Online Safety Topics: Talking to your kids about grooming.
ONLINE SAFETY TOPICS
Grooming is the building of a false relationship to gain the trust of another individual for the purpose of manipulation or exploitation.
Predators groom kids either online or in person in order to exchange explicit photos, engage in sexual activity, or for financial gain.
Talk to your kids about in-person and online relationships.
There are multiple stages of grooming, and they may not be followed sequentially. A few might even be happening simultaneously. Every situation and relationship is unique, so the grooming process can be as short as a few hours or as long as several months.
In the first stage, the predator’s primary objective is to build trust with the youth. For example, they may like or comment on a youth’s post, compliment them on their pictures, or identify a mutual interest. They scroll through social media profiles to learn about the youth and thereby strategize how to initiate and build relationships. As the predator develops a rapport with the youth, they may work to establish themselves as a trustworthy and necessary person in the child’s life. Whether it's promising a romantic relationship or offering to step into the role of a father/mother figure, they create situations where the youth becomes heavily dependent or reliant upon them for physical or emotional needs. The predator can then use this trust to their own advantage.
Once they feel confident in the level of trust they’ve gained from the youth, their predatory behavior may start to escalate, especially if they come to find there is little to no caregiver supervision of the child’s activities. They may start introducing sexual behavior, such as sending explicit pictures and videos, all the while normalizing such behavior in the context of their relationship. They convince the youth that it’s appropriate or acceptable and then ask them for something in return - sending pictures or videos of themselves, meeting in person, role-playing, etc.
Tips for talking to your kids about topics associated with grooming.
Talking to your youth about grooming may feel awkward, so here are some tips we hope will help. Keep in mind that this isn’t a one-time conversation, but one you should be having often.
First things first: be approachable. Be a safe place. Affirm and reassure your kids that you’re there for them, and do whatever you can to make them feel seen and heard.
Openly discuss online and in-person relationships they have. In a non-confrontational way, ask to see who their friends are and who they’re talking to. Scroll through their friends list (both who they follow and also who follows them) and ask curious questions. How do you know this person? Let's see who else they're following, etc. Remind them you’re asking from a place of concern and value for their safety.
Talk about relationships, both in-person and online. What does trust mean to them, and how do they build it? What are characteristics of people they tend to trust? What are characteristics of people they wouldn’t trust?
Ask them how they use their various social media platforms and what information they share. Talk to them about how the information they share about themselves could be used to manipulate them. For example, if they share that they just broke up with their boyfriend or girlfriend, how someone could then try to offer a relationship? This can then lead to a conversation about privacy settings.
Make an agreement together that you’ll be looking at their phone/laptop/tablet regularly because you want to help them stay safe. Look into the privacy settings and parental controls for the different social media apps your kids are using.
Watch this example of what grooming looks like
The best way to safeguard against grooming
Your best safeguard against grooming is cultivating emotional safety and awareness in your family. Get to know them and practice unconditional love. Coach your kids to question the motives of people they interact with online. Why are they asking these questions? Why are they offering this to me? Providing a framework of love and authenticity at home against which your kids can examine online relationships helps them build discernment and feel comfortable coming to you for help. When helathy relationships are modeled at home, kids are more equipped to recognize unhealthy relational behaviors outside of home.