What Does Grooming Look Like in the Abuse of Adults?
Editor’s Note: This week we revisit a 2023 post on the topic of grooming, the manipulative techniques used by abusive people to set the stage for the abuse of adults as well as children.
As we grapple with the problem of sexual abuse of adults in the Catholic Church, it’s important to acknowledge the role of grooming, the tactics some abusive people use to gain access to their victims and avoid getting caught.
Grooming has typically been connected to the abuse of children and teens. For example, when Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky was convicted of sexually abusing boys in 2012, news stories often mentioned that he groomed his victims with gifts and group showers to gain their trust and lower their boundaries. Grooming made the boys more likely to tolerate sexual contact and less likely to report Sandusky to other adults.
Grooming can leave victim-survivors with a sense of shame.
But it’s not just kids. Researchers are beginning to study grooming in adult abuse. Elizabeth Jeglic, professor of psychology and a sexual violence prevention researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, worked with colleagues to create a research-based list of “red flag behaviors” that may indicate that a child is being groomed and faces increased risk of sexual abuse. For example, predatory people seek children who are particularly trusting and vulnerable in some way. They will single out the child for attention and compliments, isolate them from others, and work to desensitize the child to physical touch and sexual images and ideas, to normalize such topics.
Jeglic and her team recently gave a survey about grooming behaviors to more than 500 people who experienced unwanted sexual contact as adults—in any setting, not just the Church. She is just starting to analyze this data, but says initial findings suggest that adult grooming looks similar to the childhood version. For example, many adults reported that their abuser sought them out because they were vulnerable in some way: they had a previous history of victimization and trauma, mental health problems, or substance abuse problems.
David Pooler, professor of social work at Baylor University in Texas, has conducted in-depth interviews with adult survivors of abuse in church settings. He learned that abusive religious leaders often use sacred language and scripture to make their actions seem holy and endorsed by God. They also work very gradually to gain the trust of victims and others around them. “The predatory person is extremely patient,” Pooler explains. “The grooming period can be as long as two years,” but sometimes longer, “before an actual boundary line of sexual touch is crossed.”
Marie’s Story
Marie (not her real name) was in her 40s when she first met the chaplain. They fell into an easy friendship, and he became close to her and her family. For many years her relationship with the priest “was holy, and it was good,” Marie recounts. But little by little, over time, this started to shift.
“He began to ask for exceptions, exceptions that I knew were outside of what he would ask of another woman,” Marie remembers. He suggested that they spend time alone, just the two of them, because he wanted to teach her how to pray. He asked if he could greet her with a little kiss, the way he did with his mother and sisters, because she reminded him of his mother.
The priest said God revealed to him that he and Marie were meant to be a special healing gift to each other, and eventually their relationship became sexual. Marie says the changes were so gradual that she didn’t even notice. “We’d been friends for years,” she says, “and because I had this level of trust with him that he would never do anything to hurt me, I let those exceptions go. His revelations from God became mine, and I believed him.”
Several years later, a therapist suggested to Marie that the relationship with the priest was abuse. Because the priest served as a stand-in for God and held holy authority in the Church, this could not be a consensual relationship between equals. Marie describes this as her watershed moment, a wake-up call. She began combing the internet for information and found an article by the late researcher Diana Garland, called “When Wolves Wear Shepherd’s Clothing.” Marie saw herself in the words.
“Grooming” is a process whereby the religious leader breaks down a woman’s defenses, making her feel special, perhaps pointing out her spiritual gifts, or in another way using his position as a religious leader to develop a close relationship and isolate her from others.
The article continues:
He co-opts religious and spiritual language into an agenda designed to meet his own needs. It is a gradual and subtle process, and one that has extraordinary power, desensitizing her to increasingly inappropriate behavior … [H]e speaks for God, saying things like, “I asked God for someone who can share my deepest thoughts, prayers, and needs, and He sent me you.”
“It reflected back to me what my situation was and how I had come to be there,” Marie says. “I was in shock and devastated.”
Marie says loving support from her husband and her therapists has helped her start to heal. As she has learned about grooming, she has grown alert to power dynamics in church settings, and notes that grooming by church leaders may not always lead to sexual abuse. “It can be abuse of power, emotional abuse, or spiritual abuse so that the abuser can get other outcomes that they want,” she says. “If a priest is using his authority for something that’s not life-giving,” she adds, “it is not an appropriate use of the authority conferred upon him at ordination. It’s just not.”
Knowledge Brings Healing
After they have been victimized, some survivors struggle to understand how they failed to recognize the grooming process. “I’ve seen so many survivors in the aftermath say, ‘I just feel so stupid. How could I have fallen for this?’ Pooler says. “What we really need to look at is how evil and strategic these people were. It’s not how dumb you were, it’s how conniving these predatory people are.”
If survivors are left with a sense of shame or a belief that they brought the grooming and sexual abuse on themselves, Jeglic of John Jay has some hopeful news: “We’re seeing anecdotally that understanding grooming is really very therapeutic and helpful for healing,” she says. “You understand how you were manipulated and how this really wasn’t your fault.”
“Grooming is a manipulative process, a process that we’re still trying to understand, that’s hard to identify,” Jeglic adds. “Because we have not studied this adequately, I think we were not very good at protecting people.” She hopes that research like hers will lead to change, helping identify people more vulnerable to grooming and spotting harmful behaviors in abusive people, in an effort to stop them. “Let’s recognize this,” Jeglic says, “before it gets to the point where somebody is hurt.”
—Erin O’Donnell, Editor
