This may have been an old story (March 2025) but it is totally relevent to anyone trying to monitor what their children are doing online.
As we all know children may use slang or shortened words or abbreviations when communicating in text messages or other online communications. In most cases this may just be regarded as the 'cool' thing to do but in other cases it can indicate other more concerning behaviours or problems.
The CyberTrust Monitoring Project is fully aware that some communications will look totally innocent and may not trigger any thought of a child being at risk. It may also be that children are exploring their attitudes to topics of the day, such as drugs or eating disorders, and that's as far as it goes. This said, there will be occassions when the use of such language can be used to hide other activities or problems
A child who refers to DoS could be disussing a Denial of Service attack on an organisation bringing dusruption to their online sales and marketing systems or someone mentioning CROW might be referring to Cannabis.
The article from Mum's Net provides a list of slang terms that police have recorded during their investigations and these are listed in the article. The same information is available across media but the MumsNet article is here.
A number of dictionaries of such terms is also available online. These try to keep up with the changing nature of online communications. That site is here.
