What is Grooming?
According to the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network* (RAINN), the largest nonprofit anti-sexual assault organization in the United States, an American is sexually assaulted once every 68 seconds. In children, assault occurs once every 9 minutes. As adults, survivors of child sexual abuse are about 3 times more likely to experience a major depressive episode and 4 times more likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder. Youth of color and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth experience child sexual abuse at disproportionately higher rates.**
Sexual misconduct or abuse rarely happens out of nowhere. You may be familiar with the term “grooming” which refers to a tactic commonly used by abusers throughout the whole abuse process. RAINN defines grooming as “manipulative behaviors that an abuser uses to gain access to a potential victim, coerce them to agree to the abuse, and reduce the risk of being caught.”
Considering the prevalence of abuse in today’s society, it is fundamentally important to understand what grooming involves, the warning signs to watch out for, and the impact that it can leave on someone who’s experienced it.
Some may assume that grooming only happens to children or adolescents, but grooming happens to adults as well. Quite surprisingly, sexual abuse occurs by someone the victim knows 93% of the time. This might include a family member, friend, neighbor, teacher, coach, youth leader, supervisor, etc. Perpetrators tend to hold and take advantage of positions of trust and authority because it makes it more difficult for the target to recognize and put a stop to the grooming and abuse process. Grooming can happen in any environment regardless of how safe, moral, culturally conscious, or professional it appears to be. To some extent, grooming thrives when there’s a guise of goodwill to hide behind. While most people would not expect sexual misconduct and abuse to happen in places like church youth groups or schools, unfortunately, the reports suggest otherwise.**
To get a clearer picture of what grooming involves, let’s examine some common tactics. Keep in mind that grooming happens in a wide variety of ways and each individual experience is unique. This being said, when working to understand grooming as a general concept, there are some trademark warning signs that tend to unfold in a sequence, each escalating gradually over time.
Common Grooming Tactics
Target Selection: Groomers observe and choose potential targets according to accessibility and perceived vulnerability. Life transitions, emotional challenges, and disruptions in one’s personal or family life are all examples of things that can make a target appear more susceptible to manipulation.
Target Access and Isolation: Groomers gravitate to opportunities that allow access to potential targets, whether it’s through things like work, volunteering, or social contacts. They then work to physically or emotionally separate the target from others who support and protect them.
Building Trust: Groomers work to build familiarity with the target and develop a trusting connection. Gifts, secrets, attention, praise, and encouragement are all forms of positive reinforcement used to facilitate a sense of safety.
Emotional Connection: Groomers continue to develop a connection with the target by exchanging more personal information, offering emotional support, listening to one’s feelings and problems, or offering guidance.
Testing Boundaries: Groomers gradually test and push boundaries in various ways such as introducing inappropriate topics, compliments, or activities to measure the target’s reaction.
Desensitization to Physical Touch and Sexual Topics: Groomers start with seemingly innocuous physical contact such as a high-five, a hand on the shoulder, hugging, tickling, or wrestling. The appearance of harmlessness creates a false sense of safety for the target. Gradually, touch becomes more caring in nature to increase comfort with physical contact. This leads to the introduction of sexual topics of discussion, jokes, or sharing explicit material such as pornography. Casual breaching of sexual topics is used to normalize and desensitize the discomfort of these interactions between the groomer and target.
Secrecy and Isolation: Perpetrators encourage and pressure targets into increased secrecy from friends and family, including more time spent alone with the target. The more this occurs, the less risk of outside interference.
Favoritism: Flattery can grow an emotional bond that makes it difficult to question the groomer’s motives. Groomers want to make the target feel unique or special to the groomer which fosters a sense of exclusivity in the relationship. Groomers may highlight a target’s specific talents and award them more privileges or opportunities to excel than surrounding peers.
Gifts and Favors: Groomers may use gift-giving or favors to create a sense of indebtedness in the target. This tends to be presented on the surface as nothing but kindness or a generous gesture with no strings attached to appear harmless and conceal the manipulative nature of it. Groomers may even do this to individuals within the target’s support system to win the trust of those protecting the target. However, the target may unconsciously feel obligated and more likely to comply with the groomer’s wishes.
Gradual Escalation: Interactions become increasingly demanding of the target despite seeming innocent at first. This could involve escalated emotional or spiritual intimacy, physical contact, or both. Boundaries are crossed and behavior becomes more harmful and exploitative.
Manipulation and Gaslighting: Perpetrators are skilled in manipulative tactics that control the narrative and make it difficult for the target to question or challenge the ethics of what they’re experiencing. Targets may have no idea what is happening is harmful or exploitative to them, or struggle with conflicting internal messages.
Threats, Blackmail, and Intimidation: In some instances, groomers may use threats or blackmail to maintain control of the target, such as threatening to expose embarrassing information or tarnish their reputation. Groomers with specific power to reward or punish their target may threaten a consequence, such as a coach threatening to remove a player from a sports team or a pastor threatening to excommunicate the target from their shared church community.
Community Grooming
As previously mentioned, a key aspect of grooming is the way abusers manipulate those that surround the target to reduce interference. A child abuse prevention organization called Safe Kids Thrive defines community grooming as follows:***
“Community grooming is the way in which offenders create a controlled environment around themselves. Offenders are skilled in projecting an image to others, that they are responsible and caring citizens. As a result, they are placed in positions of trust, are allowed unmonitored or unsupervised access to children and youth, and are thereby given greater access to their eventual victims. If a suspicion or allegation comes forward, it is easily explained away by adults in the organization who have been groomed by the offender to think that they would never harm a child. In this way, the community unwittingly enables the offender and confirms what the offender has told the child/youth as part of the grooming process – that if they tell, they will not be believed.”
It is critical to watch for ways that adults in a group or community protect and enable abusers, whether they intend to or not. A groomer’s social connections combined with a power advantage over others can make it extremely difficult to recognize unethical behavior or hold them accountable.
Impacts of Grooming
Everyone’s experience is different, but for some, the grooming process alone can be responsible for psychological, emotional, physical, or spiritual harm that takes time to heal. Let’s take a look at a few possible impacts of grooming on survivors:
Depression and anxiety: The betrayal of trust that occurs in a grooming dynamic can leave individuals in the wake of pain and disillusionment. This can impact one’s mood and overall outlook on life, relationships, self-worth, the future, and more.
Difficulty trusting others: Groomers work hard to present themselves as safe in the beginning stages of the grooming process. Once exploitation and harm occur, this creates a significant conflict in the target’s understanding of safe and healthy relationships moving forward.
Increased risk of victimization: Survivors may be at an increased risk of harm in the future, according to recent studies that show possible correlations here. One report suggests that females who’ve experienced child sexual abuse are 2-13 times more likely to experience sexual violence as adults.****
Confusion: Groomers cause confusion with behavior that alternates between caring and exploitative. This often results in contradictory actions that make it difficult to discern the groomer's intentions. Approval of the groomer’s reputation or behavior from other adults also reinforces the idea that everything happening is okay or normal regardless of the survivor’s feelings and experiences.
Guilt and shame: Both are extremely common and may stem from a variety of factors. Survivors may struggle with believing they caused or failed to stop the manipulation or deserve to be mistreated. Perpetrators work to maintain their power by refusing to acknowledge their behavior as exploitative or taking responsibility for their actions which may leave survivors feeling there’s no one to blame but themselves.
Emotional dependency: Groomers use manipulative tactics to reinforce the target’s dependence on the groomer. They may make their affection conditional and link it to the target’s compliance with their demands. This creates a fear of losing the positive aspects of the relationship, contributing to confusion about whether resistance is worth the potential loss of affection.
Distorted reality: Groomers may use gaslighting techniques to distort the victim's perception of reality. This can lead to confusion as the target begins to doubt their own judgment and experiences, making it easier for the groomer to control the narrative. This forced self-distrust can carry over into other aspects of life beyond the point at which the grooming/abuse process ends.
Trauma symptoms: Individuals targeted by grooming may experience signs of a dysregulated nervous system, flashbacks, nightmares, hypervigilance, anger outbursts, difficulty with daily functions, etc. – all are signs of ways that the body compensated to survive the exploitation of being deceived, manipulated, objectified, controlled, and gaslit into distrusting the self.
If you or someone you know has experienced grooming or sexual violence, know that you are not alone and there are ways to get help. Call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673 or use the confidential online crisis chat here. Your safety is important. If you are in immediate danger, call 9-1-1.
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