology are used to facilitate the
process of online grooming.
• Further the current low knowledge base about the
way in which young people are selected and
prepared for abuse online
• Make a significant contribution to the development of
educational awareness and preventative initiatives
aimed at parents, teachers and young people
Study outline
Three phases
– Scoping interviews with stakeholders, review of
police case-files; development of theoretical
model, literature review
– Interviews with online groomers in the UK,
Norway, Italy & Belgium
– Dissemination activities to parents, teachers,
young people in Europe
• Research and methods approved ethically by
NOMS, National Research Committee (October
2009)
Scoping findings: Model
development
• Two broad ‘types’ of groomer are hypothesised:
targeted and opportunistic
• Offender maintenance appears to run concurrently
with phases and encompasses:
• cognitive distortions; time on offender forums;
indecent image collections
• Groomers appear to pass through the phases in
minutes, hours or days – process does appear to have
speeded up
• A nine phase model of grooming behaviour in
development
Scoping report April 2010, Webster, Davidson, Bifulco, Gottschalk, Caretti, Pham
Stakeholder quotes
• I’ve got suspects at the moment who have four
identities…..they’ve created two identities of 13 year old
girls and two male, and what this guy has done is
absolutely plan it to make sure that he can have backup.
He’ll have one on Yahoo! Messenger, one on MSN.
Why? Well, you can’t be on two MSN at the same time
but you can be on others, so he can actually be two
people (UK SH 4 - police)
• If he hopes to communicate, he’s got to speak the same

lingo. If they don’t communicate the same way, if the
groomer isn’t familiar with the language the kid uses, it
just isn’t going to happen (Belgium, SH3 police)
Stakeholder quotes – blackmail
• The groomer gradually increases his control on the
victim, who doesn’t really realize it. An example of this
control is the online blackmail: I remember a ..young girl
seduced on chat by a groomer who started to recharge
her mobile phone, as a normal favour a friend can do
another one. He then started asking her to send him
pictures of her bare-breasted and then with only her
underwear on. When she refused to give him pictures of
her totally naked, the groomer had enough photos to
blackmail her (Italy SH4 – Internet expert)
Grooming – planned behaviour
• I think grooming is planned out in advance. In my
opinion, they have a very precise game plan (Belgium
SH4 - Police)
• I want to understand how online grooming activity is
connected to other kinds of risk activities and offensive
activities and what are the underlying dynamics in the
grooming process as such, what part of the grooming
process is different in the big picture. As a therapist I’m
concerned with the underlying motivation. What is it that
propels these people to commit these acts? If we want to
help them and avoid abuse in future, we need to
understand this. (Norway SH4 – Treatment Provider)
Groomer characteristics
• Well, my first thought is it’s useful to know if they’re different
because what you want to understand as a treatment provider
always is why did you do it, what made him want to do it, what
enabled him to do it, what triggered it, what maintained it, all
that kind of thing. So, if people, if people’s different routes
into offending mean something different in that respect, but
you see I do think, this kind of goes back to what I was trying
to say earlier, is why a lot of the research isn’t very helpful, I
think people have done research that they can do, all we’ve
got, particularly internet offenders we can split in to two
groups and we’ll compare them without really thinking about.
How valuable is it, is it if we do and I’m, often I get journals
with an internet paper and I look at the abstract and I get
halfway through and I think oh it’s not really going to tell me
anything. (UK SH1 Treatment Provider)
Groomer cognitive distortions
• Powerful Internet - feeling addicted to the Internet,
overwhelmed by and powerless to the Web.
• Role-play – ‘it’s not really me online; I was certain that
it was another man messing about; I would never
actually force myself on a child.’
• Sexual Children – ‘the young person is not saying no;
they could have stopped it if they wanted to; young
people online would not talk as they do if they did not
want sexual contact’.
• Educational – ‘I’m teaching them about sex’.
Stakeholders - prevention
• I’m really concerned about prevention because
I see a lot of things out there. If there’s one
thing I feel really strongly about, it’s prevention
programs for kids. They’re a good thing
because kids need to be protected from
paedophiles. But when we ask (adolescents)
who this type of prevention is for, they say it’s
intended for younger kids. That’s the problem
(Belgium, SH3 - Police)
Stakeholder Quotes- victim behaviour
• (in a Swedish study of grooming) most of the children had what
she (the author) calls self-destructive behaviour. They go online
and they are asking, they know what they are doing….taking risk
(Norway, SH1, young people expert)
• …it blows my mind to know that there are more and more young
girls out there who know they’re chatting with a grown man.
Paedophiles need to hide their age less and less, it’s becoming
less and less necessary for them to say they’re 12 years old;
they might say they’re 39 instead of 45. More and more, young
girls are chatting with grown men even if they know that they’re
way older than them. (Belgium, SH3 police)’
• …..they are thinking, ‘I am sitting here in my bedroom, what can
possibly go wrong’ (UK, SH5, young person specialist)
• ……..they appreciated being taken serious, they (the online
groomers) give them compliments that they are grown up, so the
child will get confirmation of being somebody and a grown up
(Norway, SH1, young people expert)
Next steps: Interviews with online
groomers
• 30 interviews in the UK, conducted by a small,
experienced team of NatCen researchers and 15
interviews conducted by partners in European centres
• Interviews will explore the behaviour of online groomers
in detail, including any variation in actions according to
their background and the demographics and responses
of different young people
• Interviews aim to develop explanations for different
types of grooming behaviours presented in the model
• Final stage - Holding workshops in schools for teachers and
parents to inform about findings and key messages re internet
grooming, both in UK and in partner countries.

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Centre for Abuse and Trauma Studies

• New centre is collaborative venture between

• If he hopes to communicate, he’s got to speak the same

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