The long approach: what research says about grooming

On 15 December 2017, after five years, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse handed its final report to the Governor-General of Australia. It ran to 17 volumes. It made 189 new recommendations, 409 across all its reports. Survivors had told the Commissioners what happened to them in 8,013 private sessions (Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017).

Thousands of accounts, from schools, churches, sporting clubs, children's homes and youth groups. The places differ. The order of events, again and again, does not. Someone is given access to children. That person becomes trusted, first by the adults and then by the child. Time alone follows. Then secrecy. The abuse comes late in the sequence, after the ground is prepared.

Researchers call this preparation grooming. The word is everywhere now, used loosely, which makes it worth going back to what the research actually found.

What offenders say they did

For a study published in 1995, researchers in Britain interviewed 91 people convicted of sexual offences against children, drawn from treatment programmes, probation, secure hospitals and prisons. They asked how the offenders found children, how they chose them, how they kept them as victims, and what would have stopped them (Elliott et al., 1995).

The answers were practical. Offenders gained access through caretaking, such as babysitting. They targeted children with bribes, gifts and games. They kept children compliant with force, anger, threats and more bribes. They desensitised children step by step, through touch, talk about sex and persuasion. Nearly half said they had no bad feelings about what they had done (Elliott et al., 1995).

None of this describes a stranger. It describes someone who is already there, or who arranges to be there, and who is welcome.

Three targets, not one

When Craven, Brown and Gilchrist reviewed the literature in 2006, the first problem they found was that nobody agreed on what grooming meant. Studies used the word for different things, and the main theories of child sexual abuse barely mentioned it (Craven et al., 2006).

Their review sorted the behaviour into three kinds, by who it works on:

Self-grooming. The offender's own justifications: the stories that make the next step feel permissible.
Grooming the environment and significant others. Parents, carers, colleagues, an institution. Becoming the helpful one, the reliable one, the person nobody would suspect, so that time alone with a child looks normal.
Grooming the child. Attention, gifts, special status, secrets, and a slow testing of limits.

The second kind matters most for prevention, and it is the one most often missed. A child cannot be groomed in private by someone the adults keep at a distance. The adults are groomed first, and they are groomed with the same thing that makes communities work: trust in people who help.

A sequence of decisions

Leclerc, Proulx and Beauregard reviewed research on the modus operandi of offenders against children: the concrete steps of how an offence happens, as opposed to why the offender wanted it to (Leclerc et al., 2009). Seen this way, abuse is not one act. It is a run of decisions: getting access, getting trust, getting the child alone, getting compliance, keeping the secret.

That framing carries a quiet piece of good news. Every decision point is a place the sequence can fail. Routine activity theory, developed by Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson for crime in general, makes the same point at the level of the situation: an offence needs a likely offender and a suitable target to meet without a capable guardian present (Cohen & Felson, 1979). Take away the unsupervised meeting and the sequence stalls, whatever the offender intends.

The experiment that should worry everyone

If grooming follows a pattern, it seems it should be recognisable. Georgia Winters and Elizabeth Jeglic tested that. Participants read one of six short descriptions of an adult's behaviour with a child, each matching a different stage of grooming. They then rated how likely the adult was to be a child molester and to commit abuse (Winters & Jeglic, 2017).

The ratings did not differ between any of the conditions. People reading the early stages, and people reading the late ones, judged the adult about equally likely to be an abuser. The authors' conclusion: people may be unable to identify potentially predatory behaviour before it ends in abuse (Winters & Jeglic, 2017).

This is the centre of the problem. Each grooming behaviour, alone, looks like something good. Paying special attention to a child is what good teachers and coaches do. Giving a lift home is a kindness. Being the parent's friend is ordinary. The pattern only shows when it is read backwards, after the abuse is known. Hindsight makes it look obvious, and that look of obviousness is what leads people to believe they would have seen it.

The same process, online

Helen Whittle and colleagues reviewed the research on online grooming in 2013. The medium changes the speed and the reach: an offender can contact many children at once, and private messages reach a child without passing through the adults around them (Whittle et al., 2013). The underlying sequence, trust then isolation then secrecy, is recognisably the same. What disappears online is the second target. There is often no environment to groom, because the adults are not in the room.

Why spotting the predator is the wrong plan

The common picture of child sexual abuse is the dangerous stranger. The research points the other way: offenders mostly reach children through relationships and roles that give them legitimate access (Elliott et al., 1995). The same pattern holds across crime more broadly, as horror films tend to discover the hard way: the masked stranger is the rarest killer in the data.

Put the two findings together. Offenders work through trusted access. Observers cannot tell grooming from kindness while it happens. A prevention plan that depends on someone recognising the predator therefore depends on the one thing the evidence says people cannot do.

What works does not require reading minds. It changes the situation so that the sequence cannot complete:

No adult, however trusted, is alone and unseen with a child as a matter of routine. Rules that apply to everyone accuse no one.
Secrets between an adult and a child are named as a warning sign to children, in plain words, before anything happens.
Institutions treat a report as information to act on, not as a threat to their reputation. Much of the Royal Commission's work concerns what happened when they did the opposite (Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017).
Adults in a child's life are expected to notice changes and to say something, without needing proof first.

The Royal Commission's recommendations run along these lines: they are about how institutions are built, not about how to recognise a type of person. That is where the evidence leads. Grooming succeeds because it uses trust. The defence is to arrange things so that trust is never the only safeguard.

Short answers

What is grooming?

Grooming is the process an offender uses to gain access to a child, build trust with the child and the adults around them, and keep the abuse secret. Researchers describe three targets: the offender's own justifications, the child's environment and carers, and the child (Craven et al., 2006).

Can people spot grooming while it is happening?

Mostly not. In an experiment, people who read descriptions of an adult at different stages of grooming rated that adult no more likely to be an abuser at any stage (Winters & Jeglic, 2017). The behaviour looks like ordinary kindness until it is read backwards.

What helps?

Changing the situation rather than reading minds: rules that stop any adult being alone and unseen with a child, open communication, and adults who are expected to notice and report. The Royal Commission's recommendations are built on this approach.

References

Cohen, L. E., & Felson, M. (1979). Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44(4), 588–608. doi.org/10.2307/2094589
Craven, S., Brown, S., & Gilchrist, E. (2006). Sexual grooming of children: Review of literature and theoretical considerations. Journal of Sexual Aggression, 12(3), 287–299. doi.org/10.1080/13552600601069414
Elliott, M., Browne, K., & Kilcoyne, J. (1995). Child sexual abuse prevention: What offenders tell us. Child Abuse & Neglect, 19(5), 579–594. doi.org/10.1016/0145-2134(95)00017-3
Leclerc, B., Proulx, J., & Beauregard, E. (2009). Examining the modus operandi of sexual offenders against children and its practical implications. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 14(1), 5–12. doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2008.08.001
Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. (2017). Final report. Commonwealth of Australia. www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/final-report
Whittle, H. C., Hamilton-Giachritsis, C., Beech, A. R., & Collings, G. (2013). A review of online grooming: Characteristics and concerns. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 18(1), 62–70. doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2012.09.003
Winters, G. M., & Jeglic, E. L. (2017). Stages of sexual grooming: Recognizing potentially predatory behaviors of child molesters. Deviant Behavior, 38(6), 724–733. doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2016.1197656