Understanding Sexual Grooming to Prevent Abuse

A parent’s most important job is keeping their children safe from harm. In the case of child sexual abuse, a threat that affects one in four girls and one in twenty boys, it’s something that keeps many parents up at night. Despite legislation in 38 states mandating prevention education, a key piece of the puzzle is missing: empirical data about sexual grooming, the process used by perpetrators to get closer to and eventually abuse young victims, all while evading detection. Closing this gap is the scholarly focus of Dr. Elizabeth Jeglic, Professor of Psychology at John Jay College.

Jeglic has been studying sexual abuse since her graduate school days, when she worked to develop a national program for the treatment of sex offenders in Canada. Most recently, she has published a number of articles with a former doctoral student, Dr. Georgia Winters, studying sexual grooming and explicating the behaviors used by perpetrators. While sexual grooming hadn’t previously been studied empirically, Jeglic claims its definition is a key piece of the prevention puzzle. Her research “suggests that 99% of all childhood sexual abuse involves elements of sexual grooming,” while a 2023 paper, also written with master’s student Lillian Steedman, notes that adults are not well-equipped to recognize grooming behaviors.

Over their years of collaboration, Jeglic and Winters have developed the Sexual Grooming Model and a self-report measure, both of which have enabled them to better understand sexual grooming and to find out, with real-world data from victims, what behaviors are most likely to correspond with abusive relationships. Out of 42 specific behaviors the team identified in the model, those who experienced sexual abuse as children report experiencing, on average, between 14 and 15, including such behaviors as giving compliments, the provision of drugs or alcohol, and increasingly sexualized discussions or touching.

In February 2023, Jeglic and Winters published a seminal work, Identification of red flag child sexual grooming behaviors, bringing together prior work on grooming behaviors in perpetrators from many demographics and creating a guide for parents, caregivers and youth-serving organizations ranking grooming behaviors by their level of risk, with the riskiest behaviors being the most likely to accompany sexual abuse. Using this guide to distinguish innocuous behaviors from behaviors that are potentially or immediately threatening to victims can help caregivers to keep kids safer from sexual abuse by helping them to know what to be concerned about. “Only five percent of individuals who are arrested for sex crimes would have been on the sex offender registry, [meaning] 95 percent were first-time sex offenders,” says Jeglic. “We have to flip the narrative and think about prevention. How can we get this to stop happening?”

As an expert in the field, Jeglic can also dispel myths about child sexual abuse that can sidetrack parents. She maintains that “Stranger Danger” and the stereotypical man in a white van are not applicable in most cases. “Only seven percent of all perpetrators are strangers to children, and 40 percent are other youth. We also found that in 14 percent of cases of child sexual abuse, the perpetrator was either a woman or a teenage girl. So we have to think more broadly.” She also says that, while parents may hope that their kids will tell them if they feel unsafe or are abused, “most kids don’t report. Only 20 percent of kids will tell within 48 hours to one month of the abuse, and the majority will delay disclosure months or even years.”

So what’s the best way to keep minors safe? On a personal, family level, Jeglic hopes that her work will help to make caregivers more aware of what grooming looks like; her red flag chart is a great place to start. She also highly recommends talking to children from a young age about healthy sexuality, personal boundaries, and what to do if they experience grooming behaviors. On a societal level, she believes providing free childcare, like after-school care or summer camps, can help to eliminate gaps in supervision that leave children vulnerable to abuse. While “grooming is a helpful target because it’s something tangible that we can talk about,” says Jeglic, “there are all these other factors we need to take into account. We know that kids who are vulnerable because they lack guardianship, or due to psychological reasons like feeling lonely or neglected, are the ones most likely to be targeted for abuse.”

Jeglic and her colleagues are currently working on a second red flag study, funded by John Jay’s Office for the Advancement of Research, that interviews victims of sexual violence by many types of perpetrators (the original study included only adult male perpetrators), in order to see whether the grooming behaviors they previously identified are generalizable. “We hypothesize that, of the 42 different behaviors [in the Sexual Grooming Model], there are different permutations depending on who the perpetrator is and their relationship to the child.” She hopes the next phase of her scholarship will go further to bridge the research-to-practice barrier, making her work accessible to people whom it can help. “We’ve been reaching out to organizations to partner and take the research from the ivory tower out to the people who are on the front lines,” she says. “People in the field, … they see this every day, and hopefully we can help them guide their prevention efforts so they’re doing the work in the best evidence-based way.”