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Extracted Text (OCR)
Case 1:20-cr-00330-PAE Document 452-1 Filed 11/12/21 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-00006825
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| Filename | DOJ-OGR-00006825.jpg |
| File Size | 890.4 KB |
| OCR Confidence | 95.3% |
| Has Readable Text | Yes |
| Text Length | 3,630 characters |
| Indexed | 2026-02-03 17:14:52.724640 |