Dragon+ (Developing Resistance Against Grooming Online: Stories Strengthened Safeguards) is an End Violence Against Children and Tech Coalition 2023-24 collaboratively funded project to research and report on the interactional dynamics between offenders and children, including how perceived-first-person CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) may be generated and how children try to communicatively resist groomers’ manipulation. We are bridging the gap between research into online child sexual exploitation and abuse (with an offender focus) and child-focused research into remediation strategies.
We are bringing together qualitative and quantitative linguistic analysis of online grooming chatlogs and participatory research methods, to provide new research-evidence knowledge on offender-child dynamics and children’s language during online grooming.
The project is developed in partnership with UK-based lived experience experts and child safeguarding practitioners from approximately 15 organisations in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America (e.g., child helpline counsellors, hotline analysts, content moderators and police school liaison officers).
Project partners include:
Together, we are generating and reporting novel, richly contextualised research insights to inform the design and implementation of actionable online grooming preventative/detective technologies, at scale.
Dragon+ newsletters will be distributed periodically, if you wish to join our mailing list or would like to contact us, please email project.dragonsplus@swansea.ac.uk.