While adults who groom children online are often strangers, this is not always the case. The groomer may blackmail the child by threatening to release the private photos or videos and share them with the child’s friends or family. In the most extreme cases, the groomer will pressure the child to meet in person and may even fly in to meet the child. The child may be pressured to take explicit photos or videos of themselves and send them to the groomer. Once an online relationship has been established, the groomer will often steer the conversation towards sex. The adult may try to secure their trust with fake profile pictures, by pretending to share similar interests, by offering gifts to the child or by complimenting the child. How Do Online Predators Operate?Īdult predators looking to groom children online often visit social media websites that are popular with young people and will pretend to be their age. And while using social media, forty percent of children remove privacy settings in order to attract more friends or followers. Two out of ten children between the ages of 8 and 11 are aware of the issue and are concerned that strangers may find out information about them. In addition, 58 percent of parents report being concerned about the threats that strangers pose online. Four percent of children receive aggressive solicitations from adults online, including attempts to contact the children in person or over the phone. In over a quarter of all reported exploitation incidents, the online predator will ask a child for sexually explicit photos of themselves. An estimated 89 percent of sexual advances directed at children occur in Internet chatrooms or through instant messaging. According to the F.B.I., over 50 percent of the victims of online sexual exploitation are between the ages of 12 and 15. Children between the ages of 12 and 15 are especially susceptible to be groomed or manipulated by adults they meet online. There are an estimated 500,000 online predators active each day. Statistics About Grooming and Online Predators In the most serious cases, this can lead to real life encounters. Even on websites geared towards children and young adults, there are often adult online predators who look to interact with children. Young people use popular social media sites to stay in touch with their friends and to meet new people. The Internet has expanded the way that young people communicate and interact with their peers. There are a variety of dangers lurking online that affect minors in a number of different ways.

Cases of online predators