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Case 1:20-cr-00330-PAE Document 397-1 Filed 10/29/21 Page 33 of 43 Sexual grooming of children 289 violence, threat and force; criminal—opportunist, which tended to be one-off offences on strangers; and intimate, which was categorized by the identified use of sexual grooming behaviours. Forty-five per cent of Canter et al.’s (1998) sample were classified as being intimate offenders. Thus, 45% of the child sex offenders employed an intimate behaviour repertoire and sexual grooming behaviours. This figure is likely to be unrepresentative of the child sex offender population as a whole. Intimate offenders tend to cause less physical harm to their victims than the other categories of offenders and the very nature of the behaviour used to categorize the intimate offenders implies that they would be less likely to be reported, identified and convicted, because these grooming behaviours are used to avoid disclosure and conviction. Hence, it is likely that intimate offenders were under-represented in this prison sample. Figures show that eight of 10 sex abuse victims know their abuser (Stop it Now, 2003). In such cases, offenders have substantial interest in preventing disclosure, because in the event of disclosure the victim would be able to easily identify them as their abuser. This is supported by offenders’ accounts about the strategies they employed to victimize the children they sexually abused; fear of disclosure affected how and when they victimized their victims (Conte, Wolf & Smith, 1989). Aetiology of a motivation to abuse Before an individual begins to groom a child, some level of motivation to abuse a child needs to be present. Furthermore, adequate theories of sexual offending should be able to account for the phenomenon of sexual grooming. Until recently there have been three dominant theories of child sexual abuse, namely Finkelhor’s Pre-condition Model (1984); Marshall and Barbaree’s Integrated Theory (1990); and Hall and Hirschman’s Quadripartite Model (1992). In 2002, Ward and Siegert proposed a more comprehensive theory of child sexual abuse by “knitting together” the strengths of each of the above theories. They propose that there are five pathways to sexual offending against children; hence, the theory is called The Pathways Model. This review shall consider each of these only briefly, because Ward and colleagues have already provided in-depth reviews (see Ward, 2001, 2002; Ward & Hudson, 2001). Herein, more emphasis will be placed on how these theories relate to the phenomenon of sexual grooming. Marshall and Barbaree’s Integrated Theory Marshall and Barbaree’s (1990) Integrated Theory of the aetiology of sexual offending proposes that the presence of vulnerabilities, which develop as a result of adverse early developmental experiences, leave offenders unprepared to deal with the surge of hormones at puberty, and unable to understand the emotional world. As a resultant, offenders satisfy their emotional and sexual needs inappropriately in deviant ways. This theory suggests that sexual offending occurs as a consequence of an individual’s sex and aggression drives becoming fused, as these functions share the same structure in the brain. Ward and Siegert (2002) state that this need not be the case, as there are many functions that are close in proximity but that do not affect each other. Furthermore, this theory suggests that sexual offending would be aggressive. Therefore, it would seem that it does not account for the phenomenon of sexual grooming, because the process of sexual grooming is generally not aggressive in nature. DOJ-OGR-00005900

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Filename DOJ-OGR-00005900.jpg
File Size 890.9 KB
OCR Confidence 95.3%
Has Readable Text Yes
Text Length 3,630 characters
Indexed 2026-02-03 17:04:30.874187