I was 12 years old when I got my first phone. It wasn’t very good, but it gave me a sense of freedom, and soon my phone was crowded with the logos of social media and messaging apps like Kik, Omegle, and Whisper. I had no idea that simply downloading apps, like my peers, would lead me deeper into the world of trafficking. In my world, I was trash already. My only purpose was to spread my legs and accept the degradation that came with it.
Let me tell you how online grooming for trafficking works, from the perspective of somebody who lived through it.
Grooming is a crime of convenience, access, and an inherent power imbalance. It predates the internet – predators have always hunted on playgrounds, in community centres, and in schools – but online mediums have given groomers fewer obstacles to accessing children. They prey on those looking for love and community, offering what those kids want, slowly reeling them in to gain the child’s trust until they’re easy to manipulate.
It’s not a high-tech operation. It’s not hard to understand or to do, especially when the groomers were once victims themselves. Sexual exploitation, grooming and abuse all create cycles of violence. Traumatised children too often grow up to become perpetrators themselves, and there’s a whole community of abused people out there now abusing others. Perpetrators and victims are both products of their environments. They don’t fall from the sky.
For the most part, groomers simply fulfil a child’s unmet needs. To the untrained eye it’s just people typing into boxes – one manipulating, the other being manipulated. But to be effective, a groomer has to decide how and when to say the right thing. Imagine a 12-year-old girl fighting with her parents. She doesn’t want a friend to tell her she was in the wrong. She wants that friend to comfort her and agree her parents are to blame. It’s not rocket science. But it’s easier to do well if you have already experienced what that child is going through.
Grooming is social, not technological. And because it is decidedly low-tech, anybody looking for a high-tech fix for it is going in the wrong direction. No algorithm, no matter how good, is going to prevent somebody saying what somebody else wants to hear.
A social problem requires a social response. It requires education. Children are perfectly capable of identifying grooming tactics if they know what to look for. It is we, as a society, that fails to equip them with the tools to identify the threat. Children also need root and branch reform to systems and institutions that expose them to abuse. Finally, children need privacy, security, and their needs met by people who are not dangerous to them.
When I entered the child welfare system at the age of five, all of those were in short supply.
The Child-Welfare to Trafficking Pipeline
Children in care are incredible. It takes a lot of mental fortitude to deal with the collapsing family dynamic, the high turnover rates among social workers, and the saviour complexes of foster parents, care workers, and school officials. By the time I was 12, I had had at least ten case workers, two kinship placements, a temporary group home placement, and one official foster home. I had also mastered the art of putting on the right face for the right audience. But behind the mask was a girl whose only constant in life was herself.
I was the ‘good kid’. But while everyone paid attention to the troubled kids, I was being groomed and raped
Hypocrisy and broken promises are common in the system, so it’s no wonder I found solace in a Kik group chat. When I met my abuser who groomed me online, I had just been discarded from my childhood abusers due to my developing body. I was desperate for love and a place to call home. My abuser used that to his advantage.
The Connecticut Alliance to End Sexual Violence defines grooming as:
[a] tactic in which someone methodically builds a trusting relationship with a child or young adult, their family, and community to manipulate, coerce, or force the child or young adult to engage in sexual activities. The person grooming identifies vulnerabilities, erodes the child’s or young adult’s boundaries, and builds up to acts of sexual abuse and control while convincing the world around the child or young adult that they are safe in their care.
It is quite easy to manipulate a child. But it’s even easier when that child is in the welfare system, as so many have normalised the abuse. “There's nothing wrong with an older boyfriend. At least he’s not my pastor, or married with children. And he is patient with me – not like the others.” These are the kinds of words that came out of my 12-year-old mouth. My experience of children inside the American welfare system is that they become so desensitised that they struggle to imagine a helping hand is there to harm them.
People generally left me alone during my ten years in and out of the system because I didn’t ‘act up’. I was the ‘good kid’. But while everyone paid attention to the troubled kids, I was being groomed and raped. I was cooking, cleaning, taking care of my brothers – and providing nightly services to the grown men next door to keep us from being evicted. I did all of this while continuing to convince myself that I was in control.
The ABCs of grooming
Groomers have a strong sense of who and how to target in order to gain their victims’ trust. Some would probably prefer to trap rich kids living in a four-story house with two doting parents if they could, but it’s much easier to exploit an isolated, hyper-independent kid with a single mother who works around the clock.
The key word here is hyper-independence, which is characterised by excessive self-reliance and avoidance of asking for help. Hyper-independence and social media became my coping mechanisms for loneliness. They numbed the pain. Social media is all about connection, so when a hyper-independent young girl goes searching for it, she becomes the perfect target for grooming.
I had already given up my childhood to become the adult I needed to be, and I shared my sadness on apps like Kik and Whisper. I could pretend to be anyone but myself and the anonymity made me bold. It made me think this was a safe place where I could say whatever I wanted.
My social network grew.
I met my groomer in the Kik chat dedicated to a Nickelodeon show about mermaids, H2O Just Add Water. I was obsessed with becoming a mermaid, because it meant I too could be special and beautiful, but I felt it was too childish to tell anyone. Embarrassment kept me from voicing this dream out loud, but with my groomer, I could be myself.
Our conversations began so innocently:
MY FRIEND: “Did you guys watch the latest episode of H20 last night?
ME: “Yeah, it was amazing. I wish I could become a mermaid.”
They were simple conversations. Then, one day, a man who was in the group chat added me as a friend. I didn’t think anything of it at first. I figured he was a fan of my favourite mermaid show too. I hardly noticed as the conversation gradually shifted from mermaids to
HIM: “Wow, you are so mature for a 12-year-old. I don’t think I could manage taking care of my siblings and house while my father gambled and drank our rent money away”
I sent my new friend a picture of the dinner I had cooked all on my own, in an empty house.
HIM: “You seem like a great cook. You should cook for me sometime.”
It continued on from there, with each new step getting a little bit closer. Eventually I sent him an explicit picture of my developing body. I wanted him to like me, I wanted him to stay in my life, so I thought that the best thing to do was to shut my mouth and do as I was told. That had been my life for the last 12 years. “What’s one more picture,” I thought, “at least I had control of it.”
Fortunately I never met with my groomer. We were evicted from the house, and while I was once again on the run from the Department of Social Services a teacher recommended that I check out a place called The Teen Center in Reston, Virginia. It was free, filled with kids like me, and for the first time in my life I felt safe. It is thanks to the staff at that centre that I was able to get out of my abusive household and later be fostered by a family that changed my life.
No amount of surveillance will stop groomers from exploiting vulnerable lonely kids on the internet
My early childhood was riddled with struggles. I learned about sex, money, and power before I knew how to multiply. For a long time, I truly believed that I held no value. I had a skewed baseline of what was normal and to this day I still struggle to understand what happened to me. But I know that the course of my life changed when I went to The Teen Center. Not only did I find friends, but a community that had nothing but unconditional love for me.
If you search the hashtag #Kik in TikTok, you will see many stories like mine of young impressionable children getting groomed by older men. Some have even labelled it the #KIKSupportGroup.
Social solutions for social problems
No amount of surveillance will stop groomers from exploiting vulnerable lonely kids on the internet. Having my phone taken away wouldn’t have protected me. I would have found another way to access my group chats and my so-called friends.
The most effective prevention tool for online child exploitation is community engagement. It’s not as exciting to wealthy tech philanthropists, but the most effective. Instead of building machines that can live on Mars, we should expand community centres and broaden the narrow definition of what an at-risk kid looks like. All children are to some degree at risk online. Foster kids are at elevated risk, you just don’t hear about them because nobody is there to advocate for them.
Educating kids about consent, bodily autonomy, sex, rights, and the dangers of social media should be the top priority for platforms, schools, social service programmes, and families.
Maintaining an open dialogue between adults and children on what grooming is and how it can happen is also an important first step. Kids need trustworthy adults with whom they can share awkward experiences, from going through puberty and worries at school to a deep-felt desire to become a mermaid. The absence of trustworthy, easy-to-talk-to adults is something predators use to their advantage.
After this, social media platforms, phone carriers, parents, schools, and social services must work together to bridge the digital gap between children and adults. Understanding that children are drifting to media for connection may push carers to reevaluate their relationships and notice more when trusted adults are lacking or non-existent.
All of this is where we need to focus our efforts. These ideas will do more for children than high-tech solutions, which often create more problems than they solve.
Kik no longer exists the way it did when I got my first phone, but predators still do. Data shows that some youth, like foster kids, are more susceptible. We must work to identify kids who are at higher risk, help them build their confidence, and grow their skillset for resisting grooming in the first place. I don’t believe in shiny tech solutions. But if an app can do that, I’ll download it to my phone.
