Focus on Adult Groomers
Learning to recognise them. Their tactics.
Spotlight on people who groom
Different Groomers find their Own Way of Working. They have their own ‘charms’ to lure their victims.
CAAGe takes a closer look.
In this section:
The psychology of adult sexual grooming
Groomers don’t just groom their targets
Breadcrumbing
Love bombing
Catfishing
DARVO
Gaslighting
PINs
The Psychology of Adult Sexual Grooming
A review of: The Psychology of Adult Sexual Grooming: Sinnamon’s Seven-Stage Model of Adult Sexual Grooming, by Grant Sinnamon, Bond University, Gold Coast, QLD, Australia. Victim and Offender Perspectives, 2017, Pages 459-487
Groomers don’t just groom their targets.
They often groom the people around them as well. Their reasons/objectives might include:
Getting close to someone in order to gain access in turn to a friend or family member (particularly alarming when it’s children they are trying to access).
Spreading gossip.
Influencing other people’s opinion of their target (often presenting them as unstable, mentally ill, hysterical, abusive, violent, exaggerating).
Presenting themselves as above reproach so that when the ‘discard’ comes they are not see as ‘at fault’.
Breadcrumbing
The term breadcrumbing comes from the fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel. The children leave a trail of breadcrumbs that they can follow back to get home. Of course they’ll follow and of course, they get nowhere. It’s a great term for the tactic of putting down a juicy trail to lure in victims, but a trail that leaves you with no way out.
Love Bombing
Love bombing has become so synonymous with grooming that there’s an increasing trend to call adult sexual grooming ‘love bombing’.
In truth, it’s just a technique used to make the victim ‘fall’ for the groomer’s ‘charms’.
(Was delighted to find this image : what is presented as love is actually firey and unpalatable!)
Catfishing
Catfishing is the technique of pretending to be someone you’re not in order to lure them in, often used on dating sites.
DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender)
A technique where the groomer’s target is presented as the offender, often presented as having taken action against the groomer themselves (see PINs, below!) Campaigners successfully challenged its use
Gaslighting
Gaslighting is the awful (for the victim) technique of getting someone to doubt their own reality.
It’s ‘DARVO’ on speed: instead of getting someone else to disbelieve the victim, they’re getting the victim to disbelieve themselves.
One tactic, successfully removed: the use of PINs was a common groomer tactic - the groomer would use PINs to preset themselves as victims, and their victims as abusers, a common form of DARVO.
“Pig Butchering”
It’s an awful name for an equally awful type of grooming to commit relationship fraud.
The victim becomes the ‘pig’ being fattened for the metaphoric kill - a ruinous financial rip off.