Focus on Adult Groomers

Learning to recognise them. Their tactics.

Spotlight on people who groom

Different Groomers find their Own Way of Working. They have their own ‘charms’ to lure their victims.

CAAGe takes a closer look.

Psychology, in typing, on an old fashioned typewriter

The Psychology of Adult Sexual Grooming

A review of: The Psychology of Adult Sexual Grooming: Sinnamon’s Seven-Stage Model of Adult Sexual Grooming, by Grant Sinnamon, Bond University, Gold Coast, QLD, Australia. Victim and Offender Perspectives, 2017, Pages 459-487

Groomers don’t just groom their targets.

They often groom the people around them as well. Their reasons/objectives might include:

  • Getting close to someone in order to gain access in turn to a friend or family member (particularly alarming when it’s children they are trying to access).

  • Spreading gossip.

  • Influencing other people’s opinion of their target (often presenting them as unstable, mentally ill, hysterical, abusive, violent, exaggerating).

  • Presenting themselves as above reproach so that when the ‘discard’ comes they are not see as ‘at fault’.

"Breadcrumbing"

Breadcrumbing

The term breadcrumbing comes from the fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel. The children leave a trail of breadcrumbs that they can follow back to get home. Of course they’ll follow and of course, they get nowhere. It’s a great term for the tactic of putting down a juicy trail to lure in victims, but a trail that leaves you with no way out.

Love Bombing

Love bombing has become so synonymous with grooming that there’s an increasing trend to call adult sexual grooming ‘love bombing’.

In truth, it’s just a technique used to make the victim ‘fall’ for the groomer’s ‘charms’.

(Was delighted to find this image : what is presented as love is actually firey and unpalatable!)

Catfish (real one)

Catfishing

Catfishing is the technique of pretending to be someone you’re not in order to lure them in, often used on dating sites.

DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender)

A technique where the groomer’s target is presented as the offender, often presented as having taken action against the groomer themselves (see PINs, below!)

Beautiful black man showing signs of self doubt

Gaslighting

Gaslighting is the awful (for the victim) technique of getting someone to doubt their own reality.

It’s ‘DARVO’ on speed: instead of getting someone else to disbelieve the victim, they’re getting the victim to disbelieve themselves.

One tactic, successfully removed: the use of PINs was a common groomer tactic - the groomer would use PINs to preset themselves as victims, and their victims as abusers, a common form of DARVO.