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ise 1:20-cr-00330-PAE Document 397-1 Filed 10/29/21 Page 23 of Dietz 29 Keywords grooming, seduction, child sexual abuse, acquaintance molestation, litigation Grooming and Seduction In the development of knowledge of child sexual abuse, few discoveries could outweigh the importance of recognizing that a large proportion of offenses are committed by acquaintances of the child using techniques other than force or threat of force. No individual has done more to share this insight with the international law enforcement community than Ken Lanning, whose writings and teachings have also reached mental health professionals, those who work in the criminal justice and social service systems, those who care for the nation’s children, and countless concerned citizens and parents. The application of the terms “seduction” or “grooming” to these nonforce- ful, nonthreatening, and nonviolent techniques has been in the service of dis- seminating this important insight, which first burst into public consciousness as a real possibility in the mid-1980s as a result of partially untrue media reports about the McMartin School case and the case of Father Gilbert Gauthe, both of which stories first broke in 1984. Yet even today, far too many people, including many who should know better, have difficulty grasping the possibil- ity of nonforceful, nonthreatening, and nonviolent acquaintance molestation, as their preconceptions of childhood innocence and predatory molesters are too strong to allow them to accept that children can be so readily manipulated into doing or allowing things that others find abhorrent. Grooming Lanning (2018) is precisely correct in dating to the 1980s the use of the term “grooming” to refer to techniques for gaining sexual access to children and in his observation that during the 1980s, this usage gradually increased. Using the search capabilities of Google Scholar, I found no use of the word “groom- ing” to mean such techniques in conjunction with the terms “child sexual abuse,” “child molestation,” or “child molester” in the professional literature from 1850 through 1983. The first publication identified by Google Scholar as using the term “grooming” in this way was an article by Conte (1984) cit- ing Groth and Birnbaum (1979) for the proposition that “[i]n most cases, except those involving abuse by a stranger, the perpetrator involves children in sexual abuse through a grooming process in which a combination of kind- ness, attention, material enticement, special privilege, and coercion are DOJ-OGR-00005890