ABSTRACT
While ‘sexting’ and ‘cyberbullying’ are beginning to come out of the shadows and be investigated by academics as forms of deviance, little attention has been afforded to these issues at public policy level. The most publicly prominent forms of harms to children which occur through online methods relate to ‘grooming’ by predatory sex offenders (McAlinden, 2012). Legislation to cover online grooming, for example, has been put in place in an array of jurisdictions including the United States, Australia, Norway, Sweden and throughout the United Kingdom. Media campaigns also abound on the safe use of the Internet and the need to protect children from predatory adult offenders in the virtual environment. Such public and official responses to online risks are, however, based on distorted notions of ‘deviance’, in particular on stereotypical and culturally entrenched images of victims and offenders in such cases — that is, that the offenders are usually adult male strangers ready to prey on unsuspecting, much younger victims.
