Are you worried about your child’s safety from child grooming online? Welcome to the club! Child grooming is becoming a major concern of parents as with everyday stories of child abuse and victimisation being reported in the media. The details of the activities of the perpetrators demand our vigilance to ensure the safety of our loved ones both online and offline.
What is grooming?
Grooming is a technique used by predators by which they try to gain the trust of children. Predators try to befriend the child or even with the family by establishing an emotional connection to lessen the child’s inhibition of sexual consents or child abuse. Child grooming is regularly used to lure teens or minors into different illicit businesses like child trafficking, child prostitution or child pornography.
Signs of child groomers
Child groomers’ main objective is to build a relationship with children and their families to achieve certain inappropriate goals. They might do various things to accomplish their desired goals and a few of their common characteristics are:
- They try to befriend with a child’s parents for easily accessing and targeting the child
- Child groomers are in the look for opportunities to spend time alone with the
- They earn the trust of parents to lessen the chance of believing the probable accusation by targeted child
- They offer to babysit the child or invite the child for sleepovers to have an opportunity of bed-sharing
- Child groomers might offer chocolates, gifts or money for no reason or in exchange for physical contact
- They often talk about pornography or sexual acts with the child to normalize their reaction
- They might be involved in continuous physical contact with the child by kissing, hugging, or other inappropriate means
- Child groomers look for ways to keep the abuse as a secret and make it sure that the prey won’t share it with anyone
These are the signs of child groomers or predators by which you can detect a probable risk to your child’s online or physical safety.
What you should do as a parent?
Parents should take special care for their child’s safety and security. You should talk about these risks for sexual abuse from potential predators or child groomers before someone else guide them about these things in the wrong way. Below are some tips for parents on what to do to secure their children against child abusers:
- Listen to your children carefully when they are accusing someone and tell them that they have done the right thing
- Monitor the suspected behaviors and activities of your friends and relatives
- Teach your child the security guidelines for using social media safely
- Teach them about child groomers and their activities
- Observe the behavioral changes in your child
- Tell your children about good and bad touch
- Don’t confront the alleged abuser
- Build your child’s trust in you
If your child is being secretive and possessive about a particular topic or is afraid of a particular person, then you should talk to your child about this. Chances are fair that they will have something to confront or will inform you about inappropriate activity.
Child groomers can badly affect your child’s personality and your child’s confidence level. Guide your children about these issues in a proper way at an early age as predators aren’t concerned about a child’s age or mental health, their purposes are to satisfy their lust and objectives.