From Vulnerable to Resilient: Examining Parent and Teen Perceptions on How to Respond to Unwanted Cybergrooming Advances

2026-01-29

AI Summary

This study addresses a critical gap in cybergrooming research by shifting focus from offender detection to adolescents’ coping strategies. Employing a mixed-methods approach that integrates scenario-based simulations, online surveys, and thematic analysis, the research examines responses from 74 parent–adolescent dyads exposed to simulated grooming scenarios. It identifies four categories of vulnerability-indicating reactions and four types of protective strategies, revealing their dynamic evolution as perceived risk escalates. The work proposes the first adolescent-centered, stage-based coping framework and develops a corresponding annotated dataset with a refined classification schema. These contributions provide both theoretical grounding and empirical evidence to inform the design of targeted educational interventions and intelligent safeguarding systems aimed at enhancing youth resilience against online grooming.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Adversarial Agents
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Adaptive Behavior
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Responsible Web: Mitigating online harms, including harassment, spam, and fake reviews
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data generation and simulation

Abstract

Cybergrooming is a form of online abuse that threatens teens'mental health and physical safety. Yet, most prior work has focused on detecting perpetrators'behaviors, leaving a limited understanding of how teens might respond to such unwanted advances. To address this gap, we conducted an online survey with 74 participants -- 51 parents and 23 teens -- who responded to simulated cybergrooming scenarios in two ways: responses that they think would make teens more vulnerable or resilient to unwanted sexual advances. Through a mixed-methods analysis, we identified four types of vulnerable responses (encouraging escalation, accepting an advance, displaying vulnerability, and negating risk concern) and four types of protective strategies (setting boundaries, directly declining, signaling risk awareness, and leveraging avoidance techniques). As the cybergrooming risk escalated, both vulnerable responses and protective strategies showed a corresponding progression. This study contributes a teen-centered understanding of cybergrooming, a labeled dataset, and a stage-based taxonomy of perceived protective strategies, while offering implications for educational programs and sociotechnical interventions.

Problem

• cybergrooming
• teen response
• online safety
• vulnerability
• resilience

Innovation

• cybergrooming
• resilience
• protective strategies
• teen-centered
• mixed-methods analysis