Child sex abusers find the internet an easier place to take part in a variety of child sexual abuse activity including contact with children due to the anonymity of the medium.
Sexual grooming of children also occurs on the Internet. Some abusers will pose as children online and make arrangements to meet with them in person.
In 2003, MSN implemented restrictions in their chat rooms to purportedly intended to help protect children from adults seeking sexual conversations with them. In 2005, Yahoo! chat rooms were investigated by the New York State attorney general's office for allowing users to create rooms whose names suggested that they were being used for this purpose. That October, Yahoo! agreed to "implement policies and procedures designed to ensure" that such rooms would not be allowed.
An organization called Perverted-Justice (known as PJ) uses PJ operatives posing as underage teens on the internet to identify potential child molesters and turn the information over to the police and the courts. To Catch a Predator is an on-running series on the television show Dateline NBC based on documenting such activities.
An organization called Crisp Thinking has created a service intended to identify grooming and warn parents, allowing them to install software that studies chat room and other Instant messaging logs for activity they have determined may identify grooming or other potentially suspicious activities. It has also adapted its technology to social networking services and ISPs.
Another software company in the UK has developed a program that hold as competitor to Crisp, called Sentry Parental Controls. It was launched by television personality Coleen Nolan and is supported by Mark Williams-Thomas, a leading expert in child protection.(Wikipedia)
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