At some point in the near future, CAAGe will be looking to become a charity.

So we want to start being very transparent about what we’re doing. We’re a tiny volunteer organisation, operating a very niche, poorly understood area, so our numbers will look unimpressive to many, but our only goal is to help individuals and get better constantly.

That may, obviously, have to change when we become a charity, but in the meantime, we’re making progress and it’s a joy to us when we’ve helped someone dealing with adult grooming.

Helpline

Our helpline is run by me, Claire (trained in helpline work).

The call volume isn’t high - we aim to signpost help on the website to get people to the best service for them - but it is important.

Recurring themes that have come up this month that we have previously encountered, have included:

• People’s frustration with the regulators, especially regulators of groups like solicitors and charities, whose main regulatory stance seems to concern money rather than rather more damaging and personal adult grooming.

• What to do when a partner/spouse seems to be being groomed away from the marital home (and is it grooming?).

• Adult grooming of young people (targeting young women) in nightclubs.

• Age differences and whether these can be signs of adult grooming.

• Un-’statemented’ vulnerable adults and grooming.

Every case is different. People’s dynamics are different. But some of our advice is generic and it would help victims to have it out there. So I (Claire) will aim to have some of these generic themes blogged over the next few weeks.

One very rewarding call was from a man this week who ended our call with ‘Thank you. This call has been more valuable than all of the time and money I’ve wasted on counsellors’. In all fairness, he’d been unlucky and found a counsellor with poor understanding of his situation. (I believe we have great ones here: counsellors who understand adult grooming.)

Volunteers

We need more, but it looks like we have a fabulous volunteer or two likely to join us over the next few weeks - watch the blog for more!!

It’s exciting, rewarding work and there’s so much to do that we can find something to meet almost anyone’s interests.

Website

Even though the move to the new website is largely complete, there is still a lot of work to do.

Despite this, our site visits were up by - woohoo! - 81% (5.3k), of whom 80% were new visitors.

Lots of people leave the site after a page or three to go off to somewhere else - which we hope means people have quickly found either what they wanted or the right place to go for help. Over the coming moths we’ll be looking for ways to check where people are choosing to go to after visiting us - so any Google or Bing analytics experts reading this - if you could spare us a little time to help us get this information/show us how to do it…..