Don’t Tell Anyone: How Grooming Delays Disclosure

Teresa Huizar:

Hi, I’m Teresa Huizar, your host of One in Ten. In today’s episode, Don’t Tell Anyone: How Grooming Delays Disclosure, I speak with Kayla Schick, doctoral candidate and researcher at McGill University. Now, perhaps the most important research over the past decade in child sexual abuse and its prevention has been that helping us better understand grooming. Understanding grooming is so central to effective child sexual abuse prevention.

That if you haven’t already reviewed your own prevention activities to ensure that they align with these findings, there’s no time like the present to do so. Today’s episode, though, asks us to consider the last phase of grooming called post-abuse maintenance and how these tactics on the part of the abusers affect how long the abuse continues to go on. And it raises some really vital questions. How can we counter the emotional manipulation and threats that are key to this phase of grooming to talk to children about toxic secret keeping? And how can we reduce delayed disclosure and therefore the suffering of survivors? I know you’ll find this conversation as thought-provoking as I did. Please take a listen.

Kayla, welcome to One in Ten.

Kayla Schick:

Hi, thank you.

TH:

So I’m wondering how did you come to this work looking at grooming and the duration of abuse?

KS:

Yeah, so my research has always kind of revolved around child experiences of maltreatment and in the court system. And that has led me to the opportunity to work on a project specifically looking at characteristics of grooming. We were doing kind of a taxonomy of groomers. And as we were collecting the data and going through all of that, we saw that pattern of, you know, delayed disclosures and repeated instances of abuse over longer periods of time.

And so that started to spark a bit of curiosity about if the grooming strategies that we’re looking at are impacting disclosure. Are they also potentially impacting the duration of abuse that is being experienced? And understanding the nuance of that could be really helpful for prevention and things like that. And so that was what kind of sparked the interest in looking at duration in this way.

TH:

Let’s go back to something you just said before duration, which had to do with delayed disclosure. And because all of our audience may not know the literature around that, can you just talk about a little bit what it is, how common it is in these kinds of cases for those who may not be familiar with that?

KS:

Yeah, so delayed disclosure is when a child or an adolescent does not tell somebody about the abuse right away. They might wait several weeks, months, years before they tell anybody about what they’ve experienced. And it’s really quite common, especially in child sexual abuse cases and sexual violence in general. It’s something that’s very often under disclosed and underreported. So it’s not something that’s unlikely, but it is something that grooming can specifically contribute to. So behaviors that they’re experiencing that make them feel unsafe to tell anybody about what has happened to them. And so it is something that I think is really important to look at when we’re looking at sexual grooming specifically as well.

TH:

So when we’re talking about delayed disclosure and what causes that, can you just talk a little bit about common things that an offender or perpetrator might say to kids that might have some influence on that?

KS:

Mm-hmm. So some of it could be, you know, telling them not to tell anybody directly. So requesting that they keep something about the abuse or the relationship a secret. But it could also include, you know, threatening the child with physical harm or threatening the people they care about if they ever tell anybody. It could include confusing the child about whether what happened to them is actually inappropriate or abusive in nature, or a lot of victim blaming we can see in this area too. So telling the child that it’s their fault that this happened to them, that they will get in trouble, that they might be taken away from the people they care about, are all kind of these concealment tactics directly targeting disclosures. I think it can also look like building enough reliance of the child onto that adult or enough trust with that adult or care in that relationship that they would feel guilty to tell anybody about it as well. They want to try and protect the person that’s actually hurting them. So it’s that mix of making them potentially feel unsafe or potentially protective of the individual that’s hurting them or just unaware that what happened is even wrong.

TH:

It’s so interesting as you’re talking because for those of us who have worked on these cases, you know, we can think of a case right off the top of our head probably that fits many of these because as you say, it’s so very sadly common. One of the things that you both mentioned in the paper, but that I also think is so fascinating is the growth and research around grooming. And I think personally that this has just been such an important area to explore over time. So as you laid out in your paper, you know, others, Jeglic and Winters, have sort of created a model of phases of grooming. And for those people who are not familiar with this, I do think it will be helpful if we kind of level set for everyone, because otherwise, if people don’t know much about grooming literature, they’re not going to be able to follow the rest of the discussion very well. So could you just talk a little bit about this sort of six phases of grooming and when we talk about pre-abuse grooming, how that might look very different from post abuse maintenance.

KS:

Yeah. And so in our study, we’ve definitely took heavily from their work because it is it’s so groundbreaking in the sense that it’s conceptualized things really, really well for us. And so grooming is a pattern of deception. And we’ve kind of see that there’s so many grooming behaviors that we put them into these six categories. And so we have those pre-abuse behaviors, which are really meant to facilitate access to a child for the purpose of abuse. And so that can look like identifying particular vulnerabilities that might make the child more vulnerable to abuse. These things can look like children that maybe have less stable access to resources or support by people around them. It could also be, you know, behaviors to build trust with that child. The perpetrator might start to integrate themselves into their lives by maybe taking on a parent role, a friend role, a romantic partnership even kind of role, kept taking an interest in what they’re interested in and building that relationship, the trust of the child and potentially the trust of people around the child as well. And then we also see a lot of this kind of enticement and control. So starting to create a reliance on the perpetrator and what they can provide, whether that’s controlling access to things that they need, perhaps it’s like important resources like food or shelter. It could also just be resources like attention and support.

It could include bribes and things like this as well. And so these are some of the things we really start to see in that pre-abuse stage. And then we move into this kind of sexual desensitization, which is that gradual pushing of boundaries. So this is where we start to see sexual touch and exposure to sexual conversations, exposure to sexual materials, things that are maybe normalizing abusive behaviors gradually until we see the actual abuse occurring.

And that brings us into these kind of post-abuse maintenance strategies. I think sexual desensitization is a a kind of in-between where it can start to pre and then after the abuse it continues because it’s that normalizing of what the abuse is so that it starts to maintain that abuse long term. And within that, we also have physical isolation. So removing the child physically from supports.

Sometimes that can look like taking them on vacations as well. So getting them away from their support system entirely to perpetuate abuse or to hide the abuse that’s occurring and those concealment strategies that we were talking about earlier with the secret keeping and different ways of reducing disclosures.

TH:

That was really helpful. And as you were talking, I was a week or two ago at the Dallas Crimes Against Children Conference and I was sitting in a case presentation, which is the methodology they use there a lot. And as you were talking, I could identify every single one of those faces in the case they presented. It was just, you know, I think it’s just so pervasive and so intentional, really, on the part of the offender and almost following a playbook in this way. Now let’s turn to your study, which I thought was very interesting in the way that you approached this.

What were the research questions? You really had two primary ones, it seems to me, that you were trying to learn more about relative to grooming.

KS:

Yeah, so we wanted to know whether the number of grooming strategies is impacting that abuse duration. So we have all of these phases, we have these six domains. Is that more domains that are present in one certain case is impacting duration and contributing it to it in some way? And our other question was whether there is specific impacts of a single strategy or a couple of different strategies that are impacting abuse duration.

So we were really looking at those two things, number of grooming strategies present, and then the type of grooming strategy present and how that’s associated with durations of abuse.

TH:

What did you find out about the number? To what extent did it impact at all?

KS:

In our study we found that there was no significant association, which is a little bit surprising, I think, in some ways, but it really just highlights that it’s the impact of the strategies and what the strategies are doing individually that is potentially having the most impact on the duration.

TH:

We answered one of the questions I had for you just right there because one of my questions was, and what surprised you in this? And it sounds like that really did. Yeah, interesting that that didn’t. But I am also wondering about the second research question that you asked, which had to do with this sort of post abuse maintenance phase and to what extent any of these items had an impact on the duration. Can you talk a little bit about what you found?

KS:

Yeah, so those post abuse maintenance strategies were the ones that we hypothesized would be the most likely to increase abuse duration primarily because they’re intending to hide abuse or reduce the likelihood that the abuse will be detected. We found only one of them, so only concealment strategies were significantly associated with longer durations of abuse or predicted longer durations of abuse in our sample.

And so it really highlights the importance of that secret keeping piece and the fact that these concealment strategies may not only be reducing disclosures, but also allowing for or facilitating opportunities for more abuse to occur over longer periods of time.

TH:

To say, speaking of things that did or didn’t surprise me, I was a little surprised that the other two did not seem to correlate with duration. The sort of normalizing through desensitization that didn’t seem to correlate. That one was quite surprising to me. But also really the physical isolation aspect. What do you make of that?

KS:

I think it is really interesting and a little bit surprising for me as well. I think it speaks to the fact that maybe disclosure is such an important piece in recognition occurring at all. So abuse may continue, especially in grooming cases, may continue to occur until it is reported or detected. Interesting. And concealment strategies are preventing disclosures. And so it might actually be indicating that we’re not very good at recognizing grooming when someone doesn’t tell us that the abuse has already occurred. So if we’re relying too much or I guess this it’s really hard to identify grooming. We’ve seen that in the literature more broadly, recognizing grooming is difficult. Recognizing sexual abuse can be difficult without that disclosure piece. And so that might be further supported by these findings here, that it’s really we’re impacting disclosure that’s creating that duration of abuse, if that makes sense.

TH:

You know, yes. And as you were talking, I was thinking about a few things. One of them is that I think in some ways, more and more abuse is being discovered as opposed to being disclosed. And so in some ways, that may not be a bad thing in that, as we know, kids often do delay disclosure. They often, because of shame and stigma and lots of other things that we’ve talked about on this podcast before they may not come forward right away. So, you know, the scourge of child sexual abuse images and other kinds of things are terrible. But on the other hand, some cases probably come to light for which kids would otherwise wait a very long time, if ever, to disclose. And I wonder how you sort of think about the way in which the online environment is continuing to shape or change or modify what we understand about grooming.

KS:

Absolutely. And I think that’s an important distinction in this case as well, because we only looked at the in-person grooming strategies. And we see that when you have the online component, it is more likely to be detected without a disclosure because you have that record and that those images that are being actively sought for by police and things like this for the purpose of detecting abuse.

And we’re starting to get an understanding of what it looks like in that setting and how that can maybe translate into in person as well in terms of the phases that they’re going through and the strategies that they’re using. I think online grooming is also a bit more expected than in person grooming. There’s some research to show that people believe grooming to be a higher risk in online settings than in person settings. And so that might be why we see a bit more of that recognition there. But I think it’s definitely an area that needs to be explored a little bit more in terms of differences with disclosure and detection online. I think the factors at play are different between online and in person and there’s an important nuance there that needs to be explored further.

TH:

You know, as you were talking, I was also thinking about the fact that for these kids, so much of this has to do not just with intervention, you know, what do we do to recognize this after the fact, but also what we do to prevent it in the first place. And one of the things that you were talking about, which is true and concerning, is that parents do struggle to recognize grooming behaviors. Now, there’s a part of me that is hopeful that that is because grooming research is fairly recent. I mean, there’s been talk of grooming a long time, but frankly, it was all so vague. You couldn’t make any sense out of it. And half the time the way people would talk about grooming was just wrong, you know, and disproved by later research. So I’m hoping that it’s sort of the relative newness of it that means that parents and educators and in the US, what we call mandatory reporters.

That’s why they struggle to recognize that. But it’s very troubling that we are so terrible at it. Because I think this means that despite our best efforts, as long as adults are terrible at it, then unfortunately this places greater weight on children to have to recognize what’s happening to them and disclose, which is, I think, in many ways entirely unfair. I mean, how do you think about this? Because in some ways the implications of your research, while very important, are also very troubling.

KS:

Yeah. And I think I agree with you entirely. I think a lot of it is just a lack of knowledge because the field is discussing it more now maybe than we have ever in the past, even just the last five years, we’ve seen so much more coming out, especially related to recognition, which is really exciting and really hopeful. And so I think in terms of parents and caregivers, that preventative peace is just, you know, learning more about grooming.

There are people that are doing the work already to teach about grooming and so just making those resources available and understanding and encouraging parents to recognize why they need them, why they need to learn more about what grooming is and how to respond so that they’re competent in doing that. And I think it also includes, especially with what our study is showing, this importance of concealment and the significant impact it might be having on duration and on disclosure is having conversations with kids simply to help them recognize, you know, what’s a safe and an unsafe secret to keep, and that it’s never a child or an adolescent’s job to keep an unsafe secret. So sitting down to have those conversations with your kids about what that can look like, sitting down to identify together who are safe people that they can tell, coming up with maybe names, right? And making sure that the people who are likely to be chosen to receive those types of disclosures are aware of how to respond to them appropriately. We know that professionals, of course, have that training, but we can continue to just advocate for other people like parents and caregivers and people who work with children to continue to receive that training as well, especially related to grooming specific things, as we continue to learn more about grooming and the unique impact it has or components that it brings to child sexual abuse more generally.

TH:

When I started my career, I was doing prevention education. And I remember this sort of no secret keeping was a big part of child sexual abuse prevention. What must be a hundred years ago? Okay, not that long, but it was quite a while ago when I was doing that work. And then I think there was a shift in prevention thinking, which was sort of like, This is really not kids’ jobs to protect themselves. We are really going to focus very heavily on what adults need to be doing to protect children. And there’s been evolution in even what the content of that is for adults. Now it feels to me like what we’re really recommending is kind of both end, that adults have a very specific job, of course, primarily to protect their kids and recognize grooming signs and make sure that the folks who are around them are not put in situations in which they have easy access to their children and those kinds of things.

But then there’s this element of it where it feels very 30 years ago to me, and that we’re going back to really needing to talk to kids about secret keeping again and have that as a key strategy in if not preventing it in the first place, although we hope we do, then at least making sure that it’s as short a duration as possible and that kids are able to recognize, even if they couldn’t recognize the abuse, they can recognize that the secret.

There’s something wrong with that, right?

KS:

I think that you’re right. It’s that kind of two pronged approach and it’s of course never the responsibility of a child or an adolescent to prevent abuse, but that doesn’t mean that abuse will not occur. And so I think equipping individuals with the tools that they need to recognize that something is wrong, that something doesn’t feel comfortable, and equipping them with the knowledge of who they can go to because it’s not their job to handle that, it is the adult’s job. So equipping them with knowing who they can bring that to. And I think sometimes in grooming as well, there’s this idea of they want to protect either other people around them or the person that’s abusing them themselves. And so it’s also letting kids know that that’s not their job either. And for someone to ask you to do that is not okay. So it’s not necessarily putting onus, it’s never putting onus on the child to prevent their abuse or to be the one that needs to handle it, but simply equipping them with the tools and the resources that if something, you know, unfortunately and we never want it to happen, but if something were to happen, they know what to do next.

TH:

I think that, especially as kids get older, because when they’re very young, they’re not gonna necessarily recognize the emotional manipulation aspect of concealment, right? When you’re saying to someone, as folks often do, you would get in trouble or your family would get in trouble or I would get in trouble if you’re using the sort of guilt aspect of that. But the but they can, even at a young age, recognize that there are unsafe secrets. I mean, I think even remembering back in my early career, kids really got that concept pretty quickly. They could understand the difference between keeping a birthday present as a secret if you happen to see what mom was getting, versus being told not to tell your parents or a caregiver or another trusted adult something. And so I think this is coming full circle and a reminder that we don’t have to let the pendulum swing too far. We can also recognize that there are some things that even younger children can understand that help them get help, right? If you don’t recognize that there’s a problem, then you’re not going to be able to go find a helper and seek that kind of help from adults. I’m wondering what you see as the next logical extension of your work, you know, both research-wise and practice-wise. You as you’re talking to me, you’re also talking to thousands of child abuse professionals out there. What do you want them to take away from this work you’re doing around grooming?

KS:

I think I’ll start with research wise, just get continuing to look at the nuance of what we know about the intent of grooming behaviors are and what they’re actually doing and the impact of different circumstances around that. I think grooming phases look very similar, but there’s also so many different circumstances to take into account in every case. I think the setting is also important. So, you know, like we’ve talked about for extending this to what it looks like in online cases, what it looks like when there’s online and in person. Another important factor we didn’t really assess for is the role of grooming that’s happening, you know, of the family around the child or within institutions and that that has impacts on you know duration and disclosure and things like that as well. So continuing to just piece out that nuance is really important. In terms of practice, I think it’s just recognizing that secret keeping is playing a really big role here. These concealment strategies do appear to be playing a really significant role in the continuation of abuse after it’s already occurred. And so if we can continue to have conversations about that piece, incorporate it into education and prevention, while also of course highlighting how we can help people recognize grooming factors outside of that.

So they can recognize when grooming is likely and what they can do when they think that grooming might be occurring, because we might not be getting those disclosures, at least in these in-person settings. And recognizing that we’re starting to see in the literature generally that sexual abuse training in recognition of sexual abuse, recognition in just receiving disclosures of sexual abuse is just so incredibly important. So getting that training out for sure.

But also recognizing that grooming brings unique factors to the sexual experience of sexual abuse and its recognition. And we’re seeing that recognizing grooming is improved when they have grooming specific education or training is something we’re starting to see. And so I think investigating more what that looks like, how to make sure that grooming specifically is being recognized and helping people just access that information will be important. And asking about concealment strategies in general, specifically when you’re suspecting abuse or assessing for potential of abuse.

TH:

Going to say, and I’m so glad you went there, that I think the other thing is that when kids are being interviewed about suspected abuse, it sounds to me as though inquiring around concealment strategies is going to be also important to help us understand more about that. But also, I think that we’re seeing some success in the courts with really looking at the pattern of grooming behaviors as demonstrating the fact that.

This is not some random event or likely made up event that you can overlay the pattern of behaviors you’re seeing in case with the literature around grooming and see clearly that there’s a connection between those two things.

KS:

Absolutely. And what I’ve seen really commonly when I’m reading transcripts of testimony in these cases where we recognize that grooming has occurred is questions around why didn’t you disclose sooner? Why didn’t you take this opportunity or that opportunity? You had people you trust. Why didn’t you disclose sooner? Why didn’t you tell somebody sooner? And it’s difficult to see those questions when you know kind of why they didn’t disclose sooner. And I think it’s really reflecting a lack of understanding about the impact that grooming strategies can have and those concealment strategies, maybe in particular, are having on disclosures and child a child’s ability to feel safe in disclosing. And so this delayed disclosure that’s being brought up in court might actually be more of a reflection of the impact that grooming strategies had that the child experienced rather than the way I sometimes see it framed, which is, you know, reducing the credibility of the child’s narrative because they didn’t say something soon.

TH:

You’re raising a really important point. And because you’re right, currently in the US, for example, there would be expert testimony brought into trial to talk about delay disclosure. But in the absence of the kind of research that you’ve done, obviously defense attorneys are going to attack that. And even if they don’t attack it with the child and their testimony, they’re going to attack it with the forensic interviewer or someone else.

Who’s talking about those delayed disclosure dynamics? Because not enough research has really been done on the why question. Why is it delayed, right? So we know that it’s common, but then you get to, but why? And maybe there’s been a little less work done. So I think this is a real contribution to the literature to say, to make the connection between that delayed disclosure and these concealment strategies, which are really just designed to create this, right?

They’re designed to prolong the abuse. They’re designed to make sure that nobody finds out. They’re designed to reduce the credibility of the child. And in fact, offenders regularly tell children, right? Nobody’s gonna believe you. Right? So all of this, they’re very deliberate strategies. And if we can sort of reframe them as deliberate strategies of offenders as opposed to some lapse on the part of the child, I think that’s just hugely important to the success of cases, but more importantly to the peace of mind of children who then don’t have to carry around that somehow there was something they should have done sooner, better, differently, to have protected themselves.

KS:

Absolutely. And like you said, it’s kind of affirming the things we already know. We understand that the point of concealment strategies is to reduce disclosure, but when we put a little bit of empirical support or some data behind it, it gives in certain settings a little bit more to work with and to speak to. And so I think continuing to look into that nuance from the research perspective can be very helpful and have a lot of important practical implications as well.

TH:

Whatever we can do to bolster children who come into that court system in a very vulnerable place, right? And already sort of with a propensity to be disbelieved by others who are looking. I mean, it’s the job of our court system here in the US, it’s the job of defense attorneys to poke holes and try to, you know, impugn their credibility. And so anything from the research literature that can help bolster that I just think is immensely important. I so appreciate you looking at this. I’m wondering what else I should have asked you but didn’t or anything else you really wanted to ensure that we talked about today that I may have missed either from this research or other research you’ve done.

KS:

Yeah, I think we’ve covered a lot of the really important parts. I think the only thing that I really wanted to emphasize is the idea that these things that are reducing disclosures are also providing more opportunities for abuse to be repeated. I think that’s really the highlight of what this study is telling us. And I think that provides really important considerations going forward for, you know, maybe not prevention of abuse, but prevention of future abuse.

So we can try and make sure that children are not experiencing more abuse than they, you know, already have by equipping them with the resources that they need and supporting professionals that are in place to help them. So I think just understanding the relationship between how grooming behaviors, how these concealment strategies are impacting experiences of abuse is just the main takeaway of that paper.

TH:

Kayla, thank you so much. I just appreciate all the work that you’re doing and your continued research, and I hope that as you publish again you’ll come back to one in ten.

KS:

Thank you so much. It was wonderful to talk to you today.

TH:

Thanks for joining One in Ten and being fans of our award-winning show, we couldn’t do it without you. We’re trying to ensure that all the child abuse professionals who need these research-to-practice conversations have access, and we’re asking for your help. Please rate us wherever you listen because it helps the algorithm expand our reach. And if you know someone who could benefit from this episode, please share it with a friend or repost or reshare it in your own social media. To access past episodes on grooming, please visit our podcast website at oneintenpodcast.org. Thanks for taking a listen.