The Grooming Process of Sexual Abusers

And so it's first identifying for people there's no visual profile. Your criminal background check is a piece of your system, but not a reason to completely rest and turn your brain off. That you need to also understand that the behavior is the key. And that sexual abusers are gonna look like you and me, and it's real hard I mean just – it's difficult to have people let go of that concept that they can visually recognize risk. Once we can shake up some of those misconceptions a little bit and then move them to a place that they understand the grooming process, that's the behaviors that a predator will go through to be able to prepare a child and the adults for inappropriate behavior of the child.

And so if it's somebody that has a deviant sexual attraction for little girls ages four to seven, you'll find somebody volunteering in the third grade Sunday school class, working with the Brownies, working where there are children within that age and sexual preference. Once that person has gained access, they're gonna work to select one or more children, and generally there's enough information that we have to understand some of the pattern in doing that. What they're looking for, because the ultimate goal is to carve a child away for inappropriate behavior one on one that this person wants to keep secret, it's looking for that child who's somehow on the fringe or in need. That child who's looking for someone to trust. That child that's from the single-parent home. The child that's maybe struggling with alcohol, pornography.

Some way in which this person that's got the deviant sexual desire will come alongside that child, win that child's trust, and start to build in some secrecy, rule breaking, things like that; and try to then, in step number three, start introducing nudity and sexual touch. For a very small child, it might be a lot of touch games, a lot of "our secrete relationship", lot of tickle games. Once a child's into middle school, high school, it will oftentimes involve a lot of sexual joking, a lot of sexual discussion, a lot of accidental in horseplay kind of touch to try to test those barriers with a child. And with the ultimate goal to push those barriers all the way back into inappropriate sexual behavior, but to find out is that child going to resist, is that child gonna pushback.

If we make some joking comments about nudity or de-pants a kid in public or dare somebody to go streaking into the girls' dorm or whatever to see which child, if it can be fun or gamey, can involve nudity or inappropriate touch. And once that person has pushed those barriers back to where there's now levels of inappropriateness, it's also important to the abuser to keep that child quiet. Now, for a boy, oftentimes – for a male molester and the victim being a boy, it's not hard. Just because of the way same-sex behavior is being tossed around in our culture, a boy will – oftentimes that's enough. That boy will never share that information, so an abuser doesn't have to work very hard to keep a boy quiet.

But it's also the threats, whether they're direct or subtle. It's the, "No one's gonna believe you. They're gonna call you a liar." Unfortunately, oftentimes we don't believe the child. Okay. In that sense it's the gain access, select child, start pushing back barriers and introducing nudity and sexual touch, and keeping the child quiet.

So the awareness training can give you information. These are meant to take that information and equip leadership with what they need to now know to put a system in place. And then on my site there's also the sample forms, so you're not just out there with theory. You can take a sample form, get the eyes to see and ears to hear, then watch these video tutorials and shape your system to be able to be a glove that fits your hand.

I can also tell you about some circumstance, like the one you alluded to in Colorado, here's some examples of how this goes bad. Just so you don't think it's my just giving you theory. These are real people that love Jesus, real people that were trying to make a difference, that this was a false allegation and the ramifications that flow from it. Here are some of the people that were accused, but no one would ever guessed.

And then I'm gonna walk 'em through here's the law on reporting. We do not mess this up. But here's what I also want from you. I don't want you to just have the permission to communicate if something triggers something that's maybe reportable to law enforcement. I want us all to be talking. I mean if something – women, you have liver quivers, something that just bothers you, it's like, "That's just not right," we need to create that culture that everybody can share what they see when they see it so that leadership has the opportunity to put a picture together.

Because when the train wrecks, oftentimes the picture becomes very clear with all of the information people knew but weren’t discussing. And then I'm probably going to finish that with just the encouragement that someday each one of these people that I'm working with are gonna be parents too. Someone's gonna call them mom or dad, and that this is just the broken environment that we work in. And that we need to take this seriously, not just because of the children we're ministering to, but it's gonna better equip us to be moms and dad in the communities and environments that we live in.

So if you hear from this person confessing, "I molested a child, and I need forgiveness, and I need," and then all of a sudden someone brings to you a report where a child has made the allegation against that person, that blows the privilege if you receive it from any other outside source. Now, the point of all of that is in the laws it's gonna identify who are your mandatory reporters. So there will be those very narrow privileges in some states, and those are getting more narrow. And it mandates that information be communicated to a designated entity; and oftentimes it will be a department of human services, a child protective service, the sheriff if it's a rural area that doesn't have one of those types of health and human services types of offices there. So the law will generally tell who they want communicating, what type of information they want communicated, where they want it communicated, in what time period, what type of protections are in place when somebody does make a good faith report like confidentiality and the ability to make anonymous reports, and what penalties are associated with a mandatory reporter failing to report. And those are changing from state to state, and they are not getting more loose. They are actually getting tighter.

So that when these situations come in, these people will call me and say, "Look, I don’t know whether it's abuse or not. I don’t know what I should do with it. I don't know if it's true or not," pick up the phone and just call whoever your law instructs you to call. It's like, "Look, I have a situation. I don’t know if it's reportable or not, but out of an abundance of caution, I wanted to share this with you," blank.

There are multiple layers that just are not foreseeable in terms of how bad this goes. Okay? Now, we need to keep in mind the Center for Disease Control tells us that of the children making reports of sexual abuse, between 92 to 98 percent of 'em are factual, even if the child recants. Okay? So there's a real high probability that what you're getting statistically is true, but when you get this information, even if it has all those indication of being – let's say, for example – and I hate to use me, but I'm in student ministry, and I know there's a spiritual target on my back if I'm effective in what I do. And the easiest way to derail me in student ministry is false allegation of sexual abuse.

But if someone were to have made an allegation against me, what I would immediately instruct my church is, "You need to pull me back out of leadership. You need to report this to the authorities. You need to potentially, depending on what the allegations are, communicate that to the area over which I have responsibility, into the youth ministry and tell 'em that, 'There's been an allegation. We've asked Greg to step away. We're gonna look into this, and we want to make sure all of you know about that. If there's any other information that you are aware of, then please come share that with us,' and let that system move forward."

And if ultimately somebody concludes that this is the eighth time this person's made a false outcry, this is whatever information could come forward. Because, you see, it's real hard to prove that a false allegation was the case. And so it's a real sense with that, I might be done in student ministry. Okay? So that's how I would advise somebody, and I would pull them out of leadership, and I would not keep it secret. See, those things that – when people finally learn something and it gives you any indication that there's like cover-up or hiding, then it just starts to go bad.

But it is a service to yourself as an organization to make sure that the one incident that's been reported is or is not an isolated incident. That's important to know, and that's something you're gonna have to work to determine. And obviously as more things surface, you're gonna also be constantly cross-referring back to the law enforcement to deal with anything that comes out of that process. But it's good for you to know what's going on within your own walls.

Don't get anywhere near what that grooming process looks like. So what does that look like for me? If somebody sends me an off-color YouTube video link, I'm not gonna share that with my students. I do the best I can to delete that. If somebody's engaging in a bunch of horseplay, like at one church not far from here, they had two parents walk in and they were adult leaders at a youth camp. And the youth pastor had a bunch of children around in a circle and they were taking turns thumping each other's genitals. Okay, it's like I don’t know whether that person's a sexual abuser or not, but I would definitely put that in the category of you're an idiot. Okay? [Laughter] If I have to ask the question, "Are you doing that to groom these children and desensitize and try to introduce nudity and sexual touch, or are you just not bright?"

And so in that sense it's important knowing the grooming process, knowing some of the statistics about what population you're dealing with to clearly identify what is and is not appropriate touch. Like what do guys like to do? Love to wrestle. Okay. But you see, with this melee of wrestling and big piles of people, it's hard to distinguish that person with an inappropriate motive between those people that are just not very bright and a bunch of grabbing and inappropriate touching and de-pantsing and just dumb stuff. But to clearly identify what is and is not appropriate touch, communicate it to my people so that if I do see it, now everybody understands exactly who to report that to and everybody knows the consequences.

Like at one of the camps we had, we trained clearly, told 'em who to share the information with, what we're gonna do with the information. Notwithstanding that instruction that I don't ever want to see your butt, this particular counselor mooned a group of people. One of the counselors knew exactly what to do with that information, shared it with leadership. An hour later this person's in the administrators office crying and swearing, "I'm not a sexual abuser." An hour later he was driving home.

Point, was he a sexual abuser? I don’t know, but I clearly communicated to you what was the appropriate and inappropriate types of behavior in this particular program. I saw the behavior which I've identified clearly, and I've asked you to leave 'cause idiots and sexual abusers both go home. So in that sense, I would want to know enough about what the grooming looks like, clearly identify what is going to be appropriate and inappropriate within my culture, and then tell people it's not a witch hunt. We all lock arms and we help each other do this well.

So if we see somebody a kid's crying because of a divorce situation or whatever in a room and they wind up by themselves because people are starting to leave the building, come alongside that person, "Hey, let's go out in the parking lot. Hey, can you finish this conversation at Starbucks?" One way or another we help each other not find ourselves in harm's way.

It was interesting. It was stressed to us that we didn’t do this, but at least I don't remember being given a particular explanation for why the rule existed, which always struck me as – I'm just sitting there doing my recreation work. It struck me as odd that they go out of their way to do this. But hearing this conversation, I can go, okay. I could see why working with thousands of people in rec centers across the city – or maybe hundreds, they would give this kind of an instruction.

It would have been, perhaps, a little nicer to have known why they were so insistent on this, but I still vividly remember getting, "They certainly are making a point of this. I wonder why." I thought it had to do with well, don't put yourself in a position where you're gonna strike a kid or punish them or spank them or whatever for doing something wrong. As a teenager, you might want to do that with a younger child, but you don't do that. That's the context I thought they might be thinking of, but I really didn't know.

I can say in all honesty that when I heard the chapel and even after hearing the chapel and knowing that we needed to do this, I had no idea. And so this has been extremely helpful, and we appreciate you taking the time to be with us. And we hope this has been helpful to those of you who've listened. I want to thank Greg and Jay for joining us. And this is The Table, where we discuss issues of God and culture, and it does matter very much how you protect your children.