A content analysis of conversation characteristics of online sexual grooming.

Objective: The online landscape is a rapidly evolving context through which perpetration of child sexual abuse may be enacted differently than offline childhood sexual abuse, and these distinctive methods remain understudied. This study aimed to (a) identify strategies/patterns of online communication to test a theoretical model of online grooming and of offline trauma-related dynamics of sexual abuse and (b) examine the nature of appearance-focused dialogue present in the online grooming process.

Method: Our study investigated a sample of 50 verbatim transcripts comprised of dialogue between adult offenders and adult decoys posing as adolescents between 2004 and 2016 from an archived database, http://www.perverted-justice.com/. A coding manual consisting of theoretically derived, content-focused domains of these conversations was developed. Using both a basic and interpretive content analysis approach, codes were applied, and the codebook was iteratively altered to best represent the data.

Results: Four primary themes included support for O'Connell's (2003) model of the stages of online grooming, the presence of two traumagenic dynamics, an emphasis on appearance-focused communication, and unique online grooming strategies.

Conclusions: Additional online context-based grooming strategies that were found could be incorporated into an updated theoretical framework of the grooming process. Parents and children should be informed of the strategies leveraged by online groomers to increase their ability to detect and avoid risky online communication. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).