Sexual grooming is generally thought of as the way that would-be abusers build trust and camaraderie with their victims in order to lower the victims' inhibitions and eventually take advantage of the situation. Minimal levels of empiricism have focused on the sexual grooming patterns of abusive Catholic priests in the United States. In order to help close this gap, we conducted a retrospective content analysis of publicly available documents of credibly accused priests from one diocese in Illinois. Findings suggest that accused priests from this diocese used any of eight grooming techniques in order to abuse their victims; one of these tactics is specific to priest offenders. Using that knowledge, we propose and discuss a behavioral taxonomy of priest sexual grooming as well as the direction that future research should take in assessing this potential taxonomy. KeywordsSexual abuse; priests; Catholic Church; grooming; taxonomy; content analysis. Please cite this article as:

Research has established that sexually abusive priests often use grooming strategies on victims. Recently, researchers have proposed a behavioral taxonomy used specifically by clergy who sexually abuse children. Because this nascent taxonomy has only been studied once using a limited sample of sexually abusive priests, we seek to replicate and expand on its findings using a sample of abusive clergy from a separate institution. Specifically, we analyzed files of 18 monks in Minnesota who were credibly accused of sexual abuse. Using a deductive approach, we searched through these files in an effort to find all instances of eight clergy sexual grooming behaviors that were identified in previous research by Spraitz, Bowen, and Strange. Our findings suggest there is evidence to support the existence of this taxonomy of priest sexual grooming, although we argue that certain aspects of the centerpiece technique of their classification scheme are faulty and must be studied more extensively.

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