welcome to dragon
Protecting Children,
Transforming Digital Safety
DRAGON (Developing Resistance Against Grooming Online) is a digital innovation programme hosting a growing portfolio of research projects that use expertise in language and communication to improve crime prevention and child protection efforts with a focus on child sexual exploitation and abuse.
DRAGON-Shield is an interactive, multimedia training course that helps users understand how groomers and children communicate during online grooming conversations.
Our Tools
We develop innovative, research-led tools that help practitioners, parents / caregivers, and law enforcement agencies better understand, prevent, and respond to technology assisted child sexual exploitation and abuse, with a focus on online grooming.
Each tool is grounded in world-class academic research, co-designed with safeguarding experts and those with lived experience, and shaped to meet the needs of diverse audiences worldwide.
Created to support law enforcement, DRAGON-Spotter plays a key role in improving how we spot and respond to grooming online, helping to protect children from harm.
Our Mission
To improve practices to better safeguard children from online child sexual exploitation and abuse.
About DRAGON
The internet offers powerful opportunities for learning, connection, and creativity but it also presents serious risks, especially for children. One of the most pressing threats is online grooming, where offenders use language to manipulate, deceive, and exploit.
At the heart of this issue is communication. Groomers use language to build trust, isolate children, and escalate abuse. That’s why DRAGON focuses on understanding and disrupting these harmful interactions through cutting-edge research and technology.
Working across the social and computer sciences – with a USP in linguistics – our research helps develop vital strategies to safeguard children and disrupt abuse before it happens.
DRAGON is underpinned by a strong co-creation ethos. We work collaboratively with key stakeholder groups (e.g., child safeguarding practitioners, children, lived experience experts, researchers) and organisations across Wales, the UK, Africa, Europe, Oceania, and the Americas.
What we do:
Conduct ethical, innovative research
Collaborate across countries and sectors
Develop and deploy research-informed technology
Advocate for greater digital safeguards for the lives of children through publications and events
Our projects and tools
Our interdisciplinary R&D team has developed and piloted two tools, which help detect (DRAGON-Spotter) and prevent (DRAGON-Shield) online grooming. The tools have undergone rigorous, independent evaluation.
We also produce pioneering, applied research that unveils offenders’ modus operandi and, crucially, that mainstreams the voices of children in the context of technology-facilitated sexual exploitation and abuse.
DRAGON+
(Developing Resistance Against Grooming Online – Stories Strengthened Safeguards)
Where we consider children’s communicative behaviour during online grooming interactions across languages and geographical contexts.
C2CHAT
(Child-to-Child Abuse Talk)
In which we investigate online sexually harmful behaviours between children from a communication perspective.
O2OT (Offender-to-Offender Talk)
(Offender-to-Offender Online Talk)
Where we investigate offender communicative modus operandi in the context of online communities, deriving patterns of relevance for detection and prevention purposes.