Groomed: Shining a Light on the Unheard Narrative of Childhood Sexual Assault


Book Description

Did you know that 1 in 10 children in America have experienced some form of sexual abuse? This shocking truth becomes even harder to accept when its coupled with a longer more extensive violation of trust called grooming. Groomed: Shining a Light on the Unheard Narrative of Childhood Sexual Assault tells the tale of one young woman's journey through her experience with abuse and sheds light on a narrative exploiting millions of children every year.Throughout the book, the author invites people to step out of their comfort zones and listen to the all-too-common narrative of childhood sexual assault. It invites people to embrace survivors, believe them and connect with them on their journey to healing while providing tips and research on creating more loving communities.In this book you will find: * A gripping narrative of sexual assault told from a child's perspective on being groomed * The critical stages of the grooming process * Actionable tips and tricks on how to prevent childhood sexual abuse and groomingGroomed is for survivors looking for a voice, young families seeking advice, and guardians wanting to learn. The book's purpose is to educate and inspire, and change the culture around sexual violence.




A Kids Book about Sexual Abuse


Book Description

Knowledge is the best defense. Give your kids the tools to identify abuse and the language to defend their bodies. Some of the most difficult things to talk about are also the most important. Sexual abuse happens more often than people realize but most kids don't learn about it until after it happens. This book will help give them the language to understand what sexual abuse is and start the conversation around owning their bodies and trusting their instincts.




Sexual Grooming


Book Description

This book provides an in-depth overview of the current research on sexual grooming. It explores the process by which an individual seeking to commit a sexual offense skillfully manipulates a potential victim into situations in which abuse can be more readily committed, while simultaneously preventing disclosure and detection. This volume addresses this understudied phenomenon and comprehensively examines what is currently known about the construct. It provides a thorough introduction to the sexual grooming literature, focusing on the history of the term and how sexual grooming strategies have become more publicly recognized through high-profile cases, as well as those in child-serving organizations (e.g., Catholic Church, Boy Scouts of America). The book reviews the various proposed models of sexual grooming – including the Sexual Grooming Model (SGM) – that detail the overarching steps or stages involved in the process. It discusses attempts to define the construct of sexual grooming and addresses potential consequences of sexual grooming, emphasizing how victims, families, and communities at large may be affected. Key areas of coverage include: Unique contexts and facets in which sexual grooming behavior has been observed, including online grooming, personal/self-grooming, familial grooming, institutional grooming, and grooming behaviors of females. The ways in which sexual grooming strategies may be manifested in sex trafficking cases and in adult sexual abuse. Assessment and treatment of sexual grooming, as well as prevention strategies. The implementation of grooming research to inform law enforcement efforts and court decision-making. The creation and adoption of legislation and policies designed to prevent sexual grooming. Child Sexual Grooming is an essential resource for researchers, professors, graduate students, clinicians, mental health therapists, legal professionals, policy makers, law enforcement, and related professionals in developmental psychology, child and adolescent psychology, social work, public health, criminology/criminal justice, forensic psychology, and behavioral therapy and rehabilitation.




'Grooming' and the Sexual Abuse of Children


Book Description

The first inter-disciplinary, thematic, and empirical investigation of grooming in a multi-jurisdictional context, this book draws on extensive research in the form of over fifty interviews with professionals, working in sex offender assessment, management or treatment, as well as child protection, in the UK and the Republic of Ireland.




Child Pornography and Sexual Grooming


Book Description

Child pornography and sexual grooming provide case study exemplars of problems that society and law have sought to tackle to avoid both actual and potential harm to children. Yet despite the considerable legal, political and societal concern that these critical phenomena attract, they have not, thus far, been subjected to detailed socio-legal and theoretical scrutiny. How do society and law construct the harms of child pornography and grooming? What impact do constructions of the child have upon legal and societal responses to these phenomena? What has been the impetus behind the expanding criminalisation of behaviour in these areas? Suzanne Ost addresses these and other important questions, exploring the critical tensions within legal and social discourses which must be tackled to discourage moral panic reactions towards child pornography and grooming, and advocating a new, more rational approach towards combating these forms of exploitation.




Online Child Sexual Grooming Discourse


Book Description

This Element examines technology-assisted grooming of children for sex – henceforth, online grooming – as an illegal practice of communicative manipulation and, as such, something that research within the academic field of forensic linguistics is ideally placed to help counter. The analysis draws upon online grooming datasets of different sizes and provenance, including from law enforcement, and deploys different analytic techniques from primarily discourse analysis. Three features of online grooming discourse are focussed on: groomers' use of manipulation tactics; groomers' abuse of power asymmetries; and children's communication during online grooming. The Element also discusses ways in which findings derived from richly contextualised analysis of online grooming discourse can – when combined with co-creation projects involving child-safeguarding groups, children and lived-experience experts – add considerable value to societal efforts to counter online grooming and other forms of online child sexual exploitation and abuse.




Counselling Adult Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse


Book Description

This updated and expanded edition provides comprehensive coverage of the theory and practice of counselling survivors of child sexual abuse (CSA). In a reasoned and thoughtful approach, this book honestly addresses the complex issues in this important area of work, providing practical strategies valuable and new insights for counsellors.




No Matter Our Wreckage


Book Description

My mother knew I was abused as a child. She had read letters sent from my abuser to me...But she never spoke to me about them, or what they described. And she never intervened to stop the abuse...Now she is dying and the past is rising to the surface like a bruise. When Gemma Carey was twelve years old, a man twice her age would sneak into her bedroom on a weekly basis and sexually assault her. When Gemma was seventeen, she took the perpetrator to court without anyone else knowing and had him placed on the child sex offenders register. When she was thirty-three, her mother died of cancer. For twenty years, her mother had known about this man. But why had she not acted to protect her daughter? Could the genesis of this betrayal be found in her own family history? No Matter Our Wreckage is the story of past and present colliding. It seeks to capture the complexity of forces which lead to abuse; to understand the intertwined narratives of mothers and daughters and how trauma becomes encoded in our DNA through generations. It explores grooming and the intricacies of consent, and how as a society we have not yet figured out how to deal with these types of crimes or the people who commit them. No Matter Our Wreckage is a powerful, poetic and unflinching memoir about what it means not to matter, and how an extraordinary woman refused to listen to the stories she was being told about herself - by her history, by her abuser, by her mother, by society. It is only by speaking out that Gemma Carey learns she can break free from her past and reclaim her life, her self and her future. 'No Matter Our Wreckage is a brutal reminder of our responsibility to notice and protect those we love. A devastating and clear-eyed memoir with a poet's voice. Gemma Carey will boil your blood and break your heart.' - Anna Spargo-Ryan, author of The Gulf




Groomed


Book Description

Someone in your past sold you a false story about who you are and what you’re worth. It has been holding you back for too long. Take control of your future. A staggering one out of three women in America was a victim of sexual abuse at some point in her childhood. No matter how many years it’s been, if that’s your story, those scars are probably still with you. But even if that’s not part of your story, this book is for you. Women today have been groomed for a lot more than just sex. Using her own story of abuse, family tragedy, and rebellion, Elizabeth Melendez Fisher guides readers toward an understanding that grooming is oftentimes subtle, but it’s always life-altering. In Groomed Fisher incorporates the language and lessons gained over the past decade working with sex trafficking victims and her work in ministry and counseling before that. She draws out five specific ways that women have been groomed, from physical appearance to spirituality to finances, and shows how those manipulative messages have affected the way we see our worth and how they’ve oftentimes stifled and limited us. From there Fisher offers readers a way to overcome their past, starting with the all-important but rarely explored idea of a selah, or a time of rest and reflection, and exploring active ways to forgive and move forward to a new level of freedom. No one has to be defined by her past. No one has to live for her groomers. It’s time to take a look back at where we came from to escape the messages of our past and take control of our future.




Identifying Child Molesters


Book Description

Stop abuse before it starts! Identifying Child Molesters: Preventing Child Sexual Abuse by Recognizing the Patterns of the Offenders will teach you to better protect children from potential child sexual molesters long before any abuse can actually occur. Here you'll learn to recognize and understand the seemingly invisible steps that typically precede child sexual abuse. These stories of molesters, their families, and their victims, will enable you to more accurately see through a potential molester's charming demeanor and better protect the children in your life. Understanding the behavior that molesters often exhibit when trying to obtain access to children is essential to protecting children from their advances. By becoming familiar with this terrain you will find the courage and strength to decide what must be done, and the skills to follow through with the necessary actions. Such responses will appropriately curtail an offender's access to children and subsequent opportunities to molest. Identifying Child Molesters will teach you: how to recognize those who might molest how molesters typically 'charm’adults how societal attitudes help to foster child sexual abuse what to do when encountering a potential molester what physical and emotional damage molestation can cause to victims how to graciously avoid potentially dangerous situations Identifying Child Molesters: Preventing Child Sexual Abuse by Recognizing the Patterns of the Offenders clearly spells out the techniques that child sexual molesters so successfully use to charm adults into giving them access to children. When these strategies are seen and understood, adults can take much more direct responsibility for preventing child sexual abuse than was previously possible. Anyone who lives or works with children needs to own this book. The information you'll encounter in Identifying Child Molesters might startle you, but it might also help you save the life of a child!