Sexual Grooming

As a counsellor to troubled youth, I have experienced many horrifying sessions with youth from the “monogamist” culture. Many of those sessions are as a direct result of sexual grooming.

Sexual Grooming refers to preparing the child to accept sexual abuse in a non-threatening way. The “groomed” child will then, not only accept sexual contact willingly, but often times the grooming is so deeply ingrained that the child will seek after it themselves.

Have you ever seen it? It can begin so innocently.

The little child comes home from kindergarden. Someone asks, Do you have a boyfriend/girlfriend yet?

What kind of insane question is that to ask a five year old child?

I’ve heard the excuses, It’s normal. Everyone does it. It is only pretend. They’re just children, nothing can happen. Oh, stop being such a prude. Etc.

How about when the neighbour boy comes over for a visit, and the mother asks her daughter if she likes him and wants him to be her boyfriend?

The child seeking for the “right” answer to please the mother, answers “yes.”

“Well then, go dress up.”

The child hurries off, and quickly returns dressed in her mother’s hat, coat and shoes. She smiles a big smile, and the mother blushes and quickly takes the child back to her room to dress her appropriately.

Soon they return with the child dressed in a mini skirt, tube top and lipstick. Everyone ooos and ahhhs, and the mother quickly fetches the camera. She sits her 5 year old daughter next to the neighbour boy and puts his arm around her. Everyone giggles and smiles and the picture is taken.

The entire event may have been a little daunting for the young children, but it made a deep impression. The children have just experienced their first lesson in sexual grooming. More lessons follow, often to the first kiss. The children love the attention and reward of acting out the boyfriend/girlfriend roles that their parents ease them into.

More techniques are employed, usually first in the non-touching area, such as having the children watch cartoons that are sexually oriented, with the excuse that they are only cartoons. Then letting the young children watch more ‘adult’ soap operas and movies, then to x-rated movies, etc, often with the grooming sessions in a happy environment.

These grooming sessions are expertly interspersed with bouts of denial of physical affection, to create the hunger drive, after which grooming to touching offenses is begun. Most times, but not always, negative emotional manipulation is brought to bear to achieve compliance. Barriers are quickly broken down at an extremely young age and the children now begin to seek after these “relationships”. It doesn’t take long and the grooming is complete.

The “groomed” child will then, not only accept sexual contact willingly, but often times the grooming is so deeply ingrained that the child will seek after it themselves. The brain-washing is so complete that the sexual contact will become all the child wants, it will become the child’s very reason for living. As a counselor, I have seen it many times. I have seen it to the extreme where upon first meeting the patient, she looks longingly into your eyes, a never ending stream of compliments spews from her mouth, and she cannot help but to physically reach out and touch a sleeve or arm of any man that walks by, often the patient never even realizes that they are doing it.

There are many “grooming” techniques, which are used in all walks of life, and they are incredibly effective. They are not new, but have been around for ages, under various titles. Psychologists have been using various grooming techniques to help people for as long as their profession has been around.

Child brides, child trafficking, prostitution, child and teenage pregnancies, sexual discrimination, inequality, and oppressed women have always been, and will forever be inextricably entwined with the “monogamist” mindset and culture.