Technology and sexual Abuse: a Critical Review of an Internet Grooming Case

Online grooming is an activity that leads to sexual abuse of children. For this reason a number of pieces of legislation governing grooming have been created on international and national levels. The present paper discusses a specific case that has received a lot of public attention and been regarded as a high-profile grooming case in Sweden. This particular case is of special interest for the purpose of this paper since it caused the creation of the Swedish so called grooming offence that was implemented 2009. It discusses the English and Swedish legal interpretations of this case in order to then engage in a critical discussion of the legislation. Drawing on the concept of critical research, the paper builds on the ideas of ideology critique and boundary critique to show how such seemingly clear-cut issues as the prevention of sexual abuse of children still require careful attention to underlying assumptions and beliefs. The paper makes an important contribution to the understanding of information and communication technology as a means of behaving in unacceptable way. It makes theoretical and practical contributions to current debates surrounding use and governance of such technologies.