Criminological differences between contact-driven and online-focused suspects in online child sexual grooming police reports

Background: Differences exist between contact and noncontact-driven online child sexual abuse offenders; however, there is still a notable lack of empirical studies with police samples from nonEnglish speaking countries, including Spain. Objective: We address this gap by analyzing the criminological characteristics of online child sexual grooming (OCSG) suspected offenders from de -identified law enforcement investigations in Spain. Participants and setting: We anonymously coded data provided by Spanish law enforcement agencies from 257 OCSG cases (i.e., unique chat logs between a suspect and minor) extracted from 98 police reports with index investigation years from 2008 to 2021. A total of 101,391 messages were analyzed. Methods: Three distinct datasets were created: 257 OCSG cases, 120 unique suspects (79 onlinefocused, 41 contact -driven), and 234 unique victims. Each dataset focused on different criminological variables for analysis, such as grooming strategy, motivation, and victim high -risk behaviors. Results: There were no significant differences between suspects on gender, age, or criminal offense history. Contact -driven suspects were more likely to use positive rapport (4) = 0.18), send unprompted sexually explicit images of themselves (4) = 0.19), and offer something in exchange (4) = 0.25). Victims of contact -driven individuals were more likely to be male (4) = 0.52) and offer something in exchange for sex or sexually explicit images (4) = 0.18). Victims of online -focused individuals were more likely to be younger (r = 0.26). Conclusions: These findings suggest criminological differences in the online grooming strategies between contact -driven and online -focused suspected offenders in Spain.