Criminological differences between contact-driven and online-focused suspects in online child sexual grooming police reports

Differences exist between contact and noncontact-driven online child sexual abuse offenders; however, there is still a notable lack of empirical studies with police samples from non-English speaking countries, including Spain.

We address this gap by analyzing the criminological characteristics of online child sexual grooming (OCSG) suspected offenders from de-identified law enforcement investigations in Spain.

We anonymously coded data provided by Spanish law enforcement agencies from 257 OCSG cases (i.e., unique chat logs between a suspect and minor) extracted from 98 police reports with index investigation years from 2008 to 2021. A total of 101,391 messages were analyzed.

Three distinct datasets were created: 257 OCSG cases, 120 unique suspects (79 online-focused, 41 contact-driven), and 234 unique victims. Each dataset focused on different criminological variables for analysis, such as grooming strategy, motivation, and victim high-risk behaviors.

There were no significant differences between suspects on gender, age, or criminal offense history. Contact-driven suspects were more likely to use positive rapport (ɸ = 0.18), send unprompted sexually explicit images of themselves (ɸ = 0.19), and offer something in exchange (ɸ = 0.25). Victims of contact-driven individuals were more likely to be male (ɸ = 0.52) and offer something in exchange for sex or sexually explicit images (ɸ = 0.18). Victims of online-focused individuals were more likely to be younger (r = 0.26).

These findings suggest criminological differences in the online grooming strategies between contact-driven and online-focused suspected offenders in Spain.