The issue of grooming young girls and boys is known about by most people. The process of grooming, however, is less understood. Grooming often has taken a long time, somtimes a number of years, and the groomer may well be working on a number of contacts at the same time.
This story, from Manchester's safeguarding team, does not go into the detail of how the grooming process took place but the references to accessing data from phones and other digital devices makes it clear that online communcations played a significant part in the process.
Months or years of digital communications would leave a trail and had it been possible to monitor this traffic the grooming behaviour may have been detected sooner than it was.
The full story can be found here.
