He cyber bullying to minors has increased exponentially in recent years, becoming even worse during the confinement due to COVID-19, as this is a period in which minors have resorted much more to the internet as contact with the outside world and a means of socialization.
Given this worrying situation, it was born Stoponsexgroom, a project coordinated by the University of Valencia in which linguists, psychologists, criminologists, lawyers and computer engineers specializing in artificial intelligence from universities in three countries, as well as police and civil guards, work on obtaining an analytical model of behavior verbal abuse of harassers and minors.
What exactly is meant by cyberbullying of minors?
It is understood as sexual cyberbullying of minors as a communicative process of deception over the Internet in which an adult uses language (words, images, voice calls, video calls) to convince a minor to participate in sexual activities online and, sometimes, to maintain physical contact with sexual intent.
What is the purpose of the Stoponsexgroom project?
In the first instance, the project tries to analyze in a detailed and rigorous way the communication strategies that harassers use to deceive minors. The purpose is to develop a cyberbullying detection/prevention tool. This tool consists of the creation of a text analysis algorithm using natural language processing and deep learning techniques, in order to detect harassment of minors in conversations over the Internet.
What conclusions have you drawn so far about the language used by harassers?
The starting hypothesis in the project Stoponsexgroom was that the harassers were going to use emoticons that implicitly alluded to sex, such as eggplants, cherries and peaches. However, a large presence of heart and kiss emojis is observed, perhaps with the stalkers' intention to trap the minors as if it were a conventional relationship.
According to researchers, the process is usually the following: first work on the minor's trust, exchanging personal information and compliments. Subsequently, the harasser will use sexual language, explicitly or implicitly, to trivialize sexual behaviors, to seek the isolation of the victim from her emotional-social environment to, finally, achieve physical contact outside the network.
Find out all the details about Stoponsexgroom and is part of the world of intervention with minors in our Postgraduate in Intervention with Minors
