How groomers operate and why victims become trapped: Report

Birmingham: Entertainer and children’s author David Walliams is alleged to have used his fame to approach teenage girls, in some cases reportedly initiating sexual contact with them. Walliams has denied the allegations, but the claims raise some familiar tropes about grooming: why did she go, why didn’t she say no, why didn’t she tell anyone?

After a legal battle, ITV News and The Guardian have now published the findings of a three-year investigation into Walliams, reporting allegations that date back to 2003.

In this and other cases, there will always be people who focus not on the claims, but on the young person and what they should have done differently. Linguistic research on how grooming actually works suggests that this instinct is exactly the result that grooming is designed to produce.

Many people imagine sexual grooming as a recognisable and clearly staged process. Build friendship, then trust, then secrecy – all leading towards the offender’s ultimate goal of sexual gratification. But if this were the case, victims could notice the steps and walk away.

Along with a colleague, I undertook linguistic analysis of real chatroom conversations between convicted offenders and adult volunteers posing as 12- to 14-year-old girls. The conversations were made public by the now-defunct organisation Perverted Justice, whose activity led to the apprehension and conviction of the offenders. In our analysis, we did not find the pattern mentioned above.

We identified 14 recurring “moves” – parts of the offenders’ language that have particular functions. These include building rapport (for instance, by sharing personal stories), assessing risk by checking parents’ schedules or the presence of a boyfriend, escalating sexual topics and planning offline meetings. But these moves overlapped and repeated, with no typical structure emerging.

Rather, offenders seemed to tailor their grooming styles, perhaps according to their individual goals and who they believed they were talking to.

Trust and rapport

What was consistent was the large amount of rapport-building, which often ran through the whole interaction. Grooming research invariably shows that rapport-building and trust development are the central devices used to persuade and manipulate.

This may be through compliments, sharing personal information and declarations of trust. Grooming strategies are designed to develop intimacy and trust, isolate the victim and dismantle the “red flags” that might alert them to the manipulative nature of the conversation. Trust development makes it much harder for victims to notice devious intentions – there is no obvious point at which the young person has failed to spot something plainly visible.

Offenders in our data spent much of their conversations sizing up their targets. They would try to work out whether a target was likely to engage, suited their preferences, was accessible and unlikely to expose them. We called this a “risk-reward ratio assessment” – in other words, a judgement about whether this person was worth their effort.

Fake personalities to ‘hook’ target

In another study, we examined the case of an offender who took a scattergun approach, in this case targeting nearly 1,000 potential young victims. This individual would strategically cycle through an array of fake online personas to identify the one most likely to “hook” his target. The vast majority ignored or rejected his first advance, at which point they were dropped. But this is the point of the scattergun approach; a small percentage, usually the most vulnerable, will respond.

Our work also revealed how offenders manage the risk of being caught. For many we studied, a key strategy was to use language that shifted responsibility onto the target.

Questions were often formulated to elicit sexually explicit content by positioning the target as the one in control. The groomer might say, for example, “how far do you want to go”, “tell me what you wanna do”. This phrasing both presumes interest and makes declining more difficult, while laying the groundwork to say later that the young person had led the conversation.

Another feature was what we termed the “mitigating lol”. This could be something like “u should send me a nude vid lol”. This served to reduce the impact of a sexual question by implying playfulness. It also supports future claims that the requests were insincere – possibly a useful tactic in a trial. We can only infer the purpose, but it points to the same strategy of building in deniability.

I cannot speak directly to the Walliams allegations, but when it comes to celebrities in general, the task of building trust and rapport may well be easier. The victims already feel they know them, and are made to feel special by being approached. It’s also easy to see how the perks of celebrity could do much of the persuasive work.

No such thing as a ‘perfect victim’

A widely used definition of grooming across linguistics and psychology describes preparing the child, their significant adults and the wider environment for abuse. Compliance and secrecy are explicit goals. They are not evidence of the victim’s character.

So when people ask, “why did they keep replying?” or “why did they go to the house?” they are asking why a technique that was designed to engage did, in fact, keep them engaged. When we ask, “why didn’t they tell anyone?” we are questioning why a strategy engineered to cultivate silence did exactly that.

Grooming involves a complex network of strategies. But we know it is never the young person’s behaviour that’s the problem. The “perfect victim” who resists every advance and raises the alarm at every opportunity is a myth.

A better understanding of the strategies can help caregivers, educators and children to recognise grooming earlier. It should also shape what we say to victims after the fact. Let’s stop asking why they gave their email address, why they went to the house, why they didn’t tell anyone. Let’s question the actions of those responsible instead.

This report was written by Emily Chiang and published on The Conversation

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