Discourses survey on grooming in Finnish news media

Abstract

In the context of crimes, grooming means the enticement of minors for a sexual purpose. It has become relatively common crime online known as online grooming. Online environments provide offenders with better opportunities for grooming, such as the possibility to be in contact with multiple victims at the same time and hiding their identity. The perpetrator can use different techniques and tactics to achieve their goals.

The goal for this thesis was to find out how the grooming discourse in Finland has evolved and what kind of themes the discourse contains. As such discourses survey was performed by using five major Finnish media sites as the data source. These media sites were searched for articles related to grooming. These articles were then coded with keywords and from these keywords, themes were found, and evolution was observed.

The results of the thesis were that five major themes were present in the dataset with some subthemes. These themes were grooming, perpetrator, law, political and grooming prevention theme. Grooming theme had victim subtheme, law theme had crime investigation subtheme and political theme had immigration and political reactions to grooming as subtheme and finally, the perpetrator theme had techniques used and ways of contacting victims as subthemes. These themes covered the major points in the grooming discourse in Finland. The grooming theme focused on general things related to grooming and its victims. The perpetrator theme focused on the offenders of online grooming. The law theme focused on crime investigations, sentencing and law-related issues. Political theme focused on the political discourse around grooming, such as immigration and political changes because of grooming. Finally, grooming prevention focused on the ways grooming is combatted in the news.

The grooming discourse has evolved overtime in a few ways. It started with only minor mentions of the grooming and the plans on making it illegal. This was followed by some mentions of investigating the crime and the difficulties in it, but the news was still rare. Only after the major Oulu’s grooming incident became public knowledge, did the amount of grooming news increase and they became to be a lot more varied, such as describing the ways offenders have groomed victims and how parents can help to keep their children safe. However, a few years after the incident, the grooming news has gone down again.

While this thesis only looks at the news articles by media, it does provide an overview of the current knowledge in Finnish public regarding grooming. These findings can provide future research on new topics, such as checking if disclosure for grooming has gone up.