Are single people more vulnerable to grooming?

Wedding rings

About to rework our research, in September 2025 we took a good look at what our research was showing us, and how that should inform our future reasearch and develop our services.

We had asked people about their marital status.

Of 374 people who shared their experiences of being groomed with us as research, 366 gave us details of their marital status.

We hadn’t defined this, leaving it open for people to give use their own definitions.

The result was an insight into the complexities of ‘marital status’ and how important it is to ask the right question. For example, some people were happy to say ‘divorced’, others say ‘divorced now’, which means we should have asked two questions: what was your marital stus when you met your groomer, and what’s your marital status now - and even then, we can’t assume that the difference is because of the grooming.

Some people just didn’t want to answer, feeling it wasn’t relevant.

A high proportion of our respondents were divorced or separated, but a vast number were also cohabitting or in a relationship.

So what can we draw from this?

Groomers show very little respect for someone’s existing realtioships, be they married, co-habiting or simply dating but living apart.

From our call handling, it’s also clear that people who have lost their partners to someone will sometimes feel that their ex-partner was groomed into a relationship. Sometimes this is true. Sometimes it’s just easier to believe this.It’s something we’ve been meaning to blog about for a while, so that’s coming up the ‘to do’ pile, but our conclusion is that someone’s marital status makes very little difference to whether or not they will be groomed. We are all potential targets, fair game to deceptive groomers.