Methodological and Theoretical Advances in Research on Grooming in Child Sexual Abuse

The science of the dynamics, consequences and treatment of child sexual abuse developed rapidly after passage of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974. However, the necessity for some set of methods to both evaluate and treat the unexpected number of survivors of child abuse led to both innovation and controversy. One contribution that has deepened our understanding of child abuse is the enhanced attention to the grooming process, a term first offered to the field by Jon Conte in 1984. Virtually all experts agree that knowledge and accurate identification of this process as it is occurring would aid prevention. However, the field suffers from definitional muddle, lack of accurate prevalence and descriptive data, and limited attention to ecological validity considerations. This paper is a review of the state of this subfield. Issues raised in the paper include the lumping of unlike behaviors (consensually inappropriate and situationally dependent actions), the problem of hindsight bias, and the lack of reliable norms. This paper attempts to address these issues and to propose some directions for further work.