Enhanced Online Grooming detection employing Context Determination and Message-Level Analysis

Online Grooming (OG) is a prevalent threat facing predominately children online, with groomers using deceptive methods to prey on the vulnerability of children on social media/messaging platforms. These attacks can have severe psychological and physical impacts, including a tendency towards revictimization. Current technical measures are inadequate, especially with the advent of end-to-end encryption which hampers message monitoring. Existing solutions focus on the signature analysis of child abuse media, which does not effectively address real-time OG detection. This paper proposes that OG attacks are complex, requiring the identification of specific communication patterns between adults and children alongside identifying other insights (e.g. Sexual language) to make an accurate determination. It introduces a novel approach leveraging advanced models such as BERT and RoBERTa for Message-Level Analysis and a Context Determination approach for classifying actor interactions, between adults attempting to groom children and honeypot children actors. This approach included the introduction of Actor Significance Thresholds and Message Significance Thresholds to make these determinations. The proposed method aims to enhance accuracy and robustness in detecting OG by considering the dynamic and multi-faceted nature of these attacks. Cross-dataset experiments evaluate the robustness and versatility of our approach. This paper’s contributions include improved detection methodologies and the potential for application in various scenarios, addressing gaps in current literature and practices. • Transformer-based models are most effective for Adult/Child determination at the message-level within an Online Grooming Context. • Context determination improves robustness of Online Grooming detection from using a cross-dataset approach. • Context Determination allows for the adjustment of False Positive/Negative frequencies to meet differing Human Reviewer/Social Media platform use cases.