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Understanding Child Sexual Grooming – Part 2: Short- & Long-Term Effects on the Child

In the first post of this three-part series, we defined what child sexual grooming is and is not, and explored how victims’ environments and families can be groomed by those who perpetrate sexual abuse. In this second post, we take a look at the following questions:

Short- and Long-Term Effects of Grooming

The trauma of child sexual grooming extends far beyond childhood. Deeply embedded feelings of shame and low self-worth become the lens through which adult survivors view themselves and their relationships. Mental health professionals must recognize that the grooming process doesn’t just facilitate abuse—it rewrites children’s fundamental understanding of themselves in ways that influence their adult lives decades later. Here are five such effects described in greater detail in Child Sexual Grooming:

  • Traumatic Sexualization: Children who experience grooming often grow into adults with complex issues around sex and sexuality. These difficulties can affect all areas of intimacy, particularly when combined with the trust and vulnerability issues that stem from the original abuse experience.
  • Powerlessness: Many survivors develop post-traumatic stress disorder, spending years searching for that lost feeling of security and perceiving danger in everyday situations—behind doors, in dark spaces, or in routine interactions. This overwhelming sense of threat can manifest as panic attacks, anxiety disorders, phobias, and recurring nightmares.
  • Stigmatization: The grooming process also leads children who have experienced the resulting sexual harm to develop a deep sense of intrinsic “badness,” as well as guilt and shame about themselves. Many see themselves as “damaged” in some fundamental way. These feelings of stigmatization can lead to profound isolation in adulthood, where survivors feel alone and unworthy of love or positive experiences. The negative messages internalized during childhood can become entrenched beliefs that require specific therapeutic attention.
  • Cognitive Distortions: Sexual grooming in a person’s childhood can make it difficult for the person to distinguish between “safe” and “unsafe” people. Without a reliable internal compass for assessing others’ intentions, they may view all people through a binary lens, as either completely trustworthy or completely dangerous. This “all or nothing” thinking pattern is common among trauma survivors and can make healthy relationship formation challenging.
  • Shame and Self-Blame: Many people who experienced sexual abuse in their childhood carry feelings of being dirty, disgusting, or fundamentally flawed. As one survivor described, perpetrators often plant messages early: “You are responsible. It’s you doing this, not me. You’re asking for this, you like this, don’t you?” These toxic messages about responsibility can persist throughout their life, creating a pattern of blaming themselves for various difficulties they encounter.
Intervention Strategies and Goals

Chapter 6 of Pruitt and Wolf’s book provides an overview of the therapeutic techniques shown to be helpful with clients who have experienced child sexual grooming and abuse. Some of these, such as EMDR, Exposure therapy, and Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavior Therapy (TF-CBT) are evidence-based, while others, such as art, music, dance, and other “expressive” therapies, and lesser-known ones such as the positive youth development approach, are evidence-informed strategies that therapists can learn more about in these pages.

Whichever treatment strategy therapists decide to use for these clients, Pruitt and Wolf reveal that they all share similar worthwhile goals. Some of these are:

A circular diagram illustrating three therapeutic goals for child sexual abuse survivors: Counter Boundary Violations, Develop Healthy Connections, and Contend with Difficult Conversations. Each goal is linked with icons and short descriptions.
  • Countering Boundary Violations: When children experience sexual abuse, their understanding of healthy boundaries becomes distorted across sexual, physical, emotional, and relational areas of their lives. For mental health professionals working with survivors, helping clients rebuild boundary awareness becomes central to treatment—modeling appropriate limits, teaching the difference between autonomy and coercion, and helping survivors establish personal boundaries without guilt.
  • Developing Healthy Connections: Betrayal is a core component of child sexual grooming. The therapeutic relationship, therefore, must model healthy connections by providing survivors with a corrective experience of trustworthy relationships built on trust and transparency.
  • Contending with Difficult Conversations: Those who sexually groom children often silence victims by making them doubt their own thoughts and needs. Supporting survivors in therapy means helping them to not run away from difficult conversations, but rather to recognize the value of these conversations and learn how to have them by conveying belief in their worth. Treatment should focus on helping survivors move from interpreting discomfort as a threat to seeing it as an opportunity for personal and relational growth, restoring their confidence in their own voice and judgment.
Impact on Families

Sexual grooming creates ripple effects that touch every corner of a family’s life. When the manipulation and exploitation finally surface, family members often experience their own trauma responses—from self-blame and anger to confusion about relationships they once trusted. Understanding this family-wide impact helps professionals develop treatment approaches that address not only the primary victim’s needs but also the healing required for the entire family system.

Before treatment can begin, the first task facing the therapist is to obtain a complete understanding of what happened not only to the child directly affected by the abuse but to those in the victim’s family who were groomed by the perpetrator to ignore what was happening. Pruitt and Wolf discuss several tools that can help with this difficult process, including the Sex Offender Grooming Assessment (SOGA), developed by the authors themselves through their extensive research, as well as the Sexual Grooming Scale-Victim Version tool. SOGA uses behaviorally specific questions rather than general categorical questions about grooming, which research has shown yields more reliable results when working with those who have sexually offended. This approach provides clarity and precision when identifying potential grooming scenarios. Additional assessment tools are described, along with an extensive reference list and links to these tools.

Understanding grooming’s long-term impact is critical for survivors and the families and professionals who walk alongside them. Healing requires both targeted strategies and a deep awareness of how child sexual grooming and abuse reshape lives. In the final post of this series, we’ll explore how working with the family and the community, as well as educating the public, can reduce the risk of grooming before it begins.

If you’re interested in learning more about child sexual grooming, we believe you’ll find the publication Child Sexual Grooming: Untangling Myth from Reality to Prevent the Harm of Child Sexual Abuse by Doyle Pruitt and Molly Wolf extremely helpful, and we also have the webinars below.

Resources from Safer Society