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If you find an abusive person in a community, you will find them gaslighting somebody and involving the whole community. It can get so bad that the victim themself doesn’t believe what’s happening. They start to believe they’ve gone crazy. And they do begin to have symptoms of mental illness because being abused and then gaslit is so traumatic– and then the community just takes that as evidence that the victim was really a crazy person imagining things all along, and the original deception becomes easier to believe. This is all part of the abuser’s plan.

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Remember the scene in The Wizard of Oz, where the Wicked Witch of the West sends out an army of ridiculous winged monkeys in dress uniforms to capture Dorothy and her friends?

In abuse survivor circles, we often refer to the community an abuser turns against their victim as “the Flying Monkeys.” That term is so ubiquitous among abuse survivors, I don’t know if it originated with a single person; several different people are cited on the Wikipedia page. It’s such a useful image, I fall back on it all the time in my own mind.

....Abusers groom communities. Remind yourself that they do this to everyone, that smart and compassionate people can get taken in as well, and that cognitive dissonance is normal when you’ve been tricked in this way.

Think about the fact that you might have been groomed, yourself– not as a victim, but as the Wicked Witch’s flying monkey. And then listen to the story, look at the evidence, and be honest.

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Abusers don’t just groom their victims; they groom their whole community. That’s what happened in the Church. We were all groomed to feel that it was a sin to ask questions about priests and bishops. We were groomed to mind our p’s and q’s, shut up if we noticed anything, and treat the clergy like living saints. And under that cloud of goodwill, they abused thousands of people. We’re getting new credible allegations all the time, and nothing like a just recompense has been made. Our trust has been shattered and there’s no bringing it back, nor will there be for a long time. This isn’t something that’s over. It’s something that’s still happening right now.

Now, every time anything irregular happens associated with the Catholic Church, we all jump out of our skins and start asking if this was to do with sexual abuse.

We don’t need to be canonizing any Catholic clergy celebrities right now.

We ought to postpone the beatification of Archbishop Fulton Sheen, not because of anything Fulton Sheen was or was not, but because of the culture we live in. We still live in a culture of Catholic clergy celebrities with cult followings who groomed us to think the Church could do no wrong, and then did grave wrong.

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Tanner and Brake


There is, however, another form of grooming which is equally important in many sexual assaults. This is the grooming directed towards individuals other than the actual victim. In many sexual assaults, the victim's environment must be groomed prior to, during, and after the assault to ensure continued access to the victim and minimize discovery or disclosure of the assault. The term "environmental grooming" will refer to the behavior focused on manipulating the perceptions of individuals in the victim's life.

Grooming The Environment
Grooming is commonly thought of as targeting only the victim of sexual assault. However, sex offenders often groom other individuals in the victim's environment as much as the victims themselves. The purpose of environmental grooming is to find victims, reduce the probability of being reported, and if reported, reduce the probability of the victim being believed. Finding victims involves establishing oneself in the victim's environment such that both the victim and the others in the victim's life see the association between the offender and the victim as positive and valued. In fact, successful environmental grooming results in the environment actually pushing the victim into association with the perpetrator. For example, establishing oneself as a skilled soccer coach in a community league will result in parents actively seeking to place their children under the offender's tutelage. Increased attention of the offender towards the victim will be viewed positively rather than with suspicion.

There are three primary goals in grooming the environment of an adult:

Affiliate - gaining access to potential victims by joining social circles
An offender has to gain access to potential adult victims. The easiest way to gain access is to affiliate with the victim’s environment. Joining social groups, feigning shared interests, and participating in group activities all serve to promote the offender as a part of the social network surrounding the adult victim.

Accept - get the environment to accept the offender
At the environmental level, acceptance means the offender manipulates perceptions so (s)he is accepted as an appropriate member of the social group. Feigning shared values, promoting group goals, and taking leadership roles are all examples of increasing acceptance. Ideally, the offender seeks to be seen as a valued individual within the group and a good “match” for the victim. The goal is to get the environment to support and approve of a relationship between the victim and the offender. Properly groomed environments actually push the victim toward the offender. Acceptance minimizes the chance the environment will raise difficult questions and serves to keep the victim in the relationship with the offender. Secondarily, in ongoing abuse situations, the offender manipulates the environment to accept the victim withdrawing from historical associations with the group.

Assure - generate disbelief of offending behavior within the environment.

A third goal of environmental grooming of adult victims is to assure ongoing access to the victim. This is generally accomplished by the offender generating disbelief within the environment that (s)he could be doing or would do anything harmful. Thus, the environment repeatedly supports the relationship, and thus, serves to diminish the ability of the victim to escape it or be believed.


With child abusers, we must be careful to guard against widening the net (suspecting well meaning, non-offending individuals). With adult victims it is somewhat different; we must guard against assuming victim resilience. The purpose of grooming an adult victim’s environment is to build a two fold belief:

•The offender is a great person or perfect match for the victim and cannot be seen as a threat or harmful.
•The victim, as an adult, would be capable of removing themselves from a harmful situation.

Within adult environments we rarely widen the net because we tend to see adults as capable of taking care of themselves and do not readily suspect abuse against an adult. Therefore, it is this second belief, the assumed resilience of the victim - the ability of the victim to remove themselves from harm - which we must guard against. The grooming of adult victims is designed to reduce resilience in victims and minimize their ability to remove themselves from harmful relationships. When victim grooming is combined with environmental grooming, it can lead to a false impression within the environment that the victim is a well functioning adult with the ability to make good decisions and protect themselves. In fact, decisions that are forced upon the victim will often appear to be voluntary to the environment. The problem with adult environmental grooming is not us seeing bad guys when they don’t exist (as with children victims), but rather us not seeing bad guys when they do exist because we assume the victim is resilient.

Offenders often systematically promote the impression of victim resilience. The attribution of victim strength is enhanced by the offender’s portrayal of the victim to the group as resilient. The offender then systematically increases the victim’s isolation from the group, while continuing to portray the victim as resilient. The decreasing contact between the victim and the group combined with the on-going messages of victim resilience by the offender, continues the environment’s assumption of victim resilience.



‘Exploring Sex Offender Grooming’ by Jim Tanner and Stephen Brake

Copyright 2013 by Jim Tanner and Stephen Brake. All rights reserved.
Kbsolutions (dot) com/Grooming.pdf