Would you recognize grooming if you saw it? We all think we know what it means, but that doesn’t mean we’re any good at spotting it—even if we’re parents determined to protect our kids from abuse. In fact, if anything, we’re overconfident about our ability to recognize grooming behaviors. Dr. Elizabeth Jeglic returns to One in Ten to discuss recent research on the topic.
Topics in this episode:
Links:
Elizabeth L. Jeglic, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York
“The Real Red Flags of Grooming” (Season 5, Episode 4, March 24, 2023)
“Examining Parental Abilities to Recognize Sexual Grooming Behaviors of Child Sexual Abusers,” Lillian A. Steedman, Elizabeth L. Jeglic, Georgia M. Winters, Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma, 2023. DOI:10.1007/s40653-023-00599-x
For more information about National Children’s Alliance and the work of Children’s Advocacy Centers, visit our website at NationalChildrensAlliance.org. Or visit our podcast website at OneInTenPodcast.org. And join us on Facebook at One in Ten podcast.
Did you like this episode? Please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.
Would you recognize grooming if you saw it? We all think we know what it means, but that doesn’t mean we’re any good at spotting it—even if we’re parents determined to protect our kids from abuse. In fact, if anything, we’re overconfident about our ability to recognize grooming behaviors. Dr. Elizabeth Jeglic returns to One in Ten to discuss recent research on the topic.
Topics in this episode:
Links:
Elizabeth L. Jeglic, Ph.D., Department of Psychology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York
“The Real Red Flags of Grooming” (Season 5, Episode 4, March 24, 2023)
“Examining Parental Abilities to Recognize Sexual Grooming Behaviors of Child Sexual Abusers,” Lillian A. Steedman, Elizabeth L. Jeglic, Georgia M. Winters, Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma, 2023. DOI:10.1007/s40653-023-00599-x
For more information about National Children’s Alliance and the work of Children’s Advocacy Centers, visit our website at NationalChildrensAlliance.org. Or visit our podcast website at OneInTenPodcast.org. And join us on Facebook at One in Ten podcast.
Did you like this episode? Please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.
Season 6, Episode 7
“How Good Are Parents at Recognizing Grooming?”, with Elizabeth Jeglic, Ph.D.
[intro music begins]
[Intro]
[00:09] Teresa Huizar:
Hi, I’m Teresa Huizar, your host of One in Ten. In today’s episode, “How Good Are Parents at Recognizing Grooming?” I speak with Dr. Elizabeth Jeglic, one of the foremost researchers on grooming behaviors and one I’ve interviewed previously, in “The Real Red Flags of Grooming.” If you haven’t checked out that previous podcast episode, make sure you do that.
Now, we know that the ability to recognize grooming behaviors—those things that perpetrators do to gain trust in kids, families, and communities, basically in order to exploit that trust—is an important skill for all adults. But it’s essential in parents in order to keep kids safe. If you want to better understand these behaviors make sure to listen to that previous episode—maybe even before you listen to this one—where she unpacks that topic in great detail. But in today’s discussion, we address an equally important topic.
First, do parents have better ability than adults in general to identify grooming behaviors? The answer may surprise you. And how confident do parents feel about their ability to recognize grooming, and how does that align with what we find in fact when that’s tested? As you will hear, the findings should take all of us back to the drawing board to see how we need to adjust prevention programs to strengthen the abilities of all adults—and especially parents—to identify grooming behaviors.
I know you will find this conversation as fascinating as I did. Please take a listen.
[01:49] Teresa Huizar:
Hi Elizabeth, welcome back to One in Ten.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Thank you so much for having me.
Teresa Huizar:
Now, since you’ve been here before, I’m going to just kind of dive right in and just tell listeners that if you are unaware that Elizabeth has been here before, then you need to go listen to “The Real Red Flags of Grooming” episode, like right now, and then come back and listen to this.
So, one of the things that I just found fascinating was this—one of the latest studies that you’ve done. I know you’ve published a lot recently, but we’re going to talk about one specifically that has to do with parents’ and other adults’ abilities to recognize grooming behaviors. And I’m just interested in what made you take this turn with your research on grooming.
Why this?
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Sure. So just before we get started, I wanted to give a shout-out to Lillian Steedman, who this is her master’s thesis, as well as my co-author, Georgia Winters, who does this work with me.
So, I am a mom and, you know, I think about issues related to sexual violence, obviously, as a researcher, but also as a mom and what I can do to protect my kids. In talking with Lily, we were really discussing how we think that parents probably have a better understanding of sexual violence prevention than non-parents, just because, you know, this is something that we talk about as parents, we think about as parents, and that we would have a better understanding of what grooming is. But it’s an empirical question like everything else, and so we wanted to test it out, and that’s kind of how this study was born.
[03:16] Teresa Huizar:
All right. Well, we don’t want to preview the findings yet, but I think that that was an interesting hypothesis, especially in light of your findings, I think.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yes.
Teresa Huizar:
So, when thinking about this, you know—well, I guess, first of all, I am going to have to back up the tiniest little bit just so that we have kind of a common framework for understanding what grooming is.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yes.
Teresa Huizar:
So when we use the word “grooming,” we’re talking about what, precisely, in layman’s terms?
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Sure. I have defined grooming as the, kind of the behaviors that a perpetrator engages in before the actual abuse happens. We’ve conceptualized it as a deceptive process in which they select a victim who is potentially vulnerable, either due to psychological issues or they lack guardianship. They then gain access to them. So if they are, you know, someone who is not in the home, they may have to join a youth-serving organization or befriend the family. Or they are in the home already. They then develop the trust, which is kind of that crux of the grooming process where they kind of fill the void of what the child is lacking.
So, you know, do they need attention? Do they need, you know, material things? Do they need compliments? Do they need to boost their self-esteem? And that person becomes kind of that everything for that child, and they kind of fill that gap for them so they develop trust with the perpetrator.
They then seek to desensitize them to sexual content and touch. And that’s when the boundary violations start to happen. And they, you know, they will initially, you know, maybe give hugs and sit on the lap and then that becomes longer hugs and the touching becomes increasingly sexualized. And as the child kind of allows that to happen—because they initially don’t see it as nefarious—those boundaries become crossed and they’ve been abused. And then afterwards they will tell them, you know, to keep it a secret, not to tell anybody, to prevent them from disclosing.
Sometimes they’ll say, “This is completely normal. We love each other.” Especially in adolescent abuse. We often see, you know, the adult perpetrator kind of convincing the child that they’re in love with them. So we see the young person feeling that this is a romantic relationship for them. Or they might kind of gaslight them and tell them, “This is somehow your fault” or, you know, “You wanted this.”
And so those are kind of some of the behaviors we see afterwards. And that’s what prevents disclosure by causing that guilt and shame that the kids feel.
So that’s kind of a big overview of sexual grooming, but it’s a process. And we have a study coming out in the next few months where we found in a sample of a thousand adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse that 99% of them reported at least one grooming behavior and on average 14.25 out of a potential 42. So these are very common in childhood sexual abuse.
[05:52] Teresa Huizar:
It just, I mean, really demonstrates how ubiquitous to the experience of childhood sexual abuse grooming is—
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Absolutely.
Teresa Huizar:
—and how widespread it is. So in thinking about that, you know, in our prior episode we talked about the framework you developed and that you’ve summarized really nicely looking at all the many behaviors that might be considered grooming.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yes.
Teresa Huizar:
And those kind of exist on a continuum as well. And you have a handy dandy infographic, which I think is also linked in the show notes to that module, that people can take a look at as they have more questions about that.
But back to this specific study for a moment. Can you talk a little bit about the study design itself? When you went to look at this empirical question about do parents know more than other adults and are they more able to recognize signs of grooming, how did you design it to test that question?
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Sure. So this builds on some work that Dr. Winters and I had previously done looking at the hindsight bias in childhood sexual abuse.
Georgia is a former doctoral student of mine, and she came into the program really interested in how the Sandusky case at Penn State happened. Like how was it that once, you know, it was revealed that he was a sexual abuser that everybody said, “Oh, well, he shouldn’t have been showering with the kids. He shouldn’t have—you know, he had a youth-serving organization. He had kids sleeping over. Clearly he was a pedophile. Why didn’t we know that before?” And she speculated that it was due to the hindsight bias, meaning once we have information that somebody is a sexual abuser, we’re much better at identifying kind of that behavior ahead of time.
So she developed these vignettes and looking, you know, where there was a young boy and an adult, and she had some that had grooming and some that didn’t. And then she randomly assigned people to either the grooming or the non-grooming condition. And then she also gave them information beforehand, whether the perpetrator was somebody that he had abused the child or he had not abused the child.
And so, people, once they had the information that the individual had abused the child, were much better at identifying sexual grooming behaviors. They could pick them out. But if they didn’t have that information, they really were not so good at picking out those behaviors ahead of time. And so that’s kind of what we refer to as the hindsight bias.
We wanted to see similarly, like, you know, as parents—and we have Erin’s Law now, where schools in many states are required to provide parents with education about, you know, sex abuse prevention, including sexual grooming— you might think that we would be better at identifying these behaviors. We might hear more about it. We might read more about it. And so we wanted to see if parents in general were better at identifying these behaviors than non-parents. So we randomly assigned parents and non-parents to—I think it was 14 different vignettes in total. Some of them depicting like each of those different five stages of our sexual grooming model.
We then also had a entire grooming vignette where we had full grooming behaviors in all five of those stages and a no-grooming vignette where we had no grooming behaviors. And overall—do you want me to, to spill the beans?
[cross-talk]
Teresa Huizar:
[Laughter] You can feel free to talk about your findings.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yeah, so we randomly assigned parents and non-parents to each of those seven conditions. And then we compared them.
And basically, we found that parents were no better than non-parents at identifying sexual grooming behaviors, and, as a whole, people just were not good at determining that those preparatory behaviors were indicative of sexual grooming. We did find, fortunately, at least our, what we call our stage 4 behaviors, those desensitization to physical content and touch were more apt to be identified by the sample as a whole, not specifically related to parents or non-parents.
But in general, people were pretty bad at identifying sexual grooming before they knew that somebody was a perpetrator.
[09:33] Teresa Huizar:
We’ve got a lot to unpack here. [Laughter]
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yes.
Teresa Huizar:
Including your own surprise, I’m sure—
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yes.
Teresa Huizar:
—when you saw the findings. Were you just sort of like, I can’t believe what I’m seeing?
When you—?
Elizabeth Jeglic:
We were definitely surprised. You know, like when you think about it, I think these are hard things to, to kind of identify. And I think we talk about grooming, but when you ask people “what is sexual grooming?”, like they’ll give you maybe a behavior here, a behavior there. But there’s not like—the term is now kind of much more thrown around and we see it, but we don’t really understand all the nuances of it.
And that’s kind of where we really think that educational interventions really need to identify these behaviors and teach people what they look like.
[10:16] Teresa Huizar:
What do you make of the fact that neither parents nor adults at all seem to be able to, in general, recognize anything but the most extreme behaviors? I mean, to me, it seems fairly obvious that someone should be able to recognize the fact that if someone is talking about some sort of sexual touch, oops, that’s grooming.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yeah.
Teresa Huizar:
But some of the others that would not fall within that were still eyebrow raising. I mean.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yeah.
Teresa Huizar:
Giving kids alcohol or drugs. I mean, that’s one of the ones in your framework and this didn’t raise any eyebrows?
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yeah.
Teresa Huizar:
You know, it’s just like, I’m a little perplexed that it took the complete extreme end of the continuum for people to be able to reliably identify that that’s what it is.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yeah. So we did find that when all the behaviors were presented, people were better than when it was just like in various stages, which is typical of the sexual grooming process, right? Very rarely do they only engage in behaviors from one individual stage. So that is actually good.
I think that what it comes down to is that a lot of the sexual grooming behaviors prior to those touch behaviors and those sexualized behaviors can mimic normal adult/child interactions. When, you know, done once or twice or done, you know, in the context of a caring relationship. Not giving alcohol or drugs necessarily, but showing a child attention, having a special relationship with the child, doing activities alone with the child. While those, you know, in context can seem potentially like grooming behaviors, if you only see one or two of those behaviors, like, you know, somebody is, is trying to be nice to a child, maybe who doesn’t have a lot and they give them presents. That could be seen as, “Oh, that’s a nice guy.”
The other thing that we see with perpetrators is that kind of halo effect. Because they often portray themselves as somebody who is well respected within the community. They’re often very much beloved. I mean, there are many cases where, you know, perpetrators have been outed, and people don’t believe that they have abused a child.
Like the child is saying, you know, “This person did this to me.” And everybody’s like, “Not him (or her). That’s a beloved member of our community. They do this, this, this, and this.” Kind of like similar to Sandusky, I guess, initially. It’s really only when you kind of look at the information that you realize that this person was using that kind of cloak of, you know, being a good upstanding member of the community to hide their deceptive behaviors. And so we interpret those behaviors in light of knowing that person as a good person.
[12:45] Teresa Huizar:
Well, and you know, that that’s another form of their manipulation, right?
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Absolutely.
Teresa Huizar:
That they are purposely cultivating …
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Absolutely.
Teresa Huizar:
in order to have this very effect that they’re getting, which is that people won’t believe terrible things said about them once they’ve volunteered all the time—
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yep. Yep.
Teresa Huizar:
and given money to charity and been the pillar of the community and all of that.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Absolutely.
Teresa Huizar:
I feel like I’m not sure what it says about the human condition that we’re so naive in the face of so many news reports and everything else that we still get sucked into this—
Elizabeth Jeglic:
I know.
Teresa Huizar:
you know, as adults with such frequency and are so easily manipulated by perpetrators. Which I think is the sad truth. It’s not just kids that are so easily manipulated by them.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
We’re going to be doing a study just to, we know kind of anecdotally and from our measure of kind of that they get close to family that they engage in familial grooming too, oftentimes.
Teresa Huizar:
That’s right.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
And so they will gain the trust of the family so that, you know, if they see some of those boundary violations, they again interpret that in light of, “Oh, this is somebody who cares about my child. I trust this person. That’s not really a big deal.”
They also groom organizations and the community as a whole. They’re really, you know, doing a lot to kind of pull the wool over our eyes.
[14:04] Teresa Huizar:
One of the things I was thinking about as you were talking is, is the way in which just as humans, we’re not very good at noticing escalating behaviors.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Mm-hmm.
Teresa Huizar:
You know, it seems like we view each individual incident in isolation, and we struggle to identify the pattern of escalation. You know, we’ve worked a lot on child abuse deaths. And where you see a lot of often low-level neglect cases before you get a child abuse fatality.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Mm-hmm.
Teresa Huizar:
And then people look back—speaking of hindsight bias—and go, “How did we not realize that if somebody had six reports to CPS that that should mean something? And it’s the same interesting, I mean, frankly, flaw in humans—
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yes.
Teresa Huizar:
that we don’t seem to be able to say: If you have all of these small violations of boundaries—
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yep.
Teresa Huizar:
then it’s going to add up to something. It’s not nothing.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Absolutely. As you said, that’s exactly what we see clinically and what you see in your work with these survivors of childhood sexual abuse is that there’s a lot of those lower-level boundary violations before it really escalates.
And so that’s why, like, it’s really important to understand the spectrum of behaviors and realize that, you know, right from the start, the kids who potentially are vulnerable either, you know, because of their circumstances or they’re, they’re struggling with various issues, they need to be protected. Because perpetrators hone in on that, right? They recognize that those are the kids that they can most easily kind of, you know, groom or gain access to. And so we need to be able to help those kids because we know that they’re at increased risk for sexual abuse.
[15:38] Teresa Huizar:
The other interesting part—well, there are so many interesting things—but the other interesting part to me of your study was that you didn’t just look at the first research question. You also looked at this issue of confidence.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yes.
Teresa Huizar:
Right. So can you talk a little bit about that? Because I was so glad to see that and so interested in what that turned up as well.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yeah, and so we thought this was really an important finding that we had. We looked at how confident people were that they were able to identify grooming behaviors. And while ultimately their ability to identify grooming behaviors was below the halfway point—so under 50%—on average, people were kind of like 70% sure that they could identify grooming behaviors, even though they were not able to. So they were overconfident. And that didn’t matter whether you’re a parent or not parent. People in general felt like, “Oh, we can do this.”
And so I think that really speaks to, you know, when we do sexual violence prevention training, I think people think they know it all. They feel like, you know, “We don’t really need it because we already know all this information. I can identify somebody who’s a sexual abuser. It’s pretty obvious.” But ultimately we know from these experimental designs that—and generally, you know, all the sexual abuse that still goes on that we really are not. And so we have to kind of put that in check and recognize that, you know, we need to constantly think about these things. Keep them at the forefront of our minds and be reminded of them.
[16:56] Teresa Huizar:
And also, I think that one of the things that I was thinking about with this sort of overconfidence is the level of increased risk that that creates for kids. You know, it’s not just like this is benign if someone’s overconfident in their ability to recognize grooming behaviors.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yep.
Teresa Huizar:
That has potentially serious consequences for the children around them because there’s a real blind spot around that.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, you can think like, “I would clearly recognize a perpetrator” and then, you know, not see the warning signs that are happening. Or then sometimes, you know, you even have the cases where children report and the parent doesn’t believe it because, like, “I would know how to identify that. And I didn’t see any of those behaviors. And so therefore, this didn’t happen.” And we know that, you know, it’s really the parents that are the ones that advocate for the child when they come forward and share that something has happened to them. And if so, the parent doesn’t believe them or is not immediately supportive, that has a lot of long-term negative consequences for that child.
[17:53] Teresa Huizar:
You know, the other thing I was thinking about is you had these neutral, you know, scenarios that you were presenting to them. And so if people cannot recognize this in a scenario presented to them in a fairly neutral way, how are they going to recognize these—
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Mm-hmm.
Teresa Huizar:
you know, they’re going to be that much more overconfident—
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yes.
Teresa Huizar:
I guess would be my point, if it’s somebody they know—
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Absolutely.
Teresa Huizar:
that’s being accused. You know, “Oh, I would know if Uncle Joe was doing that because I’ve known him forever and I know you and—." And it’s, you know, there’s no real reason to believe that, that they would at all, based on this research.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Absolutely. It’s hard. I mean, I think, as I said, I don’t think our education on grooming is where it needs to be. I think we have a lot of work to do.
As I said, like, we recently looked at the content—we haven’t published this yet—but of Erin’s Law, in states that have passed Erin’s Law. Which requires training on sexual abuse prevention for teachers, educators, and students. And while some of them, like, they link to different materials, but there’s a lot of variability in terms of if they describe grooming at all. And if they describe grooming, how they go about doing it, whether they’ve defined it or identified behaviors. And mandated reporter training, a recent study found that very few of them require training on grooming.
So we’re just not really integrating, you know, the state-of-the-art research into our prevention materials. So again, like while you might hear the term, it’s not defined and the behavior is not identified.
[19:20] Teresa Huizar:
Well, and the curricula isn’t really designed to help people to properly identify it, you know, and which I think is a difference.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Mm-hmm.
Teresa Huizar:
It’s one thing to mention something or have a little information about it. It’s another thing to organize training in such a way that that’s the primary point of it is to help someone, you know, identify that.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yes.
Teresa Huizar:
I wonder, what is it that you think would be most helpful to parents specifically in helping them recognize grooming behaviors—aside from just be less confident that you already knew it? [Laughter] Beyond that, what would be most helpful?
Elizabeth Jeglic:
You know, I think what we know from behavior change literature is really kind of having people interact with the scenarios. So give them, you know, real life situations: “How would you handle this?” Have them, you know, engage with it. “What are the behaviors that you see that could be potentially, you know, grooming behavior?” So they’re thinking about it in a different level versus kind of being passive recipients, right? So if they’re actively engaging in it and engaging in discussion about it, so we find that people change, you know, attitudes, behaviors, more aptly when they’re, you know, engaging in conversation. So a lot of what we do is either give people a flyer or some link on the computer, or people sit there, you know, and are passive attendees and instead of kind of being active recipients.
And so maybe even like, you know, “Imagine your child, this is happening to them. What do you think might be a red flag in this situation?” So then it becomes personal as well. And it’s not somebody else’s child.
I think people underestimate the likelihood that their own child is going to be abused because, you know, I take care of my child. I observe my child. I have, you know, internet protections in place. It’s not going to happen to my child. And it can happen to anybody’s child.
[20:58] Teresa Huizar:
So true.
I’m also wondering, you know, as we think about prevention curricula and prevention programming, are there things that we could do—you know, I think the idea of scenario-based training is critical, but beyond that, are there other things that you think, either in terms of the design of it or focus, that really should be shaped by the way that research is evolving on this issue?
Elizabeth Jeglic:
I mean, one of the things that we discuss in the article is, you know, the, the child versus the parent responsibility to protect the child. And I think, you know, there are people on both sides of the issue. Like, children should not be responsible for their own safety. But at the same time, sexual abuse happens in private when adults are not around, right? Because that’s the goal is to separate the child from guardians that might be able to protect them.
And so I think it’s a really holistic thing. And, and we know that about a third of kids are abused in the home, right? So, like, just training parents is not sufficient if the parent is a perpetrator. So, we really need to kind of holistically think about, you know, training children to identify what grooming behaviors are and how to report it if they have those experiences and who to report it to.
So, training teachers, because they are the ones that spend the most time with their kids outside of, you know, the home, because, you know, oftentimes they will see the abuse. Training other capable guardians in the community. So coaches, things like that, because we also see it in sporting situations that, you know, that potentially coaches or other people are engaging in it. So we want everybody to be on alert and obviously working with parents.
I think, the more that we can have interactive things, but something frequent, like, I think we do, our training, like, once and done, you know. Or we do those things, or we just quickly scroll through it and we do the test at the end. We’ve done our requirement for the year. But we really have to cultivate a culture of sexual violence prevention. Because the consequences to not only the child, the family, the community, society as a whole are tremendous, right? Because of what happens to them and how this impacts them. So really valuing that.
And we know that perpetrators seek situations where they believe they can more easily abuse. And so if we have cultures where they realize that this is something we’re talking about regularly and that we are on higher alert, they might go somewhere else or not do it to begin with.
[23:14] Teresa Huizar:
One of the things I was thinking about as you were talking, especially about the one and done, because often we do have only one session opportunity with a particular parent.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yep.
Teresa Huizar:
But are there other ways to follow up on that? You know, using technology to do, for those people who would give permission, like nudges. Like, if a message came up on your phone, that periodically said, you know, “Have you thought about—, have you reviewed—, have you—whatever this.”
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yep.
Teresa Huizar:
I mean, is that a way to be a reminder in the way that the medical profession uses nudges to remind, let’s say, diabetics to take their medication on a daily basis or, you know, whatever. I’m just curious about, like, things beyond you’re sitting in front of a computer getting something or you’re sitting in a classroom getting something.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
I think you’ve just proposed our next study.
[Laughter]
I think we need to, I think we need to kind of develop something like that and test it out and see, you know, empirically, like do people—do parents—like we could do the same study again with a group that didn’t get the nudges, did the one, didn’t get any training, group that got the one and done training, and the group that gets the nudges, and see if they are, you know, ultimately—
[Cross-talk]
Teresa Huizar:
I’d love that. I want to see that. [Laughter]
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Okay. Excellent.
The other thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about is, I have a daughter in high school and they’re recently getting some peer-on-peer mental health training. Because peers tell one another, you know, and they’re more likely to share. And in our research, we found that children are more likely to disclose to a peer that they’re experiencing sexual abuse or that they have these boundary violations. And so I really think, training kind of like bystander—like doing some kind of a similar bystander intervention—
Teresa Huizar:
Mmm.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
with, you know, middle schoolers and early high schoolers. Where you’re training them, you know, like what to do if a peer reports something—
Teresa Huizar:
Yes.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
or you see something with a peer, like, how are you going to handle that? What can you say to them? Who should you tell? I think would be really important, too, because oftentimes, you know, life is so busy and parents are running around. But kids spend a lot of time with their peers, and so they are often the ones who are noticing these behaviors but really don’t know what to do with that once they see it.
[25:12] Teresa Huizar:
Especially in adolescence, they may be very likely to be disclosed to first.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yes.
Teresa Huizar:
I mean, that’s an interesting thing, that somebody may tell their best friend before they tell their mom.
[Cross-talk]
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yep. It’s very common. Yep.
Teresa Huizar:
Or tell someone else. Yeah.
You know, the other thing I was thinking of was this experience we had—on a totally different subject that’s a little analogous to this overconfidence issue. We could see with our accreditation program that one of the things that was happening is that Children’s Advocacy Centers [CACs] that were really old often would be the ones to go pending rather than brand-new CACs when they were going through the accreditation process. And we said, what could that possibly be about?
Well, it turns out that a lot of that was about the fact that they sort of thought they already knew all of our standards of practice and so wouldn’t even necessarily really read the updated ones closely to see what had changed all of this. So we instituted this addition to this online training that we had where we would give them sort of scenarios. But instead of doing the sort of pre/post where people don’t really see their results till the end—or ever at all—
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Mm-hmm.
Teresa Huizar:
which sometimes that happens in testing—right away they would get a message, if they answered the question wrong, that would bounce up and say, “Oops,” you know, “mistake. And sort of here’s the real thing.” That was very interesting. A) People did not like it [laughter] to be told they were wrong right away. So let me just say that as a warning. But, B) It really actually, even though they didn’t like it, was helpful because it reduced their overconfidence before entering the training. So I am sure someone can invent something much more tactful than what we tried that might have the same effect.
But I do think there is this thing around this overconfidence where if they do show up for training, you do need a way to sort of—beyond just saying people can be overconfident—
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Mm-hmm.
Teresa Huizar:
to see where their baseline is and kind of prick that overconfidence a little bit, the balloon of it, to deflate the tiniest bit so people can listen. Because otherwise I do think people could sit in through a training and come out at the end of it still as overconfident as they entered.
[Cross-talk]
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yep. Absolutely.
Teresa Huizar:
I’m curious about what you think might help with that. That aspect of sort of introducing into training and other activities, you know, just someone—without being too super scary. I mean, obviously we overstepped the mark on our own effort, but without being over scary or off-putting, like “You actually do need to pay attention” kind of that idea. How do you approach that?
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yeah. I haven’t really thought about that, but I really think that that would, you know, address some of this issue by kind of highlighting the gap in knowledge. Like, so we are overconfident. We think we know it all. And it’s, especially, you know, as we get older, it’s hard to change our ways. And we think that we know it all. That’s why I love working with the students, because they come with fresh ideas, fresh questions, different perspectives. And so I think that that really is very important to kind of, you know, recognize how … how we have our own biases and how that can impact the way that we take in information.
I’m wondering, too, I know that some youth-serving organizations as part of their culture of sexual violence prevention, they have discussion-based training so that, you know, people you know, required to get an article, like, in the academic literature or even from, you know, popular literature and bring it to the group and discuss it once a week. And they’re responsible for leading that discussion. And I think when the onus is on you, you then have to kind of—you know, you don’t want to embarrass yourself. And so you have to show up. And so that kind of ties into what we were talking about before with the behavior change in that you are engaging in discussion, but you’re also the one who’s presenting the information. You’re going from a kind of a passive recipient to an active deliverer. And it also empowers people because everybody can do this, right? Not just the experts or the, the leaders who are training, but all of us have something to contribute. So I think, you know, engaging people in that way can also be very effective.
[29:04] Teresa Huizar:
I love that idea. And because we did do a “Monday morning message” research-to-practice brief on this very article, those listeners who received that could use that as the basis for such a discussion group. So that’s awesome.
One of the things I also was thinking about, kind of on the flip side of the same piece of research and its implications, you know, we’ve been talking about the prevention implications. I actually think it has potentially some maybe reassuring implications for the families we work with when we’re doing intervention. In that I think often parents feel very guilty—
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yes.
Teresa Huizar:
that they did not identify these grooming behaviors ahead. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Because it just seems to me that this literature just says basically, if that, if you’re a parent who didn’t recognize it, you were in a large cohort of people who didn’t realize it.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Absolutely, and that’s absolutely what we see.
I think I mentioned, we just got a grant to study familial grooming. And so we are going to empirically answer that question in the next couple of years. But clinically, what we see is that parents often don’t recognize it because the perpetrator grooms them. So albeit, you know, somebody in the home, the boyfriend, the uncle, the husband. Or it could be the wife. We do have females who engage in sexual violence as well, or you know, the community member. And so really recognizing that this is hard to detect and that people themselves, you know, have been groomed, I think can help alleviate some of that guilt that parents feel.
Because the children feel guilty and shameful, but the parents do as well. And that just kind of is hurtful in terms of the, you know, people’s ability to heal. I mean, it’s a difficult event to happen to anyone. But I think, you know, when you have that guilt and shame that that kind of perpetuates the long-term consequences that you experience.
[30:56] Teresa Huizar:
I’m so glad you’re looking into this sort of intrafamilial or familial grooming piece of this, because I also think that when we think about our interventions with families, we’re often, just by virtue of our name and our services, very, very focused on the child. And we realize that children exist within the ecosystem of their family. Right?
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yep. Mm-hmm. Yep.
Teresa Huizar:
And so are there interventions with the larger family that we’re going to need to do, realizing that they do face—I mean, they have been groomed themselves. They have trauma of their own that is tied to that.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Absolutely. And that’s what the research has shown. And like, you know, it’s not been large-scale, but you know, the family members of children who are sexually abused do have a lot of trauma. And as you talk about, like, it is an ecosystem, right? Children are reflections of what’s going on in the home. And if the parents are struggling with, you know, their own guilt and shame as a consequence of this, they’re not able to be as present for the child who has their own issues. And so I don’t think that you can treat the child, you know, in isolation outside of the family. I think this really, you know, has to be something that is more holistic if we really want that family to kind of move in a path of healing.
[32:04] Teresa Huizar:
Let’s turn now for just a second to public policy implications. You brought up Erin’s Law and others like it, Jenna’s Law exists in some states, other kinds of things.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yep.
Teresa Huizar:
Are there things that, as you have been researching this, you say, “Gosh, in a perfect world. There are, there’s additional work public policy wise that could strengthen prevention education in the states in which that’s mandated.”
Elizabeth Jeglic:
I would love to see some standardization. Because what you see, like, there’s federal Erin’s Law—and then each state passes their own variant. And some states have provided it educational materials. Other states just kind of linked to a bunch of different resources. And so there’s not really that information provided.
So, if you could get, you know, a task force to come up with the current state of the art, kind of, “This is the best way to do it. And this is how you should do it,” I think that would go a long way. Instead of having everybody reinvent the wheel and do it kind of hodgepodge. Like, some states don’t even give resources. So I think that’s definitely helpful. You know, I think really committing to a culture where this is like, as important—you know, like, obviously the education of our children is important, but we have to keep them safe. Like, you know, there’s a lot of emphasis on keeping them safe from active shooters, right? And like the security and things like that. But you don’t see the same focus on child sexual abuse prevention. And so I think it has to be as important because, you know, one in four girls, one in 20 boys, according to the latest CDC stats, will experience unwanted sexual contact by the time they’re 18. So this is not, you know, something that is isolated. A lot of the kids are experiencing this and we need to prevent it from happening.
[33:39] Teresa Huizar:
Would you like to see that grooming itself is required to be discussed as a part of this curriculum, incorporated in some way?
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Absolutely. I mean, we’ve advocated very strongly for that. And I believe, you know, using our red flags to train everybody. Because that’s how we’re going to identify it before it happens. Some states have actually made grooming a crime in and of itself. I don’t know that any have been successfully prosecuted yet, but at least people are kind of heading in the direction where they’re understanding it. It’s being accepted a lot more in courts of law after the abuse happens to help understand, you know, why a child isn’t disclosing. But I think it’s really the key to sexual abuse. It’s kind of the modus operandi of how sexual abuse happens. And if we can stop them in their tracks before they kind of cross that line, we’re going to prevent a lot of harm.
The grooming in and of itself, even if it doesn’t result in contact sexual abuse can be, if it’s discovered, you know, a psychological trauma as well. Because they’re forming that relationship under malintent, I guess. Right? And so, but still, if you can prevent the contact sexual abuse from happening, I think we’re going a long way.
[34:43] Teresa Huizar:
Oh, I absolutely agree. I mean, the psychological harm that comes from just being perpetually gaslit.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yep.
Teresa Huizar:
I mean, it’s substantive in and of itself and destroys trust.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Absolutely.
Teresa Huizar:
I mean, what is a child to make of that—even if they are never sexually abused—what are they to make of the fact that they now know that there are adults out there who will try to ingratiate themselves just for the purpose of doing harm? I mean, that’s—
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Absolutely.
Teresa Huizar:
that’s a, that’s a challenging understanding to come to when you’re 6, 7, 8, 10, 12—
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yep.
Teresa Huizar:
or any age.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yes.
[35:15] Teresa Huizar:
So we talked a little bit about your current research activities. Anything else you’d like to tell us to expect coming from you guys in the next few years?
Elizabeth Jeglic:
So I think the current projects I mentioned, the familial grooming, is going to be starting. We’ve been looking at grooming because we believe it differs based on the context in which it happens. Like, you know, religious organizations we’ve done. Now, we have an article coming out about educator sexual grooming. We’re looking at grooming by doctors as well, because that’s also been, you know, both of children and adults, but nobody has really studied pediatrician grooming. And a part of our sample reported that the perpetrator was their pediatrician. And I think it’s relevant, obviously, given the Nassar case.
We’re still trying to get into grooming in sports, because 50% of kids are engaging in sports. So that’s kind of on the horizon. But right now we’re doing what we’re calling our “Red Flags 2” study, where we’re looking at if the red flags differ, if the perpetrator is a woman or a man, or an adolescent or an adult. Because we believe that some of that varies based on the characteristics of the perpetrator.
We also want to see if the frequency of the behaviors—because some of these behaviors, like if you send one text to a kid, maybe that’s okay. But if you’re texting them, you know, 10, 20, 50 times, that’s where that behavior becomes a grooming behavior.
And in light of, kind of David Finkelhor’s group’s findings about how almost more than two thirds of people who are sexually abused online know their perpetrator offline, and that 80% of kids who are groomed online know that person offline, we’re really looking at the role of technology in the sexual grooming process. So not only in terms of the first contact but also, you know, how are they using electronics in the process of sexual abuse? Because we’re seeing it more and more, and it’s such a moving target, for good or for bad. Because like, we’re often able to prosecute cases now because we have those text messages and those images where before we couldn’t. But at the same time, they’re able to usurp, you know, the parental guardianship by contacting kids online and engaging in those grooming behaviors online.
[37:13] Teresa Huizar:
So true. And also to show kids a lot of sexual content and other things.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yeah.
Teresa Huizar:
Yeah. It’s just … so many areas to explore, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
I know.
Teresa Huizar:
My goodness, you have job security forever.
[Laughter]
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Well, unfortunately. No, I mean, it’s, it’s not a happy topic to research, but I think it’s such an important one. And I think, you know, one where we still don’t have a lot of empirical data. And I think that’s really so needed. As the work that you do is so important, but having the research behind it and saying, “You know, this is really what we know that works.” Because a lot of it is like what feels good but we don’t know if it works. Right? So I think that’s so important to to kind of get that data.
[37:51] Teresa Huizar:
Oh, it’s critical. And this has been such a missing gap in the research. Which is not to say that people haven’t—other people haven’t done other things.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Absolutely.
Teresa Huizar:
But really concentrated attention on grooming and all its permutations. You know, and you named, I don’t know, six or eight, right?, just a minute ago—
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yeah.
Teresa Huizar:
that still need to be explored and you have plans to explore. It’s critical to our understanding of this issue and better treatment for kids and families.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Absolutely.
Teresa Huizar:
And hopefully more prevention.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yes.
[38:17] Teresa Huizar:
Anything else I should have asked you and didn’t or anything that you wanted to make sure that we talked about today and we haven’t yet?
Elizabeth Jeglic:
There’s just some similar studies to the one that we just did on parents where they looked at, kind of, same-sex dyads versus opposite-sex dyads. And people are better able to recognize when it’s opposite-sex dyads that, you know, in terms of the perpetration of abuse.
And I had a student—and we see this almost weekly now in the media and in light of the Netflix series of female teachers sexually abusing generally male students. And so we know that women—we just published an article on female grooming—and we know that women do engage in sexual grooming at the same rates as men. And that we are not as good at detecting grooming amongst females as we are among males. So, you know, just kind of keeping in mind those biases that we all have.
And also that youth are engaging in sexually abusive behaviors in many cases, or sexually harmful behaviors.
And so just, just keeping all of that in mind. I know it’s a lot, but that it’s not just that stranger in the white van, that it can be really anybody, unfortunately.
[39:20] Teresa Huizar:
Interesting in terms of what you’re talking about with not recognizing it in women. Do you think that that’s because people get somehow confused with sort of mothering or nurturing behaviors and grooming, they can’t separate them out, or do you think it’s something else?
Elizabeth Jeglic:
I think we don’t—you know, only 2% of convicted sex offenders are women, and I think we have these biases. And they’re, 40% of men are abused by a woman, but most of them don’t report. And I think because of the, the stereotype of a woman as a kind nurturer and not an abusive person, we kind of overlook those behaviors. And just as we were talking about, we tend to excuse them in light of, you know, other, “Oh, that—she’s just showing affection. She’s just a touchy-feely person,” versus, “That’s a grooming behavior.”
And I think we also don’t think that, you know, a woman abusing a young boy is as harmful as a man abusing a girl. I think there’s that stereotype. And I have another master student who just looked at cases of educator sexual misconduct, and women on average get a year and a half less in terms of sentence for a similar crime. So they’re not prosecuted to the same extent that men are.
[40:26] Teresa Huizar:
And juror bias and all of that. I think I read a study that tied to that to sort of juror perceptions of the harmfulness of it
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yep. Yeah.
Teresa Huizar:
And it differed by sex, too, which is really interesting.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Mm-hmm.
[Outro music begins]
[40:37] Teresa Huizar:
Oh, my goodness! So much to explore.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Yes.
Teresa Huizar:
And such vitally important topics. So, Elizabeth, you know you have an open invitation. Come back anytime. And as you publish, we would love to have you come back and talk about your research again.
Elizabeth Jeglic:
Well, thank you so much for having me. And I love talking with you. And thank you so much for the work that you and your organization does to keep our kids safe and to help them. Take care.
[Outro]
[41:01] Teresa Huizar:
Thanks for listening to One in Ten. If you liked this episode, please share it with a parent in your life to help keep kids safe. And for more information about this episode or any of our others, including Dr. Jeglic’s first interview with us, please visit our podcast website at OneInTenPodcast.org.