Little red riding hood in the social forest. Online grooming as a public health issue: a narrative review.

INTRODUCTION

Online grooming is a manipulative process through which an adult attempts to arrange a sexual interaction with a minor using internet. Children are constantly exposed to the online world, posing online grooming as a public health issue.

OBJECTIVES

The aim of this narrative review is to describe the state of online grooming preventive strategies in recent literature through an overview of online grooming phenomenon.

METHODS

Our literature review included research articles and reviews published between January 2014 and March 2019, as well as reference lists of included studies.

RESULTS

The analysis provides a picture of online grooming phenomenon, identify recurrent features of perpetrators and victims. Several preventive strategies have been implemented, but they lack any kind of efficacy evaluation and miss a theory driven approach. Fragmentation of preventive initiatives is a critical issue, in contrast with the need of an institutional public health strategy.

CONCLUSIONS

While the attention around online grooming is growing, there is still the need of further sensitizing the involved stakeholders and developing evidence based preventive strategies under an institutional guidance.