Online Sexual Exploitation, Grooming, and Extortion of Youth

• Online sexual grooming – requires the formation of a relationship or building of trust, which often happens over a period of time, and may lead to online sexual solicitation or real-life contact and abuse. 
• Online sexual solicitation – contact and soliciting of nudes, partial nudes, or child sexual abuse material (CSAM) – may happen one time or repeatedly.
• Sextortion – a type of blackmail in which the victim is enticed into sharing intimate images then coerced into continually sharing more and often increasingly sexually extreme images or videos, or financially sextorted by paying money to prevent the sharing of the images. 

Scenario 1: Online sexual grooming leading to online sexual solicitation 

A common scenario for online sexual grooming involves a perpetrator lurking in a chat room, looking for signs of vulnerability from a young community member, such as seemingly not being supervised, using more sexualized language, or using a sexy screen name, says Elizabeth Jeglic, Professor of Psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The perpetrator attempts to gain 1:1 access as well as contact offline, isolating the victim from the chat and encouraging the minor to hide the relationship from their family. Just before the abuse occurs (abuse can include online solicitation and exchange of child sexual abuse material, in-person sexual abuse offline, online sexual talk), the perpetrator will introduce sexualized language. Online sexual grooming develops more quickly than in-person grooming, and research indicates this “red flag” behavior of introducing sexualized language will often occur within 24 hours of first contact, says Jeglic.

Scenario 2: Online sexual solicitation leading to financial sextortion

Typically, perpetrators will use a photo stolen online or an AI-generated image (often of an attractive woman) as bait to approach the victim (often male) via Instagram or Snapchat, says Dorrian Horsey, attorney at Minc Law. Small talk becomes conversation steered toward sexual topics and the perpetrator will suggest mutual exchange of intimate photos. Once the victim shares a photo, the perpetrator quickly becomes threatening in tone, often claiming they will “ruin your life” by sharing with parents or law enforcement. This is terrifying to victims who are coerced into financial payments to keep the perpetrator from sharing their intimate images.

Parents and caregivers worried about online solicitation may not realize the increasing commonality and socialized normalcy of adolescents sharing nude images of themselves. One in seven 9-17 year-olds say they have already shared nudes, and a quarter of this age group says they have had a sexual interaction over the internet and think it’s normal to do so, says Melissa Stroebel, VP of Research & Insights at Thorn. Some kids have even expressed that sharing nudes is the “new second base” and just an online extension of flirting that may be happening in person at school. This socialized acceptance of nude-sharing has made youth more vulnerable to exploitation of shared images by peers as well as strangers online.

Understanding how your child is spending their time online and the features of popular platforms can be intimidating for parents and caregivers who may not feel as technically equipped to stay up to date with fast-moving internet culture. However, making this effort is essential in staying engaged and helping children identify risky situations, says Jennifer Newman, Executive Director of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. “The information is out there – you have to understand how the apps work,” says Steve Grocki, Chief of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) at the Department of Justice. The dangers youth experience online are constantly evolving due to perpetrators’ sophisticated use of popular platforms. The success in financial extortion of young men using fake female identities to solicit nudes has led to suicides in a number of cases, Grocki notes, an increasingly common scenario that wasn’t on the radar a couple of years ago.

Break It Down By Apps and Functions

Familiarizing oneself with the particular functions and risks of popular online platforms can help parents and caregivers understand where potential problems may lie, says Grocki, who cites these examples: 

• TikTok is a heavily consumed platform by youth that restricts direct messages (DMs) to known minors – check whether your child’s profile identifies them as a minor or as an adult. Parents can restrict posting capabilities for minors’ profiles on TikTok and may want to do so.  
• Minor-age users of Instagram are often “sitting ducks” for bad actors if they have not restricted access to posts that often disclose personal information and photos – parents can sign on to another account and test their child’s profile visibility. 
• Snapchat allows users to find other strangers based on interests, and can also be exploited by perpetrators using the text function where the texts and evidence of solicitation or grooming disappear. 
• Popular youth gaming platforms like Discord and Roblox are also used by strangers to gain access to children if the child is participating in open play environments instead of closed-play servers with known peers.

The number one mistake parents and caregivers make is believing that “it will never happen to my child,” and not proactively educating children on how to spot risks online, says Horsey. “I call this the arrogance of disbelief – “not my Sunday school,’ ‘not my athlete,’ or ‘not my scholar.’ Well-behaved and intelligent youth just have to be vulnerable and let their guard down with the wrong person once for a dangerous situation to develop, she says. Newman agrees, “We’re still talking about kids. You can tell the smartest, smartest kid what to do online, but they’re still children. They still may make a mistake.”

Make Sure Kids DON’T:

• Share their name, age, or location with anyone. 
• Share a picture online.
• Chat with adults or strangers online.
• Agree to meet anybody that they meet online.

DO:

• Review and understand the signs of online grooming (sexualized conversation or shared imagery) with your children.
• Get youth to think critically – explain why the guardrails are in place, not just “don’t do it.”
• Let your children know you are there for them no matter what, even if mistakes are made.
• Set social privacy settings to maximum for young children.

(Elizabeth Jeglic)

The best tool in the toolbox to protect children from online sexual exploitation is communication, says Newman, who suggests talking about what they are seeing and experiencing online, what their friends are doing, and what’s happening at school. “Check in with them. ‘Are you on any new gaming platforms?’ ‘Are you on any new social media?’ ‘Where are all the kids meeting these days online?’ Make sure that you keep that conversation going and open on an ongoing basis,” she urges.

It can be intimidating and difficult to broach topics of a sexual nature with kids, but open communication about the risks online is essential to helping children develop the skills they need to keep themselves safe, says Stroebel. A helpful analogy to think about your role as caregiver is the playground for small children, she says. “We never just dropped kids at the playground and said, ‘Figure it out.’ The same thing needs to be applied in online environments. We need to help them grow, understanding what risk looks like, what their ability to navigate that risk should be, and also knowing that sometimes we’re going to be there to dust their knees off, even if they thought they were totally equipped to handle it,” she says.

Many teenagers are not aware of what sextortion is, notes Horsey. “I speak to a lot of teenagers, and they don’t even know what it is until I talk to them about it. It’s important to let your expectations be known [not to share sexual images online]. We know that kids are still doing it, but they do listen to parents.” 

Communication with youth is critical in helping them build the skills to recognize “red flag” situations and act upon that information to keep themselves safe from common sexual exploitation scenarios, says Horsey. “I often hear kids say, ‘I saw that that was a red flag, but I kept going because I was bored,’ or ‘I just want to see what happened,’” she says. Helping them understand some of the real consequences of “red flag” situations may help them resist this behavior when someone online takes the conversation to a sexual place, she says.

Adults cannot always protect youth themselves, especially as children age into adolescence and beyond, notes Jeglic. “We want to give them the skills to think critically, because we cannot always protect them. When they inevitably encounter things that are challenging for them, they will think critically about them and hopefully think twice about them.”

Adolescents do not always respond well to top-down restriction and a “don’t do this” attitude, but disclosing your own mistakes and vulnerability to online phishing can help overcome this typical teen resistance or overconfidence that it “can’t happen to them,” says Grocki. “I say to my teens all the time, ‘I get emails at work training me on security, trying to trick me. I get emails all the time in my private email trying to trick me, and text messages from people that I don’t know.’ And sometimes I’m still not sure [if it’s real].” Sharing this vulnerability even as a well-informed adult may help youth understand that keeping a critical guard up is essential for youth and adult netizens alike.

Some tragic consequences of online sextortion have occurred due to children being unable to face the shame of disclosure to parents and caregivers. Creating a relationship where they can come to you, even when they have made a serious and damaging mistake, is extremely important, says Horsey, as it can be the difference between life and death. “You need to reassure them that they can always come to you. That is the most important message that you want to get across.”

It’s not just adolescents who need to understand the risks they face online, says Jeglic. “We have to have these conversations frequently. We have to have them young, and we have to have them in various different ways that are age-appropriate for the child,” she says.

For younger kids in the 5-9 year-old range, instead of talking about dark and dangerous internet scenarios, there’s a “full world of runway” of age-appropriate topics that lay the groundwork for online safety, says Stroebel. Talking about autonomy, who children should turn to for help if they don’t feel comfortable about something, what respect and healthy interactions look like in online places, and just sitting down and sitting with them while they use technology “creates a really open conversation that is much lower pressure than the types of higher risk conversations that need to happen as they start entering puberty at 10, 11, 12 years old,” she says.

While strangers do perpetrate online sexual exploitation and abuse, it’s actually not the majority of these interactions, says Jeglic, who cites research indicating that 80% of kids experiencing sexual grooming online also know the person offline. “We’re seeing a lot of crossover between the kind of in-person sexual grooming and online sexual grooming, as these are people who are in their social sphere. Often they are significant others, friends, or siblings of a friend.”

Research indicates that perpetrators are more likely to engage with potential victims after 11pm, when parents are likely asleep, says Jeglic. “One of the biggest things that I encourage parents to do is not allow Internet-enabled devices in bedrooms at night. That’s when a lot of this grooming behavior happens, it’s when the pictures are exchanged. Kids are more apt to make poor decisions when they’re tired.”

Identification as a minority – whether that be racial, ethnic, sexual, gender, or neurological minority – is a known risk factor for being a child who is harmed online with sexual grooming, says Jeglic. “Oftentimes, these kids struggle to find peers in person, and so they find communities online who understand them better. But this also makes them vulnerable, and sometimes they’re taken advantage of through these communities,” she notes.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t require a real photo for today’s youth to be exploited using sexual images. More recently, the ease of creating “deep fake” sexual images using non-sexual images of real children’s faces has become a real concern and problem, says Grocki. “Any one of a child’s friends can post a picture on Instagram. That picture then becomes a source material and suddenly they become a CSAM victim.” The availability of this technology means that even other youth, who may not realize the seriousness of what they are doing, are able to create sexualized deep fakes of their peers.

Online resources can provide age-appropriate exercises or discussion guides for helping families and children develop the skills to protect youth, says Newman. The National Center For Missing and Exploited Children offers a safety program called “NetSmartz” with free programming, educational materials, and information about issues youth may face online, such as cyberbullying, sharing and disclosing too much data, sextortion, and online grooming. This program provides resources and activities for parents to educate themselves as well as specific age-appropriate content for ages from 5 to 17 years old.

Neurodivergent children may have a particular vulnerability to online sexual solicitation and exploitation, says Jeglic. A child with difficulty identifying social cues may also have difficulty understanding when somebody is grooming them or engaging in inappropriate conversations with them online. Jeglic suggests coming up with internet ground rules and making a visual cue or poster of simple, concise and explicit rules to follow, such as: no sharing of personal information, address, name of their school, or images, and that if they feel uncomfortable or something happens that they need to alert an adult. For younger children, close monitoring and even possibly use of parental control software may be appropriate, she suggests. Above all, continuing to communicate regularly and openly with your neurodivergent youth will help alert parents to any unsafe situations that may be developing.

Parents can’t prevent every possible online harm from befalling their children nor fix it entirely once it happens – society in general must develop a collective resolve to addressing the problem, says Grocki. “Investigation and prosecution are not the solution. It will not be the solution to ultimately turning the tide on children being exploited and abused in online environments or offline environments. It takes a whole society approach. Engagement with parents and caregivers, teachers, whoever is out there listening is critical to gain a collective understanding of the problem and a collective resolve to respond to that problem,” he says.

Legislative bills that would require Internet providers to do more to detect possible online sexual abuse and provide more transparency into what they are doing for online safety have been stalled in Congress for several years, says Grocki. Advocating for movement on these bills in federal legislation or state legislation like “Erin’s Law” – which mandates sexual violence prevention and has been passed in many states – will help get the topic discussed more in schools and society, says Jeglic. “We have to start talking about sexuality, healthy sexuality, and sexual abuse more in society, because when we keep it quiet, that’s what gives the perpetrators the ability to engage in these types of behaviors.”

Applying pressure to platforms themselves through lawsuits and other means is another avenue to advocate for change and transparency, notes Horsey. “The change that we’re seeing most recently on platforms is because pressure has been applied. They’ve been sued, and that’s what it’s going to take.”

It’s very easy, and understandable, to react with fear and anger when you learn your child has been sexually groomed or exploited online. However, displaying this in front of the child will likely scare and deter them from fully disclosing to you or asking for your help, says Newman. “One thing we really try to talk to parents about is how do we put ourselves in the right mind frame that if a child does come to us and say, ‘Hey, this person reached out to me online,’ or ‘I got this weird direct message on this app,’ instead of reacting, instead making sure that those kids know you’re who they can go to for help and that there is help out there.” 

Children make mistakes and are less likely to tell parents and caregivers about a situation before it escalates if they feel their caregivers are going to be angry with them, says Jeglic. “We want them to be able to come and talk to us so that we can work it through with them.”

Your support is crucial to helping your child through this difficult experience, even if you may be upset that they haven’t followed your advice on online safety, says Horsey. “I can’t tell you how many parents I’ve talked to who have said to me, ‘I can’t believe my kid did this. I’ve talked to him. I told him not to send out pictures.’ I always tell parents when we are in that situation that we’ve already won, because we’re having this conversation and not a much more difficult conversation. So if you find your kid becomes a victim of something like financial extortion, it’s so important that you encourage them and thank them for telling you, because that is half the battle right there.”

“Do not panic and do not pay” if your child is being financially sextorted, says Horsey. “If you pay them, they’ll ask for more.” Instead, she suggests:

• Preserve as much evidence as possible by taking screenshots of what’s transpired between the child and the extortionist.
• After collecting evidence, block contact so the perpetrator no longer has the ability to communicate with you or your child.  
• Set the child’s online accounts to private or even deactivate the accounts if necessary. 
• Report this sextortion to the proper authorities, such as the FBI or the CyberTipline with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. 
• Contact an experienced attorney for any additional guidance.

In addition to the CyberTipline, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children also has the service “Take It Down” to help take down online nude, partially nude, or sexually explicit photos or videos of youth under 18. “What we’ve heard from kids is they just want content down. When the nudes that they’ve shared have been distributed without their permission, when things have been posted online, when they’ve lost control of the distribution of an image, they come to us and they say, ‘I just want it down.’ This is a way that we can do that,” says Newman. The service will work with platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp and Snapchat to try and get imagery taken down.

Some victims of online sextortion believe perpetrators’ claims that they will be arrested and prosecuted if “found out” that they have shared a sexually explicit image of a minor (even if themselves) online. “We see offenders using that type of messaging to further their exploitation online, such as ‘You sent this to me already. If you report me, you’re also going to get in trouble because what you did was illegal. You self-produced this.’ We see that as a tactic for grooming and for exploitation,” says Grocki. “A child in that scenario should never be under threat of prosecution.” There are localities where it’s technically under investigative discretion, he says, but in actuality the vast majority of prosecutors will not bring charges to a child victim.