Understanding grooming and boundary transgressions Dr. Michael Salter: Grooming is very important for professionals that work with kids to understand, because child sex offenders don't just groom kids, but they groom the environments in which they access children. When we think about grooming, the term is used to refer to the ways in which offenders initiate a rapport or a relationship with the child. The way in which they reduce the inhibition of the child, and induct the child into sexualized behaviour and then also secure secrecy, between themselves and the child. So that's generally what we mean when we talk about grooming. It's the process through which an offender secures a relationship with a child that they can then utilize in order to sexually abuse the child. However, when sex offenders are targeting a child in this way, they often establish a really strong rapport, not just with the child, but with other authority figures around the child, with other professionals, with the child's family. And these relationships feel very real. And I think they are real, I think they're real for the offender and they are real for the people around the offender.

When we talk about grooming, we need to recognize that there is a spectrum from a very calculated offender who's very premeditated, and highly intentional and deliberate in the way in which they deploy particular strategies in order to sexually abuse kids. And that involves a lot of very intentional manipulation and deception. There are certainly those offenders out there, but then there's a spectrum of grooming where the offender can be strategic but not necessarily calculated. The offender has already got a world view in which they strongly believe that they just love kids, that they're close to kids, that maybe they're just like a kid themselves, and so that's how they engage with children. That's how they engage with other adults around them. And they just recruit other people into their own world view and it's very easy to be deceived by that.

So when we're thinking about identifying grooming and disrupting grooming, we need to be really conscious of the ways that groomers overstep boundaries, blur boundaries between adults and children, blur appropriate professional relationships, even though sometimes that seems to be done with very good intentions. We have to understand that child sex offenders are a really diverse group, and the way in which they engage with environments and start to transform environments in order to facilitate their sex offending is very diverse as well, and we can get caught up in that against our will.

One of the real complexities when we're thinking about grooming is recognizing that from the child's point of view, from the minor's point of view, that their connection with the offender can be very genuine. Offenders are very skilled at crafting what feels like, for the child, a consensual loving relationship, particularly where offenders have gone out and really targeted a kid who has unmet emotional needs. Kids who aren't getting the support and care that maybe they need at home, you know, if a young person is same-sex attracted, for example, they can be really quite vulnerable to an older person coming in and offering them a whole set of understandings that they're not getting anywhere else. And so when we're dealing with a young person who has been groomed into a relationship, they can feel very strongly that this is their boyfriend or this is their girlfriend.

And we need to recognize that offenders have also recruited that young person's sexuality into the abuse. Child sexual abuse doesn't necessarily feel physically bad for the minor. It can feel good and so that's a very complex thing for us to untangle when we're working with young people, is to recognize, on one hand their sexual agency and their autonomy, but also the way in which their capacity to make free and open consensual decisions about their sexuality has been taken away from them, in a way that they just don't have the developmental maturity to understand. So we might be dealing with a nine-year-old or a ten-year-old or someone in their mid-teens who has a very passionate attachment to the offender and then from the offender's point of view, that's very legitimizing for them. They're saying to themselves and sometimes to other people, well, I'm not doing anything wrong, this young person enjoys it, this young person is coming back for abuse.

It really requires ethical bystanders and interveners to step back and have a very, very clear view of the real power relations in this relationship, and to recognize that that young person at fourteen or fifteen may feel a particular way about this "relationship," but in ten years' time, that young person is going to have a very, very different understanding of what they've been through, and they are going to be very, very grateful for those people that drew that boundary and drew that line for them even when they didn't understand the value of that line at the time. It is really up to us to hold that very clear understanding of just how powerful manipulation and grooming can be in confusing a young person about the nature of the abuse.

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