Every system designed to detect child grooming has the same problem: it's looking at the wrong unit of analysis.

Grooming doesn't happen in a message. It happens across weeks of messages — a slow accumulation of trust, a gradual shift in conversational register, an escalation in contact frequency that would look unremarkable if you sampled any individual session but reads clearly as a pattern when you step back and look at the whole trajectory.

When you build a detection system around message-level classification, you're designing for a problem that doesn't exist. Predators don't send a message that contains the whole grooming attempt.…