Retrospective Perceptions of Grooming in Same-Sex versus Opposite-Sex Child Sexual Abuse

ABSTRACT

Research on child sexual abuse (CSA) has predominantly focused on opposite-sex (e.g., male adult-female child) adult-child pairs, neglecting same-sex (e.g., male adult-male child) adult-child pairs. Grooming behaviors are an early indicator of CSA and while it is important to recognize grooming to prevent abuse, research has shown that detecting these behaviors is a difficult task. Despite this difficulty, people retrospectively overestimate their ability to recognize abuse once it is clear that abuse has occurred. The current study investigated how outcome information (abuse did or did not occur) and the sex of the adult-child pair influenced perceptions of adult-child interactions. Participants evaluated vignettes depicting grooming and non-grooming behaviors in same-sex and opposite-sex adult-child conditions. Participants who were told CSA occurred provided higher likelihood ratings that abuse occurred than participants who were not given information about the abuse. There was some evidence that gender pairings influenced retrospective perceptions of these interactions.

KEYWORDS:

• Child maltreatment
• sexual grooming behaviors
• child molester
• sex offenses
• hindsight bias

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Laura Pazos and Nicholas Simons for their help with stimulus creation and assistance with data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical standards and informed consent

All procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation [institutional and national] and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Kayla D. Spenard

Kayla D. Spenard is a graduate student in the Clinical Psychology, Ph.D. program at Sam Houston State University. Her research primarily focuses on perceptions of grooming behaviors in child sexual abuse and how to recognize and prevent future abuse.

Daniella K. Cash

Daniella K. Cash is an Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University. Her research examines how social and cognitive psychology interact within the legal system across topics such as eyewitness identification, jury decision-making, deception detection, and the detection of grooming behaviors.