Protecting children from online grooming

This was the question tackled by Western Sydney University, the Young and Resilient Research Centre and Save the Children for a recent study. They spoke with 604 children aged 8-18 years across seven countries (Australia, Cambodia, Colombia, Finland, Kenya, Philippines, and South Africa) to understand how they experience and respond to interactions with unknown people online.

Around the world, more and more children are using the internet and online devices, like a smartphone or computer, everyday. Internationally, about a third of all new internet users are children.

If you think about what you do online, you might go online to connect, communicate and share with others, to find information, to learn, to relax and have fun – or for many other reasons. So, you will understand that there are many benefits of going online for children.

But you will also know that going online can be risky and, under some circumstances, can expose you to dangers. This is why it is important to take steps to protect yourself online.

While chatting, gaming and sharing with many different people online can be lots of fun and is often safe, we also know that not all the people that children talk to have good intentions. Indeed, since the COVID-19 pandemic started, there have been growing numbers of children who have had negative experiences when interacting online with people who they don’t know face-to-face.

Governments, technology platforms and non-government organisations are stepping up their efforts to make sure that children, in different parts of the world, can be safe when they go online. Hearing from children living in different places on how they decide who to connect with and why, helps in these efforts.

In this report, they explain who, when, and how children engage online. Then they share what children thought about the dangers of engaging with someone they don’t know online; how they make decisions about when it is safe to engage; and how they protect themselves. Lastly, they share children’s suggestions about what they need adults to do to help them be safe online.

Key Messages

1. Children routinely interact with unknown others in the spaces where they gather to socialise and play online. They tend to only fully trust those they also know face-to-face and treat all others with a degree of suspicion.
2. While they generally recognise the risks of harm associated with engaging with unknown others online, children derive enormous benefit from these interactions.
3. Online safety education, strategies and features should build upon and fortify children’s existing ways of identifying and managing their interactions with unknown others.
4. Online safety education, strategies and features should target the needs of children aged 9-12, particularly those in low- and middle-income countries, as they transition to increasingly social uses of digital technology.
5. Parents and caregivers urgently need targeted education, resources and support to ensure they can guide their children to protect themselves from online grooming.
6. Technology can and must be part of the solution to online grooming. Thoughtful, age appropriate design that leverages the power of artificial intelligence and emerging capabilities will be a critical part of responses to online grooming.
7. Keeping children safe from online grooming requires a whole-of-community approach. Governments, NGOs, technology platforms, teachers, parents and caregivers, and children all have a role to play.
8. Children across diverse contexts experience digital interactions differently and thus responses to online grooming must work with children across cultures to develop effective responses.

Recommendations

1. Better support children to manage their relationships with friends and a range of unknown others online, including those with whom they have a mutual connection and those who are completely unknown to them.
2. Encourage children and the adults who support them to block and report bad actors online.
3. Strengthen pathways to support services to support young users to address online grooming and other online safety challenges.
4. Strengthen and increase the accessibility of online safety and digital literacy education for children, regardless of location or age, to support their management of interactions with unknown others.
5. Strengthen education for parents, carers, teachers, and community leaders to equip them to better communicate with and support their children to interact safely with unknown others.
6. Equip decision-makers to take informed decisions about how to strengthen responses to online grooming.
7. Strengthen and enforce legislation and mechanisms of justice for children who experience online harms.
8. Consider developing a default industry standard around online privacy and security for children to minimise the possibility that they inadvertently share personal information with bad actors in ways that compromise them.
9. Reduce the likelihood that children will encounter violent, sexually explicit, or other age-inappropriate online content.
10. Reduce the likelihood that children will unwittingly interact with adults and those who might be bad actors in online spaces, and ensure that children can engage in age appropriate interactions.
11. Consider implementing AI-driven warning systems to alert young users about the characteristics and prior practices of unknown others with whom they interact online.
12. Ensure platform features do not exacerbate the risk that children might be exposed to bad actors online.

For more information

Find the full report online:

Digital for All: Understanding and Enhancing the Digital Lives of Refugee and Migrant Background Youth

Exploring the role of the digital in promoting resilience:

The Young and Resilient Research Centre