What is Grooming and How Do Child Molesters Groom Children?

Transcript of the video:

Grooming is the process by which a child molester gains control of the child for purposes of molesting him and oftentimes part of that process is also grooming the family. Grooming is a non-violent process. It doesn’t involve the child molester hitting the kid. It typically doesn’t involve the child molester threatening the child. It doesn’t involve the child molester stalking the child, making a child fearful. No!

What grooming involves is making the child feel comfortable with the molester. And the way the molester does that, the way the pedophile does that, is to first be friendly to the child. Present a friendly ear to the child. Typically these children who are molested are kids who have problems in their home. Sometimes they have problems with self-esteem. What’s the best thing you can give a kid with problems with self-esteem or a kid with problems in the home what you give them is attention.

That’s the first thing that happens. And that attention first is compliments and the compliments are followed by spending more time with the child. Doing a favor for the child. Doing the child’s homework. That follows by small presents: McDonald’s hamburgers, buying a child a pair of sneakers. Then the molester, sometimes at the same time, moves on to groom the parents. Because what a molester knows is in order for me to get this kid where I want him I need to have the parents feel comfortable.

Parents though are really in an impossible situation because most parents don’t see it coming. They just view this person as a nice guy. They view the offer to babysit as being one of… “oh what a nice teacher, what a nice Scoutmaster, what a nice priest. What the priest who wants to come in and say prayers with a child in his room what a nice guy.” And they don’t realize that this is the way slowly but surely hooking, it’s getting that hook sunk deeper and deeper and deeper.

And then what follows, and sometimes it’s the same time as the present start, is the innocuous touch; the rub across the arm, the tousle of the hair the slight embrace. You find sometimes people say “You know I always thought there was something weird about that guy who was always hugging the kids.” Well, that’s the way that they start. It’s a little embrace and then when he, when the molester sees that the child is not opposing it they go a little further and go a little further till when they start touching the genitals or the kissing.

And so that’s what starts and by the time the touches go from what the child thinks is through an accidental touch or just a hug to the actual sexual touching and sexual acts it’s way too late. The kid can’t get out of it. The kid starts believing why would a person who I trust do these things to me unless it was right. So the sexual abuse becomes normalized in the child’s life and the kid doesn’t see the need to report that abuse what to tell his parents about it. Unless it’s really making the child feel uncomfortable and you only see that when the kid typically is getting a little older. And then what will happen is the kid will feel embarrassed because he’ll
think maybe I’m gay if it’s a man on a man or if it’s a girl she’ll think maybe people think I’m a slut if I say something or I’ll be blamed.

And so then the grooming period has done, the grooming period has done its job and now that child is in the clutches of the person who’s going to destroy his future.