According to the National Centre for Victims of Crime, one out of five girls and one out of twenty is prone to sexual abuse before attaining 18 years. The number of children undergoing sexual assault is difficult to ascertain since most cases are not reported to the authorities.
Investigations conducted on reported child abuse cases establish that the sex abuse resulted from child grooming signs. Grooming is a slow and deliberate process that sex offenders use to gain trust and begin a secret sexual relationship with their minors. The offenders can bypass any boundaries before the action takes place.
It is difficult to establish if grooming occurs since it may appear as a close relationship between the offender and the minor. In most cases, the offender may be a family member or someone well known by the family or community at large. It makes it easy for them to gain trust without suspecting anything. The grooming period varies and may take years, months, weeks, or days.
How Does Childhood Grooming Take Place?
In most cases, grooming happens face to face. However, the widespread use of social media also makes it happen online. For face-to-face grooming, the offender tries to find ways to create a connection with the minor and the other family members. Severely, the person would buy gifts or offer compliments to increase the trust and make them feel special.
Online grooming takes place when the offender pretends to be a child. The person may send instant messages or texts to connect with the child.
The Main Stages of Childhood Grooming
Grooming happens in six main stages as listed below:
Singling Out the Child
Targeting the minor is the first step the perpetrators use to begin an intimate relationship. At this stage, the offender takes advantage of the child’s vulnerabilities such as isolation, neediness, home violence, and lack of enough parental care and decides to provide attention to the child.
Building Trust With the Child’s Parents or Guardian
The perpetrators then move to build a special relationship with the child’s parents or guardians that enables them to lower any suspicion towards them. It allows them to gain more access to the child by providing a warm, calculated welcome. It also assists them in building a stronger relationship with the minor by gaining more information about the needs. In most cases, the perpetrator tries to fill some of the requirements that seem to be more important to the child.
Providing For The Needs Of The Minor
Continuous fulfillment of the child’s needs makes them important people in the minor’s life. The needs come as gifts, flattery, money, and other basic needs, increasing the child’s attention towards the perpetrator. The perpetrators will also increase their attention and care towards the minor.
Applying Isolation Tactics
Isolating the kid becomes the next move to bring the child closer. Most perpetrators create situations that ensure that they are alone together. Some of the tactics include babysitting and coaching. During these times, the perpetrator builds more trust by creating a scenario where they love, care, and understand the child more than anyone else, including parents. The child will automatically prefer spending more time with the person because they make them feel special.
Begin Sexual Advancements
After gaining emotional trust and dependence, the person starts making sexual advances towards the child. The person might use different strategies such as sharing pictures, talking, and creating situations where they are naked or expose part of their bodies, such as swimming.
The adult takes advantage of the child’s curiosity and trust during this period using methods that introduce a sexual part of the relationship. They may offer to help the child perform sexual activities such as masturbation and explain how good it feels.
Take Control of the Relationship
The perpetrators may use different strategies to maintain sexual abuse and ensure that the child remains quiet. Some of the tactics used include blame, secrecy, and high-level threats. These strategies make the child feel that they may lose an important person, hence choosing to remain quiet. The child may also feel that breaking the relationship or exposing it may cause more harm than staying in it.
How to Identify Childhood Grooming and Prevention
It is difficult for one to notice any form of childhood grooming since the perpetrators also groom the parents. Another main reason is that the offenders are someone related or close to the family, raising no suspicion. However, it is important to understand grooming to make us able to prevent any form of abuse.
Some of the main signs of grooming include:
Directed Attention Towards a Specific Child
Since the perpetrators are close to the family, they may overstep some boundaries, but never will they be caught abusing the child. It is important to take caution when you observe anyone crossing boundaries as a parent. Do not keep quiet and warn the offender about the behavior. Develop house rules that explain how outsiders relate with your children.
Gifting a Child
Gifting is a common technique most offenders use to gain the child’s and parents’ trust. As a guardian or caregiver, watch out for any gifting towards a certain child and inquire about its purpose. Limit when your children can receive gifts for special occasions such as birthdays.
Increased Touching And Hugging
Most offenders test the level of their relationship by introducing some form of touch for signs of grooming. The adult may try to hug or ask for one from the child and see the reaction. They may also do it in front of the parents to test their reactions. If you fail to react, the child may fail to recognize it as inappropriate.
Increased Sympathy Towards The Child
Adults groom minors always provide a listening ear regardless of whether they are upset or excited. It will give them a chance to develop a boundary between the child and the parents or friends. It is important to explain to your child that not everyone who shows affection has a good motive and can hurt them. Let your children know that you are there for them and should not keep anything a secret from them.
Increased Help To The Family
Most perpetrators offer to provide some support to parents to ensure that they remain alone with the child. In this case, explain to anyone making such advancements that you do not approve of your child being alone without your presence or knowledge. If you have to leave the child alone, ensure that you check in regularly to make the individual know that you are present and watching.
Use Of Internet
Some individuals may pretend to be someone they are not to gain access to your child. They may pretend to love some of the things loved by your child to gain trust, allowing grooming to take place online. It is important to monitor your child’s social media accounts and know whoever they are talking to. You can also install a phone tracker app to monitor the child’s activities while using the phone and know where they are every time they leave the house.
Other signs of grooming that will help you identify grooming include:
- The child has several gifts and finds difficulties explaining the source
- The child is receiving several messages from an unknown person through online channels
- The child speaks a lot about an older person and prefers spending most of the time with that person
- The child insists on going alone when meeting a particular person
- When the child is afraid of speaking about what they did when they are alone
- When the child stops being open about their daily activities
- The child chooses to spend less time with friends of the same age
- The child starts skipping classes or other activities such as sports
Steps To Take
Child sexual abuse is common in many countries. Most victims of sexual assault fail to report the matter; hence no legal action is taken on the perpetrator. However, parents need to check out any signs of grooming or sexual abuse on their children. Never ignore anything your child tells you and alert the authorities any time you suspect any form of child abuse.
Most perpetrators use different tactics to make the child develop fear hence fail to report. Children may suffer from the abuse’s long-term effects, such as depression and anxiety. Therefore, always ask your child about their daily experience while in school or playing. If no action is taken, the healing process from this situation might be lengthy and costly for the parents.
Alert the authorities if the child reports some level of sexual harassment since confronting the individual without any investigation might get you in trouble. Most countries have well-developed statutes that talk about child molestation. You can also seek help from an attorney specializing in child sexual abuse cases.
