Sexuality, Gender and Grooming
The research is in.
At CAAGe, we are in the process of reworking our research questionnaire. We don’t want to lose the data that we have, and as we have between 350 and 400 responses from people who have been groomed, it represents significant information about grooming and groomers.
So what have we learned so far about gender, sexuality and grooming?
The breakdown of people who have identified that they have been groomed breaks down as follows:
Key: Women : blue. Men : red . Others : varied
On the face of it, it looks like women, representing 86.6% of our respondents, are the primary targets of grooming. And women’s socialisation, the expectation of ‘niceness’, almost certainly makes women more susceptible to staying in/developing a relationship when something feels ‘off’. (We have had data to this effect for a while, something we’ll blog about later.)
Men get groomed too
But we are also aware that men’s socialisation is probably doing them just as much of a disservice. For example, men who are ripped off on dating/marriage sites may just see it as women being ‘Gold Diggers’. We have seen men going abroad, expecting to come back with a bride, but instead being groomed by the supposed ‘brides’ and coming home with empty pockets/debt but no bride. (We are aware that not everyone who finds themselves in this position has been groomed.) So we suspect that the percentage of men being targetted by groomers is understated. We believe that men, 8.6% of respondents, is an understated figure.
Hidden Issues?
It’s also interesting to note that people making up the ‘Others’ group account for nearly 5% of our sample. We very deliberately haven’t put identities against the ‘pie slices’ on the chart for privacy reasons. We don’t want individuals being identified or put at risk when they’ve already been through enough. This group is made up of people from transgender and non-binary communities. We have become increasingly aware, through our helpline and campaigning activities that the transgender community are being subjected to very specific patterns of grooming, apparently motivated by very different reasons to cisgender grooming targets.
We should point out that the law has, until fairly recently, itself created some difficulties for transgender people, notably around ‘rape by deception’/sex by deception, which has created further issues and reasons for victims not to step forward and ask for help.
There is no solid reliable data to indicate how many people in the UK are trans or non-binary. The last ONS data (2021), which the ONS has itself stated was based on a faulty methodology, suggests 0.5-1% of the population are trans. We may have suspicions that these groups are over-respresented as targets of grooming, but without any meaningful comparisons we can’t genuinely point to the level to which they are more or less likely to become the targets of groomers.
Sexuality and Being Groomed
Targets who identified themselves as straight/heterosexual made up 67.2% of our respondents. 12.6% identified as bi-sexual.
Whilst 4% of respondents identified as lesbian or gay, our helpline is conscious that caller patterns indicate a higher proportion of gay/lesbian people. We didn’t separate out lesbians and gays, but will do going forward. If our belief is that men in general have difficulty in identifying that they’ve groomed and seeking help, it will help to know if the experiences of straight and gay men differ. The ways in which they are groomed, and the people targetting them, are, we know, very different.
We also have also never recorded the sexuality of the groomer(s). This could prove a minefield for obtaining accurate data, since we are collating information from a victim’s perspective. Groomers are rarely likely to self identify . However, there must be some opportunity to collect data for insight in this respect. One for further consideration!
Taking action
As a result of these findings we will look at gender/sexuality more closely in our research going forward, and consult with experts over the signposting that needs doing for men and transgender people that find themselves falling victim to grooming.
We looked more closely at the individual responses of people in the ‘Other’ group to see if there are any common threads for us to pick up on in the experiences of trans and non-binary people. The individual numbers were too small to draw conclusions. We have our helpline experiences anecdotally to call on, but feel at this stage that we need to reach out to other organsiations who work more closely in and with these communities to help us to understand their challenges better and incorporate this into our work/offerings, research and signposting.
We are also going to look closely at holding data records on callers. We have always taken the view that our callers should be entitled to total privacy. Other than making manual notes of what name the caller wishes to be known by and some personal ‘nudge notes’ to help handle the call empathetically, we keep no data on callers for their privacy. We offer only a listening and signposting service. Perhaps the time has come for us to start keeping that data? The big questions for us lie around trust, security and reliability. We are well aware that there usually a power imbalance in grooming relationships, and that in the instances we come across of people who have been groomed to be trafficked or who are in cults the dangers of recording anything about callers could have wider implications.
There are also some internal debates to be had as well about who we serve at CAAGe, and how we serve them; how best we can serve very different groups of people; and where awareness needs raising. We are a tiny group pf volunteers taking on a massive subject/problem. The biggest question for us is going to be whether we can genuinely serve everyone.
We welcome opinions, ideas and recommendations. One thing we do pride ourselves on is listening.
