Grooming

Trigger warning: this post contains descriptions of grooming and abuse.

This is about the process that abusers do to potential victims preparatory to actually abusing them, rather than any other sort of grooming. It is also about real grooming and not the imaginary grooming that right w(h)ingers see in drag, being kind to other people and social justice.

This post is heavily reliant on this page.

Grooming is the process of an abuser building a relationship with a potential victim and sometimes their wider family gaining their trust and power over the child in preparation for abuse.

So we already have several clear features: stranger danger never did really exist and it is now understood that abusers are known to their victims. They build a relationship with the family for the same reason, that if the child's family think they know, and respect and trust, the abuser, they will allow the abuser more opportunities to abuse the child and are less likely to believe the child when s/he says they've been abused.

The page I've linked above stresses that the abuser also makes the child think that what is happening is normal, and to isolate them. The example I've used above of the parents not believing their abused child features the isolation and the way the parents' thinking has also been conditioned by the abuser.

This is of course to gain trust and so grooming is invariably pleasant and kind to start off with. You are conditioned to think that the abuser couldn't possibly do something bad which of course easily crosses into blaming yourself or not trusting yourself.

The abuser then gains power by manipulation and often gifts involving tests. They are testing the victim's compliance and that they won't tell, by starting with lower level boundary violations that are unlikely to give them much trouble, and seeing what the child does. It is only after much testing and setting up the child to think it's them, that actual abuse will happen. Incidentally this is why it simply isn't true when it comes out that an organisation is simply riddled with abuse and everyone is very surprised: in reality unless everyone is lying, this means they haven't noticed all the grooming and because of the number of boundary violations necessary before abuse, there has to be all sorts of other things wrong in the organization that everyone is conveniently missing.

Because it just doesn't happen that adults who know their victims suddenly start raping them with no warning: there are always warnings.

But the knowledge of this pattern of abusive behaviour - building a relationship, gaining trust, making the victim trapped and isolated, gaining power by manipulation, making the victim think they're initiating it, then actually abusing - is a very useful knowledge to have. Not only to recognise it in children (the linked page has a list of signs a child is being groomed) but because it is handy to recognise when someone is trying to groom you in reality.

Now I'm going to be my usual inappropriate self and say that since I was a psychiatric nurse for 25 years I gained the kind of reactions and gallows humour you get from dealing with endless trauma day in and day out. It is not unusual in the profession to hear a particularly arse-licking member of staff as being 'groomed' for management, for example. I like this image because it stresses how they're being used as well as getting promotion, but this idea of grooming is definitely applicable to other circumstances than child sexual abuse.

The best example is churches, who groom and manipulate their congregants and ministers to comply and keep schtum. This is how the entire hierarchy of the RC church covered up abuse: you have to be groomed to get to covering up crime.

This may sound extreme but look at this example:

Recently, JD Great decided to fuss at people who come late, listen online, and leave early, saying they treated the worship service like an entertainment venue. However, the guy on the camera pulled back, and observers could look at JD’s big stage, which looked a lot like an entertainment venue to me!

Watch it yourself, and then I will offer additional thoughts on what he said. It appears that all the clips of the statement keep getting removed from Twitter, so I had to do a workaround. Here I present the entire service. To hear his relatively short rant, go to mark 42:20-43.09. If you want to listen to him telling about all those wonderful churches that he has planted to reach the disenfranchised, listen for about 10 minutes before his rant. Source

You get told off at school or work for being late, not at something you are attending voluntarily, particularly if you are giving them money. This actually seems to me quite high level in terms of grooming, because there's something so wrong with telling a congregation off. There must therefore have been lots of steps before this. 

I would suggest some of the ways churches groom people by getting their trust, obtaining power over them and manipulating and trapping them so they can't leave include: providing the lonely with a conditional social network they would lose if they stopped going; getting people to give 10% of their income; telling them they're sinners and they should blame themselves; setting very high standards of spiritual perfection; expecting frequent attendance; claiming to be the one true church, etc.

The effect of all these things (and others) is exactly the same as that of grooming and can only have the effect of isolating people, make them doubt and blame themselves, and make them dependent by a progressive series of expectations leading from just visiting to being completely enmeshed.

I have a theory that the reason churches often turn out to be hotbeds of abuse is that they are hotbeds of grooming and grooming is their business. Of course this happens elsewhere, but I honestly think churches are the best example of this.

Because there must be some reason, mustn't there, why whole denominations get riddled with abuse, and I think it's the grooming. You would think that people would just leave after this comes out but they don't. They act all surprised and just carry on. They even go to the church after their own child has been abused. They're acting like abuse has become normal, exactly as if they've been groomed.

Could it be happening to you?