DRAGON+ (Developing Resistance Against Grooming Online: Stories Strengthened Safeguards) is a Tech Coalition Safe Online Research Fund project (2023-2024) that examines the interactional dynamics between offenders and children and how children communicate in the context of online grooming, including how they try to communicatively resist groomers’ manipulation. The project bridges 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 23 organisations in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America (e.g., child helpline counsellors, hotline analysts, content moderators and police school liaison officers). These can be viewed on the DRAGON+ Partner Map.
Project partners include:
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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.dragons@swansea.ac.uk.