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.
Keywords: Child Sexual Abuse; Online Child Exploitation; Online Grooming; Prevention and Education; Sexual Solicitation; Social Network Sites.