Abstract
Although previous research has examined the association between the absence of guardianship and online sexual grooming victimization, no previous study has examined the impact of parental supervision on the progression of an online grooming event. To address this empirical gap, we designed three honeypot chat bots that simulated young female users on online chatrooms and deployed them on a list of 21 popular chatrooms commonly accessed by youth and online groomers from all around the world. The first chat bot was designed to convey an active guardianship style to a grooming suspect (treatment 1), the second chat bot was designed to convey a passive style of parental guardianship, and the third chat bot was designed to convey no guardianship (control group). The chat bots were deployed over a period of 2.5 months. Findings indicate that online unstructured socializing with peers in the absence of parental supervision increased online groomers’ likelihood to persist in an online sexual grooming event. In contrast, online groomers were less likely to continue their online grooming once believing their targets were communicating online in the presence of parental guardianship (both passive and active).
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