CESAGRAM (Towards a Comprehensive European Strategy Against tech-facilitated GRooming And Missing) is a two-year, EU-funded ISF project dedicated to enhancing the understanding of the grooming process, its facilitation through technology, and its potential to lead to missing children. The project’s primary objectives are to prevent grooming-related incidents of children going missing and to ensure that victims receive appropriate support before, during, and after any disappearance. CESAGRAM’s approach includes conducting extensive research, providing targeted training and raising awareness among stakeholders, developing an advanced AI tool to detect and prevent grooming activities online, and advocating for policies and practices that protect children. By integrating these interconnected activities, CESAGRAM aims to develop a comprehensive European strategy against grooming and missing children, ultimately creating a safer environment for children and ensuring those affected by grooming receive the necessary support.
Objectives
- Research the links between missing and grooming for sexual purposes to advance existing knowledge on prevention and responses.
- Identify key risk indicators of grooming before, during and after a child has experienced sexual abuse and/or has gone missing for better victim identification and identification of those at risk.
- Develop tools and material to increase understanding and awareness of the grooming process for young people and their carers.
- Train frontline workers to increase their skills and knowledge to better identify and respond to victims of grooming.
- Design, pilot and evaluate an AI-based tools that will facilitate the prevention and detection of grooming content online aimed to enhance the operational prevention and detection capabilities of the relevant end users.
- Create knowledge hub to share knowledge on grooming and missing children with professionals and experts to further develop and build on existing expertise and resources.
- Develop recommendations to advise the improvement of the legal and regulatory environment to support protection systems.
Project partners:
- Missing Children Europe (Coordinator) 🇧🇪
- KEMEA 🇬🇷
- CESIE 🇮🇹
- KU Leuven 🇧🇪
- To Hamogelo Tou Paidioi 🇬🇷
- Ministry of Justice, Transparency and Human Rights 🇬🇷
- CERTH 🇬🇷
- Marie Collins Foundation 🇬🇧
- Missing persons’ families support centre 🇱🇹
- Hellenic Polices 🇬🇷
Project website:
Gianluca Schiavo
Massimo Zancanaro
Giulia Deppieri
