Chatbots to Support Children in Coping with Online Threats: Socio-technical Requirements
Abstract
Online threats to children, in the form of cyberbullying, grooming, and sexting, have reached unprecedented and alarming levels. Support is still lacking despite endless efforts by child safety organisations and online safety educational programmes. This is mainly due to children feeling apprehensive in such situations, ashamed of revealing their distressing encounter to an adult or even for not having anyone to approach with their concerns. This paper investigates how children envision the potential support of a chatbot in such contexts. We captured design requirements for such a chatbot through a participatory design approach involving 110 schoolchildren in the UK. Using LEGO figures, they elaborated and performed stories featuring the interaction of a child under threat with a chatbot. The analysis of the dialogues in their performances and their reflections resulted in a set of expected tasks for the chatbot, a conversation flow, and novel socio-technical requirements addressing potential users’ main concerns and expectations.
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Most chatbot-based interventions function as aftermath measures, serving as moderators to reduce the burden of in-person consulting.
“While researchers have investigated sociotechnical approaches to support teens beyond surveillance [38, 55, 70, 79], most chatbot-based interventions function as aftermath measures, serving as moderators to reduce the burden of in-person consulting.”
From From Vulnerable to Resilient: Examining Parent and Teen Perceptions on How to Respond to Unwanted Cybergrooming Advances (2026) · cites this paper as [70]
Cites
Fitzpatrick, K. K., Darcy, A., & Vierhile, M. (2017) · JMIR Mental Health · doi:10.2196/mental.7785 · Cited by 2,730 · cited 2× · see citing works
“In fact, studies have shown that engagement with conversational agents in human-like dialogues can improve mental health [16], well-being [32], facilitate self-disclosure [26] and, commercially1, support employees that need to address difficult situations, including harassment, within organisations.”
BackgroundEstablishing and maintaining long-term human-computer relationships
Bickmore, T. W., & Picard, R. W. (2005) · ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction · doi:10.1145/1067860.1067867 · Cited by 1,333 · cited 1× · see citing works
“Although the literature presents a growing number of research designing chatbots to be positioned in support roles typically performed by humans, the overall implications of this approach are not yet fully understood [7, 8], in special if the chatbot fails to deal with critical situations [6].”
Background"I Hear You, I Feel You": Encouraging Deep Self-disclosure through a Chatbot
Lee, Y.-C., Yamashita, N., Huang, Y., & Fu, W. (2020) · Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3313831.3376175 · Cited by 339 · see citing works
Iversen, O. S., Smith, R. C., & Dindler, C. (2017) · Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and Children · doi:10.1145/3078072.3079725 · Cited by 306 · cited 2× · see citing works
“Inspired by work of Sanders and William [40] that propose make methods to harness creativity, the design session aimed to engage children with a generative technique [40] likely to activate their feelings and enable the articulation of ideas, also inviting them to reflect on the usage and impact of technology in real-…”
BackgroundParental Control vs. Teen Self-Regulation: Is there a middle ground for mobile online safety?
Wisniewski, P., Ghosh, A. K., Xu, H., Rosson, M. B., & Carroll, J. M. (2017) · Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing · doi:10.1145/2998181.2998352 · Cited by 206 · see citing works
Chasing the Chatbots: Directions for Interaction and Design Research
Piccolo, L. S. G., Mensio, M., & Alani, H. (2019) · Lecture Notes in Computer Science · doi:10.1007/978-3-030-17705-8_14 · Cited by 28 · see citing works
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Zhang, X., Akter, M., An, H., Liu, M., Zhang, Q., Huang, L., Cho, J.-H., J. Wisniewski, P., & Lee, S. W. (2026) · Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3772318.3790949
- Authors
- Piccolo, L. S. G., Troullinou, P., & Alani, H.
- Affiliations
- The Open University (GB)
- Trilateral Research, Ireland
- Venue
- Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2021-06-28
- Pages
- 1504-1517
- OpenAlex
- W3174242867
- Cited by
- 25
- References
- 6
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 3 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 1
- FWCI
- 5.54
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Designing Interactive Systems Conference (publishedVersion)
- Open Research Online - ORO (The Open University) (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- Centre for Policing Research and Learning
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Applied Psychology › Digital Mental Health Interventions
- Keywords
- chatbots, children, online risks, cyberbullying, online grooming, sexting, child online safety, participatory design, elementary school students, conversation flow, children's expectations
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