Online Grooming Research
How children across seven countries experience online grooming
Most of what is known about online grooming comes from offenders and case files. This study started from the other end: how do children themselves experience it? I served as Co-Principal Investigator on a seven-country, qualitative, child-centered study of exactly that.
It was a collaboration between Save the Children and the Young and Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University, supported by the Tech Coalition's Safe Online Research Fund. The resulting report, Protecting Children from Online Grooming, translates children's own accounts into guidance for prevention and response.
The point of centering children is practical: interventions designed around how harm is actually experienced tend to work better than those designed around how adults imagine it.