children grooming

‘Grooming’ is the term used to describe behaviours employed by the sex offender to target and prepare children for sexual abuse. One of the problems for professionals and parents is that the signs that a person is grooming a child are very discreet and difficult to recognise.

The Home Office has defined grooming as: ‘A course of conduct enacted by a suspected paedophile which would give a reasonable person cause for concern that any meeting with a child arising from the conduct would be for unlawful purposes.’

Grooming is a process adopted by an abuser that is normally very subtle, drawn out, calculated, controlling and premeditated. It is the subtlety of the grooming process that enables abuse to go undetected. What is vital to the paedophile is access to children and the opportunity to abuse themSome paedophiles will target children within a certain age range or of a certain sex or ethnicity while others will be more general in their targeting. They will all target a specific child, perhaps because they have access to them and the opportunity to abuse them without being identified as a sex offender. Some offenders target a child who is naturally approachable and others will target lonely children who are seeking attention from adults. The offender may empathise with the child’s problems and liken them to the problems they had at that age and in this way make the child start to feel sorry for them. The offender will try to develop trust with the child by sharing feelings and secrets and may buy small gifts for the child, who might then be instructed to keep them secret from parents and friends.

Rajan prasad singh

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