POLL: Do you monitor what your child looks at online?
Parents have been urged to take more of an interest in their children's online activities.
The prompt has come after a new study found paedophiles can groom children in less than 20 minutes.
Researchers at Swansea University looked at the language groomers use in chatrooms and on social media – and said the results were worrying.
Academics found that paedophiles do not always pose as children and use 'highly skilled' techniques to persuade rather than coerce children into doing what they want at alarming speed.
Professor Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Dr Cristina Izura lead the Online Grooming Communication Project – which will be presented at the British Science Festival on Thursday.
Professor Lorenzo-Dus said: "We have carried out a detailed analysis of the language used by more than 100 online groomers which shows that they are skilled communicators who use a range of strategies.
"These include seemingly innocuous 'small talk' to develop a sense of trust in them, requests and commands to gauge the children's disposition to meet online groomers' desires for verbal or visual sexual engagement and compliments on various topics to increase feelings of trust and emotional bonding."
The four-year study looked at chats between 192 online sexual predators and researchers posing as children before analysing the language used in the chat.
It found that the age range of those doing the grooming were between 21 and 65 and the vast majority admitted they were adults – conflicting popular belief that internet paedophiles always pretend to be children.
And academics say they were shocked after discovering that grooming does not take long – with the time between initial online contact and first sexual requests ranging from between 18 minutes and 82 hours.
Dr Izura said: "Online groomers are communicatively, highly skilled."
