Boiling Them Slowly
How Grooming Works.
Grooming. Is that a new term for you? For many it is. It sounds like something you get done to your pet… groomed. It sounds like page 55 in your employee handbook called “Personal Grooming.” It’s a little too soft of a word really for what it means when used to describe what a predator does to a victim.
One of my famous sayings around my house is “Boiling a Frog.” This is a country term for… let’s kill it slowly and it won’t even notice.
And really… that is just what grooming is.
Previously I wrote about my own experience of being groomed as a child. When I became a mentor to trafficking survivors, I had the TOTALLY skewed notion that all victims are groomed as I was. Slowly, softly, quietly, somewhat gently, and with very little violence.
When I first began sharing my story I was often asked…
Why didn’t you leave?
Why didn’t you tell someone? Weren’t you afraid?
Didn’t it hurt?
My answers in order are:
“Because I was a child under the care of a trusted adult, and I didn’t have a cell phone with Uber at the age of 7.”
“Because I didn’t have the language to say what was happening, because I was threatened that I would be blamed and made to believe this was my fault and not ONLY my fault by my idea.”.
“I was afraid, but it was not scary. If monsters acted like monsters, they could not groom children to do what they want to fulfill their sick needs.”
“There was pain and discomfort and I taught myself to disassociate and breath through it”.
Grooming is how predators boil a frog and I thought it looked the same for every victim, but I could not have been more wrong. Here are some words that can make me cringe and depending on the day, either my blood will boil or hot tears will descend from my eyes in floods.
Why did she run away from home?
What did she think would happen?
Why would she stay with a pimp?
She’s just asking for it if she goes back.
My only comfort when I hear these words is assuming good intent. I can only think that the person or persons saying these words just don’t know about grooming and Stockholm syndrome. This is typically when I launch into what I hope is a helpful discussion about all these “whys.”
She ran away because she’s in an unsafe environment or an environment she thinks will become unsafe because most have for her.
What she thought would happen is that she would find her own way, she would be free of pain, and she would be in control of her own life.
She stays with a pimp because he’s convinced her he’s all she has. Youths and adults who are exploited and trafficked tend to be lacking in family connections.
Imagine… a young girl or boy in a foster home being mistreated. They run away. Along their journey they “meet” a “really nice person” who offers to buy them a meal, maybe clothing, a place to live. But really what they’ve done is just walked into the web of a predator who was waiting for them to show up… there are very few coincidences in the predatory world of trafficking.
This person tells them things no one else has like:
you are beautiful
you are smart
you can make your own decisions
I am your family now
Family. It’s what they’ve been looking for and longing for all of their lives.
Slowly, things change. Relapsing is what it’s called. And relapsing in this case is no less of a relapse than relapsing back to heroin. And we would not say a person with a drug addiction deserves to overdose. The overdose is a symptom of the addiction. Going back to “the life” is a symptom of having no idea what to do outside of it, having extraordinarily low self-esteem, and almost no sense of self. The water is slowly warmed, and it is almost unnoticeable when it begins to boil.
The rising temperature of the water is most likely fueled by stress and pressure. Stress on the victim to earn more money and pressure from the pimp to be more compliant, and to prove loyalty. Further adding to the rising of temperature is the demand on the victim from the sex buyers. Possibly demand for services she is unwilling or reluctant to perform. As all this stress, pressure, and demand mount the water begins to boil. The boiling point can look something like this:
Excerpt from: Girls Like Us by Rachel Lloyd (referencing a boiling point with her pimp)
I guess my questions are:
Why is a pimp a pimp?
Why can he prey on this child with VERY few consequences?
Why are the sex buyers not blamed, jailed, lives ruined because they buy sex?
If pimps and buyers allow children back to “the life,” what are they asking for?
Grooming. It’s a slow process that starts out feeling like a warm, lovely bath. If done well it can even feel good as the temperature rises. It can feel like love. And that is how pimps and buyers are able to sell and buy sex roughly every 30 seconds creating a 150 billion dollar industry in the United States alone.
