<![CDATA[Cyber child grooming is a form of modern sexual crime that develops along with the advancement of information technology, particularly through social media, messaging applications, and online games. This crime is carried out through a gradual approach to build emotional relationships, gain children’s trust, and lead to sexual exploitation. This study aims to analyze the juridical qualification of cyber child grooming in Indonesian legislation and to formulate the construction of criminal liability for perpetrators based on sentencing theory oriented toward child protection. The research method used is normative legal research with statutory, conceptual, and comparative approaches. The results show that Indonesian positive law has not explicitly regulated cyber child grooming as an independent criminal offense. Its regulation is still scattered in the New Criminal Code, the Child Protection Law, the Electronic Information and Transactions Law, and the Sexual Violence Crime Law. This condition creates normative ambiguity, regulatory fragmentation, and legal uncertainty, especially at the early stage of grooming which mainly involves psychological manipulation. Perpetrators can still be held criminally responsible because they fulfill the elements of fault in the form of intent (dolus), unlawful acts, capacity for responsibility, and the absence of justification or excuse. Based on Article 51 of the New Criminal Code, punishment must be directed toward preventive, rehabilitative, and restorative purposes by placing child protection as the main priority. Therefore, national criminal law reform is needed to specifically regulate cyber child grooming as an independent offense in order to provide optimal legal protection for children in the digital space.]]>
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