Coercion, grooming and online harms
Rod Landman reflects that whilst online spaces can provide valuable social opportunities for Neurodivergent people and those with learning disabilities, they can also exacerbate innate vulnerabilities to grooming and coercion.
Rod is also delivering a webinar as part of the G&CC Summit 2023. Find out more.
Coercion and grooming have run like letters through a stick of rock in all the project work I have done for ARC England over the last 15 years. Most recently in supporting women with learning disabilities and autistic women who have experienced domestic abuse and sexual violence, and in the work I am currently involved in on online harms; but the origins go right back to the ARC Safety Net project which identified what we now call ‘mate crime’.
The Safety Net project started following the murder of Steven Hoskin in Cornwall in 2006. Steven was brutally murdered by a group of young people who he took to be his friends, but who were clearly only interested in exploiting and abusing him. Our experience in the project was that it is frighteningly easy to claim the friendship of someone with a learning disability or neurodivergence. In one case all it took was to use the word “mate” and the concerns runs right through to Facebook “friends”. With so few supported people having others in their lives who are neither family nor people paid to be with them it is hardly surprising that people are prepared to settle for any proffered relationship; a situation that is so easily exploited by those who have coercion or grooming as part of their toolkit.
To summarise the law on consent, drawing on CPS advice on rape and sexual offences, consent is only lawful if a person “agrees by choice, and has the freedom and capacity to make that choice”. Prosecutors should consider this in two stages. They are:
Whether a complainant had the capacity (i.e. the age and understanding) to make a choice about whether or not to take part in the sexual activity at the time in question.
Whether he or she was in a position to make that choice freely, and was not constrained in any way.
Where a “vulnerable or immature” individual has been groomed, the question of whether real or proper consent was given will usually be for the jury, but for these purposes the following considerations (amongst others) apply:
The presence of any other vulnerability of the complainant such as a learning disability;
The existence of grooming through the provision of gifts, alcohol, insincere compliments, apparent security, a more exciting way of life, attention and false promises;
Other anecdotal evidence gathered during our work on mate crime suggested that the use of ‘false promises’ was widespread. An archetypical case of mate crime was reported to us concerning a woman with a learning disability who had been the victim of a standard romance scam. She was befriended on Facebook by a man who spent some months grooming her – developing the relationship and selling her a dream of their future happiness, before asking for (and getting) money to help with his ‘divorce’ and naked pictures from his victim.
The pattern in which this grooming happened bore a strong resemblance to that which we found in a later project (Get SMART) on the grooming of young people with learning disabilities and autistic people for the purposes of extremism and radicalisation. This included groomers:
Cutting people off from family and friends.
Bestowing gifts or money, or making people feel ‘special’.
Creating strong emotions, channeling those emotions, and using them against the person.
Setting up a ‘binary’ world view [us v. the world].
Giving a strong sense of belonging.
Creating a group (even if it just a couple) where all needs can be met. A pretend family unit.
The young autistic people who participated in the project provided strong insights into how they seemed to be at such disproportionate risk in these situations. They said things like:
“We find it harder to make friends”
“We can find a community online”
“People with autism like following rules”
“We don’t see why people would lie to us.”
And this particular insight, from a young autistic man, brings us right up to date with the work that we are now doing on Online Harms, and points to the challenges in supporting people to have a happy and healthy online life:
“Real life is terrible, filled with crime and death. I am not happy in real life. Real life is boring. I am invisible in real life. Online I can be seen. I can be whatever I want. There are no limits. I can achieve things. Online is a drug, it numbs the pain that is life.”
However, I would like to end this blog on a happier note. All our recent work tells us that, despite all the obvious dangers, the online world is a fantastic place to be for 95% of people 95% of the time. It also tells us that that is particularly so for people with learning disabilities and neurodivergence, for whom it offers a world of opportunity and relationship beyond often limited immediate physical environments.
Hence we take a very ‘online positive’ approach to the work that we do. We strongly believe that most of the online risks (characterised by grooming and coercion) that supported people experience can be mitigated by co-producing policy and strategies that are based on the lived experience of the people we support and the solutions that work for them.
