Online Content

Online Grooming: How to Protect Your Children from It

With the internet, children are connected to a larger network. Many children meet and connect with strangers over the internet and through online platforms such as social media and gaming.

A child’s increased exposure to strangers can lead to a dangerous threat known as online grooming, which refers to sexual grooming that takes place in the cyber world. Sexual grooming is the act of getting to know and exposing the child to sexual content in a bid to prepare the child for sexual activity (Randhawa & Jacobs, 2013).

Dangers of Online Grooming

Due to the accessibility of the internet, many children can be complacent and careless when using it. This is alarming, since most children have yet to fully develop their social and emotional maturity and may not know how to handle the complexities of the online world.

There have been incidents of online grooming that occurred on games as well as social media. Popular online games like Minecraft and Roblox attract many children – unfortunately, they also attract adults with ill-intentions. In one such incident, a 23-year-old man targeted two boys on Minecraft and sexually groomed them (BBC News, 2017). Social media has its share of online grooming cases as well. A 38-year-old man got acquainted with boys on Facebook and eventually performed sexual acts on 10 of them (Alkhatib, 2017). The victims were not just children, but youths as well.

Protecting Your Child

How can you ensure your child’s safety online?

1. 1. Have open conversations with your childIt is important to talk to your child regularly and cultivate a healthy relationship with him or her. Your child will then be more willing to share any problems with you, which provides you with a glimpse into your child’s world. This allows you to detect any potentially dangerous online behaviour.At the same time, do not be afraid to talk to your child about the dangers of the internet and the possibility of online grooming. Talking to a stranger online can be equally or even more dangerous than talking to a stranger offline.
   2. Monitor your child’s online activityChildren spend large amounts of time on their mobile devices. While it is impossible to totally stop them from using the devices, it is important to define the boundaries of mobile device usage with your children. A possible framework would be “The 3-2-1 Rule” (as recommended by DQ World): play games less than 3 times a week, limit total screen time to less than 2 hours a day and play games for less than 1 hour a day (DQ World, 2017).It is also important to install parental control software on the devices that your child uses. The extent of parental control should differ depending on your child’s age, and parents should be careful not to either under-block or over-block their child’s online activity. The former refers to the inability to block the desired content from the devices while the latter refers to the excessive blocking of content.

Even with preventive measures in place, it is important that you don’t neglect educating your child on how to use the internet responsibly. There will come a time when the child can no longer be controlled by such preventive measures, and that is when the child’s values will determine his or her actions on the internet.