I warn before starting: this is a delicate topic, and I approach it from a prevention standpoint, not from morbid curiosity or panic. I will not describe methods or provide details that could be used to cause harm. I will talk about why the prevention of grooming, as it is designed today, has a blind spot regarding LGTBIQ+ minors, and why that concerns me from my work in digital violence.
What we already know about grooming in Spain
Grooming, when an adult uses the internet to gain the trust of a minor for sexual abuse purposes, as defined by UNICEF, is not a marginal phenomenon. A study with more than 1,500 minors from different autonomous communities, conducted by Fundación SOL in collaboration with the Civil Guard, found that one in five primary school students actively seeks new friends online and adds strangers, and that figure rises to over 30% in secondary school, where almost half admit to adding people they do not know in person. An analysis of Spanish court rulings between 2017 and 2020, published in the Yearbook of Legal Psychology, found that in 90% of cases the aggressor ended up proposing an in-person meeting, and that most victims never told their parents while it was happening, according to the study by Riberas-Gutiérrez and collaborators.
That last piece of data, the silence, is the key to everything that follows.
Why silence weighs more on an LGTBIQ+ minor
Here is the point that general prevention campaigns usually do not address. An LGTBIQ+ minor has, from the outset, more structural reasons not to tell their family what is happening to them online. The data about their offline environment explains this, and it is getting worse: 66% of LGTBIQ+ people in Spain report having suffered harassment, humiliation, or threats during their school years due to their sexual orientation or gender identity, compared to 49% who reported it in 2019, a notable increase in just four years, and 56% actively hid their identity at school, according to the LGBTIQ Survey by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), published in 2024. In Spain, moreover, 25% of LGTBI+ people from Generation Z (18-24 years) have suffered school bullying motivated by hate, and in 64% of those cases, the educational institution did nothing about it, according to the report “State of LGTBI+ Education 2024” by the State Federation LGTBI+, which also estimates specific cyberbullying at 7.25% of recorded hate acts.
If home and school are, for that minor, the places where they perceive the most risk of being rejected or singled out and where, according to this same data, the institution rarely intervenes when something happens, it is logical, not imprudent, that they seek online what they do not find outside: spaces to talk about their identity without fear, community, validation. That same impulse, healthy in itself, is exactly what an expert groomer knows how to identify and exploit: the more isolated and in need of connection a minor is, and the less likely they are to tell a trusted adult if something goes wrong, the more time the aggressor has to act without being discovered.
The blind spot of generic prevention
Most grooming prevention campaigns, including those I value and support, such as those from the Civil Guard or Fundación SOL, speak in general terms: do not share photos with strangers, tell an adult, distrust those who ask for secrecy. These are correct messages, but they assume a minor who has, in principle, a trusted adult to turn to without fear that the reaction will be worse than the problem itself. For a minor who has not yet spoken about their sexual orientation or gender identity at home, that assumption does not always hold, and no campaign I know of states it explicitly.
The counterargument that must be acknowledged
I am very aware of the risk of saying this poorly. If the message that remains is “the online spaces where LGTBIQ+ minors seek community are dangerous,” we would be stigmatizing something that, for many of them, is a real and necessary lifeline; finding others who feel like them can literally be what sustains them. That is not my intention, and I want to be explicit about it: the problem is not that an LGTBIQ+ minor seeks community online, the problem is that prevention does not distinguish between that legitimate support space and the specific risk of isolation that an aggressor can exploit within it. Closing those spaces does not protect anyone; leaving those minors without specific tools does not either.
What is really needed
We have already talked about this absence of specific digital education when analyzing why no one teaches you to protect yourself on Tinder or Grindr: generic prevention is not enough when the starting point is not the same for everyone. We need grooming prevention training, aimed at families, educators, and health professionals, to explicitly incorporate this reality: that an LGTBIQ+ minor may have compelling and understandable reasons not to share what is happening at home, and that this requires alternative channels of trust, not just “talk to your parents.” LGTBIQ+ associations, school counseling services, and specialized helplines should be as visible a resource as family in any prevention material aimed at these minors. At Rainbow eSafe, we believe that protecting this childhood and adolescence is not about choosing between community and safety: it is about building safety without taking away the community that, many times, is all they have.
