Validation of the Sexual Grooming Model of Child Sexual Abusers

“The Stay at Home Order is Causing Things to Get Heated Up”: Family Conflict Dynamics During COVID-19 From The Perspectives of Youth Calling a National Child Abuse Hotline

“…Importantly, around 20% of our sample were unable to report their abuse experiences because they did not have access to a phone or experienced challenges making safe phone calls. This is particularly concerning given isolation can become a powerful control and abuse tactic (Mega et al, 2000;Walker et al, 2017;Winters et al, 2020). This highlights the need for additional online child abuse reporting options, which is now only available in nine states (Health and Human Services, 2020).…”

The Sexual Grooming Scale – Victim Version: The Development and Pilot Testing of a Measure to Assess the Nature and Extent of Child Sexual Grooming

“…The Wolf et al (2018) study represented a big step forward in terms of empirically measuring sexual grooming, however it was not without limitations. While the 14 items from the CAMI may reflect some sexual grooming behaviors, they were not designed to measure the entire grooming process and the three factors that emerged (i.e., verbal coercion, grooming that used drugs and/or alcohol, and grooming that used threats and/or violence) is not generally consistent with the models of sexual grooming (see Winters et al, 2020). Further most of items reflect behaviors from stages immediately preceding the abuse (i.e., developing trust tactics include verbal coercion or provision of drugs/alcohol) or after the abuse (i.e., post-abuse maintenance includes the possible use of threats) which significantly limits the measure's utility, as it is not comprehensively capturing the sexual grooming stages and behaviors.…”

“…Then in 2020, Winters and colleagues further expanded the proposed Sexual Grooming Model (SGM) to incorporate fifth post-abuse maintenance stage (see Table 1 for the SGM stages). A two-part study by Winters et al (2020) established content validity for the SGM using experts in the field. In part one, they conducted a comprehensive literature review using the terms sex* groom* and child* groom* from four main academic databases yielding 1,363 English language, peer-reviewed sources.…”

“…These behaviors were then coded which generated 77 possible sexual grooming behaviors. In part two of the study, a list of content experts who published the identified articles and books (see Winters et al, 2020) and who had valid e-mail addresses (n = 44) were asked to participate in an expert review survey where they rated the relevance of the five stages of the SGM to the sexual grooming process. Next, they were asked to rate how relevant each of the 77 behaviors was and which stage(s) of the SGM the behavior fell under.…”

“…Next, they were asked to rate how relevant each of the 77 behaviors was and which stage(s) of the SGM the behavior fell under. Eighteen experts completed the survey and using the Content Validation Index (CVI; Lynn, 1986), all five stages of the SGM were deemed relevant to the sexual grooming process (Winters et al, 2020). Further, of the original 77 behaviors, 42 (54.5%) were deemed relevant to the construct of sexual grooming, and each behavior was placed in the sexual grooming stage that was deemed most relevant by experts (see Table 1 for the SGM behaviors).…”