Protecting Children from Online Grooming: Cross-cultural, Qualitative and Child-Centred Data to Guide Grooming Prevention and Response

With funding from the Tech Coalition Safe Online Research Fund, in 2023-24, Save the Children Hong Kong partnered with the Young and Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University and six Save the Children offices, primarily in the global South, to explore how children from diverse backgrounds experience the various pleasures and pressures of engaging with unknown others online, and what steps they take to protect themselves from potential harm. By listening carefully to children, the study aimed to identify how governments, technology platforms, services, educators, and parents might channel children's insights into the design of more effective policies, programming, product features, and systemic change to better support children to prevent, respond to, and report OCSEA.