Understanding Children’s Reports of Grooming in Child Sexual Abuse Cases

Grooming, the largely nonviolent tactics used to seduce children into sexual abuse, shifts healthy adult-child relationships into patterns of abuse. Grooming provides a framework for explaining delayed disclosure, recantations, and lack of evidence in child sexual abuse cases (CSA). Yet researchers have not established how grooming behaviors are addressed during the investigation and prosecution process. Across 4 studies I explored how grooming is addressed by legal and investigative actors. Across Studies 1 and 2 I analyzed a series of 138 forensic interviews and 134 trial transcripts to establish if and how interviewers and attorneys address reports of grooming. In Study 3 I examined 31 cases of expert testimony to explore whether experts reference grooming. In Study 4 I explored, experimentally, how attorney questioning and expert testimony related to grooming can influence perceptions of child credibility and subsequent case verdicts. In forensic interviews (Study 1), grooming questions comprised less than 5% of all questioned asked and primarily related to exposure to pornography (46.8%); interviews may be missing an important opportunity to raise grooming with children. In criminal trials (Study 2), less than 2% of attorneys’ questions addressed grooming. “Tell me more” questions yielded the most productive reports of grooming from children when compared to every other question type. This suggests attorneys should consider raising grooming more often, using open ended “tell-me-more” questions when they do. In expert testimony (Study 3), grooming was referenced in 52% of cases. Expert testimony often addressed boundary violations (19.4%) with no specific reference to their source of their knowledge. Experts should consider raising grooming in a larger proportion of their cases and mentioning the source of their knowledge when they do. Finally, I found no impact of grooming education through expert testimony or attorney questioning on perceptions of child credibility or subsequent case verdicts (Study 4). The manipulation in this case may have been too weak, suggesting the need for replication. Training with these legal actors is an important avenue to educate them on grooming and how to raise grooming issues with the children they encounter.