Dr Jess Taylor wrote a blog piece recently about grooming. I disagree with her on some very fundamental points. I hope I haven’t misrepresented anything she has said, and I have worked very hard to write in the spirit of collegiality. I have also done quite a lot of “steel manning” and have acknowledged where I believe she is correct in her views. However, I can’t agree in her characterisation of everybody as grooming everybody all time time, or in her characterisation of parenting, social work, counselling, love as all being like grooming because they involve elements of persuasion. I’ve set out why below, in case it isn’t as immediately obvious to you as it was to me. I hope it’s helpful.
Why is Grooming So Hard To Spot: Not Quite The Truth
Dr Jess Taylor’s article, “Why Grooming is so Hard to Spot: The Truth” points out similarities between: grooming behaviour; the behaviour of professional “helping” services such as social work; and behaviours related to building personal relationships. However, Dr Taylor fails to recognise important differences regarding malignancy of intent, deception and the ways in which individuals view each other in these different types of relationship – as subjects with intrinsic worth, or as objects which may be of value.
As a result, she misses the most important ways in which the after effects of grooming stay with victims; it damages our faith in our own ability to make judgements; it damages our ability to trust normal relationship building processes; it makes us feel that we are not human subjects, but objects; it calls into question our intrinsic worth; it makes us question who we are, what we are for. Grooming is, as such, a horrible caricature of love; the effects of love and grooming are the exact polar opposites of each other.
Dr Taylor says that when she teaches the material in her article to social workers, she gets glared at. This article is a deep dive into what I believe are the reasons for those glares.
Universality of Grooming?
Dr Taylor argues that “grooming” is a “common, normal human behaviour that we all engage in.” It happens “constantly, to all of us and by all of us.” She gives a list of things that you can be “groomed” into, including political ideology, bullying culture, drug taking or drinking, thinking you are mentally ill, and being racist. You can also be “groomed,” says Dr Taylor, into sitting quietly in rows at school, working 9-5, or saying please and thank you. You can be “groomed” into conformity to social norms, such as not making rude remarks about your boss at a party. You can be groomed by marketing into buying things you don’t need. This, she argues, makes grooming hard to spot, as it is so common and pervasive in human relationships.
In Dr Taylor’s view, grooming seems to be anything which involves having persuasive influence over another human being, in any sphere. In personal relationships, partners may buy gifts, flatter, pay each other attention, ask questions about each other, tell each other “you’re special,” or “I don’t want anybody else,” listen to each other, sacrifice for each other and tell each other, “I’ll never cheat.” For Dr Taylor, this too is grooming; in her view, you are trying to persuade the other person that you are the best option for them; you are trying to influence them to invest exclusively in your relationship. You are, in Dr Taylor’s parlance, “grooming” each other.
I fully disagree with Dr Taylor’s view of relationships here. However, before critiquing it, I’m going to steel man her argument, which is strongest where she talks about the helping professions. Social workers, psychologists, care staff, teachers, counsellors do, in fact, do something that is akin to grooming on one axis. A paedophile, practicing grooming, has an aim in mind. His aim is to get access to children, so he can sexually abuse them. He will use a variety of techniques to this end. Those techniques are a horrible, malignant, dishonest caricature of the things that people do in ordinary relationships, ones that are founded on love and trust. In possibly the most extreme example of its kind, Saville managed to build enough trust through his TV and charity work to literally get the keys to Broadmoor. His aim was not the TV and charity work, it was to get access, and cover, so he could abuse his victims with impunity.
A therapist, it could be argued, has the intention of “helping” their client, and will use a variety of techniques to this end. A therapist is trained in building rapport, building trust. They bring their personality to bear on influencing the client to get them to act in their own interest. They have a variety of tricks, tools and techniques, some of which may be almost entirely formulaic, to help the client, influence them. You could argue that many of these techniques look something like the things that people do when they are building relationships with each other, in the real world. If you were particularly jaded and cynical, you could argue that therapy is, essentially, similar to prostitution, in that both offer a simulacrum of love, in exchange for money. This may be what Dr Taylor is pointing to when she says that it is actually a positive step when families say to social workers, “back up, leave us alone.” Recognising authentic, genuine human connection is deep in the blood of our species, and it is deeply healthy to turn away from inauthenticity, from hidden intentions, from people who “use tools” instead of engaging in meaningful interchanges based on the feelings you both have about each other and the world.
Saville’s intention was malign, the therapist’s is benign, but I can see why Dr Taylor thinks there are similarities between the two. Before offering a critique, I’ll go further to steel man this point, and say that what Dr Taylor wrote is quite insightful into my own experience. I sought help from a therapist, as an adult, to sort through the absolute train wreck that my life had become in the wake of childhood abuse and neglect. For the longest time, although I was making some changes and seeing some improvements in my life, and as kind as she was, I couldn’t trust that woman. Why? Two reasons. First, she was doing it for money, and I felt like she wouldn’t be there unless I was paying her. Second, I felt like she was “using techniques” on me and not relationship building. Added together, I felt that she didn’t really care, and I couldn’t get past it, I couldn’t let her in.
One session changed that. I had lost my job. I put a lot of myself into that job, and it ended horribly. It crushed a big part of who I thought I was as a human to lose it, as well as casting me and my family into financial insecurity. I told my therapist, I can’t afford to continue in therapy. I was really upset, not just about the job, but about the unstable person I was, about what had happened to me, about having to stop therapy, about my wavering sense of self. I looked at her, and I could see, to my surprise, that although she wasn’t crying or anything, she was genuinely upset that I was upset. She felt emotional about my predicament. And then she said, “pay me ten pounds a session, pay me nothing, but I’m sticking with you, I’m not leaving you to deal with this on your own.” I’m crying again writing it, because everybody had always left me to deal with things on my own all my life, up until then, and she didn’t. She cared about me as a human being and she was determined to be there for me. That was when I could open up and let her in. That’s when I could start to really heal.
Dr Taylor rightly identifies that there’s something about those in the helping professions which skeeves people out and makes them draw back. She’s right to say that the thing is the same thing that skeeves people out about being groomed by abusers. Both social workers and sexual abusers are not engaging their whole, honest self, in order to develop a meaningful relationship with another person. Both have a different goal in mind, and both use “tools” and “techniques” in the service of that goal. In both cases, the goal is more important than the relationship, and people with healthy boundaries can work this out quickly. In the case of sexual abusers, the goal is selfish; in the case of social workers, unselfish (we hope). But still, both utilise “rapport building techniques” to (perhaps unstated) ends rather than the goal of improving and deepening a human connection. Both will end the relationship when it is no longer pointed towards the goals that the abuser, or the social worker, sets. The point of the relationship is not the relationship, but the goal that it’s oriented towards.
Why does this feel wrong to victims/clients? Why do clients draw back from social workers who are trying to help? They sense inauthenticity, they sense they are being manipulated, they sense dishonesty. They sense that this person is disguising their real intention and who they really are, what they really want. No matter whether somebody does that for nefarious, or helpful purposes, it feels skeevy to those of us who engage in human relationships for their own sake, on honest terms. We can spot it. It’s like a piano tune we know and love, being played by somebody who is fairly skilled, only it is being played without feeling, on an out of tune instrument. If we are healthy, it jars us.
The inauthenticity always makes me of those books on seduction techniques; “how to get girls by hypnosis.” I don’t like it. Healthy, boundaried people can sense it, and back away from people who behave like this, instinctively, no matter how apparently well intentioned they are. Dr Taylor is right in identifying it as a “healthy” move by families, when they draw back from social work involvement. But she is wrong to equate the behaviour of social workers (with benign, legal intentions) to the behaviour of paedophiles (with malign, illegal intentions), and she is definitely wrong to call them both “grooming.”
Personal Relationships
Where Dr Taylor goes really wrong is when she says that healthy personal relationships, outside of the professional sphere, involve “grooming.” It seems that she thinks this is grooming because it involves influencing others. This feels horrible to me. It makes human relationships seem flat, transactional, calculated. It misses out the complicated reality of feelings, the wonderful, imperfect, unknowable, intuitively felt out, interpersonal feedback loops, the messy interactions that make human relationships worthwhile. It isn’t about influencing each other. It’s about noticing and engaging with each other, as whole human beings, as going human concerns, as people invested in making meaning, making a relationship together.
When my wife Lauren and I first met, I had to go back to Japan for three months shortly after. If you know about geography, you’ll know that the sun sets in Japan every night, and rises in Northern Ireland the next morning. Every evening, I climbed the hill behind my house at sunset, and placed kisses on the setting sun. Every night, Lauren slept with her curtains open. Every morning, the sun came in and woke her with my kisses. When I found my way back to her, she put her strong arms around me, and I felt myself safe, in the only home I had ever known. We both loved each other, we wanted to be in a relationship with each other, to be together, for the sake of being together. For human connection. For love. That is, to quote Jesse Pinkman (a character in a show that essentially grooms its viewers), “the exact polar opposite” of grooming.
Love relationships do not involve grooming techniques. Grooming techniques take elements of human relationships, and use them to manipulate victims to the ends of the perpetrator. Grooming mimics love relationships, and walks a similar path, for nefarious ends. Grooming, for example, may involve showering a victim with gifts if they have nothing, in order to create feelings of love, admiration, indebtedness, so that the perpetrator can more easily manipulate the victim. This is why child sex abusers seek out children who are poor, socially excluded, lacking in love, lacking in parental support or boundaries. They are easier to manipulate. I’ll say it again. Grooming mimics normal, healthy human relationships, and uses “techniques” which look like those relationships. The end goal, however, is the manipulation of the victim. The feelings of the victim are only important to the perpetrator in so far as he can use those feelings to manipulate them. The victim is not, I’m sorry to say, a human subject at all in the eyes of the perpetrator. They only have value, not worth.
To suggest that this type of relationship is of the same order as, let’s say, falling in love, is patently ridiculous. It minimises the harms of grooming. I was groomed. It left me utterly unable to trust the normal processes of relationship building. It left me feeling like “people who want to do that sort of thing only want to manipulate and abuse me.” It left me desensitised to the normal process of relationship building; after the love bombing that goes with sexual abuse, normal, gentle, careful trust building felt like a pale shadow. It left me feeling like a fucking idiot for believing that one of the only bright spots, the only places where I felt loved in my childhood was actually real, when it came from a man like that. It isolated me from others. It left me alone, hurt, confused. Normal relationships do not leave you feeling like that. Normal relationships build your capacity to trust, to relate, to be intimate. My relationship with my wife has been a large part of my realising my own intrinsic worth, as a human being, and in believing in myself as a going human concern. Grooming destroys these exact same things. Grooming is a horrible caricature of love, not the same thing at all.
Ultimately, this is why Dr Taylor’s point about social workers fails too, although it is on the face of it, more persuasive than the one about personal relationships. Unless somebody has already been sexually abused, groomed, or unless they are very naive, they are not going to think that a social worker is there to help them because they love them. You may feel “betrayed” by a social worker if you think that they are there to help, but in fact they end up taking your children. However, if their rapport building techniques make you think for a second that they would be there if they weren’t getting paid, then you are sadly mistaken. Likewise, with a therapist and a client. There is a professional agreement about why you are there, talking to each other, and what the potential outcomes are. It is (or at least it is to be hoped that it is) at bottom, an honest relationship. Grooming is, at bottom, a dishonest and manipulative one.
What Dr Taylor wants to argue is that social workers are like child abusers because both, to some degree, “work” the people they engage with. I think that she gets glared at by professionals when she “teaches” this because she makes no distinction in her piece between the bad intentions of paedophiles who “groom” and work adults and children for nefarious reasons (to get access to children and cover if they are caught), and the good intentions of social workers, who use a variety of techniques in the course of their professional lives to gain trust and help families. I think social workers would be well within their rights to glare at somebody who elided grooming and social work, and did not make the distinction between malign and benign intentions very, very clear. Grooming is grooming. Love is love. Social work is social work. There are similarities, commonalities, but eliding them and calling them all “grooming” is as offensive as calling them all “love.”
It’s offensive to victims, it’s offensive to everybody in the helping professions, and it’s offensive to anybody who has ever been involved in a love relationship. Grooming is a specific, technical term, to describe one particular type of malignant behaviour, related to the way in which paedophiles perform a horrible caricature of a love relationship, in order to get access to and abuse children. It comes from a place of malign intent, illegality, and always contains within it the willingness to treat victims not as having intrinsic worth as human beings, but as being means to the ends the paedophile desires for them.
Love comes from a place of deep honest, it starts with valuing the intrinsic worth of the other, of wanting to know them better, of wanting to spend time with them, to build something with them, to engage in those wonderful feedback loops of feeling, depth, intimacy. When you get brave enough to turn your face to hers, and she’s already looking at you, and you blush, and she sees you blush, and she leans in to kiss you, and you kiss her back. And so on. And there is transformative power in that, too. It really can set things right, transform a life, transform the geography of a heart.
As it has transformed mine.
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https://victimfocusblog.com/2020/06/30/dr-jessica-taylor-explains-the-real-reasons-why-you-cant-spot-grooming-behaviour/
This covers some of my own objections to Jess' essay, but I have some others!
I agree with her that all relationships of all types include some aspects of persuasion, even manipulation, of a sort. There's a certain amount of value in drawing an analogy to grooming for Jess' stated goal of revealing that there's nothing shameful about being groomed and that it is not altogether surprising that victims fall for it when the people who are supposed to be looking after them fall for it too.
But I think the analogy fails when it's stretched any further than that. This is largely for the reasons you point out, the key point being that grooming is about manipulating the tendency we all have to be persuaded; mimicking the signals we expect to see in ordinary relationships and systematically amplifying responses to them. It's not just that the goal of the groomer is malign, it's that - as you say - it's mimicry. It's similar to how cuckoo chicks manipulate their hosts; through using signals that hyperstimulate a response. In the case of the groomer, a victim is led into behaviour that is deeply harmful. A victim might seem to collaborate with their groomer in their own harm by agreeing to keep secrets, cutting ties with people who might be able to intervene and so on. This is because the groomer puts out signals that cause a hyperstimulated response in the victim, causing them to ignore danger signs and other red flags.
This is a gross simplification, but I'm just trying to get across the point that while grooming is a type of persuasion, it differs from the other types of persuasion Jess discusses *in character* as well as in intention. The character of grooming is about finding the right kind of stimulus. The character of persuasion in a normal personal relationship (or the other types Jess describes) are about communicating the sort of outcome desired and allowing the other person to decide how to react. They are about *giving* people choices, rather than taking choices away.
The other main disagreement I have with Jess is in her assessment of the ability of responsible adults to spot grooming behaviour. While I agree that it's difficult and we're all absolutely capable of being fooled, we're also capable of learning. This is especially true if we understand how grooming (and other types of persuasion) work to begin with. It helps if we understand what passes for motive in a predator or what is considered a reward. It's useful if we realise that a predator might apparently extend vast amounts of time and effort for what seems like negligible reward, as you've discussed before.
There should certainly be no shame in having been the victim of grooming and no great surprise if you find yourself a responsible adult who has been fooled by a groomer... But that doesn't mean that we can't all learn from the experience and build better toolkits to help us respond in future.
Coupled with that is the fact that our responses to potential grooming situations can be dynamic. We see a red flag, we make some decisions about how to proceed in the future. The amount of importance we place on various alternatives to make a decision are one of the main targets of the groomer. They artificially reduce the weight of the importance we place on certain factors so that we eventually don't recognise downright dodgy behaviour for what it is. We can train ourselves to keep certain weightings intact or to dramatically increase some weightings when we see certain red flags.
I'm not saying we can make ourselves immune to grooming or being an unwilling participant in the grooming process, but I'm sure we can train ourselves to be more aware of grooming behaviours as a fairly distinct class of persuasion in general and we can train ourselves to have more protective responses, even when we haven't actually identified that grooming is taking place.
Sorry that this is rather long and stream-of-consciousnessy. I will try to come back and leave a more considered comment when I have more time.