What every parent should know about 'online grooming'

There have even been cases where the predator has established a Freephone number for the child to call him on. In the UK, Freephone numbers do not show up on telephone bills; again making monitoring impossible, or at any rate very difficult. Secretiveness is generally essential to the abuser's strategy.

The shocking facts
So far, in the UK, following the sort of grooming process outlined above, in the past two to three years 25 children or young people have subsequently gone off to meet such predators in real life, and have been either raped by them or subjected to a serious sexual assault. Of the 25, 22 were girls and three were boys. We know about these 25 children because, in each case, the crime was reported, the perpetrators were caught, convicted and sent to jail.

We do not, of course, know how many cases there have been where no prosecution was not brought or did not succeed for want of evidence, or because the incident was not reported to the police. But we can be sure that 25 convictions does not represent the real level of offending.

For more information about the NCH go to www.nch.org.uk

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