Responses to Child Solicitation/Grooming

1. Responses to Child Solicitation/Grooming Prof. Alisdair A. Gillespie De Montfort University, UK

2. This Session • Examines the response of the criminal law to child sexual exploitation. • Focuses primarily on the issue of child solicitation/grooming. • Also considers the response where children generate harmful content.

3. Child Solicitation/Grooming Attack No previous identification of the child. No intention to abuse in the future. Extremely high-risk. Abuse Offender unlikely to want to be caught. Likely to want to create a pattern of abuse Control required. • Grooming is neither new nor particularly hi-tech. • How does an offender abuse a child?

4. Child Solicitation/Grooming Controlling a Child Negative control Abuse of power (teacher, cleric etc.) Threats to child (violence, care etc.) Threats to those known to the child “Positive” control Befriending a child McLachlan notes that “monsters don’t get children, nice men do.” Create a situation where the child “acquiesces”

5. Online threats • The Internet allows for a degree of anonymity. • Quayle & Taylor • “You can’t go up to a boy in the street and say… do you fancy having sex… whereas you could online.” • Yet we also know that (increasingly) it is not by subterfuge.

6. Child Solicitation/Grooming • Place in International Law.

7. Legal: International Law • CoE Convention on Protection of Children. • Each party shall take the necessary legislative measures...to criminalise the intentional proposal, through information and communication technologies, of an adult to meet a child who has not reached the age [of consent]...for the purpose of committing any of the [sexual] offences...where this proposal has been followed by material acts leading to such a meeting. • EU Directive (Article 6.1 has similar wording).

8. Legal • Difficulties: • Proving intent. • What are “material steps”? • “Thought crime”? • Proactive or Reactive?

9. Online Threats • Some changes in grooming behaviour. • There appears some evidence that less meeting and more on pornography. • Difficulty where law focuses on meeting a child.

10. Legal: International Law • The EU Directive is the only international instrument that appears to have recognised this directly. • Member states shall…ensure that an attempt, by means of information and communication technology, to commit the offences…by an adult soliciting a child…to provide child pornography depicting that child is punishable.(Article 6.2) • Other instruments arguably cover it through procuring child pornography. Still limiting: Cyber-sex?

11. The Law in England & Wales • England (famously) has a ‘grooming’ offence (s.15, SOA 2003) but this is somewhat misunderstood. • It arguably does not criminalise grooming but the results of grooming. • It is focused on the issue of a meeting. • It is only one of a patchwork of offences that relate to grooming.

12. Law in England & Wales

13. Child Solicitation/Grooming • Tackling the solicitation/grooming of a child requires a multi-faceted approach. • Traditional approaches concentrated on the meeting with a child but this is not the only form of exploitative situation. • Some studies suggest that once a child has sent indecent material / posed in front of a webcam the footage is then used to blackmail the victim into contact offending. • Recognition of the portability of technology.