tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/grooming-22506/articlesGrooming – The Conversation2023-09-27T16:30:53Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2140992023-09-27T16:30:53Z2023-09-27T16:30:53ZChanging the age of consent is not the solution to protecting young people from unhealthy relationships with adults<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/550056/original/file-20230925-29-mfdtt5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C6240%2C4154&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/teenage-girl-around-whom-there-darkness-2165240799">Pandagolik1/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Comedian and actor Russell Brand has been accused of abuse, including sexual assault and rape, by four women. <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/russell-brand-rape-sexual-assault-abuse-allegations-investigation-v5hxdlmb6">The allegations</a> – <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psFiwFI_VQo&ab_channel=Reuters">which Brand denies</a> – include the sexual assault of a woman who says she was in a relationship with Brand when she was 16 and he was in his 30s. </p>
<p>The alleged victim, known as Alice, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/sep/20/calls-grow-to-reassess-age-of-consent-laws-after-russell-brand-allegations">has suggested</a> that a discussion should take place around changing the age of consent to protect young people from older adults. One option, which she raises, is that a staggered approach would allow sexual relationships between people aged 16-18 but would prohibit older adults from having sex with young people in this age group. </p>
<p>This, on face value, appears to be an approach that might work – and it’s incredibly important that we have these conversations about how to protect young people. But unfortunately, changing the age of consent alone may be too simplistic a solution for a complex problem.</p>
<h2>What the law says</h2>
<p>The current <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/contents">age of consent</a> dates back to 1885, when it was <a href="https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/relationships/overview/sexualbehaviour19thcentury/#:%7E:text=A%20press%20campaign%20on%20the,of%20young%20women%20from%20vice">raised to 16 from 13</a> after a campaign by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (now the NSPCC). The law states that anyone who is 16 or over can take part in legal sexual activity – mutual masturbation, oral sex and penetrative sex. The legal age of consent for sex between men was lowered from 18 to 16 in 2000 via the <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/44/notes#:%7E:text=This%20reduction%20is%20from%2018,and%2017%20in%20Northern%20Ireland.">Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act</a>.</p>
<p>However, there are <a href="https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/child-protection-system/children-the-law#:%7E:text=Additional%20protection%20up%20to%20the,in%20line%20with%20safeguarding%20procedures.">other legal protections</a> in place for young people aged under 18. Additional legislation states that it is illegal to photograph or video under 18s taking part in sexual activity, pay for sex from them, or take part in sexual activity with them if in a position of trust or a member of their family. </p>
<p>Cases of <a href="https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/rape-and-sexual-offences-chapter-6-consent">child sexual exploitation</a> also consider a child to be someone aged under 18. In some cases, a young person over the age of 16 may be considered to <a href="https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/rape-and-sexual-offences-chapter-6-consent">not have been able</a> to give consent. </p>
<p>But despite the presence of these protective elements in law for those under the age of 18, sexual abuse of young people is still widespread. What’s more, in cases of sexual exploitation, often complex and well-planned grooming has taken place beforehand, making it hard for the young person to realise that they are being exploited. A change in the age of consent would not stop this kind of grooming happening to young people under 18. It simply won’t work.</p>
<h2>Understanding healthy behaviour</h2>
<p>Raising the age of consent also runs the risk of asserting more control over the bodies of young people and removing their agency. If, as has been suggested, sexual relationships between people aged 16-18 is permissible, but is not allowed between this age group and older adults, young people having sex may run into issues when the older teen in a relationship turns 19. This approach risks criminalising healthy sexual behaviour. </p>
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<img alt="Girl talking to her mother" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/550237/original/file-20230926-23-vnghh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/550237/original/file-20230926-23-vnghh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/550237/original/file-20230926-23-vnghh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/550237/original/file-20230926-23-vnghh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/550237/original/file-20230926-23-vnghh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/550237/original/file-20230926-23-vnghh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/550237/original/file-20230926-23-vnghh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Young people should be able to talk about sex and relationships without fear of shame.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/beautiful-mother-her-cute-teenage-daughter-639567613">Olimpik/Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>There are a number of steps that certainly should be taken to help young people. One is good <a href="https://theconversation.com/sex-education-review-controversial-proposals-risk-failing-young-people-202182">relationships and sex education</a> that equips young people with the knowledge to better recognise an abusive or potentially abusive scenario – when they are being taken advantage of or are being put in an unsafe situation. </p>
<p>This education should include <a href="https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-social-sciences/social-policy/publications/a-students-guide-to-what-you-dont-know.pdf">input from young people</a>: we need to listen to them and the solutions that they suggest as they are the experts on what they need.</p>
<p>Another is to create environments – at schools, at home, at youth clubs and other places – where young people can talk about relationships and sex without shame. Speaking out about abuse is notoriously difficult for young people because they worry they will be judged or that speaking to someone will lead to negative consequences. Safe spaces for these conversations need to be created. </p>
<p>The allegations against Brand have brought societal issues to the forefront that have been in the background for many years. This, in itself, is not a bad thing. We need to consider why toxic behaviour and imbalanced relationships go ignored and unnoticed in society. It is useful to remember that candid and open conversations about how to protect young people from abuses, grooming and exploitation can only be a good thing.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214099/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sophie King-Hill receives funding from ESRC. </span></em></p>A staggered age of consent has been suggested, which would make it illegal for adults to have sex with under-18s.Sophie King-Hill, Associate Professor at the Health Services Management Centre, University of BirminghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1910742022-09-26T20:03:07Z2022-09-26T20:03:07Z‘There is great strength in vulnerability’: Grace Tame’s surprising, irreverent memoir has a message of hope<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486421/original/file-20220926-70338-1bz36l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=26%2C301%2C4446%2C6411&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Kishna Jensen</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Grace Tame’s The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner shifts expectations. It’s not a minute-to-minute backstage account of the 12 months Tame spent as Australian of the Year, or the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/aug/12/tasmanian-survivor-of-sexual-assault-wins-the-right-to-tell-her-story">#LetHerSpeak campaign</a> or the March4Justice.</p>
<p>It’s not wholly focused on her struggles with hostile elements in the commercial media or the former prime minister she calls “Scott” – which is only democratic after all, given “Scott” invariably called her “Grace”.</p>
<p>The book presents a horrifying account of being groomed and sexually abused as a 15-year-old by her 58-year-old schoolteacher, but it’s also not entirely taken up with “that part of my story that has been magnified and scrutinised publicly”. </p>
<p>What the book reveals is that while such events are “undoubtedly traumatic” they haven’t “defined” her “unfinished experience of life”. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485796/original/file-20220921-27-f9dqwu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485796/original/file-20220921-27-f9dqwu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/485796/original/file-20220921-27-f9dqwu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485796/original/file-20220921-27-f9dqwu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485796/original/file-20220921-27-f9dqwu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485796/original/file-20220921-27-f9dqwu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485796/original/file-20220921-27-f9dqwu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/485796/original/file-20220921-27-f9dqwu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>And this is the important message of hope it gives to survivors of child sexual abuse. Until very recently, this crime was diminished or largely ignored by a culture that has historically <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Child-Sexual-Abuse-Moral-Panic-or-State-of-Denial/Pilgrim/p/book/9781138578371">labelled it a myth or moral panic</a>, thereby enabling abusers. Meanwhile, as Tame writes, “they [abusers] deny, they attack, and they cry victim, while attempting to cast [victims] as the offenders”. </p>
<p>“Child abusers groom through isolation, fear and shame,” writes Tame. “Through the manipulation of our entire society. All of us, to some extent, have been groomed.”</p>
<p>Ahead of publication, Tame deleted her Twitter account. “I am aware this book will draw varying responses,” she writes, “including brutal backlash”. Pre-emptively responding to trolls and detractors, Tame says that she doesn’t “work for critics” but for “the people who find themselves in our words” and are “empowered by them”. </p>
<p>Instead, the book shares the larger story of Tame’s life in the hope that “my being vulnerable will permit the vulnerability of another”. </p>
<h2>Mining for diamonds as an attitude to life</h2>
<p>Unexpectedly, the memoir opens with the story of a man called Jorge – aged “67 or 76” – who Grace met in a ramshackle share house in Portugal at the age of 19. Jorge was “asset poor” but “story rich”. He had led “nine lives” in “seven different languages”, as a soccer player, a musician, a springboard diver, the former husband of a Jewish-American heiress and – like the figure in the book’s title – a diamond miner in Brazil. All that remained of these great adventures was an “overstuffed” chihuahua called Pirate and books of photographs. </p>
<p>An older, “healthily jaded” Tame suspects the chameleon-like Jorge was probably a con artist but writes that this “layer of delicious irony” merely served to confirm in her mind the things Jorge taught her that had “genuine value” – that life is essentially about people, experiences, authenticity, and connection. “Raw. Real. Uncut.” </p>
<p>Of course, it’s not Jorge but Tame herself who is the diamond miner in the book’s title. In this extended motif, diamond mining expresses an attitude to life. </p>
<p>“Some things in life are ultimately what we make of them,” writes Tame, “… there are things we can and cannot control” but “our power resides in how we respond to each”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486413/original/file-20220926-70338-t1qt1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C33%2C5540%2C3110&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486413/original/file-20220926-70338-t1qt1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C33%2C5540%2C3110&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486413/original/file-20220926-70338-t1qt1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486413/original/file-20220926-70338-t1qt1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486413/original/file-20220926-70338-t1qt1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486413/original/file-20220926-70338-t1qt1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486413/original/file-20220926-70338-t1qt1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486413/original/file-20220926-70338-t1qt1j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Grace Tame poses for a photograph at an International Women’s Day breakfast in Sydney in March.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bianca de Marchi/AAP</span></span>
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<p>Inevitably, this sense of optimism is tempered with a warning. The “ninth life” of a cat is the point at which the creature becomes vulnerable.</p>
<p>For feminists of my own generation, who were taught that you had to be stronger, and tougher, and smarter just to get by, the book surprisingly reveals that “there is great strength in vulnerability”. Being vulnerable, says Tame, is about remaining open to life.</p>
<p>Tame writes about her aunts and cousins, about her parents’ divorce, her fight with anorexia, her neurodiversity, and the six years she spent living in the United States, where she moved aged 18. There’s her brief marriage to former Hollywood child star Spencer Breslin in 2017, with an Elvis-themed wedding, her friendship with actor John Cleese and his daughter Camilla, her work as an illustrator and indeed her brief stint working on a marijuana farm. </p>
<p>She writes about partying in California, hanging out in New York, and experimenting with drugs, which she says she no longer does. She has strong views on everything from the politics of Austrian novelist and playwright Peter Handke to her visit to the house of Frida Kahlo’s husband Diego Rivera in Guanajuato, Mexico.</p>
<p>The book is loosely chronological, but mostly follows the rhythms and shapes of Tame’s thoughts. It is held together by a strong, irreverent, irrepressible voice, and is enclosed within a cover illustration that she drew herself.</p>
<h2>Growing up neurodiverse</h2>
<p>Tame was born in 1994, in Rokeby, a working-class suburb of Hobart, growing up in the same street as her aunts, cousins and grandparents, surrounded by a boisterous crowd of relatives who taught her, “Solidarity. And lots of love.” </p>
<p>She describes childhood days spent “climbing trees, jumping fences” and running in and out of cousin’s houses.</p>
<p>But she also recollects her childhood as a time of instability, being carted back and forth between the houses of two amicably divorced parents, which was, she says in retrospect, too much for a neurodiverse child. </p>
<p>“My mind sees time through the glass door of a front-loading washing machine on a never-ending spin cycle,” she writes. “I can pull out specific memories that look as clean as yesterday because at any given moment everything is churning at high speed in colour”. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486419/original/file-20220926-23337-xapq2z.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486419/original/file-20220926-23337-xapq2z.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486419/original/file-20220926-23337-xapq2z.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486419/original/file-20220926-23337-xapq2z.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486419/original/file-20220926-23337-xapq2z.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486419/original/file-20220926-23337-xapq2z.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486419/original/file-20220926-23337-xapq2z.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486419/original/file-20220926-23337-xapq2z.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Tame writes that she learnt survival strategies as an autistic woman.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kishna Jensen</span></span>
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<p>She quickly learnt “mimicking and masking”, the “survival strategies” of autistic women. Much later, she would find out that neurodiversity can also be a strength. Tame calls herself “the autistic artist who finds everyday socialising harder than calculus, but walking onto a stage as easy as kindergarten maths”. </p>
<p>She is at pains to point out that although she has “seen some strife” – unlike the former prime minister’s characterisation of her as person who has had “<a href="https://7news.com.au/politics/pm-had-no-issue-with-grace-tame-meeting-c-5473752">a terrible life</a>” – “on the whole” her life has been mostly “wonderful”. </p>
<h2>Abuse</h2>
<p>But in the background was “our family’s sixth spidery sense”, largely directed at divining the presence of huntsmen, which Tame learnt to carry out of the house “by the leg”. Aptly, this description foreshadows her encounter with the “rock spider” Nicolaas Bester, the serial sex offender lurking in the private Anglican girls’ school for which Tame’s mother, aspiring to a better education for her daughter, worked hard to pay the fees. </p>
<p>Bester began preying on Tame at age 15 in “the very same year my mental health began to decline”. The grooming started in the classroom with Bester telling what he claimed were jokes. Once, about a student “obsessed with tubular objects”. At another time, about <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/rage-saved-my-life-in-the-end-grace-tame-on-not-backing-down-20220719-p5b2s7.html?collection=p5biok">a former student</a> who he claimed was “as easy as a McDonald’s drive-through”.</p>
<p>Through “innocent, permissive laughter” students became acquainted with a “supposedly harmless man”. His “recycled racy comments were just part of his schtick, and they didn’t alarm our young inexperienced minds in the same way they might have adults”. </p>
<p>Nobody suspected there was something fundamentally wrong in all this, alleging “he pushed the boundaries, that was all”.</p>
<p>Bester soon began following Tame about, attempting to gain access by pretending to be her uncle at a medical facility where Tame was being treated, also turning up at the kiosk where she had a part-time job.</p>
<p>Tame’s parents had two consecutive meetings with the school, asking them to put an end to Bester’s “inappropriate behaviour”. But Bester “coolly laid the groundwork for a narrative in which I was the supposed aggressor, and mentally ill one that he felt ‘sorry for’.” And the school, she writes, believed him. “This would, in fact, be his line of defence in court.” </p>
<p>The police statement given by the school principal was, she argues, “perversely, almost as damning of the school as it was of him”. </p>
<p>It revealed that “despite regular and consistent complaints from students, staff, parents and visitors to the institution” the school “allowed him to continue working”. </p>
<p>Police found “videos of adults raping children on his computer”. </p>
<p>Tame writes that after she disclosed the sexual abuse by Bester, the school sent her mother a bill for outstanding fees.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/not-a-relationship-why-the-legal-language-of-child-abuse-needs-to-change-184453">Not a 'relationship': why the legal language of child abuse needs to change</a>
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<p>Bester was sentenced to <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-01-12/nicolaas-bester-sentenced-over-social-media-comments-child-abuse/7083524">two years and 10 months in jail in 2011</a> for the abuse of Tame. Yet, writes Tame, he was surrounded by apologists. His church group invited him back to play the organ as soon as he was released. On social media, or simply standing on the street outside a nightclub, Tame was surrounded by a barrage of victim-blaming abuse. </p>
<h2>Advocacy and the media</h2>
<p>Over time, the media narrative around child sexual abuse has begun to shift, due to the public advocacy of countless men and women, including Tame. But the change is inconsistent and uneven. </p>
<p>In 2018, Tame teamed up with Nina Funnell, a Walkley Award winning freelance journalist and sexual assault survivor who began the #LetHerSpeak campaign in partnership with Marque Lawyers and End Rape On Campus Australia. The campaign was aimed at overturning the gag clauses in Tasmanian and Northern Territory law. In 2019, Tame won a supreme court exemption to tell her harrowing story of being groomed by Bester.</p>
<p>But advocacy takes its toll, she writes, in “the re-traumatisation that results from reliving the abuse.” It is predicated on an incessant “unpacking and processing”, with the reality of abuse “playing on a loop”. </p>
<p>All the while Tame says she has been called everything from a “feminist hero of the fourth wave” to a “man-hater” and a “transgender child abuser”. </p>
<p>The brief accounts Tame gives of her interactions with commercial television producers and journalists (excluding Funnell) are far from flattering to the media. Though she looks strong, the media furore frequently left her “shaking”. </p>
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<p>I’d never had such intense panic attacks, coloured by flashbacks cut with criticisms so violent that all I could hope to do was knock myself out in the hopes of knocking them out of me. </p>
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<p>And there were, consequently, missed opportunities. The 2021 National Press Club address “in which I talked about how the media retraumatises survivors by not listening closely to the boundaries they set” was “overshadowed that day by a confected feud” between Tame and the former prime minister “that then spiralled and became an ongoing convenient media distraction used to dilute the work I did.” </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/making-change-making-history-making-noise-brittany-higgins-and-grace-tame-at-the-national-press-club-176252">Making change, making history, making noise: Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame at the National Press Club</a>
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<p>Other media encounters are slammed as “trauma pornography in disguise” and the “unethical, disingenuous gathering of vulnerable people for the purpose of entertainment”. </p>
<p>Towards the end of the book Tame recounts the frenzied criticism generated by the so called “side-eye” moment, where she was photographed with then PM Morrison at this year’s morning tea for Australian of the Year recipients. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486406/original/file-20220926-25245-x9h30l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486406/original/file-20220926-25245-x9h30l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/486406/original/file-20220926-25245-x9h30l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486406/original/file-20220926-25245-x9h30l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486406/original/file-20220926-25245-x9h30l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486406/original/file-20220926-25245-x9h30l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486406/original/file-20220926-25245-x9h30l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/486406/original/file-20220926-25245-x9h30l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Prime Minister Scott Morrison and 2021 Australian of the Year Grace Tame during a morning tea for state and territory recipients in the 2022 Australian of the Year Awards at The Lodge in Canberra, Tuesday, January 25, 2022.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mick Tsikas/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the wake of these photographs, she writes, her partner Max Heerey was “sent a barrage of text messages” including repeated messages from one journalist asking whether her “autism” had “something to do with” her frosty exchange with Morrison and if “I frowned because I was autistic”. </p>
<p>At this point, Max informed the journalist that their questions were ableist and “incredibly offensive”. </p>
<p>“I have no idea if it’s offensive or true or what but just wanted to ask as it’s a discussion being raised,” the journalist shot back, followed by a screenshot sampling an article citing autistic “so-called ‘social-deficits’”.</p>
<p>“I said please don’t contact me again. This is all incredibly offensive,” Max repeated. “Grace is autistic but not stupid”. </p>
<p>But the texts kept coming.</p>
<p>Tame writes,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I didn’t frown at the Prime Minister because I can’t control my face, because I’m disabled, because I have some kind of deficit, or because I need help. I didn’t frown at him because, in his words, ‘I’ve had a terrible life’’". </p>
<p>I frowned at Scott Morrison deliberately because, in my opinion, he has done and assisted in objectively terrible things.“ </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Without specifying what those things are, Tame writes, "No matter what your politics are, the harm that was done under his government was … not limited to survivors of domestic and sexual violence”.</p>
<p>To have “smiled at him” would have been a lie. </p>
<p>In place of confected outrage, which is “disturbingly skewed”, this memoir attempts to “bridge gaps in understanding” and “ignite a conversation”. It’s worth the “risk and pain”, Tame writes, because “evil thrives in silence”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191074/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Camilla Nelson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>From partying in California to activism in Australia, Grace Tame refuses to be defined by past traumatic events. The voice of her memoir, writes Camilla Nelson, is irrepressible.Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame AustraliaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1802482022-06-10T03:45:08Z2022-06-10T03:45:08ZVirtual child sexual abuse material depicts fictitious children – but can be used to disguise real abuse<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/455487/original/file-20220331-19-eceshd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> </figcaption></figure><p>Child sexual abuse material (previously known as child pornography) can be a confronting and uncomfortable topic.</p>
<p>Child sexual abuse material specifically refers to the possession, viewing, sharing, and creation of images or videos containing sexual or offensive material involving children.</p>
<p>But less publicised is another form of child sexual abuse material: virtual child sexual abuse material (VCSAM).</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/whats-in-a-name-online-child-abuse-material-is-not-pornography-45840">What's in a name? Online child abuse material is not 'pornography'</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>What’s virtual child sexual abuse material (VCSAM)?</h2>
<p>VCSAM is sexual content depicting fictitious children in formats such as <a href="https://theconversation.com/ai-can-now-create-fake-porn-making-revenge-porn-even-more-complicated-92267">text, drawings, deepfakes</a>, or <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1525/srsp.2007.4.1.93">computer-generated graphics</a>. It’s also known as fictional child pornography, pseudo pornography, or fantasy images.</p>
<p>Recent technological advancements mean fictitious children can now be <a href="https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/jltp2008&div=9&id=&page=">virtually indistinguishable</a> from real children in child sexual abuse material.</p>
<p>Some offenders create VCSAM through a morphing technique which uses technology to <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12119-021-09820-1">transform real images</a> into exploitative ones. </p>
<p>A non-sexual image of a real child could be <a href="https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/wlsj21&div=6&id=&page=">visually altered</a> to include sexual content. For example a child holding a toy altered to depict the child holding adult genitals.</p>
<p>Morphing can also happen in the reverse, where an <a href="https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/jltp2008&div=9&id=&page=">image of an adult is morphed</a> to look like a child – for example adult breasts are altered to look prepubescent.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A darkened picture of a hooded man sitting alone at a laptop." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464406/original/file-20220520-18-gkluh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464406/original/file-20220520-18-gkluh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464406/original/file-20220520-18-gkluh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464406/original/file-20220520-18-gkluh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464406/original/file-20220520-18-gkluh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464406/original/file-20220520-18-gkluh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/464406/original/file-20220520-18-gkluh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=511&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Offenders can manipulate both real and fictitious images to produce VCSAM.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Williams RUS/Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Another type of VCSAM includes <a href="https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/jltp2008&div=9&id=&page=">photo-editing multiple images</a> to create a final, more realistic airbrushed image.</p>
<p>But what might be most troubling about VCSAM is it may still feature images and videos of real children being sexually abused. </p>
<p>In fact, certain software can be used to make images and videos of real <a href="https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20091207110841/http:/www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/cons-2007-depiction-sex-abuse">victims look like “fictional” drawings or cartoons</a>. </p>
<p>In this way, this allows offenders to effectively <a href="https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20091207110841/http:/www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/cons-2007-depiction-sex-abuse">disguise a real act of child sexual abuse</a>, potentially preventing law enforcement from bringing victims to safety. </p>
<p>It may also enable repeat offenders to avoid detection. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-worlds-biggest-dark-web-platform-spreads-millions-of-items-of-child-sex-abuse-material-and-why-its-hard-to-stop-167107">How the world's biggest dark web platform spreads millions of items of child sex abuse material — and why it's hard to stop</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Why do some people engage with VCSAM?</h2>
<p>There’s limited evidence revealing why some people might engage with VCSAM.</p>
<p>To learn more about this offending group, <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12119-021-09820-1">we recently investigated the possible psychological basis</a> for people who engage with such material.</p>
<p>We discovered <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12119-021-09820-1">several potential reasons</a> why offenders might use VCSAM.</p>
<p>Some used it for relationship-building.</p>
<p>Despite the diverse offending group, some offenders who use child sexual abuse material have been found to have <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10683160701340577?casa_token=s36qCADnsJgAAAAA%3AGuta6CBYlJPYJXoRRMzRlDRZhigjmTAlHnw2d5SjqTrbZqb0k9LnwEv8KewEdL5W06Pv9SmYOK1L">limited intimate relationships</a> and <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13552600701365654?casa_token=xjmhrRjzFvMAAAAA%3AUIyUQ4hjyIL_3rZA_vaofD29VWjIe1Ps9O5DEFTv9QU-xsepi4VHwLYkX6TN6_18s1_azceS2Lts">heightened loneliness</a>. </p>
<p>Online communities of other deviant but like-minded people may therefore provide offenders with a greater <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10896-008-9219-y">sense of belonging, social validation, and support</a>. Such interactions may also, in turn, serve as positive reinforcement for their criminal behaviour.</p>
<p>Others may use this material to achieve sexual arousal. </p>
<p>It could be argued the material may also <a href="https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20091207110841/http:/www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/cons-2007-depiction-sex-abuse">normalise</a> the sexualisation of children. </p>
<p>In fact, professionals in child welfare and law enforcement seem to share the concern that VCSAM may <a href="https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20091207110841/http:/www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/cons-2007-depiction-sex-abuse">“fuel the abuse” of children</a> by framing the offenders’ criminal behaviour as acceptable. </p>
<p>Sometimes the material is used for “grooming”.</p>
<p>Adult offenders may show child sexual abuse material to children, <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/hojo.12006?casa_token=hYX5Pr8X04kAAAAA%3AHHvgg1mfu7eAuyC2Roh65cAzfVXhpn6RfnC4-WR2XRXD3XCNftR42hVg7yN25AzvsRj7s5A-74KfbQ">breaking down the child’s inhibitions</a> to <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marie-Eneman/publication/324951511_The_New_Face_of_Child_Pornography/links/5caf3c90299bf120975de200/The-New-Face-of-Child-Pornography.pdf">falsely normalise</a> the abusive act being depicted. </p>
<p>This is one form of grooming – that is, <a href="https://www.justice.vic.gov.au/safer-communities/protecting-children-and-families/grooming-offence#:%7E:text=Grooming%20is%20now%20a%20criminal,sexual%20activity%20with%20a%20child.">predatory conduct</a> aimed to facilitate later sexual activity with a child.</p>
<p>Such material can also be <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/hojo.12006?casa_token=hYX5Pr8X04kAAAAA%3AHHvgg1mfu7eAuyC2Roh65cAzfVXhpn6RfnC4-WR2XRXD3XCNftR42hVg7yN25AzvsRj7s5A-74KfbQ">used to teach children</a> how to engage in sexual activities. </p>
<p>For example, offenders may use VCSAM to show children material depicting young – and, most alarmingly, happy – <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12119-021-09820-1">cartoon characters engaging in sexual activities</a>.</p>
<h2>An urgent cause for concern</h2>
<p>Clearly, VCSAM is incredibly harmful. </p>
<p>It can be used to <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13218719.2015.1042419">disguise the abuse</a> of real children, as a gateway to “<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lauren-Shapiro-7/publication/321137227_Child_Sex_Dolls_and_Robots_More_Than_Just_an_Uncanny_Valley/links/5a3062850f7e9b0d50f8e28e/Child-Sex-Dolls-and-Robots-More-Than-Just-an-Uncanny-Valley.pdf">contact offending</a>” against children (meaning abusing them in real life), and as a <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01418030412331297065">grooming</a> technique. </p>
<p>Child welfare and law enforcement officials have sounded the alarm about the increasing creation and distribution of VCSAM for over a decade. </p>
<p>And it seems this problem will only escalate with the development of <a href="https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20091207110841/http:/www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/cons-2007-depiction-sex-abuse">increasingly sophisticated software</a> and digital technologies.</p>
<p>So while VCSAM remains illegal and offenders are frequently prosecuted, detecting – and ultimately preventing – these often obscure acts of abuse remains a challenge. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/it-takes-a-village-law-reform-cant-be-the-only-response-to-online-child-abuse-material-60620">It takes a village: law reform can't be the only response to online child abuse material</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/180248/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Recent technological advancements mean fictitious children can now be almost indistinguishable from real children in child sexual abuse material.Larissa Christensen, Senior Lecturer in Criminology & Justice | Co-leader of the Sexual Violence Research and Prevention Unit (SVRPU), University of the Sunshine CoastAshley Pearson, Lecturer in Law, University of the Sunshine CoastDominique Moritz, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of the Sunshine CoastLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1815732022-05-16T13:55:26Z2022-05-16T13:55:26ZGrooming: an expert explains what it is and how to identify it<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462766/original/file-20220512-14-7yvfj3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C6%2C4196%2C2984&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/silhouette-mother-daughter-holding-hands-sunset-483950449">Nadya Eugene / Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The word “grooming” has become synonymous with sexual abuse of children. High-profile cases such as the allegations by cyclist <a href="https://www.menshealth.com/uk/mental-strength/a39726623/bradley-wiggins-mens-health-alastair-campbell/">Bradley Wiggins</a> have raised public awareness of how grooming can go unnoticed. To stop grooming before it takes place, we have to fully understand what it is and how it happens – a difficult task for such a complex and wide-ranging concept.</p>
<p>According to <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0886260517742046?casa_token=1-2kbtOeJdYAAAAA:KFq74B8XY-FOvd7vCxLYki-Cv84swUt3E4LmWDmCyHzdKIyCP2TTNAnDRUdrBat-z0sEg9G2ESSNEg">ex-FBI agent Ken Lanning</a>, the term “grooming” originated in the 1980s during a series of investigations into sex crimes against children in the US.</p>
<p>Early investigations uncovered patterns of behaviour and specific techniques used by predators to gain access to and the compliance of victims. These early conclusions brought to life the concept of grooming as a non-violent technique used by sexual predators who were not strangers, but known to their victims. </p>
<p>Groomers placed themselves in roles that allowed them access to children, such as club leaders, carers and teachers. Investigators found that the grooming process involved “normal” adult-child interactions, such as playing games, buying gifts and trips to the park (which isolated victims). On the surface, these behaviours would not necessarily flag any concerns. </p>
<p>Another finding was that offenders take a lot of time to develop relationships, learning about their victim’s vulnerabilities, likes and interests. They use this knowledge to gain and maintain control and trust, and then slowly introduce sexual content and physical contact. Readers might be shocked to think that a person can be repeatedly sexually abused without the use, or threat, of violence. But as Lanning wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Many of the most persistent and prolific (and therefore dangerous) sex offenders primarily groom and seduce their child victims and rarely use violence.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Grooming creates long-lasting harms while preventing the likelihood of disclosure. Victims are often manipulated to <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01639625.2021.1941427?journalCode=udbh20#:%7E:text=ABSTRACT-,ABSTRACT,and%20summarizes%20this%20complex%20process">“acquiesce” to the abuse</a>. </p>
<p>Many grooming victims report feelings of shame or guilt about complying, which <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/childsexualabuseinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2019">stopped them from disclosing</a>. In contrast, adult victims of offences that do not involve grooming (which are more likely to be committed by strangers) do not report the same levels of <a href="https://www.whealth.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Raped-by-a-Partner-A-Research-Report.pdf">shame or responsibility</a>.</p>
<h2>Different forms of grooming</h2>
<p>Grooming can be sexual, romantic, financial or for criminal or terrorism purposes, and can target both children and adults. The common aspect is that a perpetrator manipulates a victim by building trust and rapport. The key to grooming is a power dynamic within the relationship: age, gender, physical strength, economic status or another factor. </p>
<p>Technology has allowed groomers to identify and target victims in new ways. Predators use threatening models of coercion and grooming in which they <a href="https://www.europol.europa.eu/crime-areas-and-statistics/crime-areas/child-sexual-exploitation/online-sexual-coercion-and-extortion-of-children">manipulate their victims</a> (children or adults) to send naked images.</p>
<p>Sexual predators may now <a href="https://theconversation.com/stranger-danger-in-the-online-and-real-world-79517">use dating and social media apps</a> to facilitate their conversations with victims. This has led to personal disclosures, sexualised conversations and sometimes image exchanges. This mirrors the process highlighted in early investigations, where seemingly normal interactions are manipulated by groomers. </p>
<p>Romance fraud such as <a href="https://www.ageuk.org.uk/information-advice/money-legal/scams-fraud/how-to-spot-a-catfish/#:%7E:text=Catfishing%20is%20when%20someone%20sets,get%20money%20out%20of%20them">“catfishing”</a> is also a form of grooming. Predators may form (false) relationships with their victims to scam them out of money, using social media to establish whether victims have support networks around them that may challenge their behaviour.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Close-up of a woman's hands with a mobile phone swiping on a man's profile on a dating app" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462730/original/file-20220512-22-fpsltc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/462730/original/file-20220512-22-fpsltc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462730/original/file-20220512-22-fpsltc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462730/original/file-20220512-22-fpsltc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462730/original/file-20220512-22-fpsltc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462730/original/file-20220512-22-fpsltc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/462730/original/file-20220512-22-fpsltc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dating apps and social media have been useful tools for groomers hoping to coerce victims into sending them money or naked images.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/find-love-online-concept-adult-woman-1851220126">Studio Romantic / Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There is also evidence that grooming processes are used in terrorism and radicalisation. Statements by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/16/shamima-begum-uk-british-muslims">Shamima Begum</a>, the woman who left London as a teenager to join Islamic State, indicate that she was groomed online by older men who coerced her into leaving for Syria. Another UK teenager has had her terrorism prosecution thrown out after evidence showed she was <a href="https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/shamima-begum-return-uk-court-victory-isis-syria-terror-suspect-b979347.html">sexually exploited and groomed online by an extremist</a>. </p>
<h2>Precise language</h2>
<p>The term grooming has evolved with growing awareness and publicity. But experts still <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-80212-7_1">struggle to agree on a common definition</a> and how best to conceptualise grooming in child sexual abuse and other crimes. This ambiguity opens the door to <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/women-who-stray/202204/misuse-and-abuse-the-term-grooming-hurts-victims">misuse and manipulation</a>. </p>
<p>In the US, the term has been <a href="https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/05/01/how-child-sex-abuse-grooming-rhetoric-impacts-lgbtq-abuse-survivors/7446284001/">used for political gain</a>, to pressure people into supporting a controversial ban on discussing sexual orientation and gender identity in the classroom. A spokesman for Florida governor Ron Desantis <a href="https://twitter.com/ChristinaPushaw/status/1499890719691051008">tweeted</a> in March that anyone opposing the bill is “probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children”.</p>
<p>Public outrage following the <a href="https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/download/31/independent-inquiry-into-child-sexual-exploitation-in-rotherham-1997---2013">Rotherham</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/apr/17/rochdale-victim-i-was-groomed-at-14-then-the-courts-came-for-my-children">Rochdale</a> scandals in the UK, which saw hundreds of children subjected to horrific abuse, has led to <a href="https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/rape-and-sexual-offences-chapter-7-key-legislation-and-offences">legislative changes</a> and cultural shifts in how people talk about child sexual abuse. For example, police forces have been discouraged from using <a href="https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1051729/child-sexual-abuse-organised-networks-investigation-report-february-2022.pdf">language that blames victims</a> for “promiscuous behaviour” or “putting themselves at risk”, although such language has not completely disappeared. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-virtual-door-to-online-child-sexual-grooming-is-wide-open-90972">The virtual door to online child sexual grooming is wide open</a>
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<p>Because people tend to see grooming mainly linked to child sexual abuse, many often fail to identify victims in other forms of grooming even though they are clearly being coerced and manipulated. This is evident in responses to <a href="https://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/what-we-do/blogs/different-forms-child-exploitation">criminal exploitation</a> of young people involved in <a href="https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/what-we-do/crime-threats/drug-trafficking/county-lines">county lines</a> drug trafficking, where gang members use the same methods used by sexual groomers to coerce young people into criminal activity. Law enforcement often doesn’t identify victims as being groomed, treating them as criminals instead.</p>
<h2>Stopping grooming before it leads to abuse</h2>
<p>Most of what we know about grooming has come from victims who were subject to horrific and often sustained abuse and harm. This is because it is difficult to identify grooming behaviours before an offence such as sexual abuse happens.</p>
<p>More public awareness of the normal relationship-forming interactions that can be grooming (sharing secrets, exchanging personal information and taking trips) may encourage victims to be more open to family and friends about their concerns.</p>
<p>Groomers are skilled at isolating their victims, including from friends and family. If you suspect someone is being groomed, the most important thing you can do is to be a patient, supportive and unconditional friend. It may take time for a victim to recognise themselves as such, but maintaining lines of communication will encourage them to open up eventually.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/181573/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle McManus receives funding from various bodies such as Home Office, Welsh Government and various UK police forces for research projects.</span></em></p>The term ‘grooming’ is often misused or misunderstood, but its scope reaches far beyond child abuse.Michelle McManus, Head of Criminal Justice, Liverpool John Moores UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1436752020-07-31T03:31:03Z2020-07-31T03:31:03Z10 things we do that puzzle and scare horses<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350539/original/file-20200731-17-s8jwh0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C33%2C4496%2C2950&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kenny Webster/Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Horses, like our dogs and cats, are familiar to many of us, be they racehorses, police horses, or much-loved pony club mounts. So it might surprise you that horses, in Australia, are <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/imj.13297">more deadly than snakes</a>, and indeed all venomous animals combined. </p>
<p>An equine veterinarian is <a href="https://veterinaryrecord.bmj.com/content/175/11/263">more at risk</a> of workplace injury than a firefighter. Does horses’ apparent familiarity lead us to misinterpret or misunderstand their behaviour?</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/8-things-we-do-that-really-confuse-our-dogs-122616">8 things we do that really confuse our dogs</a>
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<p>Some of our interactions with horses <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19375965">correspond to interactions between horses themselves</a>. Giving our horse a scratch on an itchy spot or allowing them to rub their head against us, while <a href="http://montyrobertsuniversity.com/forum/post/do-i-let-her-rub-her-head-on-me">frowned on by some trainers</a>, mimics how horses <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh5T4ge1JWk">behave together</a>. </p>
<p>But there are many other interactions which, from the horse’s perspective, are unusual or downright rude.</p>
<p>The culture clash between horses and humans can trigger defence or flight responses that can leave us badly injured. Here are ten common challenges we present to horses:</p>
<p><strong>1. Invasive veterinary care</strong></p>
<p>There are many veterinary practices we impose on horses to keep them healthy. Some of them, such as injecting or suturing, are invasive or painful. Horses’ natural reaction to pain is to flee. If they can’t, they may resort to aggression, such as biting or kicking. </p>
<p>Horses don’t know veterinary treatments are meant to help them, and hence <a href="https://beva.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/eve.12891">vets who treat horses are at more risk of injury</a> than those treating other species. Equine vets sustain <a href="https://veterinaryrecord.bmj.com/content/175/11/263">more workplace injuries</a> than construction workers or firefighters.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Hand gently pats a horse's nose" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350387/original/file-20200730-13-1c5vpor.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350387/original/file-20200730-13-1c5vpor.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=853&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350387/original/file-20200730-13-1c5vpor.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=853&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350387/original/file-20200730-13-1c5vpor.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=853&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350387/original/file-20200730-13-1c5vpor.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1072&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350387/original/file-20200730-13-1c5vpor.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1072&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350387/original/file-20200730-13-1c5vpor.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1072&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wes Mountain/The Conversation</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
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<p><strong>2. Patting them</strong> </p>
<p>Many horse people routinely pat their horses as a reward <a href="https://thehorse.com/149781/do-horses-actually-enjoy-pats-after-a-winning-ride/">for a job well done</a>. But horses have not evolved to find this rewarding. They don’t pat each other – instead, they scratch or gently nibble each other as a <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168159197001299">form of bonding</a>. </p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297722473_Physiological_and_Behavioral_Responses_of_Horses_to_Wither_Scratching_and_Patting_the_Neck_When_Under_Saddle">recent study</a> showed patting increased horses’ heart rates, whereas scratching lowered them and was associated with behavioural signs of relaxation and enjoyment.</p>
<p><strong>3. Picking up feet, hoof trimming and shoeing</strong></p>
<p>An important task in horse-keeping is hoof care through regular cleaning, trimming or shoeing. This requires us to pick up a horse’s foot and hold it aloft for several minutes. This practice of immobilising the hoof restricts the horse’s ability to flee if it perceives a threat, which may be why many horses <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168159117300448">find hoof-handling stressful</a>. Training a horse to accept having its feet and legs held requires patience to prevent injury to both the horse and the handler.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/dressing-up-for-melbourne-cup-day-from-a-racehorse-point-of-view-104771">Dressing up for Melbourne Cup Day, from a racehorse point of view</a>
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<p><strong>4. Grooming sensitive areas</strong></p>
<p>Horses in groups regularly groom each other, favouring areas that aren’t sensitive or ticklish. We like to groom our <a href="https://nasdonline.org/227/d000026/grooming-horses-safely.html">horses all over</a>. Grooming the sensitive groin, inguinal and perineal regions is likely to be unpleasant for horses. This may account for the tail-swishing, agitation <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168159119300620">and even biting of the handler</a> often seen when people groom these taboo areas.</p>
<p><strong>5. Pulling or clipping hairs and whiskers</strong></p>
<p>Many horse owners like to impose strict order on their horses’ body hair, including pulling out “excess” hair from the mane and tail, and trimming or removing body hair, facial whiskers and the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHZ4RplnXtc">protective hair inside the ears</a>. These activities are <a href="https://www.equinebehaviorist.ca/post/2018/03/23/does-mane-pulling-hurt-horses">frequently resented</a> by horses. Some <a href="http://www.eurodressage.com/2019/04/03/france-bans-trimming-whiskers">European countries have banned whisker trimming</a> altogether because of the importance of whiskers to horses in detecting the proximity of surfaces and foraging outside their field of view.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="Can of horse flyspray" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350386/original/file-20200730-21-156zf6g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350386/original/file-20200730-21-156zf6g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=898&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350386/original/file-20200730-21-156zf6g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=898&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350386/original/file-20200730-21-156zf6g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=898&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350386/original/file-20200730-21-156zf6g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1128&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350386/original/file-20200730-21-156zf6g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1128&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350386/original/file-20200730-21-156zf6g.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1128&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wes Mountain/The Conversation</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
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<p><strong>6. Spraying them with chemicals such as flyspray</strong></p>
<p>Spraying fly repellent is common enough for many humans. But it creates a strange noise and may also be perceived as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbqnP8AhbEw">aversive</a> when it lands on sensitive skin. The strong scent of the chemicals can also be aversive to horses, given their highly <a href="https://thehorse.com/149781/do-horses-actually-enjoy-pats-after-a-winning-ride/">sensitive sense of smell</a>. Patient training is often needed to counter-condition horses so they stand quietly while being sprayed.</p>
<p><strong>7. Feeding by hand or from a bucket</strong></p>
<p>As grazers, horses do not feed each other (except when nursing foals) and in free-roaming situations, aggression over food is rare. In contrast, food aggression is often <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016815911200041X">seen in domestic horses</a>. We provide highly palatable foods and treats that can bring out unwelcome behaviours because horses are highly motivated to eat these foods. </p>
<p>Some learn to mug their carers, for example by knocking the feed bucket out of their hands. In such a situation, crime really does pay and the horse can swiftly learn to repeat the behaviour. Of course, the horse’s confusion increases and its welfare plummets if it is punished for this.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Unhappy horse in a trailer" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350385/original/file-20200730-31-67ijqr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/350385/original/file-20200730-31-67ijqr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350385/original/file-20200730-31-67ijqr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350385/original/file-20200730-31-67ijqr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=403&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350385/original/file-20200730-31-67ijqr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350385/original/file-20200730-31-67ijqr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/350385/original/file-20200730-31-67ijqr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=507&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wes Mountain/The Conversation</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
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<p><strong>8. Putting them in a trailer or horse box</strong></p>
<p>Horses are claustrophobic and have 320° vision, so our practice of loading them into dark, narrow spaces with unstable footing, such as into trailers (floats) and horse boxes, is often a challenge for a species that has evolved to avoid such spaces. Difficulties with loading and with dangerous behaviours during transport <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27671078">are routinely reported</a>. These responses are generally manifestations of panic and include rushing off the trailer and pulling back when tied up.</p>
<p><strong>9. Branding</strong></p>
<p>Searing a permanent mark onto the skin of horses is often required for identification purposes. The use of super-cooled brands or firebrands is unpleasant because they cause a third-degree burn and require the horse to be restrained, either in <a href="http://www.robertsonhorsestocks.com/">stocks</a> or via chemical sedation. Thankfully, less invasive methods of identification, such as microchipping, are gaining increasing acceptance among breed and competition societies.</p>
<p><strong>10. Stabling and other forms of isolation</strong></p>
<p>Putting horses in stables might seem benign, and many horses voluntarily enter stables because that is where they are fed. But stabling prevents horses from engaging in most of their <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168159108000725">grazing and social behaviours</a>. Horses rarely voluntarily isolate themselves from other horses, and prolonged social isolation can lead to behavioural problems such as separation distress, rug-chewing and stereotyped behaviours such as weaving and stall-walking.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/is-your-horse-normal-now-theres-an-app-for-that-107000">Is your horse normal? Now there’s an app for that</a>
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<p>If you’d like to benchmark your horse or pony against thousands of others that we have gathered data on, consider using the <a href="https://www.e-barq.org/">Equine Behavior Assessment Research Questionnaire</a>. Understanding why horses find so many procedures unpleasant, frightening or painful is the first step to cutting them some much-needed slack. </p>
<p>They do not defend themselves out of malice but from fear. Taking a walk in their hooves allows us to make them happier and safer to be around.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143675/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Professor Paul McGreevy is an Honorary Fellow of the International Society for Equitation Science and a life member of the RSPCA NSW. He has received funding from the Australian Research Council for research into the welfare of racing Thoroughbreds. He consults to the RSPCA Australia.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cathrynne Henshall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Patting, shoeing, grooming, feeding, and even putting them in a stable - the list of seemingly benign human interactions that can confuse or upset horses is surprisingly long. On the eve of the official Horse’s Birthday, we explain why.Paul McGreevy, Professor of Animal Behaviour and Animal Welfare Science, University of SydneyCathrynne Henshall, PhD Candidate, School of Animal and Veterinary Sciences, Charles Sturt UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1362642020-04-24T05:00:02Z2020-04-24T05:00:02ZCyber threats at home: how to keep kids safe while they’re learning online<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/329958/original/file-20200423-47820-3jteej.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/curious-interested-kid-boy-secretly-looking-1164198337">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Before COVID-19, children would spend a lot of the day at school. There they would be taught about internet safety and be protected when going online by systems that filter or restrict access to online content.</p>
<p>Schools provide protective environments to restrict access to content such as pornography and gambling. They also protect children from various threats such as viruses and unmoderated social media. </p>
<p>This is usually done using filters and blacklists (lists of websites or other resources that aren’t allowed) applied to school devices or through the school internet connection.</p>
<p>But with many children learning from home, parents may not be aware of the need for the same safeguards.</p>
<p>Many parents are also working from home, which may limit the time to explore and set up a secure online environment for their children.</p>
<p>So, what threats are children exposed to and what can parents do to keep them safe?</p>
<h2>What threats might children face?</h2>
<p>With an increased use of web-based tools, downloading new applications and a dependence on email, children could be exposed to a new batch of malware threats in the absence of school-based controls. </p>
<p>This can include viruses and ransomware – for example, <a href="https://www.techrepublic.com/article/covidlock-ransomware-exploits-coronavirus-with-malicious-android-app/">CovidLock</a> (an application offering coronavirus related information) that targets the Android operating system and changes the PIN code for the lock-screen. If infected, the user can lose complete access to their device.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1238626577212215296"}"></div></p>
<p>Children working at home are not usually protected by the filters provided by their school.</p>
<p>Seemingly innocent teaching activities like the use of YouTube can expose children to unexpected risks given the breadth of inappropriate adult content available. </p>
<p>Most videos end with links to a number of related resources, the selection of which is not controlled by the school. Even using YouTube Kids, a subset of curated YouTube content filtered for appropriateness, <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tanyachen/mom-discovered-youtube-kids-shows-school-shootings-violence">has some risks</a>. There have been reports of content featuring violence, suicidal themes and sexual references.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/can-you-keep-your-kids-safe-watching-youtube-88124">Can you keep your kids safe watching YouTube?</a>
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<p>Many schools are using video conferencing tools to maintain social interaction with students. There have been reports of cases of class-hijacking, including <a href="https://theconversation.com/zoombombers-want-to-troll-your-online-meetings-heres-how-to-stop-them-135311">Zoom-bombing</a> where uninvited guests enter the video-conference session.</p>
<p>The FBI Boston field office has documented <a href="https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/boston/news/press-releases/fbi-warns-of-teleconferencing-and-online-classroom-hijacking-during-covid-19-pandemic">inappropriate comments and imagery</a> introduced into an online class. A similar case in Connecticut resulted in a <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/04/08/teen-arrested-after-zoom-bombing-high-school-classes/">teenager being arrested</a> after further Zoom-bombing incidents.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/zoombombers-want-to-troll-your-online-meetings-heres-how-to-stop-them-135311">'Zoombombers' want to troll your online meetings. Here's how to stop them</a>
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<p>Because video conferencing is becoming normalised, malicious actors (including paedophiles) may seek to exploit this level of familiarity. They can persuade children to engage in actions that can escalate to inappropriate sexual behaviours.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1248023612256169984"}"></div></p>
<p>The eSafety Office has reported a <a href="https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/blog/covid-19-online-risks-reporting-and-response">significant increase in a range of incidents of online harm</a> since early March. </p>
<p>In a particularly sickening example, eSafety Office investigators said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In one forum, paedophiles noted that isolation measures have increased opportunities to contact children remotely and engage in their “passion” for sexual abuse via platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and random webchat services.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Some families may be using older or borrowed devices if there aren’t enough for their children to use. These devices may not offer the same level of protection against common internet threats (such as viruses) as they may no longer be supported by the vendor (such as Microsoft or Apple) and be missing vital updates.</p>
<p>They may also be unable to run the latest protective software (such as antivirus) due to incompatibilities or simply being under-powered.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330121/original/file-20200423-47799-194qt2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330121/original/file-20200423-47799-194qt2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/330121/original/file-20200423-47799-194qt2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=361&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330121/original/file-20200423-47799-194qt2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=361&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330121/original/file-20200423-47799-194qt2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=361&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330121/original/file-20200423-47799-194qt2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330121/original/file-20200423-47799-194qt2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/330121/original/file-20200423-47799-194qt2g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Error message when attempting to install a new application on an older device.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What can parents do to protect children?</h2>
<p>It’s worth speaking with the school to determine what safeguards may still function while away from the school site. </p>
<p>Some solutions operate at device-level rather than based on their location, so it is possible the standard protections will still be applicable at home.</p>
<p>Some devices support filters and controls natively. For example, many Apple devices offer <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT208982">ScreenTime</a> controls to limit access to apps and websites and apply time limits to device use (recent Android devices might have the <a href="https://wellbeing.google/">Digital Wellbeing</a> feature with similar capabilities).</p>
<p>Traditional mechanisms like firewalls and anti-virus tools are still essential on laptops and desktop systems. It is important these are not just installed and forgotten. Just like the operating systems, they need to be regularly updated.</p>
<p>There is a wealth of advice available to support children using technology at home. </p>
<p>The Australian eSafety Commissioner’s website, for instance, provides access to:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>an <a href="https://www.esafety.gov.au/parents/children-under-5/online-safety-for-under-5s-booklet">online safety booklet</a> for children under five</p></li>
<li><p>advice on <a href="https://www.saferinternet.org.uk/advice-centre/parents-and-carers/parental-controls-offered-your-home-internet-provider">parental controls</a> such as setting up filters on the home internet</p></li>
<li><p>an <a href="https://www.esafety.gov.au/parents/online-safety-guide">on-line safety guide</a> for young people</p></li>
<li><p>specific advice on the <a href="https://www.esafety.gov.au/parents/big-issues">“big issues”</a> such as cyberbullying and unwanted contact or grooming</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://www.esafety.gov.au/key-issues/covid-19/advice-parents-carers">global safety advice</a> to help parents deal with online abuse.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>But if you’re feeling overwhelmed by these materials, some key messages include:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>ensuring (where appropriate) the device is regularly updated. This can include updating the operating system such as Windows, Android or Mac</p></li>
<li><p>using appropriate antivirus software (and ensuring it is also kept up to date)</p></li>
<li><p>applying parental controls to limit screen time, specific app use (blocking or limiting use), or specific website blocks (such as blocking access to YouTube)</p></li>
<li><p>on some devices, parental controls can limit use of the camera and microphone to prevent external communication</p></li>
<li><p>applying age restrictions to media content and websites (the Communications Alliance has a list of accredited <a href="https://www.commsalliance.com.au/Activities/ispi/fff">family friendly filters</a>) </p></li>
<li><p>monitoring your child’s use of apps or web browsing activities</p></li>
<li><p>when installing apps for children, checking online and talking to other parents about them</p></li>
<li><p>configuring web browsers to use “safe search”</p></li>
<li><p>ensuring children use devices in sight of parents</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://www.esafety.gov.au/parents/children-under-5/family-tech-agreement">talking to your children</a> about online behaviours.</p></li>
</ul>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/children-can-be-exposed-to-sexual-predators-online-so-how-can-parents-teach-them-to-be-safe-120661">Children can be exposed to sexual predators online, so how can parents teach them to be safe?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>While technology can play a part, ensuring children work in an environment where there is (at least periodic) oversight by parents is still an important factor.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/136264/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Just as office workers need to be aware of cyber risks when setting up a home office, parents need to think about the increased exposure their children will face to cyber threats at home.Paul Haskell-Dowland, Associate Dean (Computing and Security), Edith Cowan UniversityIsmini Vasileiou, Associate Professor in Information Systems, De Montfort UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1346042020-04-08T12:13:17Z2020-04-08T12:13:17ZSocial distancing increased over the course of human history – but so did empathy and new ways to connect<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326170/original/file-20200407-69763-10gbta8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Reading lets you experience another time, place, even mind.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/1MHU3zpTvro">Ben White/Unsplash</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://theconversation.com/social-distancing-what-it-is-and-why-its-the-best-tool-we-have-to-fight-the-coronavirus-133581">Social distancing</a> is vital in the present moment. While the increased isolation and spacing of the new drastic measures come as shock to many people, social distancing is not new if you take the long view – the very long view.</p>
<p><a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=q9oOrpMAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">As a cognitive scientist and scholar who studies empathy</a>, I see human history as a process of increasing social distancing. Along the way, empathy emerged to bridge the widening gaps, allowing physical distance while encouraging mental bonds. In fact, I suggest that cultural practices of empathy changed over time, from mere tracking of others to “<a href="https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501721649/the-dark-sides-of-empathy/#bookTabs=1">co-experiencing the situations of others</a>” from a distance.</p>
<h2>Staying connected over wider spaces</h2>
<p>Our ancient African ancestors lived in groups of perhaps 150 individuals. According to evolutionary psychologist <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=VoBNag8AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra">Robin Dunbar</a>, human beings could live in these larger groups because they developed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1520-6505(1998)6:5%3C178::AID-EVAN5%3E3.0.CO;2-8">new forms of social interaction</a> their predecessors didn’t have.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326269/original/file-20200407-172365-81z6wh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326269/original/file-20200407-172365-81z6wh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326269/original/file-20200407-172365-81z6wh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=297&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326269/original/file-20200407-172365-81z6wh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=297&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326269/original/file-20200407-172365-81z6wh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=297&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326269/original/file-20200407-172365-81z6wh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326269/original/file-20200407-172365-81z6wh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326269/original/file-20200407-172365-81z6wh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Grooming is a way of maintaining relationships for nonhuman primates.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/eastern-chimpanzee-female-gremlin-and-family-royalty-free-image/659578581">Anup Shah/Stone Collection via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Our human ancestors replaced the physical grooming that bonded other apes with gossiping. By means of social chitchat, these first humans could focus attention on the members of their group. Physical distance could grow, while group members stayed close in a new mental way by tracking each other through spoken language. <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674363366">Grooming became obsolete</a>. </p>
<p>Somewhere in our species’ transition from a fully nomadic existence to more permanent dwellings, separations emerged. Caves and walls unite smaller groups, but separate them from others. While researchers don’t know much about this time period, they have <a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Lascaux_Cave/">discovered stunning cave paintings</a> dating back many thousands of years that depict hunting scenes. It’s impossible to say whether these images represent memories of past hunts or mythological scenes, but they illustrate how imagination transcends the walls. </p>
<p>Fast forward to the early modern age: Living communities became smaller and the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/657010">nuclear family of mother-father-child became the new norm</a>. This family structure started to exclude further removed relatives and members of the household. In the age of the nuclear family, social distance grew tremendously. Not just separation, <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo3621211.html">but privacy became a key value</a>. Around 1800, the <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Solitude-and-the-Sublime-The-Romantic-Aesthetics-of-Individuation/Ferguson/p/book/9780415905497">Romantics celebrated being in a very small group and being alone</a>.</p>
<p>Again, a new technique of empathy emerged that made the new social distance palatable: <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520230699/the-rise-of-the-novel-updated-edition">the novel</a>. Novels provided people with a way to experience what others felt from a far off distance. Empathy now became detached from proximity of time and space, and in fact, reality. You can sit alone in your room and feel with and for others.</p>
<p>Empathy could become universal and apply to everyone, including in far away places. As the historian Lynn Hunt has argued, the <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393331998">idea of human rights was born and emerged parallel</a> to the sentimental novel.</p>
<h2>How empathy isolates the self</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326270/original/file-20200407-169866-5u3k6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326270/original/file-20200407-169866-5u3k6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326270/original/file-20200407-169866-5u3k6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326270/original/file-20200407-169866-5u3k6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326270/original/file-20200407-169866-5u3k6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326270/original/file-20200407-169866-5u3k6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326270/original/file-20200407-169866-5u3k6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326270/original/file-20200407-169866-5u3k6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Koch’s discovery helped transform contact with others into a recognizable risk.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/robert-koch-isolated-the-bacterium-tubercle-bacillus-the-news-photo/959158364">Photo 12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1882, the microbiologist <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijid.2009.12.003">Robert Koch identified the bacteria</a> that cause and transmit tuberculosis. His discovery changed how people view each other – the possibility of passing germs makes contact with others a risk. </p>
<p>Consequently, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Hygiene_Exhibition">international hygiene movement</a> emerged around the turn of the 20th century. The winning strategy to cope with the risk of contact, then and now, is self-control: tactics like cleaning regimes and self-isolation. In the relation of self and other, the self became dominant in Western culture.</p>
<p>Something interesting happened at the same time: Empathy also became more about the self than the other. In fact, it was around this time that <a href="https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=PVQ4AAAAIAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA17&dq=Empathy+word+origin+Titchener&ots=Km4Q3pihyr&sig=H1xQgYfJKiy9hSJVl4d7utcEJMo#v=onepage&q=Empathy%20word%20origin%20Titchener&f=false">the very word “empathy” was coined</a>. It was born to translate the concept of “Einfühlung” from German art theory, which literally means feeling yourself into an artwork. In this concept, the individual who practices empathy faces an artifact, not another human being.</p>
<p>Since 2000, social media have cultivated a new mixture of social distance and empathy. While researchers have not generally agreed whether social media <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868310377395">decrease</a> or <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2016.05.040">increase</a> social bonds, time spent on social media is time spent without physical proximity to other people. </p>
<p>These technologies have transformed one’s small cliques of friends to an amorphous collection of followers at a distance. These networks increase social distance by satisfying the need for social connection. Likes and retweets provide the pleasant feeling of mattering to others. Having resonance on the internet thus enables physical social distancing and perhaps mental social distancing, too.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326274/original/file-20200407-172365-1dqetmy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326274/original/file-20200407-172365-1dqetmy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/326274/original/file-20200407-172365-1dqetmy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326274/original/file-20200407-172365-1dqetmy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326274/original/file-20200407-172365-1dqetmy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326274/original/file-20200407-172365-1dqetmy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326274/original/file-20200407-172365-1dqetmy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/326274/original/file-20200407-172365-1dqetmy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">With businesses closed and many public spaces off-limits, people aren’t able to gather and interact in person.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Virus-Outbreak-Washington-Daily-Life/c4adb4163cc0492bbf5fdb0cf1c9ad63/3/0">AP Photo/Patrick Semansky</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Social distancing in 2020</h2>
<p>The human trajectory of increasing social distance paired with new forms of empathy and related techniques, ranging from novel-reading to social media, might suggest that people are set to weather the current socially distanced situation.</p>
<p>And yet, there’s another side to what is happening now. While over the millennia, human beings have adapted to various forms of distancing, we have not lost the appeals of being close. Most people crave the presence of people, real physical beings with bodies and emotions.</p>
<p>As a species and individually, people indeed can adapt to social distance. But I suggest that once in a while we want to leave all of these adaptations behind and just meet people and rub shoulders. We may even rediscover some form of grooming.</p>
<p>[<em>Get facts about coronavirus and the latest research.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=upper-coronavirus-facts">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.</a>]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/134604/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Fritz Breithaupt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>People have changed over time, growing ever more distant and isolated from others – while at the same time finding new ways and technologies that let individuals connect and feel with others.Fritz Breithaupt, Provost Professor in Cognitive Science and Germanic Studies, Indiana University, Indiana UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1323512020-02-26T02:24:23Z2020-02-26T02:24:23ZYoung women won’t be told how to behave, but is #girlboss just deportment by another name?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317028/original/file-20200225-24672-1mndmdr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=43%2C14%2C4804%2C3164&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Priscilla du Preez/Unsplash</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In today’s terms, June Dally-Watkins was Australia’s OG (<a href="https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=OG">original gangster</a>) <a href="https://www.girlboss.com/about">#girlboss</a>. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/every-woman-has-a-right-to-be-beautiful-dally-watkins-dead-at-92-20200223-p543hn.html">illegitimate child</a> of a single mother, Dally-Watkins came from humble rural beginnings and found fame as a young model in 1950s Sydney. She turned this fame into a fortune, using her profile to start a chain of finishing and deportment schools for young women and, later, young men.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.jdwbrisbane.com/">Dally-Watkins’ schools</a>, which still operate today, taught catwalk strutting, posing for photographs, and make-up application. She taught models how to win beauty pageants and taught men how to court like gentlemen. And she made a lot of money doing it.</p>
<p>Dally-Watkins <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2020/feb/23/june-dally-watkins-australias-queen-of-deportment-and-etiquette-dies-at-92">died</a> earlier this week, and is being remembered as a strict yet charming teacher and a very successful businesswoman. The legacy of Dally-Watkins and what she symbolises as a successful <em>and</em> feminine woman presents an opportunity to think through some of the ways our culture both applauds and maligns women’s success.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317025/original/file-20200225-24690-cx4dq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C0%2C1196%2C1670&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317025/original/file-20200225-24690-cx4dq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=838&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317025/original/file-20200225-24690-cx4dq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=838&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317025/original/file-20200225-24690-cx4dq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=838&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317025/original/file-20200225-24690-cx4dq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1053&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317025/original/file-20200225-24690-cx4dq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1053&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317025/original/file-20200225-24690-cx4dq2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1053&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">June Dally-Watkins was a model before she was an entrepreneur, photographed here in 1949 by Max Dupain.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Supplied by The National Portrait Gallery</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Is self-branding the new deportment?</h2>
<p>Although today’s young women might be less interested in learning manners and etiquette, many continue to seek advice on presenting a polished, appealing image of themselves. </p>
<p>The YouTube beauty tutorial is one of the largest genres on the platform, and there are influencers who base their self-brand on advising viewers how to appear feminine and classy. 25-year-old YouTuber <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzEolHECo7JmmkWMGDYaSOA">Alexandra Beth</a> offers advice to her 3.44 million subscribers on subjects from “how to dress better” to “dating mistakes every girl makes”. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ljf4l6Nuh8Q?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Lifestyle and personal development workshops can be found everywhere, from the practical, to the vague “<a href="https://designyourlifeseminars.com.au/release-your-limitations/">Release Your Limitations</a>”, to the terrifyingly titled “<a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/burn-your-fear-intensive-tickets-94109801951?aff=ebdssbdestsearch">Burn Your Fear Intensive</a>”.</p>
<p>The mission behind Dally-Watkins’ schools is as relevant as ever: if you invest in yourself (by paying someone for advice) you can be a happier, more successful person.</p>
<p>Dally-Watkins recognised people overwhelmingly want to believe self-improvement is a means to improving their circumstances, and her schools sold this promise of social mobility.</p>
<h2>Girlbosses</h2>
<p>Girlbossing has been coined to describe a way of presenting a professionally successful persona that highlights femininity. </p>
<p>June Dally-Watkins was undoubtedly a girlboss before girlbossing became a term. Self-made, ambitious, and feminine, she enforced rigorous grooming practices, using her own polished, perfect self as marketing for her schools. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317022/original/file-20200225-24676-1mth2fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317022/original/file-20200225-24676-1mth2fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317022/original/file-20200225-24676-1mth2fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317022/original/file-20200225-24676-1mth2fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317022/original/file-20200225-24676-1mth2fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317022/original/file-20200225-24676-1mth2fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317022/original/file-20200225-24676-1mth2fk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>The term girlboss was popularised by entrepreneur Sophia Amoruso, whose 2014 book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18667945-girlboss">#Girlboss</a> was adapted into a (critically <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/06/girlboss-netflix-canceled-one-season">maligned</a>) <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5706996/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Netflix series</a> in 2017. The girlboss has since become a powerful, if controversial, cultural icon.</p>
<p>They are lauded for their success in business and entrepreneurship, an arena notorious for its boys club culture that’s been hostile to women in the past. </p>
<p>At once revered and reviled, girlbosses have become fascinating case studies for gender dynamics and professional self-branding in contemporary culture. </p>
<h2>The anti-feminist core of girlbossing</h2>
<p>It’s important to remember that girlbossing isn’t feminism, it’s capitalism. </p>
<p>Girlboss rhetoric often works to propagate sexism, racism, and class elitism, among other forms of oppression. </p>
<p>Recent <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/12/fictions-bombshell-movie/603982/">discussion</a> of the film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6394270/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Bombshell</a>, the story of female Fox News presenters who victoriously sued the channel’s former CEO Roger Ailes for workplace sexual harassment, is an illustrative example. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/bombshell-hollywoods-lukewarm-attempt-to-get-to-grips-with-metoo-131496">Bombshell: Hollywood's lukewarm attempt to get to grips with #MeToo</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Although the film celebrates these women, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/12/movies/bombshell-review.html">critics suggest</a> it is not necessarily smart to blindly celebrate such stories. And this is especially the case when women’s success, like that of Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson, is built on politics or institutions that fuel social ills like misogyny and racism. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317024/original/file-20200225-24659-lydb9z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/317024/original/file-20200225-24659-lydb9z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317024/original/file-20200225-24659-lydb9z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317024/original/file-20200225-24659-lydb9z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=255&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317024/original/file-20200225-24659-lydb9z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=320&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317024/original/file-20200225-24659-lydb9z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=320&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/317024/original/file-20200225-24659-lydb9z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=320&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Charlize Theron plays Megyn Kelly in Bombshell: critics say the film has erased controversial parts of Kelly’s story to suit the girlboss narrative.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Annapurna Pictures</span></span>
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<p>Girlboss rhetoric encourages women to “<a href="https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/12/6/18128838/michelle-obama-lean-in-sheryl-sandberg">lean in</a>” without addressing underlying disadvantages that make that project difficult. It is an <a href="https://www.theringer.com/2017/4/29/16043520/the-problem-with-girlboss-feminism-98f48bb6aa16">individualised approach</a> that sells women the myth that a will to self-improvement is all they need to succeed. </p>
<p>It’s important to note the feminist history here. Feminists made the ascension of the girlboss possible through fighting for the rights of women to enter the workplace. But “lean in” logic is a perversion of feminism. It takes the rhetoric of empowerment and deploys it in the service of oppression, suggesting an individual’s success is determined by her efforts alone. </p>
<p>Take Dally-Watkin’s <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/every-woman-has-a-right-to-be-beautiful-dally-watkins-dead-at-92-20200223-p543hn.html">first advertisement slogan</a> for her deportment school in the early 1950s: “Every woman has a right to be beautiful”. </p>
<p>While the invitation appeals to the rights of women, the call to action reinforces a patriarchal mechanism of oppression: beauty standards. </p>
<p>Meeting beauty standards requires significant investments of time and money, which detracts from women’s ability to invest that time and money elsewhere. Beauty standards also reinforce the idea that women’s value is in their status as objects to be looked at. </p>
<p>This darker side of beauty and deportment is undeniably part of Dally-Watkins’ legacy.</p>
<p>Dally-Watkins’s passing this week is a sad event for her family and the many people whose lives she touched, her students not least among them. She sounds like a charismatic teacher, and was undoubtedly a fiercely successful businesswoman.</p>
<p>But alongside reflecting on her career, her legacy can teach us a lot about the rise of girlbosses, made possible by the work of feminist activists who fought for the rights of women to enter the workforce and generate their own income, and about the commercialisation of self-improvement.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/132351/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Emma Maguire does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Today’s young women might be less interested in etiquette classes, but many still seek advice on presenting a polished image. It’s important to remember girlbossing is capitalism, not feminism.Emma Maguire, Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, James Cook UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1319932020-02-19T06:07:25Z2020-02-19T06:07:25ZGrooming: what parents should know and what schools should do if they suspect it<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/316096/original/file-20200219-11040-uty6re.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C4563%2C3019&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://unsplash.com/photos/4nKOEAQaTgA">Taylor Wilcox/Unsplash</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>This week’s <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/">ABC’s Four Corners</a> exposed an elite Melbourne school for failing to <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-17/investigation-into-teacher-behaviour-at-st-kevins/11972138">adequately respond</a> to the grooming of a student by a former athletics coach, who is now a convicted offender.</p>
<p>Several current and former staff, students and parents told Four Corners St Kevin’s College had a history of <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-19/st-kevins-headmaster-stephen-russell-resigns/11980008">failing to adequately deal</a> with complaints of inappropriate behaviour.</p>
<p>Those complaints involved an allegation of sexual harassment and concerns raised by staff members about potential grooming and inappropriate behaviour towards boys by two male teachers. </p>
<p>Findings <a href="https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/sites/default/files/final_report_-_volume_13_schools.pdf">from the Royal Commission</a> into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse identified abuse has generally occurred in instances when:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>leadership and governance had failed (such as not acting on suspicions or allegations of grooming or abuse)</p></li>
<li><p>there were inadequate or poorly implemented policies and procedures (resulting in ambiguity on what and when to report concerns)</p></li>
<li><p>there was insufficient training for staff to able to spot grooming and signs of sexual abuse at school.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>So, what are schools required to do if they suspect grooming, or if suspicions are raised? </p>
<h2>What is grooming?</h2>
<p>Grooming is typically considered to be the deliberate action of an adult to befriend a child and establish an emotional connection with him or her. It often (but not always) precedes abuse. </p>
<p>The perpetrator uses grooming behaviours to build a child’s trust and create opportunities to perpetrate abuse.</p>
<p>Grooming encompasses a <a href="https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/sites/default/files/final_report_-_volume_13_schools.pdf">wide range of tactics</a>, which can include giving the child extra attention or touching them in a non-sexual way, which, over time <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/jdibrief/documents/sexual-abuse-in-schools/SEXUAL_ABUSE_IN_SCHOOLS__1-5_All_.pdf">escalates into intimate</a> behaviours. </p>
<p>Once abuse starts, grooming may be used to <a href="https://www.qct.edu.au/pdf/Transgressions.pdf">maintain, control and conceal</a> the abusive behaviour. </p>
<p>Many perpetrators are now using e-grooming – <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190740912003544">grooming in an online environment</a> – as another tactic to initiate abuse. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-excuse-of-pure-fantasy-works-in-online-child-sex-abuse-cases-88231">How the excuse of 'pure fantasy' works in online child sex abuse cases</a>
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<h2>What does grooming look like at school?</h2>
<p>During the <a href="https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/sites/default/files/final_report_-_volume_13_schools.pdf">royal commission</a>, survivors of school-based sexual abuse provided accounts of their experience. They said they had been singled out by the abuser with rewards, attention and favouritism.</p>
<p>While children of any age, gender or background can be victims of grooming, children who experience <a href="https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/sites/default/files/final_report_-_volume_13_schools.pdf">discrimination, isolation and racism</a> are among those most targeted due to their social vulnerability. </p>
<p>The nature of school environments provides regular interactions between students and staff, as well as authority of staff over children. This can facilitate grooming and create <a href="https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/sites/default/files/final_report_-_volume_13_schools.pdf">opportunities for abuse</a>. The term “<a href="https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199583720.001.0001/acprof-9780199583720-chapter-5">institutional grooming</a>” describes the perpetrator using a position of trust to gain access to a child and avoid detection. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/316097/original/file-20200219-10976-sfgqlm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/316097/original/file-20200219-10976-sfgqlm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/316097/original/file-20200219-10976-sfgqlm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/316097/original/file-20200219-10976-sfgqlm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/316097/original/file-20200219-10976-sfgqlm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/316097/original/file-20200219-10976-sfgqlm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/316097/original/file-20200219-10976-sfgqlm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/316097/original/file-20200219-10976-sfgqlm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Perpetrators of grooming can use online and offline methods to reach their victims.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/little-girl-sitting-on-yellow-sofa-727469575">Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>The perpetrator <a href="https://www.csyw.qld.gov.au/child-family/protecting-children/what-child-abuse/child-sexual-abuse">may also groom</a> significant others (such as parents, carers or teachers of the child) to build their trust and create further opportunities for abuse. </p>
<p>Children’s behaviour may be a signal they are being groomed. This could include a <a href="https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/news/2019/may/grooming-often-discovered-not-disclosed-how-can-teachers-spot-signs/">change in the child’s manner</a> that is out of character. While not telltale signs, <a href="https://www.nspcc.org.uk/what-is-child-abuse/types-of-abuse/grooming/#signs">indicators can include</a>:</p>
<ul>
<li>appearing withdrawn or distressed </li>
<li>avoiding school staff or activities</li>
<li>secrecy about who they are spending time with (offline and online)</li>
<li>having new unexplained things (such as a mobile phone).</li>
</ul>
<h2>What can parents do if they suspect grooming?</h2>
<p>When parents suspect grooming, they should direct their concerns to the school, no matter how trivial it may seem. Often, <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/jdibrief/documents/sexual-abuse-in-schools/SEXUAL_ABUSE_IN_SCHOOLS__1-5_All_.pdf">only after abuse is disclosed</a>, a process of joining the dots uncovers a history of unreported concerns that, in isolation, did not appear to be serious, but together indicated harm. </p>
<p>Of course parents can report directly to police if they believe a crime has been committed. Reluctance to raise concerns is often linked to fear of being wrong. </p>
<p>Secrecy is a powerful tool used by perpetrators to groom children, perpetrate abuse and avoid detection. The best line of defence is <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-parents-need-to-know-about-the-signs-of-child-sexual-abuse-113559">open communication and dialogue</a> with children about appropriate and inappropriate behaviours.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-parents-need-to-know-about-the-signs-of-child-sexual-abuse-113559">What parents need to know about the signs of child sexual abuse</a>
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<p>This creates a safe environment for young people to initiate conversations about issues thare are worrying them. It can enable them to disclose or alert parents to concerning behaviour – whether they notice it in adults or children. Research <a href="https://aifs.gov.au/cfca/publications/responding-children-and-young-people-s-disclosures-abu">shows young people most often</a> disclose abuse first to a parent or peer.</p>
<p>Open dialogue between parents and schools is also essential. Parents <a href="https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/sites/default/files/final_report_-_volume_13_schools.pdf">should be informed</a> of the school’s child protection policies and protocols. They have the right to ask the school what strategies they have in place to keep their children safe. </p>
<p>If parents have reported suspicions to the school but feel like they have not been heard, they are advised to raise their concerns with police.</p>
<h2>What should schools do to protect children?</h2>
<p>Teachers (like parents) should <a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/jdibrief/documents/sexual-abuse-in-schools/SEXUAL_ABUSE_IN_SCHOOLS__1-5_All_.pdf">raise all concerns</a> or disclosures to the school leadership, regardless of how trivial they appear or how respected the teacher involved is. </p>
<p>The Australian Human Rights Commission’s <a href="https://childsafe.humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/2019-02/National_Principles_for_Child_Safe_Organisations2019.pdf">National Principles for Child Safe Organisations</a> were developed in response to recommendations handed down during the royal commission. These principles – which have been endorsed by all governments – provide guidance on how schools can help ensure children’s safety.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1229681354524114944"}"></div></p>
<p>Under the principles, schools leaders should develop child safety policies and procedures, ensure they are transparent and widely communicated (including with parents) and consistently enforced. This includes guidelines for reporting, responding to complaints and supporting students. </p>
<p>Some of these <a href="https://childsafe.humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/2019-02/National_Principles_for_Child_Safe_Organisations2019.pdf">actions</a>) include:</p>
<ul>
<li>providing staff training to respond effectively to child safety issues</li>
<li>ensuring processes to respond to complaints are child-focused, aimed at protecting children as a priority</li>
<li>handling complaints seriously, and responding promptly and thoroughly to any concerns.</li>
</ul>
<p>Schools must equip teachers <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0190740912003544">with the knowledge</a> and skills to identify concerns, talk to children about safety (including <a href="https://aifs.gov.au/cfca/publications/responding-children-and-young-people-s-disclosures-abu">providing support and reassurance</a>, and raise concerns with school leadership or other authorities where necessary.</p>
<p><a href="https://aifs.gov.au/cfca/publications/mandatory-reporting-child-abuse-and-neglect">Mandatory reporting laws</a> typically require teachers (and other occupations) to report their concerns where it is suspected, on reasonable grounds, that a child has or is being abused. But these these laws, and threshold assessments, differ across jurisdictions.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-royal-commissions-final-report-has-landed-now-to-make-sure-there-is-an-adequate-redress-scheme-89158">The royal commission's final report has landed – now to make sure there is an adequate redress scheme</a>
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<p>All schools, however, should have child safety policies in place to guide their responses to concerns that don’t meet this threshold, but that still warrant monitoring or follow-up at a local level, as a form of early intervention. </p>
<p>School leaders must empower students, parents and teachers to raise concerns without fear of reprisals. Without strong leadership, grooming and other behaviours may go unreported, be ignored or dismissed. </p>
<p>Any failings of school leadership should be investigated and addressed by education boards or regulators.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/131993/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>When parents suspect grooming, they should direct their concerns to the school, no matter how trivial it may seem.Larissa Christensen, Lecturer in Criminology & Justice | Co-leader of the Sexual Violence Research and Prevention Unit (SVRPU), University of the Sunshine CoastNadine McKillop, Senior Lecturer in Criminology & Justice | Co-leader of the Sexual Violence Research and Prevention Unit (SVRPU), University of the Sunshine CoastSusan Rayment-McHugh, Lecturer in Criminology and Justice & Co-Leader of the Sexual Violence Research and Prevention Unit, University of the Sunshine CoastLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1300992020-01-20T15:49:23Z2020-01-20T15:49:23ZAsian grooming gangs: how ethnicity made authorities wary of investigating child sexual abuse<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/310687/original/file-20200117-118347-k9slp1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/lonely-girl-city-danger-159177017">Shutterstock/tommaso79</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the UK, the debate around so-called Asian grooming gangs and the sexual threat they pose to vulnerable white girls shows no sign of abating. A leaked report produced by the <a href="https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/">Independent Office for Police Conduct</a> (IOPC) has upheld a complaint made by a father whose daughter had been missing for a week. He said a police officer told him that <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/18/rotherham-police-did-not-do-enough-protect-girls-abuse-asian/">Rotherham “would erupt”</a> if it came out that Asian men were habitually having sex with underage white girls. </p>
<p>The five-year investigation conducted by the IOPC, codenamed Operation Lindon, has produced a highly critical report. It states that the South Yorkshire police were scared to take action against a group of Asian men who were sexually abusing a young girl for fear of triggering unrest in the Asian community and being branded racist. Instead, they did little to disrupt the gang and safeguard the vulnerable victim and other young girls, even though they knew they were being subjected to horrendous sexual abuse. </p>
<p>South Yorkshire police has <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-chief-we-ignored-sex-abuse-of-children-hgrhc358v">accepted the findings</a> of the report and said it has been developing a “far deeper understanding” of child sexual exploitation since 2014. It will now await the full and final report, which will focus on the actions of its former senior command team and whether it deliberately turned a blind eye to what it knew was happening. </p>
<p>This is something the media has been suggesting for many years due to the explosive mix of sex, race and excessive political correctness. The Times has even claimed there was a “<a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/crime/article2863058.ece">conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs</a>”. The leaked IOPC report came just days after yet another <a href="https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/paedophile-grooming-gang-left-roam-17562300">scathing report</a> was published, this time in Manchester, about the abject failure of the police and children’s services to protect vulnerable young girls from Asian grooming gangs there.</p>
<h2>Cultural sensitivities</h2>
<p>In 2011 Jack Straw, the former home secretary, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12142177">suggested</a> there was a cultural element to the then new phenomenon of “grooming gangs” and suggesting some men of Pakistani origin see white girls as “easy meat”. The former Blackburn Labour MP spoke out after two Asian men who abused girls in Derby were given indeterminate jail terms. At the time, he was quickly shouted down and labelled a racist. It was even suggested that his comments were an attempt to influence a pending Oldham by-election. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/blamed-for-being-abused-an-uncomfortable-history-of-child-sexual-exploitation-82410">Blamed for being abused: an uncomfortable history of child sexual exploitation</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Despite the continuous flow of cases – other examples were in <a href="https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/all-about/rochdale-grooming-scandal">Rochdale</a>, <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-46945043">Oxford</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jun/10/report-evidence-of-huddersfield-grooming-ring-not-followed-up">Huddersfield</a>) – the public is constantly being reminded that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/11/84-per-cent-of-grooming-gangs-are-asians-we-dont-know-if-that-figure-is-right">it is not just Asian men</a> who commit “on-street” child sexual exploitation. </p>
<p>Clearly this type of sexual exploitation is not exclusive to Asian/Pakistani men. Nevertheless, given the severity of these offences and long term impact they have on young people’s lives, it is important to question whether there are cultural elements influencing how perpetrators see young white girls.</p>
<p>As a criminologist and former senior detective I have interviewed numerous second generation Asian-Pakistani men convicted of grooming and sexually abusing young vulnerable white girls. The majority claimed they were innocent and put forward theories of how the government, police, judges and witnesses had conspired to wrongly convict them. It was also clear that they did not see their victims as children and therefore did not consider themselves to be sex offenders. </p>
<p>An example of this mindset was the leader of the Rochdale grooming gang, Shabir Ahmed, who <a href="https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/rochdale-grooming-white-jury-appeal-11959904">failed to overturn his convictions</a> at the European Court of Human Rights by claiming an all-white jury was part of a conspiracy to scapegoat Muslims. During his trial Ahmed repeatedly accused the judge, the jury, and the police of being part of a racist conspiracy against Muslims and said: “It’s all white lies.” The story (focusing on the victims in this case) was subsequently made into the BBC drama Three Girls.</p>
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<p>Many of the offenders I have spoken to were also involved – or on the fringes of – low-level crime, most commonly drug dealing and theft. They tended to lack victim empathy and had a habit of trying to taint victims by suggesting they lied about their age or were already drug addicts and/or sexually promiscuous.</p>
<p>The victims of child sexual exploitation in these cases were targeted because they were considered “available” by their circumstance and behaviour: they were in care, truanting from school, drinking alcohol, taking drugs, staying out late at night or being overtly sexual. The vast majority of victims were underage white girls. Their perceived availability and vulnerability led the perpetrators to believe, rightly, that these girls were unlikely to tell anyone what was happening to them. </p>
<p>When it comes to child sexual exploitation, grooming takes on a series of behaviours designed to ensure secrecy, increase victim compliance, build rapport and avoid detection. <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0964663906066613">Extensive research</a> tells us that these tactics make sexual abuse much <a href="https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=(Bennett+%26+Donohue,+2014)&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholar">more likely</a>. </p>
<h2>Abandoned victims</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-51093159">Review</a> after <a href="https://www.nscb.org.uk/sites/default/files/Final%20JSCR%20Report%20160218%20PW.pdf">review</a> has found that there is a tendency by almost all protection agencies to to essentially leave these vulnerable girls to suffer and let the criminals continue their offending. One of the reasons for this is the issue of the ethnicity of the perpetrators.</p>
<p>As a criminologist I believe all criminals should be defined by their actions and punished accordingly. But it is necessary and relevant for society to discuss the ethnicity of perpetrators and victims and how this influences specific crimes.</p>
<p>It is not racist to do this, just as it is not racist to say that the majority of men on the UK sex offenders register for sexual crime <a href="https://fullfact.org/crime/what-do-we-know-about-ethnicity-people-involved-sexual-offences-against-children/">are white</a>. It is also important to remember that black and minority ethnic children and young people are <a href="https://www.csepoliceandprevention.org.uk/sites/default/files/cse_guidance_bame.pdf">victims of sexual exploitation</a>, too.</p>
<p>But in May 2019 it was estimated that there were at least <a href="https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2019-05-14/debates/349FA275-CB65-45C0-87C7-EE16D1FD1B0A/GroomingGangs">73 grooming gangs</a> operating in the UK. The inability of South Yorkshire Police and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/24/police-serious-case-review-exploitation-girls-in-bristol">other forces</a> to act professionally and speak openly and plainly about the ethnicity of on-street child abusers is a significant factor in why these horrific offences have gone undetected for so long and it remains a significant factor today.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/130099/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Graham Hill does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The fear of ‘racial tension’ has been at the heart of many botched police inquiries into child sexual abuse.Graham Hill, Visiting research fellow, School of Law, University of LeedsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1278522019-12-17T16:42:53Z2019-12-17T16:42:53ZRising rape cases, a broken criminal justice system and the ‘digital strip search’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307167/original/file-20191216-123987-1d8f8g7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/statue-justice-symbol-legal-law-concept-681265648?src=b4d36b19-25d5-498b-8115-78cff1765099-1-0&studio=1">Shutterstock/r.classen</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-50812810">New rape statistics </a> have highlighted what many people already know: the UK’s criminal justice system is broken. Rape allegations are at a record high, but the number of cases progressing through from <a href="https://www.cps.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/publications/cps-vawg-report-2019.pdf">charging to prosecution</a> have significantly dropped. </p>
<p>A Cabinet Office report <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/nov/10/half-of-victims-drop-out-of-cases-even-after-suspect-is-identified">leaked to the Guardian</a> suggested a lack of police resources were a key contributing factor. While this is clearly having an impact, it would be wrong to blame the whole crisis on police resources. The issue goes to the heart of the criminal justice system and how it treats sexual assault victims.</p>
<p>The statistics on rape in the UK are shocking. According to the Crown Prosecution Service’s <a href="https://www.cps.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/publications/cps-vawg-report-2019.pdf">Violence Against Women and Girls report</a>, rape figures from 2017 to 2019 showed that the number of suspects referred for a charge of rape by the police has fallen by 22.8%. Charges for rape have fallen by 38%, prosecutions have fallen by 32.8% and the number of convictions have fallen by 26.9%. </p>
<p>Yet recorded offences of rape are increasing at <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/crimeinenglandandwales/yearendingjune2019">an alarming rate</a>. The crime data shows there is a 350% increase in the number of rapes recorded by the police when comparing figures from 2008 to 2019. Recorded crimes, include offences reported to the police, but do not necessarily result in charge or conviction. </p>
<p>And, according to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, just 17% of people report their rape, so many offences <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/sexualoffendingvictimisationandthepaththroughthecriminaljusticesystem/2018-12-13">do not even enter the criminal justice system</a>.</p>
<p>So why when we are finally at a point in society where the reporting of sexual violence is <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/sexualoffendingvictimisationandthepaththroughthecriminaljusticesystem/2018-12-13">increasing</a> are there huge reductions in the amount making it through each stage of the criminal justice system?</p>
<h2>The digital strip search</h2>
<p>The majority of rapes take place in a room where there are no witnesses. And there is unlikely to be video evidence that shows consent was not given.</p>
<p>When a victim initially discloses to the police that they have been a victim of rape, the process often starts with them having to offer themselves up to a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/law/2019/jul/23/police-demands-for-access-to-victims-phones-unlawful">“digital strip search”</a>. This involves police and lawyers scrutinising personal photographs and messages from the victim’s phone. A <a href="https://www.cps.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/publications/cps-vawg-report-2019.pdf">recent report by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS)</a> states: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is not something that should be requested as a matter of course in every case. Only reasonable lines of inquiry should be pursued, to avoid unnecessary intrusion into a complainant’s personal life.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But the <a href="https://www.cps.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/publications/Key-facts-about-how-the-CPS-prosecutes-allegations-of-rape.pdf">decision to charge a suspect</a> requires the CPS to find “sufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction”. So the “type” of girl/victim becomes a key part in each stage of decision making as the narrative and evidence must be understood and interpreted by a jury.</p>
<p>Defence teams in rape trials often attempt to tarnish the credibility of the victim, questioning whether they showed “normal sexual behaviour”. But this is a dangerous game. Issues like <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/teenage-girl-underwear-rape-trial-cork-sex-latest-a8625871.html">what the victim was wearing</a>, intoxication levels, how the victim interacted with the attacker, have all been shown to influence <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6348335/">negative perceptions and outcomes</a> in rape cases. </p>
<h2>Victims are not “perfect”</h2>
<p>It is important for defence teams to challenge a victim’s versions of events, but now <a href="https://www.cps.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/publications/cps-vawg-report-2019.pdf">the CPS</a>, as well as <a href="https://wecantconsenttothis.uk/">victim groups</a>, are rightly raising questions about the requirements for victims to fully disclose all aspects of their lives, which make them feel like <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/apr/29/why-might-rape-victims-refuse-to-give-phones-to-police">they are the ones under investigation</a>. </p>
<p>This problem was highlighted in the recent high-profile <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/grace-millane-murder-rough-sex-defence-legal-court_uk_5dd52a54e4b0fc53f20bc589">Grace Millane murder trial</a> in New Zealand. In attempting to create <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-46618040">reasonable doubt</a> about the case, the accused lawyers brought into evidence the amount of alcohol Grace drank and her previous sexual history. Victims can face <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/29/uk-rape-complainants-unfair-questions-sexual-history">similar questioning</a> in the UK.</p>
<p>The fact is there is no such thing as the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/04/friend-raping-me-case-dropped-uk-rape-prosecution">“perfect” rape victim</a>. We need to urgently review how far the courts can delve into a victim’s life and there should be clear guidelines about what should be off limits.</p>
<h2>Changes in offending behaviour</h2>
<p>Our work in <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0886260518756118">serious sexual offences and homicide</a> has shown how modern technology is leading to <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0886260517718187">key changes</a>, not just in the behaviour of sex offenders, but also in the behaviour shown by the general public when it comes to sex. </p>
<p>People are meeting their attackers <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-49508871">after brief online interactions</a>, in riskier, isolated places – sometimes even in the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37278670/how-to-stay-safe-when-youre-dating-online">victim or offender’s home</a>. This change from outdoors (where more precautions are taken) to indoors has led to more bold, confident and overt <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0886260518756118">sexual offending</a>. And defence teams can interpret these decisions to create reasonable doubt in a jury’s mind over the question of consent.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/stranger-danger-in-the-online-and-real-world-79517">'Stranger danger' in the online and real world</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Sexual offences where the victim <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0886260517718187">met their attacker online</a> are going to continue to increase, as will the technology and data which is available to examine. Huge <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/backlog-of-devices-awaiting-police-analysis-leaves-trials-facing-collapse-bgb6zft9x">backlogs across police forces </a> with additional <a href="https://www.itv.com/news/london/2019-07-03/rape-cases-delayed-by-months-because-of-digital-forensic-backlog/">delays in rape charge decision making</a> are already being reported.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48871994">Urgent reviews and funding</a> are needed to ensure that victims are supported from the initial crime report through to court. It is in our power to ensure that victims aren’t prevented from reporting crimes because the system is not effectively set up to deal with the demand this creates. </p>
<p>But there are also <a href="https://theconversation.com/grace-millanes-murder-trial-shows-social-attitudes-continue-to-minimise-gendered-violence-127796">huge ethical questions</a> about the balance of justice regarding how far victims can reasonably be pushed in court. And given the clear increase of rape cases failing <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/sexualoffendingvictimisationandthepaththroughthecriminaljusticesystem/2018-12-13">due to victims retracting their accusations</a>, this has never been so critical.</p>
<p>Simply stating this is <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-50812810">a policing resource issue</a> is not a sufficient response. The system is unintentionally giving confidence to perpetrators by effectively putting a victim’s personal life on trial before a case even gets to court. There is now a real risk society is going back to a time when victims were too afraid to report rape as they had no confidence the system would protect them.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/127852/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle McManus has previously received funding from the Home Office and actively works with a number of police forces and criminal justice agencies across the UK. Michelle was also a serving Magistrate for 10 years, but has since retired. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Louise Almond actively works with a number of police forces and criminal justice agencies across the UK</span></em></p>We can’t just blame falling rape prosecutions on a lack of resources.Michelle McManus, Subject Head in Criminal Justice, Liverpool John Moores UniversityLouise Almond, Senior lecturer in Investigative and Forensic Psychology, University of LiverpoolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1238722019-11-14T19:07:37Z2019-11-14T19:07:37ZFriday essay: shaved, shaped and slit - eyebrows through the ages<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301462/original/file-20191113-77326-pyg9vs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C517%2C4483%2C2622&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In ancient China, India and the Middle East, the art of eyebrow threading was popular. It is now enjoying a resurgence.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/close-female-face-during-eyebrow-correction-295769573">www.shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Eyebrows can turn a smile into a leer, a grumpy pout into a come hither beckoning, and sad, downturned lips into a comedic grimace. </p>
<p>So, it’s little wonder these communicative markers of facial punctuation have been such a feature of beauty and fashion since the earliest days of recorded civilisation. </p>
<p>From completely shaved mounds to thick, furry lines, eyebrows are a part of the face we <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/beauty/what-you-get-for-40-120-or-1000-worth-of-eyebrow-care-20191113-p53acj.html">continue</a> to experiment with. We seek to hide, exacerbate and embellish them. And today, every shopping strip and mall has professionals ready to assist us with wax, thread and ink. </p>
<h2>Minimising distraction</h2>
<p>In the court of Elizabeth I, to draw attention to the perceived focal point of a woman’s body – her breasts – the monarch would pluck her eyebrows into thin lines or remove them completely, as well as shaving off hair at the top of her forehead. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301415/original/file-20191113-37464-uifye2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301415/original/file-20191113-37464-uifye2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301415/original/file-20191113-37464-uifye2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1039&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301415/original/file-20191113-37464-uifye2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1039&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301415/original/file-20191113-37464-uifye2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1039&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301415/original/file-20191113-37464-uifye2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1305&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301415/original/file-20191113-37464-uifye2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1305&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301415/original/file-20191113-37464-uifye2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1305&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Many of her subjects followed Queen Elizabeth’s shaved eyebrow example.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47de-6079-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99">New York Public Library</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This was an attempt to make her face plain and blank, thereby directing the viewer’s gaze lower to her substantial <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=mNLZkzxmiEIC&pg=PA107&dq=eyebrows+breasts+elizabethan&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjrq9p1t_lAhUTXisKHffJCSYQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=eyebrows%20breasts%20elizabethan&f=false">décolletage</a>. </p>
<p>Although the intentions were different, nonexistent or needle-thin brows had also been common in ancient China and other Asian cultures, where women plucked their eyebrows to resemble specific shapes with designated names such as “distant mountain” (likely referring to a central and distinctive point in the brow), “drooping pearl” and “willow branch”. </p>
<p>In ancient China, as well as in India and the Middle East, the technique of threading - the removal of hairs by twisting strands of cotton <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1046/j.1365-4362.1997.00189.x">thread</a> - was popular for its accuracy. The technique, referred to as “khite” in Arabic and “fatlah” in Egyptian, is enjoying renewed <a href="https://journals.lww.com/dermatologicsurgery/Abstract/2011/06280/Eyebrow_Epilation_by_Threading__An_Increasingly.26.aspx">popularity</a> today. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301484/original/file-20191113-77342-1n7ymcj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301484/original/file-20191113-77342-1n7ymcj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301484/original/file-20191113-77342-1n7ymcj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=682&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301484/original/file-20191113-77342-1n7ymcj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=682&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301484/original/file-20191113-77342-1n7ymcj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=682&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301484/original/file-20191113-77342-1n7ymcj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301484/original/file-20191113-77342-1n7ymcj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301484/original/file-20191113-77342-1n7ymcj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Detail from Tayu with Phoenix Robe, a Japanese painting by an anonymous artist.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%27Tay%C3%BB_with_Phoenix_Robe%27,_anonymous_19th_century_Japanese_painting,_Honolulu_Academy_of_Arts.jpg">Honolulu Academy of Arts/Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In Japan between 794 and 1185, both men and women plucked their eyebrows out almost entirely and replaced them with new pencilled lines higher up on the <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=9Z6vCGbf66YC&pg=PA120&dq=eyebrows+robyn+cosio&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiJ1uCXx-TkAhU0IbcAHSc3D_IQ6AEIPjAD#v=onepage&q&f=false">forehead</a>.</p>
<p>Eyebrows of Ancient Greece and Rome, on the other hand, are frozen in contemplation. </p>
<p>They are often represented in sculptures through expressive mounds devoid of individual or even vaguely suggested hairs: in men they are strong and masterful furrows above a purposeful gaze; in women, soft and emotive. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295560/original/file-20191004-118222-4xfro6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295560/original/file-20191004-118222-4xfro6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295560/original/file-20191004-118222-4xfro6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295560/original/file-20191004-118222-4xfro6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=803&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295560/original/file-20191004-118222-4xfro6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1009&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295560/original/file-20191004-118222-4xfro6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1009&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295560/original/file-20191004-118222-4xfro6.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1009&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bronze portrait of a man from early first century with masterful furrows.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This lack of detail demonstrates a fondness, in some corners of ancient Greek and Roman society, for joined or “continuous” brows. </p>
<p>Poet of tenderness, Theocritus, openly admired eyebrows “<a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=37MDAAAAQAAJ&pg=PP9&dq=The+British+Poets,+including+Translations+in+One+Hundred+Volumes:+Theocritus&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjw-fiWjoLlAhXBXisKHfPBC50Q6AEIMjAB#v=onepage&q=The%20British%20Poets%2C%20including%20Translations%20in%20One%20Hundred%20Volumes%3A%20Theocritus&f=false">joined over the nose</a>” like his own, as did Byzantine Isaac Porphyrogenitus. </p>
<h2>Brows as barometers</h2>
<p>For much of the 19th century, cosmetics for women were viewed with suspicion, principally as the province of actresses and prostitutes. This meant facial enhancement was subtle and eyebrows, though gently shaped, were kept relatively natural. </p>
<p>Despite this restraint, a certain amount of effort still went into cultivation. A newspaper <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/189261094?searchTerm=%22If%20a%20child%27s%20eyebrows%20threaten%22&searchLimits=">article</a> from 1871 suggested intervention during childhood to thicken them:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If a child’s eyebrows threaten to be thin, brush them softly every night with a little coconut oil, and they will gradually become strong and full; and, in order to give them a curve, press them gently between the thumb and forefinger after every ablution of the face or hands. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>As fashions became freer after the first world war, attention was once again focused more overtly on the eyes and eyebrows. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301505/original/file-20191113-77305-1jafapf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301505/original/file-20191113-77305-1jafapf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301505/original/file-20191113-77305-1jafapf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301505/original/file-20191113-77305-1jafapf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301505/original/file-20191113-77305-1jafapf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301505/original/file-20191113-77305-1jafapf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1077&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301505/original/file-20191113-77305-1jafapf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1077&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301505/original/file-20191113-77305-1jafapf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1077&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Louise Brooks’ high brow bob showed off her neck and her eyebrows.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/252f8180-ff5d-012f-38ab-58d385a7bc34">New York Public Library</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This was partly to do with the development of beauty salons during the 1920s, many of which offered classes in makeup application so women could create new, bold looks at home. </p>
<p>The fashion for very thin eyebrows was popularised by silent film stars such as Buster Keaton and Louise Brooks, for whom thick kohl was a professional necessity and allowed a clearer vision of the eyebrows – so crucial, after all, for nonverbal expression on screen. </p>
<p>The amount of attention paid to eyebrows continued to change according to specific global events. </p>
<p>In the 1940s, women began to favour thicker, natural brows after several decades of rigorous plucking to achieve pencil-thin lines. Considering the outbreak of the second world war had forced many out of a wholly domestic existence and into the workforce, it stands to reason they had less time to spend in front of the mirror, wielding a pair of tweezers and eyebrow pencil. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295563/original/file-20191004-118222-1tliwfk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/295563/original/file-20191004-118222-1tliwfk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295563/original/file-20191004-118222-1tliwfk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295563/original/file-20191004-118222-1tliwfk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295563/original/file-20191004-118222-1tliwfk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1077&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295563/original/file-20191004-118222-1tliwfk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1077&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/295563/original/file-20191004-118222-1tliwfk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1077&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The natural look, circa 1943.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The post-war 1950s saw wide, yet more firmly defined brows and from the 1960s onwards various shapes, sizes and thicknesses were experimented with, accompanied by a firm emphasis on individuality and personal preference. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301670/original/file-20191113-77310-11rfw4v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301670/original/file-20191113-77310-11rfw4v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301670/original/file-20191113-77310-11rfw4v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=739&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301670/original/file-20191113-77310-11rfw4v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=739&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301670/original/file-20191113-77310-11rfw4v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=739&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301670/original/file-20191113-77310-11rfw4v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301670/original/file-20191113-77310-11rfw4v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301670/original/file-20191113-77310-11rfw4v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A brow beautician in a South Yarra salon in 1960.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/222938930?q=eyebrows&c=picture&versionId=244447695">Laurie Richards Studio/National Library of Australia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>More than mono</h2>
<p>When Dwight Edwards Marvin’s <a href="https://www.bartleby.com/346/14.html">collection</a> of adages and maxims, Curiosities in Proverbs, was published in 1916 it included the old English advice: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If your eyebrows meet across your nose, you’ll never live to wear your wedding clothes. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The “mono-” or “uni-brow” had become suggestive of a lack of self care, particularly in women. </p>
<p>Research undertaken in 2004 reported American women felt judged and evaluated as “dirty”, “gross” or even “repulsive” if they did not shave their underarm or leg hair, or pluck and shape their <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=y5Enl3JamIgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Embodied+Resistance:+Challenging+the+Norms,+Breaking+the+Rules,&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi54bWkjoLlAhVs7nMBHSOJCe8Q6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&q=Embodied%20Resistance%3A%20Challenging%20the%20Norms%2C%20Breaking%20the%20Rules%2C&f=false">eyebrows</a>. As the most visible of these areas, untamed eyebrows perhaps point to the bravest exhibition of natural hair. </p>
<p>Today, model Sophia Hadjipanteli sports a pair of impressively large, dark joined eyebrows, and has assertively fought back against the legion of online trolls who have abused her for this point of difference. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301470/original/file-20191113-77338-2u31d2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301470/original/file-20191113-77338-2u31d2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301470/original/file-20191113-77338-2u31d2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301470/original/file-20191113-77338-2u31d2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301470/original/file-20191113-77338-2u31d2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=750&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301470/original/file-20191113-77338-2u31d2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301470/original/file-20191113-77338-2u31d2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301470/original/file-20191113-77338-2u31d2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Model Sophia Hadjipanteli and her distinctive brow.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.instagram.com/sophiahadjipanteli/">Instagram</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A reference back to the distinctive brows of Frida Kahlo, Hadjipanteli’s look is linked to an ongoing debate surrounding women’s body hair. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301469/original/file-20191113-77326-q7f2uo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301469/original/file-20191113-77326-q7f2uo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301469/original/file-20191113-77326-q7f2uo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301469/original/file-20191113-77326-q7f2uo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301469/original/file-20191113-77326-q7f2uo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301469/original/file-20191113-77326-q7f2uo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301469/original/file-20191113-77326-q7f2uo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301469/original/file-20191113-77326-q7f2uo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Artist Frida Kahlo and her famous monobrow.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frida_Kahlo,_by_Guillermo_Kahlo.jpg">Guillermo Kahlo/Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Giving a pluck</h2>
<p>For many, excessive plucking and shaping has become emblematic of the myriad requirements women are expected to comply with to satisfy restrictive societal beauty norms. </p>
<p>Still, plenty of people with eyebrows are dedicating time and money to their upkeep. In Australia, the personal waxing and nail salon industry has grown steadily over five years to be worth an estimated <a href="https://www.ibisworld.com.au/industry-trends/specialised-market-research-reports/consumer-goods-services/personal-waxing-nail-salons.html">A$1.3 billion</a> and employ more than 20,000 people. </p>
<p>Over this time, social media has offered a diverse and changing menu of brow choices and displays. </p>
<p>One choice: the “eyebrow slit” – thin vertical cuts in eyebrow hair – has re-emerged online and in suburban high schools. It’s important to emphasise <em>re-emerged</em> because, with beauty as with clothing, what goes around comes around. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301683/original/file-20191114-77363-1x8k3a4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301683/original/file-20191114-77363-1x8k3a4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/301683/original/file-20191114-77363-1x8k3a4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=785&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301683/original/file-20191114-77363-1x8k3a4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=785&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301683/original/file-20191114-77363-1x8k3a4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=785&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301683/original/file-20191114-77363-1x8k3a4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=986&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301683/original/file-20191114-77363-1x8k3a4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=986&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/301683/original/file-20191114-77363-1x8k3a4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=986&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Vanilla Ice, working the eyebrow slit since 1991.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://twitter.com/smashhitsmag/status/1019841015874715648">Smash Hits/Twitter</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The eyebrow slit was especially popular amongst hip hop artists in the 1990s, and draws appeal due to its flexibility: there are no firm rules as to the number or width of the slits, which originally were meant to suggest scarring from a recent fight or gangsta adventure. More recent converts have been accused of <a href="https://www.teenvogue.com/story/eyebrow-cuts-cultural-appropriation">cultural appropriation</a>. </p>
<p>Some have experimented by replacing plain slits with other shapes, such as hearts or stars, though plucking or shaving brows into unusual shapes is – as we have seen – by no means new either. </p>
<h2>Facing the day</h2>
<p>If the popularity of recent trends is anything to go by, eyebrow fashion will remain on the lush side for some time.</p>
<p>The “<a href="http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/news-features/TMG8997240/Scouse-Brow-a-beginners-guide.html">Scouse</a>” brow (very thick, wide and angular eyebrows emphasised with highly defined dark pencil shapes: named after natives of Liverpool in the United Kingdom) is still trending. </p>
<p>The “Instagram eyebrow” (thick brows plucked and painted to create a gradient, going from light to very dark as the brow ends) is inescapable on the platform and beyond. Makeup for brows is therefore also likely to continue, providing a clear linear connection through nearly all the eyebrow ideals since ancient times. </p>
<p>The latest offering to those seeking a groomed look is “<a href="https://www.elle.com.au/beauty/eyebrow-lamination-22517">eyebrow lamination</a>”, a chemical treatment that uses keratin to straighten individual hairs - a kind of anti-perm for your brow. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/B4R-fgynQmr","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<p>Those still searching for their eyebrow aesthetic may benefit from some wisdom shared by crime and society reporter Viola Rodgers in an 1898 edition of the San Francisco Call newspaper. </p>
<p>In a piece which ran alongside an interview with the man who had inspired Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer character, she advised that the appearance of one’s brow conveyed more than just their grooming <a href="https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SFC18981023.2.141.22&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------1">habits</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>An arched eyebrow … is expressive of great sensibility … Heavy, thick eyebrows indicate a strong constitution and great physical endurance … Long, drooping eyebrows indicate an amiable disposition and faintly defined eyebrows placed high above the nose are signs of indolence and weakness. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Eyebrow slits? We can only imagine what Viola would think.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/123872/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lydia Edwards does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Moulding eyebrows to make a statement is nothing new. A journey through history, across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the United States, shows some of the highs and lows of brow fashion.Lydia Edwards, Fashion historian, Edith Cowan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1131602019-03-08T15:43:52Z2019-03-08T15:43:52ZMichael Jackson: as an expert in child sexual abuse here’s what I thought when I watched Leaving Neverland<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/262906/original/file-20190308-155510-14az7se.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C8%2C1917%2C1138&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Michael Jackson with Wade Robson, then aged five.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Channel 4</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Since <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/mar/06/leaving-neverland-review-michael-jackson-documentary">Leaving Neverland</a> – the disturbing documentary film about Michael Jackson and the nature of his relationship with two young boys – aired, many of Jackson’s fans have said they cannot believe their idol would commit the abuses alleged by the now adult men. </p>
<p>But others watched horrified as stories from the 1980s and 1990s were recounted. Viewers asked: how could this have happened? How did the parents let their children get into such apparently dangerous situations? And why weren’t red flags raised at the time?</p>
<p>I’m not going to speculate on the accuracy or otherwise of the two men’s stories. But, true or not, they raise important issues which we need to better understand if we are to prevent abuse happening.</p>
<p><a href="https://static.cambridge.org/resource/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20170221045052129-0117:S0047279400005857:S004727940000585Xa.pdf">Historically</a>, as a society we have actually found it very difficult to believe allegations or to acknowledge possible signs that child sexual abuse is occurring. Several <a href="https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents/5381/view/social-political-discourses-about-child-sexual-abuse-their-influence-institutional-responses-full-report_0.pdf">theoretical explanations</a> have been offered for this including our need to believe in a just world where this kind of thing isn’t done by adults to children. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/10/the-psychology-of-victim-blaming/502661/">Just world beliefs</a> encourage us to conform to the rules and regulations of our communities, since we believe that this will be rewarded with a safe and orderly existence for us and our families. So we find it difficult to comprehend that bad things happen to those who do not deserve it.</p>
<p>There are several common misconceptions about child sexual abuse which can make it hard to believe allegations when they are made. These include the belief that sexual abusers are monsters who are violent and frightening to children. We also tend to believe that parents would know if their child was being sexually abused or that children would tell someone immediately and that they would display fear towards the perpetrator. It’s also commonly – and often wrongly – thought that a child’s statements about experiences of abuse would <a href="https://www.secasa.com.au/pages/the-effects-of-childhood-sexual-abuse/the-child-sexual-abuse-accommodation-syndrome/">remain consistent over time</a>.</p>
<h2>‘Best friends’, not ‘monsters’</h2>
<p>It is quite natural to think of child molesters as monsters who intimidate and frighten the children they prey on. But while there are various types of offender, many are able to gain access to – and the trust of – children due to their ability to attract children to them and to emotionally and socially connect with them. Such offenders will gravitate towards children who are shy, withdrawn, lonely or rejected by peers. They work to create an emotional bond with the child through becoming their “best friend” and <a href="https://www.secasa.com.au/assets/Documents/grooming-and-predatory-behaviour.pdf">making the child feel “special”</a>.</p>
<p>In this way, the child becomes emotionally dependent on the perpetrator. The dependency is further fuelled by isolating the child from others. This grooming process can take between hours and months and the sexual element is often introduced gradually through desensitising the child to touch using hugs, rough and tumble play or tickling. Rarely, does child sexual abuse involve violence or threats of harm (any threats that are made tend to relate to the consequences for their relationship should they be “found out”).</p>
<p>When offenders do not have a legitimate reason to have unsupervised access to a desired child or the child is so young that they have little autonomy outside of the family, the motivated offender will also <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/02/27/parents-targeted-by-child-abuser-grooming-techniques-report_a_21726244/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer_us=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_cs=jUNcFC0ZNQx9prpQCT9ZoA">groom the child’s parents</a>. Indeed, it is reported that the child’s parents are often groomed before the child. The abuser will ingratiate themselves with the parents, doing small favours and creating an emotional bond with them. It maybe something as simple as offering childminding to give the parents a much-needed rest. The bond is created by sharing personal information, particularly that that which signifies vulnerability. Their involvement in the family become natural, normal and highly welcomed. Some will come to be heralded as the family’s saviour.</p>
<p>This means the parents’ natural guard against “strangers” around their children will be lowered, if not dropped. Any suspicions that might arise will be automatically be dismissed or explained away, since they become unable to comprehend how anyone so wonderful could possibly engage in something so abhorrent.</p>
<h2>Why don’t they tell?</h2>
<p>Very few children disclose sexual abuse at the time that it is occurring. Where disclosures do occur, these tend to be where the abuse is a one-off incident perpetrated by a stranger with little by way of grooming. So the abuse is more readily conceptualised as an unwanted assault by both the child and others to whom the child discloses.</p>
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<p>There are many reasons for <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nadia_Wager/publication/273776210_Understanding_Children's_Non-Disclosure_of_Child_Sexual_Assault_Implications_for_Assisting_Parents_and_Teachers_to_Become_Effective_Guardians/links/5582d4dd08ae1b14a0a28b34.pdf">non-disclosure</a>. One reason reported retrospectively by adults who were abused as children, is that they did not know that what was happening was wrong. Some children even feel hurt by the perceived rejection when the abuse ends. Many only come to realise that their experience constituted abuse as they entered adulthood, and they can see the relationship from a new perspective. This realisation, which can be perceived as a betrayal of trust, can result in delayed trauma due the abuse only emerging in adulthood.</p>
<p>Despite the new realisation of the abusive nature of the relationship, it is not unusual for adult survivors of child sexual abuse to report still feeling a conflicted love for the perpetrator. This has been <a href="https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-07-grooming-child-abusers-stockholm-syndrome.html">likened to “Stockholm syndrome”</a>, which has been found to arise in hostage situations, where a deep and immutable bond is established with the perpetrator. So there there can be an ongoing reticence and feelings of guilt for having reported the abuse. Sometimes statements are retracted as a result. This effect has been associated with a phenomenon known as “child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome”.</p>
<p>As I have said, we’re not dealing here with any specific case. But, in my experience, the alleged horrors detailed in Leaving Neverland – and Michael Jackson’s family denies that they ever happened – appear to conform to the issues I’ve discussed. What is clear is that the trauma such experiences cause can take decades to emerge and can last a lifetime.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/113160/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nadia Wager has received funds from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse for the production of a rapid evidence assessment into quantifying the extent of online facilitated child sexual abuse in 2017-18 and has just been awarded research funding by the British Academy for a study exploring the pathways to sexual revictimization.</span></em></p>A documentary film has made disturbing allegations about Michael Jackson and child sexual abuse. Whether true or not the film raised some important issues.Nadia Wager, Reader in Forensic Psychology, University of HuddersfieldLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1070072018-11-18T21:54:51Z2018-11-18T21:54:51ZCool for cats: that spiny tongue does more than keep a cat well groomed<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245689/original/file-20181115-194494-a3sr15.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A domestic cat grooming its fur.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy of Candler Hobbs (Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta).</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Have you ever been licked by a cat? If so you’ll know the feline tongue feels more like sandpaper than satin. </p>
<p>A cat’s tongue is covered in hundreds of sharp, scoop-shaped spines made of keratin that spring into action during grooming. Until now we haven’t really known why their tongues are so rough. </p>
<p>But new research, <a href="http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1809544115">published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences</a>, shows they play a role in helping a cat keep cool.</p>
<h2>Cat grooming</h2>
<p>Domestic cats spend up to a quarter of their waking time grooming their fur coat to help remove pesky fleas and loose hairs. If they didn’t groom, then any excess debris could tangle fur, causing painful tugging of the skin, and even lead to infection.</p>
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<em>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/senate-inquiry-calls-for-tougher-rules-on-pet-food-in-australia-102410">Senate inquiry calls for tougher rules on pet food in Australia</a>
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<p>But the new study reports something else that happens when a cat uses its tongue for grooming.</p>
<p>The scientists used CT scans of cat tongues to work out the structure of the spines, known as papillae. The spines are about 2mm long and have a U-shaped cavity at their tip (more on why later). The researchers also measured the hardness of the papillae, and found it is similar to that of human fingernails.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245701/original/file-20181115-194509-o4a07.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245701/original/file-20181115-194509-o4a07.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245701/original/file-20181115-194509-o4a07.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245701/original/file-20181115-194509-o4a07.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245701/original/file-20181115-194509-o4a07.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245701/original/file-20181115-194509-o4a07.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245701/original/file-20181115-194509-o4a07.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245701/original/file-20181115-194509-o4a07.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">This is the surface of a cat’s tongue. Rigid, hollow papillae near the tongue tip are shown on the right, while soft, conical papillae near the throat are shown to the left.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alexis Noel</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It got more interesting when the scientists used high-speed videography to work out what happens to the spines when a cat is grooming. Only the spines at the end of the tongue contact the fur during grooming. These are larger and not as closely packed as the spines nearer the bottom of the tongue.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245707/original/file-20181115-194513-oocc4g.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245707/original/file-20181115-194513-oocc4g.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/245707/original/file-20181115-194513-oocc4g.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245707/original/file-20181115-194513-oocc4g.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245707/original/file-20181115-194513-oocc4g.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245707/original/file-20181115-194513-oocc4g.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245707/original/file-20181115-194513-oocc4g.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/245707/original/file-20181115-194513-oocc4g.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A slice of a cat tongue, displaying papillae embedded in tissue.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image courtesy of Taren Carter (photographer).</span></span>
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<p>As a cat grooms, there are four steps. First the tongue is extended out of the mouth. Then the muscles in the tongue expand the surface, and the spines rotate to become perpendicular to the tongue. </p>
<p>In the final two steps the tongue sweeps through the fur and is taken back into the mouth with a U-shaped curl. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">This is a black cat grooming its fur, displaying the papillae on the tongue.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Using some fake fur and a force plate, the scientists calculated that with the amount of compression of the tongue on the fur, the spines can actually contact the skin of the cat. </p>
<p>This is where it gets even more interesting – and also a bit icky, as we need to think about cat saliva.</p>
<h2>The saliva action</h2>
<p>The U-shaped cavity in the tip of the spines, which we mentioned earlier, acts as a wick in the mouth to take up saliva. This is the same action as when you put the tip of a tissue in water and the water creeps up the tissue.</p>
<p>Because scientists like to work out the detail, they calculated that these cavities would take up around 4μL (microlitres) of saliva across 290 spines. (It would take around 1,200 times this amount of saliva to fill a 5ml metric teaspoon.) </p>
<p>This 4μl is only around 5% of the total saliva on the surface of the cat’s tongue. Not much, but it has a really important function as it can deposit saliva right down to a cat’s skin.</p>
<p>The scientists used the estimate that cats spend around a quarter of their time awake grooming (about 2.4 hours a day) and lick about once per second.</p>
<p>This means cats can lose around a quarter of the total heat they need to lose per day through the tiny bit of saliva in their tongue spines. (We lose heat through liquid by sweating when we’re hot.)</p>
<h2>Cool for cats</h2>
<p>Many (not all) cats live in hot climates, so this would be really important for their survival. The researchers looked at the tongues of several species of cat, including domestic cat, bobcat, cougar, snow leopard, tiger and lion.</p>
<p>Most cats groom themselves very effectively, helped by enzymes (special chemicals) in their saliva that dissolve blood and other debris.</p>
<p>By working out how far the spines penetrate cat fur, and measuring the length of fur in different breeds, the scientists also worked out the only cats that can’t groom themselves effectively are domestic Persians, which are typically long-haired.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/chocolate-labradors-die-earlier-than-yellow-or-black-and-have-more-disease-105366">Chocolate Labradors die earlier than yellow or black, and have more disease</a>
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<p>This means if you own a Persian you need to take the time to brush them, or else matts form and can damage their skin and lead to infections. But here’s where the scientists made another breakthrough.</p>
<h2>A new brush</h2>
<p>In the final part of this research, the scientists used the knowledge they gained about the spiny form of a cat’s tongue, and used 3D printing to develop a better grooming brush to use on cats.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ejv7YYAc414?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The prototype grooming tool allows easy removal of hair after grooming.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The scientists say the biology-inspired brush should help remove allergens from cat fur, and help with the application of any cleaning lotions and medications on cats’ skin.</p>
<p>The brush design may also help inspire news ways to clean other complex hairy surfaces. </p>
<p>So next time you watch a cat grooming, take a moment to marvel at just how much awesome science is involved in the evolutionary design of its tongue.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/107007/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Susan Hazel is on the Dog & Cat Management Board of South Australia. </span></em></p>Domestic cats spend a quarter of their waking hours grooming. But that tongue action on the fur does more than keep fur clean – it also helps keep a cat cool.Susan Hazel, Senior Lecturer, School of Animal and Veterinary Science, University of AdelaideLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/927882018-04-09T15:37:15Z2018-04-09T15:37:15ZCategorising child abusers as online or offline doesn’t help protect victims<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/213443/original/file-20180405-95689-14nx0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/hooded-computer-hacker-stealing-information-laptop-594726908">PORTRAIT IMAGES ASIA BY NONWARIT/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>How an online child abuser is classified by researchers is primarily based on the <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1079063210384275">intended location of sexual climax</a> – online or offline. Offenders driven by fantasy intentions are seen as only having contact with children in the virtual world – using the internet for sexual activities such as exhibitionism, voyeurism, masturbation and cybersex. Contact-driven offenders meanwhile are seen to use the internet as a medium to engage minors in physical sex. </p>
<p>However, our research into these two types of internet-initiated child sexual offenders has found these definitions are problematic. And that our lack of understanding about the behaviour of adults who abuse minors via the internet means that the laws protecting children exploited purely online is lagging behind those who are abused offline.</p>
<p>Offenders who commit non-contact sexual deviations offline (for example, voyeurism, exhibitionism and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frotteurism">frotteurism</a>) often also <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19924524">commit contact sexual deviations</a> – such as rape and sexual coercion – too. So perhaps it is not so easy to distinguish offenders based on online fantasy and offline contact behaviour. In fact, there may be an overlap between these crimes.</p>
<h2>Virtual contact crime</h2>
<p>We recently completed <a href="https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Wl82X18YDkMp">an extensive and systematic review</a> of all the relevant published studies that examined the behaviour of offenders who sexually exploited children online. Our aim was to determine whether a true distinction can be made between fantasy and contact-driven offenders and, if so, to identify the communicative and behavioural tactics that separate the two groups. </p>
<p>Our review shows that it is not always possible to verify where, or even if, sexual climax was reached. Patterns of online fantasy behaviour, such as <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1079063215612442">online masturbation</a> and <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0145213414004360">arousal</a>, were reported in studies examining both fantasy and contact-driven interactions. This suggests that groomers’ sexual gratification occurs with or without the intent to meet offline. </p>
<p>In addition, there were cases in which talk of offline contact was used to support the online fantasy, making it difficult to determine the true intent of the person. And so, to strictly define them as either fantasy or contact driven is misleading. </p>
<p>The behaviour of child sexual exploitation offenders <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13552601003698644">can escalate online</a>, particularly when combined with <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222563344_Emotion_and_self-control">masturbation</a>. So it is unclear whether intent or detection prevents online sexual fantasies from developing offline. </p>
<p>Importantly, the fantasy/contact distinction does not consider the existence of <a href="https://jhu.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/internet-sexual-solicitation-of-children-a-proposed-typology-of-o">mixed offenders</a>, who commit both online and offline sexual abuse.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/213444/original/file-20180405-189798-18eqpbz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/213444/original/file-20180405-189798-18eqpbz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/213444/original/file-20180405-189798-18eqpbz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/213444/original/file-20180405-189798-18eqpbz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=408&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/213444/original/file-20180405-189798-18eqpbz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/213444/original/file-20180405-189798-18eqpbz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/213444/original/file-20180405-189798-18eqpbz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=513&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">In danger.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/little-girl-sitting-dark-playing-laptop-447296563?src=uHHU2p7zclILpoHjG2QRLA-1-2">Halfpoint/Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>Evidently, there is no neat distinction to be made between fantasy and contact-driven individuals. Though we did not find any communicative or behavioural patterns that separated the groups, it is clear both fantasy and contact-driven offenders use technology as an enabler for sexual abuse. </p>
<p>They achieve contact with victims in the virtual environment with the aim of sexual gratification. Fantasy-driven individuals incorporate talk of offline contact within interactions, and contact-driven individuals engage in online sexual activities. This indicates that abuse can occur both online and offline, as minors become <a href="http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.920.5933&rep=rep1&type=pdf">cyber-victims</a> through various methods of online exploitation such as <a href="http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Society/documents/2003/07/17/Groomingreport.pdf">cyber-rape</a> (the aggressive coercion of victims into sexual behaviour on line). </p>
<h2>Redefining online exploitation</h2>
<p>Instead of using the fantasy and contact distinction, we think that the European Online Grooming Project’s <a href="http://natcen.ac.uk/media/22514/european-online-grooming-projectfinalreport.pdf">three category system</a> – of “intimacy seeking”, “adaptable” and “hypersexual” groomers – is a much better fit. The distinction between these categories is primarily based on the nature of the relationship, not the intent for online/offline sexual gratification. </p>
<p>“Intimacy seeking” groomers focus on developing a relationship, introducing sexual content slowly. They consider the “relationship” to be consenting and intimate. “Adaptable” groomers focus less on the relationship and more on the risk of being detected. They change their approach to match the victim and engage in both online and offline sexual behaviours. Finally, the “hypersexual” group introduce sexual content very quickly (sometimes in seconds), with the intent of immediate sexual gratification. Talk of offline contact and relationship building is limited here, and these individuals are often in possession of child and extreme adult pornography. </p>
<p>Just as adults that are sexually attracted to children vary in the degree of their sexual desires, so to does the extent to which they act upon them. Our findings provide empirical support that offline contact is not needed for victimisation to occur, which is why we need to continue working to clearly distinguish types of offenders. Doing so will help make better, more informed decisions in several areas, such as police investigations and victim empowerment</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92788/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>How online child abusers are categorised is stopping the proper protection of victims.Laura Broome, PhD Researcher in Psychology, Swansea UniversityCristina Izura, Associate Professor of Psychology, Swansea UniversityNuria Lorenzo-Dus, Professor of English Language & Applied Linguistics, Swansea UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/909722018-02-01T11:13:05Z2018-02-01T11:13:05ZThe virtual door to online child sexual grooming is wide open<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/204422/original/file-20180201-123826-1cimz24.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock.</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="http://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/publications/670-emerging-new-threat-in-online-dating-initial-trends-in-internet-dating-initiated-serious-sexual-assaults/file">The nature of sexual offending has changed</a> with most interactions occurring online and involving younger victims. This change is seeing people taking more risks by virtually <a href="https://theconversation.com/stranger-danger-in-the-online-and-real-world-79517">opening their door to “strangers”</a>.</p>
<p>A harsh reality of “contact” sexual offending is that many offenders will use various <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cfs.12080/pdf">grooming techniques</a> to enable them to commit sexual offences. Whether this is an online conversation manipulated into a face-to-face meeting, or a chat in a cafe or bar resulting in a victim being led to a less crowded area, the reoccurring themes are coercion, control and trust.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-crackdown-on-child-groomers-comes-into-force">new offence</a> of sexual communication with a child was introduced in April 2017. Before this, police could not intervene until groomers attempted to meet victims face-to-face. </p>
<p>The latest figures reveal that a staggering <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42855172">1,316 offences</a> were recorded in the first six months of this law being introduced in England and Wales. There are now calls for social media sites to do more “grooming prevention” and consider the use of “<a href="https://www.nspcc.org.uk/what-we-do/news-opinion/more-than-1300-cases-sexual-communication-with-child-recorded-after-change-in-law/">anti-grooming alerts</a>” for potential victims. But there are some key issues that should be considered before furthering this idea. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/204272/original/file-20180131-157462-l9r83u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/204272/original/file-20180131-157462-l9r83u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204272/original/file-20180131-157462-l9r83u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204272/original/file-20180131-157462-l9r83u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=380&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204272/original/file-20180131-157462-l9r83u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204272/original/file-20180131-157462-l9r83u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/204272/original/file-20180131-157462-l9r83u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The realities of sexual grooming online are only just being discovered.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/silhouette-girl-using-her-tablet-computer-265870769">Shutterstock/KylieWalls</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>What is the true scale of online grooming?</h2>
<p>Crime figures released for 2015/16 indicate there were <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/compendium/focusonviolentcrimeandsexualoffences/yearendingmarch2016/overviewofviolentcrimeandsexualoffences#what-do-we-know-about-sexual-offences">37,778 child sexual offences</a> (including grooming) in England – that’s 36.3 sexual offences per 10,000 children under 16. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland recorded even higher rates.</p>
<p>Within these figures, the <a href="https://www.nspcc.org.uk/globalassets/documents/research-reports/how-safe-children-2017-report.pdf">NSPCC reported </a> that there were 11,230 child rape offences and 25,577 involving sexual assault/sexual activity against children. These figures are much higher than the reported grooming offences (<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42855172">1,316 over six months</a>). But why?</p>
<p>Crime data does not detail how many sexual offences also included grooming, or whether grooming offences are dropped when evidence of child sexual abuse is found. Undetected grooming offences can lead to horrific sexual abuse, such as in the much publicised <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/08/rochdale-grooming-case-10-men-sentenced-to-up-to-25-years-in-jail">Rochdale grooming case</a> (where young girls were targeted by older men who plied them with alcohol) and in the <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13552600.2014.927009">online</a> grooming world too. Child victims describe grooming as a <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cfs.12080/abstract">key feature</a> of their abuse. </p>
<p>Is it that the intelligence tools available are unable to identify interactions in time to stop contact sexual abuse occurring? There is no doubt that the <a href="http://www.college.police.uk/News/College-news/Documents/Demand%20Report%2023_1_15_noBleed.pdf">demand on police</a> is ever increasing, with this type of crime requiring specialist skills and expertise. </p>
<h2>Responsibility on social media companies</h2>
<p>Social media companies should do all they can to reduce illegal behaviour on their platforms. A key issue centres on the ability to accurately identify potential groomers. Various studies have reported good results in <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-13734-6_30">identifying grooming behaviour</a>. But research has also noted that offenders are using <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01639625.2014.944074">a wide variety of grooming processes</a> to snare their victims. </p>
<p>Evidence of differing functions within <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1079063210384275">offender-victim interactions</a> have been
observed with some restricting their sexual behaviour to online (fantasy-driven) and others using the internet to facilitate the abuse of children (contact-driven). Research has also shown that a <a href="http://www.internetbehavior.com/pdf/contact_and_cp_mcmanus.pdf">key part of the “offending pathway”</a> from online to contact abuse is grooming. </p>
<p>Consequently, many researchers agree that although the motivations behind interactions are sexually deviant, they may <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13552600601069414">seem innocent</a> in nature when observed, making it <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01639625.2016.1197656">difficult to identify</a> before actual abuse occurs. This becomes more problematic if <a href="https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/child-abuse-and-neglect/child-sexual-abuse/sexual-abuse-facts-statistics">young people</a> are the groomers, <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13552600701788608">displaying complex grooming behaviours</a>. Using multiple social media platforms, as well as online and offline methods, further reduces the ability to identify offenders.</p>
<p>There is also the controversial belief that some offenders find engaging in sexual deviant fantasies online <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/B%3AASEB.0000029071.89455.53?no-access=true">reduces urges</a> to commit contact offences. A real fear is that social media warnings could push these offenders to interact offline.</p>
<p>But if the intention is for social media companies to give potential child victims “<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-42855172">grooming alerts</a>”, this puts the onus on victims to acknowledge that they may be subject to grooming. The power a groomer has over a victim may override any considerations to stop interactions. </p>
<p>Those committing these offences are often highly skilled at <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13552600601069414">identifying vulnerable</a> victims, and manipulating them by giving <a href="https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/child-abuse-and-neglect/grooming/">compliments</a> and attention. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"958061448642543616"}"></div></p>
<p>Developing grooming alerts may also inadvertently lead to parents/caregivers taking their eyes off the ball when it comes to their childrens’ social media accounts. Assumptions might be made that the technology is able to detect suspicious behaviour better than they can. Not enough is known about childrens’ online interactions, with reports only just highlighting this issue within <a href="http://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/publications/670-emerging-new-threat-in-online-dating-initial-trends-in-internet-dating-initiated-serious-sexual-assaults/file">adult populations</a>. </p>
<p>The new child grooming law was introduced to reduce the risk of contact sexual offences. However, it seems the ability to identify grooming behaviours before sexual abuse still falls short. There are issues here for social media companies, the police, teachers and parents. But the message is clear. The virtual door to strangers is wide open. More needs to be done to identify and respond to online sexual grooming.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90972/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle McManus receives funding from Lancashire Constabulary and Lancashire Police Crime Commissioner as part of a part-time secondment placement within Lancashire Constabulary's Evidence Based Policing Research Hub.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Louise Almond does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The nature of sexual offending has changed, but can we better identify sexual groomers before abuse occurs?Michelle McManus, Senior Lecturer in Policing, Forensic and Applied Sciences, University of Central LancashireLouise Almond, Senior lecturer in Investigative and Forensic Psychology, University of LiverpoolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/841702017-10-19T13:22:21Z2017-10-19T13:22:21ZWe analysed online groomers’ conversations to find out how deceptive they really are<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190496/original/file-20171016-30957-uzigm5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Being lied to?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/teen-girl-excessively-sitting-computer-laptop-535639165?src=t2LiNRuoOslS2QZjcSI7Lw-1-30">Burdun Iliya/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The online world can be an exciting place for children. But internet-related sex crimes against children and young people are reported an average of <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/cyber-child-sex-offences-increase-half-nspcc-uk-children-charity-a7765666.html">15 times per day</a> in England and Wales alone.</p>
<p>Researchers looking into how online groomers work have <a href="https://ac.els-cdn.com/S2211695816300095/1-s2.0-S2211695816300095-main.pdf?_tid=6885b13c-b3e6-11e7-bab7-00000aab0f26&acdnat=1508318964_d80b158428b6a763880cce80ec42abd6">found that</a> gaining victims’ trust is a key part of engaging them in sexually explicit behaviour. During this process, groomers hide their main intention, to sexually abuse the victim, by <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-paedophiles-speak-to-children-online-66243">developing a friendly and personal relationship</a> with them. </p>
<p>Though you might expect that they deceive and lie to encourage their victims to go along with their plans, the truth is that, generally, online groomers are not as overtly deceptive as we might assume. Groomers’ use of <a href="https://ac.els-cdn.com/S1054139X04001715/1-s2.0-S1054139X04001715-main.pdf?_tid=db8564f0-b3e8-11e7-9a15-00000aacb35f&acdnat=1508320016_fc59d5b3acbf538a11fb43e677c2acfb%20/%20http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1054139X13003364?via%3Dihub">identity deception</a> – deception around age, location and appearance – is fairly low (5-33%), and some identity deceptions have actually been found to <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15564886.2013.873750">reduce the likelihood</a> of groomers meeting offline with victims. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190562/original/file-20171017-5066-18adpro.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190562/original/file-20171017-5066-18adpro.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190562/original/file-20171017-5066-18adpro.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190562/original/file-20171017-5066-18adpro.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=404&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190562/original/file-20171017-5066-18adpro.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190562/original/file-20171017-5066-18adpro.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190562/original/file-20171017-5066-18adpro.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=508&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Criminal intent.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/man-criminal-intentions-desktop-computer-on-656050543?src=t2LiNRuoOslS2QZjcSI7Lw-2-96">Sander van der Werf/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Deception and lies</h2>
<p>Our research looks deeper into the language used by online groomers. We analyse real chat logs against key linguistic indicators of deception – emotional expression, pronoun use and cognitive complexity – to find out just how deceptive they really are.</p>
<p>When people lie they tend to use words that are emotional. Negative words, like alone, angry, or blame, represent an unconscious feeling of guilt and anxiety, as well as a lack of concern over the development of the social relationship. But lying does not always make people feel guilty, it can also make them excited or proud, which is reflected in the use of positive emotion words, such as awesome, beautiful or best. These words are particularly important during trust development, and are often used to appear convincing and “sell” the interaction.</p>
<p>Lying is a cognitively complex task. When telling the truth, more detailed abstract information can be provided without thinking too much. Liars tend to <a href="http://www.albany.edu/%7Ezg929648/PDFs/Newman.pdf">use concrete terms</a> that can be experienced perceptually – like seen, felt, heard – to enable them to focus on their deceit. For example, responding to the question “what are you doing?” in a abstract way would be to say “it’s a nice day so I decided to walk rather than get the bus” compared to the concrete response “walking home”.</p>
<p>Pronoun use is another key deceptive marker and gives insight into where the communicator focuses their attention. Those who use the first person-singular pronouns I, me and mine, tend to be more honest, self-aware and “own” their story. For example, “I am too old for you but I just thought I would talk to you”. Second person pronouns – you, you’ll – represent dishonesty, interpersonal distance and deflection of blame: “you tell me what you like best?” or “told you, it’s up to you, want you to feel good.”</p>
<p>Finally, first person plural pronouns (we, our, us) are considered to represent honesty and a shared identity. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/books/review/the-secret-life-of-pronouns-by-james-w-pennebaker-book-review.html">Research has shown</a> that using “we” to include “you” and “I” recognises that specific people are part of the same group. This is important for groomers as they attempt to isolate victims from their social network, by creating a new group identity that exists only between the two of them.</p>
<h2>Honesty</h2>
<p>When we applied these deceptive indicators to 64 online grooming conversations, totalling around 150,000 words, we found something quite surprising: groomers do not follow a clear pattern of deception. Judgement of their own behaviour appears to be positive and focuses on developing the relationship. There were signs of honesty in the use of abstract language and attention on themselves – that is to say the I, me and mine – but also signs of deception seen in high frequencies of “you” terms and positive affect words (love, beautiful), and low use of “we”.</p>
<p>Examining the strength of the emotional words, we found that groomers use either strongly positive (happiness, fantastic) or negative (rape, harm) words as opposed to neutral terms (shy, challenge). So underneath the positive drive there are signs of a more implicit feeling of negativity.</p>
<p>One important factor to consider here is how the anticipation of future events – be it sexual activity online or offline – limits the groomers’ ability to explicitly lie to their victim. We know that groomers employ a <a href="https://www.ceop.police.uk/Documents/ceopdocs/CEOP_TACSEA2013_240613%20FINAL.pdf">“scattergun” approach</a> to find victims, contacting dozens if not hundreds online to increase their chance of success. This also limits their ability to lie, as maintaining this level of deception would be an impossible task. </p>
<p>However, there are signs of a more deep-rooted form of deception: deception of the victim and possibly themselves about their true goals. For no matter whether the “relationship” is truthful or deceptive, the outcome can be viewed no other way than as the sexual abuse of a minor.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/84170/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cristina Izura receives funding from ESRC. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Laura Broome does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Finding out how ‘real’ the relationship is between online groomers and their child victims.Laura Broome, PhD Researcher in Psychology, Swansea UniversityCristina Izura, Associate Professor of Psychology, Swansea UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/829092017-08-31T03:53:13Z2017-08-31T03:53:13ZDoctors, lawyers and ministers all take a professional pledge: here’s why teachers should too<p>What do these occasions have in common: a wedding, a witness about to give evidence in court, and a citizenship ceremony? All are public occasions, all require witnesses, and – most importantly – all require those at the centre of the occasion to make a vow, swear an oath, or make a binding pledge. </p>
<p>Such occasions are far more common than we might think. Those joining the legal profession pledge to uphold certain values and behave accordingly. Think also of the words required at the swearing in of ministers of the crown or a president. Members of police and security forces, those joining the armed forces – even scouts – have to pledge to abide by codes of conduct and ethics. </p>
<p>So why not teachers too?</p>
<p>An important question to ask is what would be gained by having teachers publicly record their commitment to uphold their professional codes of conduct and ethics. To put it another way, what would be lost by removing the requirement for lawyers, doctors, ministers and others? </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/documents/final-actuarial-report-(1).pdf">findings</a> from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse are instructive. Allegations were received from 1,467 survivors of sexual abuse suffered from at least as far back as 1940. </p>
<p>Of the institutional categories employed by the commission, educational institutions were the second-most-represented: 29.8% of the total. Of all alleged perpetrators, about one in six was a teacher, and by far the majority were male. Importantly, many were also clergy. Of faith-based institutions, the two most prominent were Catholic (40.9%) and Anglican (7.4%). </p>
<p>More than three-quarters of all survivors experienced multiple episodes of abuse, while 42.8% reported having been abused by physical contact, such as vaginal, oral and digital penetration. The average age of first abuse was 9.5 years for females and 10.3 years for males.</p>
<p>Even without any of the harrowing detail of particular cases, all involved in education must heed the questions asked time and again by survivors of childhood sexual abuse: how could anyone do this to me? Why didn’t anyone notice? Why wasn’t I believed? </p>
<p>Wherever it has happened, children have been confronted by the criminal duplicity of teachers, principals – even school counsellors and chaplains – and in schools <a href="http://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/getattachment/f01013d8-a911-4f8c-93b8-09515a35ecaf/Report-of-Case-Study-No-32">characterised by survivors</a> as having a culture of violence, intimidation and a sense of entitlement. For example, in the <a href="https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/getattachment/8fcb1078-a5ca-4750-ad24-052452f15a58/Volume-2">Interim Report Volume 2</a>, the school chaplain at a Christian Brothers’ college told an 11-year-old boy who complained of being molested: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Some of us have a cross to bear boy, and that’s yours. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Grooming has hidden in plain sight in many cases. Grooming was <a href="https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/getattachment/b8c8cc19-ad65-44f5-951e-3b1705156da2/Grooming-and-child-sexual-abuse-in-institutional-c">defined in a research project</a> commissioned by the royal commission as: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The use of a variety of manipulative and controlling techniques; with a vulnerable subject; in a range of interpersonal and social settings; in order to establish trust or normalise sexually harmful behaviour; with the overall aim of facilitating exploitation and/or prohibiting exposure. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>It can look like the very trusting behaviours teachers strive to attain and school policies have been rendered futile by ambiguous wording or a lax environment of implementation. For example, <a href="http://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/getattachment/f01013d8-a911-4f8c-93b8-09515a35ecaf/Report-of-Case-Study-No-32">evidence given</a> by a former female student of Geelong Grammar describes how a music teacher at the school used his position to convince her to take additional music lessons, during which he repeatedly molested her.</p>
<p>The teaching profession simply can’t leave the responsibility for a forensic response to others. The profession, through its peak bodies, must respond. </p>
<p>Respect for teachers has increasingly focused on their contribution to fairly narrow educational outcomes. But historically, teachers were expected to be “moral agents” as well as “values educators”. </p>
<p>While such expectations may have assumed a questionable consensus and been inadequately monitored, in more recent times peak bodies have formulated <a href="http://ro.ecu.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1825&context=ajte">codes of conduct and ethics</a> according to which teachers are meant to conduct themselves.</p>
<p>Aspirational sentiments such as these, and behavioural expectations such as that “Teachers Treat Their Learners With Courtesy And Dignity” have meant nothing to those paedophiles who have worked – and hidden or even been protected – <a href="http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/download/publications/tabledpapers/8ce373d5-fe28-4f2b-9505-9dc478f3a951/upload_pdf/child%20abuse%20interim-report-volume-1-final-020714_lr_web%25TZ_.pdf;fileType=application%2Fpdf#search=%22publications/tabledpapers/8ce373d5-fe28-4f2b-9505-9dc478f3a951%22">among the vast majority of teachers</a>.</p>
<p>What the royal commission and media coverage of other cases have revealed is that it has been too easy for some teachers, principals and others working with children in schools, to make a mockery of their <a href="http://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/principals/spag/safety/Pages/dutyofcare.aspx">duty of care</a>. It reveals their criminality in grooming and abusing children, in trivialising their reports of abuse, and in striving to protect schools’ and individuals’ reputations at children’s expense. </p>
<p>Regardless of police checks for those working with children, regardless of the legally binding duty of care and of the obligatory mandatory reporting of suspected abuse, and regardless of responsibility for pastoral care, the sexual abuse of children in educational contexts has continued.</p>
<p>A pledge for educators could be made within schools and upon first employment. Its declaration could be made a requirement for all job applications, just like police checks. It would indicate a formal declaration to conduct oneself ethically in all educational contexts, regardless of whether or not some individuals ultimately fail to do so. </p>
<p>But much more is needed as well. Teachers need help in their duty of care to identify grooming. Teacher training should pay far more attention to ethical decision-making in the practice of being a teacher. </p>
<p>It seems prudent that in a public and open profession, a public and open pledge to uphold its values should be made.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82909/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>John Whelen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has demonstrated how catastrophically some teachers have failed their duties - a pledge is one way to turn that around.John Whelen, Associate Fellow, Faculty of Education, Monash UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/824102017-08-17T10:18:48Z2017-08-17T10:18:48ZBlamed for being abused: an uncomfortable history of child sexual exploitation<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181987/original/file-20170814-12098-r8dyp3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Class and race have long played a role in the way victims of abuse are treated. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">via shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the northern English town of Newcastle, 17 men and one woman were convicted of abusing <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-40879427">22 girls</a> in early August 2017. All the men were of Asian origin. The ethnic origin of the victims has not been officially disclosed, but it is <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/09/newcastle-sex-grooming-network-operation-shelter">understood</a> that the majority of them were white and working class. </p>
<p>Responding to the conviction, a former director of the Crown Prosecution Service, Lord Macdonald, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/newcastle-child-sex-ring-asian-men-underage-white-girls-sex-abuse-racist-crime-lord-macdonald-cps-a7885571.html">said</a> that they suffered a “profoundly racist crime”. The solicitor general, Robert Buckland, then <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/11/asian-gangs-must-handed-longer-sentences-targeting-white-girls/">argued</a> that grooming gangs like this should get longer sentences if there is evidence of racial hostility. </p>
<p>Yet, the experiences of these victims – and those involved in several other recent similar cases – reflect a long history of British authorities ignoring the complaints of working-class girls and blaming them for their abuse.</p>
<p>The Newcastle verdicts were the latest in a series of court actions – following a high-profile case in the town of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/08/rochdale-grooming-case-10-men-sentenced-to-up-to-25-years-in-jail">Rochdale</a>, Greater Manchester, where hundreds of teenagers were subject to serious sexual abuse, between 2005 and 2013 by organised grooming gangs, including rape. The testimonies of three of these girls proved vital in the eventual, but shamefully late, prosecutions of some of the men involved in the Rochdale ring. </p>
<p>Similar gangs were found to be operating in many more towns and cities across the country and high-profile cases, the majority involving Asian men, followed in <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-37873340">Rotherham</a>, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-39466980">Oxford</a> and other towns. </p>
<p>These cases have triggered several enquiries into policing and safeguarding practices that posed very uncomfortable questions. How was it possible for systematic abuse on such a scale to have gone unchallenged for so long? And why had so many agencies failed in their duty to protect the children involved – especially when so many of them were already on child protection registers?</p>
<h2>Guilty of ‘poor lifestyle choices’</h2>
<p>One answer to this lies in deep-seated attitudes towards the girls involved.
Those who reported what was happening <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/nov/20/rochdale-child-abuse-case">were often disbelieved or dismissed</a>, their status as victims denied. In effect, they were cast as partly culpable for their own abuse. </p>
<p>Another answer lies in the framing of organised child abuse as child prostitution. Some of the girls concerned were themselves arrested on prostitution-related charges. In a cruel and unbelievable irony, <a href="http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/rochdale-grooming-story-sex-abuse-13043853">these included</a> conspiracy to engage with sexual activity with a child. It was this view – that these child victims were either fully fledged offenders or at the very least guilty of making poor lifestyle choices – that paralysed professionals and prevented them from taking action.</p>
<p>A recent BBC series called <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08rgd5n">Three Girls</a>, focused on the Rochdale cases. The central character – a sexual health worker and whistleblower called Sara Rowbotham – was portrayed by actress Maxine Peake as one of the few officials to challenge that view. In a powerful scene, she assures the father of one of the girls that his daughter is not a prostitute, despite being described as one by her social worker: “Because there’s no such thing as a child prostitute. What there is, is child abuse.”</p>
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<p>In the wake of these scandals, there has been a step change in the way these kind of cases are handled. Most police forces and social services now have strategies to combat what is now termed “child sexual exploitation” and no longer talk in terms of child prostitution. But why has this taken so long, given that – as historical <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Gender_Justice_and_Welfare.html?id=7Rg2yPseYQcC&redir_esc=y">research</a>, including my own work, has highlighted – efforts to end ‘child prostitution’ in Britain date back well over a century?</p>
<h2>Victorian child sex laws</h2>
<p>In 1885, a journalist named W T Stead revealed the shocking extent of London’s child sex trade, calling <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo3684336.html">for new measures</a> to end the “sale, purchase and violation of children”. In a series of articles, he described the girls involved as “<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/images/part2_p.1.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.attackingthedevil.co.uk/pmg/tribute/mt2.php&h=1009&w=755&tbnid=dWSNttzftvOT_M:&tbnh=160&tbnw=119&usg=__Bbq5yU6sr3lIjpjdGdOYpADTgb0=&vet=10ahUKEwjQ84KCjdfVAhWrLMAKHZLtChkQ_B0IfDAK..i&docid=dn7QuOy2ZFYvJM&itg=1&client=firefox-b-ab&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjQ84KCjdfVAhWrLMAKHZLtChkQ_B0IfDAK">the maiden tribute to modern Babylon</a>” – or innocents sacrificed on the altar of Victorian sexual “double standards”. Building on earlier campaigns against child prostitution spearheaded by organisations such as the <a href="http://www.childrenshomes.org.uk/LA/">Ladies’ Association for the Care of Friendless Girls</a>, the ensuing public scandal around Stead’s articles contributed to the passing of the <a href="http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private-lives/relationships/overview/sexualbehaviour19thcentury/">1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act</a>. This raised the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16, after which sex with a girl under 16 became a form of abuse liable to prosecution.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181993/original/file-20170814-27094-1fek813.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/181993/original/file-20170814-27094-1fek813.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=814&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181993/original/file-20170814-27094-1fek813.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=814&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181993/original/file-20170814-27094-1fek813.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=814&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181993/original/file-20170814-27094-1fek813.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1023&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181993/original/file-20170814-27094-1fek813.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1023&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/181993/original/file-20170814-27094-1fek813.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1023&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">To the Victorians, prostitution was the ‘great social evil’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AThe_Great_Social_Evil%2C_Punch_1857.jpg">By John Leech (1857 Punch Magazine 33:114) via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>But this important reform had little impact on public and professional attitudes. Young victims of abuse continued to be removed from their families and placed in moral rescue homes or church penitentiaries, some certified by the state as “special reformatories”. It was they, not the perpetrators, who were judged to require reform. </p>
<p>Prosecutions were rare. These girls were also separated from other vulnerable children because of fears that they would corrupt them. Some of these rescue homes were <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=SxdaCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA17&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false">formally reserved</a> for “girls with moral contamination and knowledge of evil”. Some 20th-century “approved schools” for young offenders and those in need of protection continued to be set aside as “treatment schools” for girls who had been sexually active or found to have a sexually transmitted infection. This continued into the 1940s. The message here was clear: sexually active girls were trouble, even if they were victims of abuse.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the child sex trade continued. And the children involved continued to be cast as culpable for their involvement in it, even by many of those who had been newly employed to protect them. Women police officers, for example, were hired during and after World War I to develop new approaches to young offenders and victims. They routinely blurred these lines in ways that would have lasting consequences, not least in contributing to the professional paralysis that has underpinned Britain’s most recent child sexual exploitation scandals.</p>
<p>One of the first women to join the Metropolitan Police, Lilian Wyles, <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=SxdaCwAAQBAJ&q=page+39#v=onepage&q=39&f=false">wrote</a> in her memoirs about her experiences of dealing with so-called “juvenile prostitution” in the 1930s and 1940s. She recalled one wartime case involving a “pretty, well-built” ten-year-old girl who “had discovered that she could earn money by hanging around the back doors of public houses and accosting half-drunk men as they came out”. She goes on that the girl “had marked down a disused air-raid shelter to which she would take these men who she had invited to assault her”. Wyles describes how “the small procuress” then gathered together and “coached” a small group of young girls to do the same, taking a substantial cut of their two shilling fee.</p>
<p>The idea that a ten-year-old could be held fully responsible for this situation stands as a tragic testament to the fact that 60 years after Stead’s intervention, girls like her were not seen as victims by either the public or by professionals. As recent <a href="http://www.historyandpolicy.org/projects/project/historical-child-sex-abuse">investigations</a> into historical sexual abuse have all too clearly shown, it was attitudes like this that allowed other serial abusers such as the TV celebrity Jimmy Savile to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jun/26/jimmy-savile-sexual-abuse-timeline">continue</a> to exploit vulnerable girls and boys.</p>
<h2>The ‘colour’ problem</h2>
<p>In addition to Lord Macdonald’s view that the latest Newcastle case was a “profoundly racist crime”, there has been speculation about why the authorities did not intervene more quickly in Rochdale, Newcastle and elsewhere. Some have suggested the authorities did not want to be seen to be “targeting” the Asian community in neighbourhoods where racial tensions were often already running high. </p>
<p>But historical examples suggest that this lack of intervention might be linked not only to professionals’ views of certain kinds of girls but to certain kinds of “mixed-race” relationships. In the past, poor white girls’ association with migrant men was often read as evidence of their “wayward” lifestyles.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182253/original/file-20170816-32632-334dfa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182253/original/file-20170816-32632-334dfa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182253/original/file-20170816-32632-334dfa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182253/original/file-20170816-32632-334dfa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182253/original/file-20170816-32632-334dfa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182253/original/file-20170816-32632-334dfa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182253/original/file-20170816-32632-334dfa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182253/original/file-20170816-32632-334dfa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1134&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The Wedding of Canton Kitty, from the book East in the West.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.thcatalogue.org.uk/">Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives. All rights reserved.</a></span>
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<p>In 1896, London City Missionaries involved in welfare work around the East End docks <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303924525_Race_Delinquency_and_Difference_in_Twentieth_Century_Britain">complained</a> that girls they knew as “Canton Kitty”, “Calcutta Louisa” and “Lascar Sally” were “turning parts of the city into perfect pest-spots” through “the commingling of the worst vices of East and West”. Three decades on, a <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6443.2008.00336.x/full">report</a> in 1930 by social researcher Muriel Fletcher investigated Liverpool’s “colour problem” and concluded that there were four types of girl who “consorted” with “coloured men”. She listed these as those who already had an illegitimate child, those who were “mentally weak”, those already working as prostitutes, and young women looking for adventure. Fletcher recommended that special rescue homes be set up for them and their “half caste” illegitimate children.</p>
<p>Writing in the 1950s, sociologist Michael Banton <a href="http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/221821">explored</a> this theme further in his study of Stepney’s “coloured quarter” in the east end of London. He reported that the young white women living there and frequenting “coloured cafes” were known locally as “utilities” because of the sexual services they “offered” to migrant men. Banton believed that they “almost always [had] a family background of deprivation and rejection” and were “personally unstable [with] no settled residence”. </p>
<p>By no means all these young women were victims of abuse. But some were and their needs went unmet. While accounts by social scientists such as Banton were pioneering and helped pave the way for later studies of multicultural communities, they also contributed to a lasting stigmatisation of these young white women and their lifestyles.</p>
<p><a href="https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmselect/cmhaff/68/68i.pdf">Investigations</a> into child sexual exploitation rings in Rochdale and elsewhere suggest that the girls involved were effectively demonised by many agencies. They were <a href="https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmhansrd/cm121113/debtext/121113-0003.htm">viewed</a> by many in the police and social services as ‘chaotic’, cast as unruly, unreliable and unwilling to accept advice or support offered.</p>
<p>The UK has been trying to end child sexual exploitation and abuse since at least the 1880s. These efforts have foundered – in part because we have struggled for so long to see the young girls involved as victims with rights and needs and frequently failed to prosecute perpetrators. There is still a long way to go. </p>
<p><em>This article was updated on August 18 to correct that Rochdale is in Greater Manchester, not South Yorkshire.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82410/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Pamela Cox receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust. </span></em></p>For over a century, British authorities have ignored the exploitation of working-class girls.Pamela Cox, Professor of Sociology, University of EssexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/825992017-08-17T09:58:10Z2017-08-17T09:58:10ZThe ‘boyfriend model’ of abuse is not restricted to grooming gangs<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182254/original/file-20170816-10444-1qiau7u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/traumatized-woman-sit-on-bed-bedroom-145891352?src=_0MtQEp0HSmPeTXZPhWgyQ-1-3"> ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The “<a href="http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/what-the-boyfriend-model-how-13457769">boyfriend model</a>” of abuse, seen in the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-40879427">Newcastle sex exploitation trial</a> is not new or rare. All perpetrators exploit the vulnerabilities of girls and young women, whether they are boyfriends, partners, husbands or members of a gang. </p>
<p>Former chief crown prosecutor Nazir Afzal is now leading <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/10/boyfriend-model-sex-abuse-grooming">calls for urgent research</a> into the “boyfriend model” – whereby a vulnerable person is manipulated to believe they are in a loving relationship with their abuser – as it has been at the heart of a string of national grooming scandals. But I think there is a more urgent need for honesty, as many women and girls are suffering abuse in their relationships every day. This may not make it into the news but it’s there and it needs to be addressed. </p>
<p>In Newcastle, 18 adults were convicted of rape and other offences against girls and young women aged between 13 and 25. The adults entrapped the youngsters into ongoing relationships, before exploiting them. Afzal sees parallels with the infamous <a href="http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/girls-rochdale-grooming-scandal-case-13051982">Rochdale grooming case</a>, which he oversaw as chief crown prosecutor in the northwest. His calls for research have been supported by <a href="http://www.sarahchampionmp.com/">Labour MP Sarah Champion</a> who says research is needed to investigate why <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/10/boyfriend-model-sex-abuse-grooming">“hundreds of Pakistani men”</a> have been convicted. Indeed, her stand on the subject <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-40952224">led her to resign</a> from the front bench this week after a newspaper article she wrote on the subject attracted criticism. </p>
<p>As Afzal and Champion say, there are similarities between these cases. The offenders used a model of abuse which involves seduction, followed by cruelty and rape. The seduction may involve alcohol, drugs and/or money so that the young victims are coerced into becoming involved and then silenced by their sense of guilt. It is also true to say that these convictions included large numbers of British Asian men. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182271/original/file-20170816-32614-1tb2j93.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/182271/original/file-20170816-32614-1tb2j93.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182271/original/file-20170816-32614-1tb2j93.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182271/original/file-20170816-32614-1tb2j93.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182271/original/file-20170816-32614-1tb2j93.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182271/original/file-20170816-32614-1tb2j93.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/182271/original/file-20170816-32614-1tb2j93.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/hairy-mans-hand-holding-woman-rape-538229962">SOMKKU/Shutterstock</a></span>
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<h2>A hidden crime</h2>
<p>This is not new and it can be understood as an extreme version of the experience many girls have. Many young girls are taught by the media, social media, friends – and often family – that they need to look a certain way, act a certain way and attract young men. </p>
<p>Sadly it is too often the case, that when some girls find a partner, they may be treated with disrespect (she isn’t pretty enough, slim enough or sexy enough). Sometimes, they will walk away, but in many cases, the girls stay and try to please “their boy” by changing themselves. When they do, they become more trapped in the relationship. The net can draw tighter, when friends and family criticise the boy, forcing the girl to choose between them. </p>
<p>There are young men who do not exploit this – but a good number do. They may move on from criticising to chastising. They may use violence or emotional abuse and in some cases may also extort sex. Sometimes, this is revealed to someone and gets acknowledged as being “domestic abuse”. However, it is often never spoken of and acts to imprison young girls in unhappy relationships.</p>
<p>The men – and sometimes women – in the gangs in Rochdale and Newcastle (<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/rotherham-grooming-gang-sentenced-to-combined-103-years-in-prison-for-rape-and-sex-abuse-of-girls-a6897731.html">and elsewhere</a>) have simply followed this pattern in a more organised way, often targeting girls who are already extremely vulnerable. The behaviour of these men is not so different from that of <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/domesticabuseinenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2016">countless others</a> and there is nothing particularly Asian about this kind of abuse. Their behaviour can be compared to that of white male celebrities such as <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20026910">Jimmy Savile</a>, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-30431452">Ray Teret</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/may/07/stuart-hall-broadcaster-court-rape-trial-prosecution">Stuart Hall</a> who also used manipulation to get what they wanted from youngsters. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"865325067479265281"}"></div></p>
<h2>Abusive relationships</h2>
<p>The gang cases help to shine a light on a continuum of abusive relationships – and what we need rather than research, is awareness. All sexual abuse crosses cultural boundaries. Domestic abuse is staggeringly common, with the police receiving an emergency call about domestic abuse <a href="https://www.womensaid.org.uk/information-support/what-is-domestic-abuse/how-common-is-domestic-abuse/">every 30 seconds</a>. We use a range of different labels for abuse, depending how we want to categorise the case or story we are talking about. Sometimes it is “sexual exploitation”, sometimes “domestic violence” or “relationship rape”. Considering these terms sheds light on how interchangeable they are. </p>
<p>All of these forms of abuse are problems created by abusive behaviour towards girls and women. To create a society where young girls are not so easy to abuse, we have to start to consider relationships differently. It is helpful to understand the links between the average boyfriend who demands sex every Saturday night and the man who rapes youngsters that another man has lured to a party. </p>
<p>Both are rapists in law, although the ordinary boyfriend rarely gets charged with any offence. The criminal justice system is more interested in the bigger cases. To create change, we need to hold all men accountable for their crimes. Both of these men exploit girls’ wishes to have a boyfriend. So another way to make a difference is to ensure that girls can find self-respect without being in a relationship. </p>
<p>The abuse revealed by the case in Newcastle is horrifying. But routine rape and cruelty goes on within many ordinary homes, around the country, attracting little attention. All of the survivors of this abuse suffer a great deal. All need justice and society needs to find ways to make changes. I don’t believe that it is useful to label particular groups of men as more likely to rape and exploit. Instead, there needs to be a national conversation about relationships and men’s attitudes to sex and women, or these cycles of abuse will continue.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82599/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kate Cook is part of a group of researchers who currently receive funding from the Lloyds Foundation. Kate is a feminist activist with links to rape crisis and the Campaign to End Rape.</span></em></p>The ‘boyfriend model’ of abuse is in the headlines after a string of high-profile grooming scandals. But are we in denial about how prevalent it is?Kate Cook, Senior Lecturer in Law, Head of the Sylvia Pankhurst Gender Research Centre., Manchester Metropolitan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/795172017-07-28T11:56:31Z2017-07-28T11:56:31Z‘Stranger danger’ in the online and real world<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180174/original/file-20170728-23744-erpmyn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/adult-online-anonymous-internet-hacker-invisible-513076849?src=fNOcR8GpzKFm0SQBhBzmXA-1-74">Artem Oleshko/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The term “<a href="https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/keeping-children-safe/staying-safe-away-from-home/">stranger danger</a>” was coined as a warning to children: beware the unknown adult, proceed with caution and be very careful what personal information you reveal. The question is, do adults take their own advice? Perhaps most would be more guarded and make sure they know who they are dealing with before revealing too much about themselves. But our relationship with “strangers” has been evolving and social media has torn down some of the barriers that used to protect us.</p>
<p>Now a relative stranger could be a Facebook “friend” and <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0886260517718187">evidence shows</a> that sexual predators are using this <a href="http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/local-news/cops-slammed-over-facebook-murderer-885048">to their advantage</a>. How we transition from stranger to non-stranger relationships is a relatively unexplored strand in research, with little recognition paid to the fact that the internet has completely transformed our <a href="http://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/publications/670-emerging-new-threat-in-online-dating-initial-trends-in-internet-dating-initiated-serious-sexual-assaults">level of engagement with strangers</a>. </p>
<p>At the same time <a href="https://rapecrisis.org.uk/statistics.php">other studies</a> are showing how the rate of reporting sexual offences to conviction is low. A report by <a href="https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmic/publications/crime-recording-making-the-victim-count/">Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC)</a> concluded that 1 in 4 sexual offences should have been recorded as crimes but were not. Reasons cited for this were mainly centred on poor processes for recording the crimes and transferring them on to national recording systems. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180178/original/file-20170728-22562-1qz1246.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180178/original/file-20170728-22562-1qz1246.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180178/original/file-20170728-22562-1qz1246.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180178/original/file-20170728-22562-1qz1246.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180178/original/file-20170728-22562-1qz1246.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180178/original/file-20170728-22562-1qz1246.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180178/original/file-20170728-22562-1qz1246.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The rate of reporting sexual offences to conviction is low.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/monochrome-portrait-sad-lonely-girl-crying-286384004?src=o3cEGYey2Ute6A3vzMJbvg-1-7">Kamira/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Regardless of these issues, the <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/compendium/focusonviolentcrimeandsexualoffences/2015-02-12/chapter4violentcrimeandsexualoffencesintimatepersonalviolenceandserioussexualassault#reporting-of-serious-sexual-assault">reporting of sexual offences is on the rise</a>, with this attributed to increased reporting of sexual offences and apparent improved investigative responses. In the year ending March 2015, the Office of National Statistics <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/compendium/focusonviolentcrimeandsexualoffences/2015-02-12/chapter4violentcrimeandsexualoffencesintimatepersonalviolenceandserioussexualassault#reporting-of-serious-sexual-assault">recorded the highest figure</a> for sexual offences since recording began in 2002, up 37% increase on the previous year. For female victims of serious sexual assaults, 16% were recorded as “stranger relationships”. Other categories included partner/ex-partner (47%) other known (33%) and family member (4%). </p>
<h2>What is a ‘stranger’?</h2>
<p>What is our understanding of how stranger rapes occur? Do we believe this happens within a dark alleyway, involving victims randomly chosen by someone they have never interacted with? Given that most of these attacks are perpetrated by people the victims know – as opposed to the dangerous “stranger” – do these statistics allow us to feel safe within our online social interactions? Herein lies the problem: people we know. At what point would we say we actually <em>know</em> someone in the online and interconnected society of today?</p>
<p>One in three relationships now <a href="http://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/publications/670-emerging-new-threat-in-online-dating-initial-trends-in-internet-dating-initiated-serious-sexual-assaults">start online</a>. The change in how people communicate in their day-to-day lives has impacted on the “modus operandi” of sexual offenders. The online environment has evolved a “<a href="http://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/publications/670-emerging-new-threat-in-online-dating-initial-trends-in-internet-dating-initiated-serious-sexual-assaults">new type of sexual offender</a>”. Police forces have recorded <a href="http://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/publications/670-emerging-new-threat-in-online-dating-initial-trends-in-internet-dating-initiated-serious-sexual-assaults">a six-fold increase</a> in the number of “internet-facilitated” sexual offences between 2009 and 2014. </p>
<p>The vast amount of <a href="http://www.onlinedatingassociation.org.uk/membership/research/research.html">dating and social networking sites</a> easily accessed through smartphones has resulted in the <a href="https://ssrn.com/abstract=2050898">normalisation of providing personal information</a> to strangers. Even Snapchat now allows users to share their exact location. People are able to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/23/snapchat-maps-privacy-safety-concerns">see your every move</a> from your home location, work, school or college. </p>
<p>Snapchat states that their default setting is “off” for location-sharing and users must activate it. They claim that locations can only be shared with your friends list. Given our friendship circles are continually changing and our friends lists are likely to contain <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/06/nspcc-urges-parents-to-do-more-to-keep-their-children-safe-online">people we have never met</a>, how practical is this safety feature? </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"889515770740326400"}"></div></p>
<h2>Are you being groomed?</h2>
<p>Grooming techniques are individually tailored to meet victims’ expectations. From <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13552601003698644">child sexual grooming research</a>, we know that trust is key in developing relationships online, with boundaries slowly broken down before introducing <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13552600601069414">sexualised conversations</a>. In cases initiated through online dating that resulted in sexual assaults, sexual communication was reported in over 50% of cases prior to meeting, with online contact to first meeting occurring within a week for <a href="http://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/publications/670-emerging-new-threat-in-online-dating-initial-trends-in-internet-dating-initiated-serious-sexual-assaults">43% of cases</a> . The frequency and intensity of interactions allows victims to feel comfortable and shifts the perception of the relationship from stranger to non-stranger <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0886260517718187">quicker than offline encounters</a>.</p>
<p>National Crime Agency <a href="http://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/publications/670-emerging-new-threat-in-online-dating-initial-trends-in-internet-dating-initiated-serious-sexual-assaults">evidence</a> reveals 72% of internet-facilitated sexual assaults took place in the victim’s home. Exploration of attack locations of 459 internet-facilitated rapists showed more than half occurred within a <a href="http://clok.uclan.ac.uk/18983/">1.6km radius of the offenders’ home</a>. This differs from <a href="https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1023/A%3A1023044408529.pdf">previous findings</a> where offenders travelled further to their assault location in a bid to reduce the risk of identification. Is this due to an expedited transition from stranger to non-stranger, where the regular dating precautions are dismissed, with victims meeting their victims sooner and in unsafe locations?</p>
<h2>New offenders, new crimes</h2>
<p><a href="http://clok.uclan.ac.uk/18984/">Recent research</a> exploring sexual offending within the UK appears to back this up, concluding that the typical offender profile and crime scene behaviours have changed. Stranger rapists are appearing to be <a href="http://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/publications/670-emerging-new-threat-in-online-dating-initial-trends-in-internet-dating-initiated-serious-sexual-assaults">less “criminogenic”</a> – in other words, they have fewer criminal convictions. And those with previous convictions are now likely to be for more low-level offences. This new type of sex offender is also taking <a href="http://clok.uclan.ac.uk/18984/">fewer precautions</a> and less likely to use forced entry or violence in their sexual attacks.</p>
<p>The same techniques used by online sexual offenders are being employed by so-called “<a href="https://inews.co.uk/essentials/news/uk/cyber-crime-romance-fraudsters-extracting-34m-year-britons-looking-love-online/">romance fraudsters</a>” targeting dating websites with the intention of extracting money from victims. Around £34.4m from over 3,100 victims was recorded regarding romance fraud last year. </p>
<p>More needs to be done to increase the understanding of the term “stranger” and how this is defined within criminal justice agencies. More importantly society as a whole needs to start getting to grips with the term. Our interactions online are now embedded at such a young age. They have allowed us to become comfortable in revealing personal information and speeding up the relationship process <a href="http://www.onlinedatingassociation.org.uk/membership/research/research.html">at a dangerous pace</a>.</p>
<p>So before engaging with new “friends” online ask yourself: is this person really a stranger? Have you transitioned them to “non-stranger” status too quickly? Are you really being safe online?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79517/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michelle McManus receives funding from Lancashire Constabulary and Lancashire Police Crime Commissioner as part of a part-time secondment placement within Lancashire Constabulary's Evidence Based Policing Research Hub.
This article was written with the help of Lee Rainbow and Mark Webb from the National Crime Agency.
</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Louise Almond does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Social media and the internet has helped create a new type of sexual predator, forcing us to reassess our understanding of the terms “friend” and “stranger”.Michelle McManus, Senior Lecturer in Policing, Forensic and Applied Sciences, University of Central LancashireLouise Almond, Senior lecturer in Investigative and Forensic Psychology, University of LiverpoolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/724442017-05-05T08:40:43Z2017-05-05T08:40:43ZMetrosexual, hipster, spornosexual: why do we keep redefining men?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166640/original/file-20170425-12640-16kgr18.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Groomed to perfection. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">via shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ten years ago, men were metrosexual, but now I’ve lost track. Currently, the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/fashion-and-style/10881682/The-metrosexual-is-dead.-Long-live-the-spornosexual.html">spornosexual</a>, a more body conscious and sexually explicit version of the metrosexual, is vying with the check-shirted, bearded <a href="https://gearjunkie.com/the-rise-of-the-lumbersexual">lumbersexual</a> for top spot. Nattily dressed and neatly bearded, the “<a href="http://www.vogue.com/article/dandy-wildman-mens-grooming-day">dandy wildman</a>” and the hipster also abound, too. </p>
<p>These are men’s consumer lifestyles. If you want to be a spornosexual, you buy gym membership, protein and some expensive photography equipment to spruce up your Instagram feed. To be a hipster, go to vintage clothes shops, buy the most obscure craft ales, and some beard oil. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="InstagramEmbed" data-react-props="{"url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/BQ6VsGQDHGA","accessToken":"127105130696839|b4b75090c9688d81dfd245afe6052f20"}"></div></p>
<p>In the last 30 years, the number of men’s lifestyles on the market has grown exponentially. My ongoing PhD research explores this phenomenon, trying to understand and explain the appearance of new “marketed manhoods”. Having held focus groups with young men around the country, I have found new marketed versions of manhood have taken hold to vastly differing extents in different areas.</p>
<h2>Marketing masculinity</h2>
<p>One participant from Doncaster described Sheffield as “like a different country” in terms of how men behave, while another from Taunton in Somerset suggested that, in rural Devon, men’s fashion is “ten years” behind that of his hometown. The more urban and metropolitan the area was perceived to be, the more likely that manhood is to have changed.</p>
<p>Unprompted, many participants linked these masculine dividing lines to those that characterised the vote to leave the European Union in June last year, with one participant summarising, in terms of geography, “Brexit’s just blown stuff up”. They’re <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36616028">not wrong</a>. The places that stood out as bastions of Remain were urban areas, notably London plus Bristol and Brighton in the south, but also northern cities, such as Manchester, Liverpool, York and Leeds. Personally, I don’t think this is a coincidence. </p>
<p>Some of the analysis of the Brexit vote <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/04/jeremy-hunt-nhs-doctors-theresa-may-conservative-conference-live/">argued that</a> people in rural parts of the country felt their employment was under threat from migrant labour from the EU. This was an argument that came up in many of my focus groups, too, with one participant arguing that “if they see immigrants as threatening that employment, then it’s almost, yeah, threatening their manhood, their masculinity”. </p>
<p>This analysis is somewhat misguided, as there is <a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/05/eu-immigration-hasnt-hurt-jobs-or-wages-heres-why/">little evidence</a> that migrant labour actually does negatively affect employment prospects. But there is a strong sense in which many men, in this country and the Western world generally, gather their own identity from their worth in the workplace. And the type of work that men do is significantly affected by the function of capitalism.</p>
<h2>Jobs changing</h2>
<p>The last 30 years hasn’t just moved men in a different direction, but also altered capitalism, too. A lot of people refer to this era as neoliberalism, a specific form of capitalism that leaves markets free of regulation. One of neoliberalism’s central achievements has been <a href="http://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/SN01942">a significant decline</a> in the type of manual labour once dominated by working class men, from coalmining through to factory work. As a result of this decline, more men are now freelance, in office-based jobs, or working for service companies rather than doing manual labour. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166639/original/file-20170425-12468-1bq4k8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/166639/original/file-20170425-12468-1bq4k8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166639/original/file-20170425-12468-1bq4k8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166639/original/file-20170425-12468-1bq4k8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166639/original/file-20170425-12468-1bq4k8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166639/original/file-20170425-12468-1bq4k8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/166639/original/file-20170425-12468-1bq4k8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">What next?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">via shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These different types of work involve non-physical investments, such as aesthetic and emotional commitment to your work. If “what it means to be a man” is so dependent on labour, this would suggest that as labour changes, so too does manhood. Now required to do more than physically exert themselves, men need new ideals of manhood that teach them such skills. Fashion-conscious metrosexuality and hipsterism, body-conscious spornosexuality – these are men’s lifestyles that, like the work in the service sector that many men now do, demand daily upkeep of appearance. With the decline of manual labour, the masculine ideal has changed.</p>
<p>But, as my research shows, men’s consumer lifestyles have not had universal geographical acceptance across the UK. In areas that used to be more reliant on manual labour, such as Durham, Yorkshire, and large parts of Wales, men have struggled to deal with its decline. Why? Capitalism has for a long time focused development and renewal in urban and metropolitan areas, an aspect that neoliberal capitalism has magnified. As a result, the resolution of new forms of labour with new manhoods have taken hold to a much greater extent in more urban and metropolitan areas.</p>
<p>So, instead of providing men in less urban areas with the investment and skills to engage in new forms of labour, the market simply forgot them. The American sociologist Michael Kimmel calls this “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/books/review/angry-white-men-by-michael-kimmel.html">aggrieved entitlement</a>” – men who thought they were entitled to these jobs feel they have had their futures taken away from them, and, frankly, it’s made a lot of them quite angry.</p>
<p>The point of this is not to “blame men” for Brexit, and nor is it to suggest that what rural Yorkshire really needs is more hipsters. In the short term, it’s certainly a good idea to invest more thoroughly in the harder hit former industrial areas of the UK. But none of this would be a problem if masculinity were able to sever its association with employment. The view that men obtain their worth from their employment exacerbates already existing geographical divides. To fully address those divides, men must begin to question whether they are more than just their employment.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/72444/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Greg Wolfman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Over the past 30 years, capitalism has redefined the labour market – and with it, men.Greg Wolfman, PhD researcher in gender, men and masculinities, University of HuddersfieldLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/730012017-03-01T11:03:59Z2017-03-01T11:03:59ZWhy teaching children about porn and sexting is a step in the right direction<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158731/original/image-20170228-29936-hzefp2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Research shows that parents and the police are often unaware of the majority of cases of online sexual abuse.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Given that the large majority of UK adults think <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-39096100">children should be taught about pornography and sexting</a> in the classroom, the news that sex and relationship education is to be made <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/sex-education-to-become-compulsory-in-secondary-schools-a7603916.html">compulsory in English secondary schools</a> will be welcomed by many parents. </p>
<p>The decision will see relationships education added to the national curriculum, with primary school children also expected to have lessons on modern relationships. The curriculum is expected to include issues such as online safety, sexting and consent. It will also tackle domestic abuse and sexual harassment.</p>
<p>And it sounds like this move can’t come soon enough, with <a href="http://www.bath.ac.uk/psychology/staff/catherine-hamilton-giachritsis/">recent research</a> by the universities of Bath and Birmingham in collaboration with the NSPCC finding high rates of sexting among young people. </p>
<p>The research found that 55% of those involved in sexting were below the age of 16. The research also showed that two-thirds of these young people felt forced to send images to the other person – and that in more than half of cases this was to someone over the age of 18.</p>
<p>But alongside sexting and pornography, there have also been <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-measures-to-keep-children-safe-online-at-school-and-at-home">calls for children to learn more</a> about the risks associated with the internet. Because while it is widely acknowledged that the internet has many positive aspects, it can also be used by some individuals to engage in illegal behaviour.</p>
<h2>Inappropriate chats</h2>
<p>Of course, the sexual molestation and abuse of children existed long before the emergence of the internet. But there are features that are unique to the online environment – such as anonymity, accessibility and affordability – which means that sexually inappropriate communication with children can take place more easily. </p>
<p>Offenders often access internet communication platforms that are popular with young people – such as chat rooms, gaming and social networking sites. Young people are then approached on these platforms, and can end up having regular conversations with potential abusers. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158735/original/image-20170228-29915-1jvh4gq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158735/original/image-20170228-29915-1jvh4gq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158735/original/image-20170228-29915-1jvh4gq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158735/original/image-20170228-29915-1jvh4gq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158735/original/image-20170228-29915-1jvh4gq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158735/original/image-20170228-29915-1jvh4gq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158735/original/image-20170228-29915-1jvh4gq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">These online interactions also have the potential to develop into physical meetings.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The conversations can then develop into interactions of a sexual nature. And as part of these interactions, offenders may groom and then sexually abuse a young person via a variety of different technologies – including mobile phones and web cameras. </p>
<p>Offenders may also request sexual images of the young person, or for them to expose themselves via their web camera and engage in sexually explicit acts. </p>
<p>These interactions also have the potential to develop into physical meetings and offline sexual abuse.</p>
<h2>Putting the abuse in context</h2>
<p>While this type of offending behaviour constitutes a very small proportion in <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13552600.2014.893031">comparison to sexual offences overall</a>, there has been an increase in the number of reports of <a href="http://www.ceop.police.uk/Documents/ceopdocs/CEOP%20IIOCTA%20Executive%20Summary.pdf">negative experiences by young people online</a>. And in a <a href="http://www.bath.ac.uk/psychology/staff/catherine-hamilton-giachritsis/">recent UK study of 354 school children</a>, 33% of the 13- to 14-year-olds said they had been approached sexually online. </p>
<p>And this figure may well be the tip of the iceberg, given that online abuse is not something people want to talk about. Not one of the 13- to 14 year-olds in the school study had previously spoken about their experiences, and <a href="http://www.unh.edu/ccrc/pdf/cv42jama.pdf">previous research</a> has found that only 10% of these types of sexual approaches tend to be reported to authorities. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158732/original/image-20170228-29906-il5vko.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/158732/original/image-20170228-29906-il5vko.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158732/original/image-20170228-29906-il5vko.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158732/original/image-20170228-29906-il5vko.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158732/original/image-20170228-29906-il5vko.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158732/original/image-20170228-29906-il5vko.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/158732/original/image-20170228-29906-il5vko.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Offenders may request sexual images of the young person.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These low numbers are a huge concern given the impact these experiences can have on young people. In the same study, 25% of the young people who had received unwanted sexual approaches reported high levels of distress as a result of the contact. Symptoms reported by these young people included stress, fear, anxiety and depression, along with post traumatic stress disorder.</p>
<p>It became apparent that the risk of distress was associated with certain factors. This included the child being of a younger age (10 to 13 years) and having received more aggressive sexual approaches.</p>
<p>These aggressive approaches can include an adult attempting to establish offline contact with a young person, and can often take various forms. It can involve anything from a physical meeting to phone calls or emails and even sending money or gifts. </p>
<h2>Impact of abuse</h2>
<p>It can take years for victims to come to terms with the abuse before they feel able to access professional help. This involves a long-term process that hopefully helps them overcome – or at least learn to live with – what has happened to them. </p>
<p>This process can be very difficult for victims of online sexual abuse and it can sometimes be the unexpected and “decontextualised” nature of certain behaviours – such as offenders’ exposure via web camera – that can be particularly harmful and distressing to young people. </p>
<p>Quite often, because the computer’s location is in their own home, many victims can also feel like their safe space has been violated. On top of this, offenders commonly distribute sexual images that may have been taken and exchanged as part of the online interaction with a victim, which then become permanently available on the internet. </p>
<p>It is clear then that the relationship young people have with the internet can be incredibly complex. And that monitoring or policing their online presence can only go so far in protecting them. </p>
<p>Instead, the focus now should also be on developing young people’s awareness of the risks involved. It should also equip them with general life skills that help build internal resilience, which will enable them to better manage threats encountered online in the future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/73001/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Juliane Kloess has received funding from the Police Knowledge Fund, the ESRC IAA (University of Birmingham, and the EPSRC IAA (University of Bath). </span></em></p>Moves to make sex education compulsory cannot come quickly enough.Juliane Kloess, Research in Psychology, University of BirminghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/662432016-11-28T10:20:39Z2016-11-28T10:20:39ZHow paedophiles speak to children online<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147411/original/image-20161124-15339-1p3ipwf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/pic-169147106/stock-photo-anonymous-male-on-a-laptop-at-night-concept-of-internet-addiction.html?src=ZzbK-RzcikFOaK_mxZRXJQ-1-7">www.shutterstock.com/icsnaps</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The internet has transformed our lives. As of July 2016, around 40% of the world’s population was online – that’s nearly <a href="http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/#trend">3.5 billion internet users</a>. </p>
<p>Since it was created, the web has gone from being a simple tool used to share and distribute information to a complex virtual place which pervades nearly every aspect of society. Though the creators’ intentions for the internet were surely good, today it is also used for heinous crimes such as the sexual exploitation of children. This type of abuse can take almost as many forms as in the physical world: ranging from producing, storing and trading child pornography to seeking paid or unpaid sex online or offline once onscreen contact has been established.</p>
<p>Online grooming – that is, the process of persuading a youngster to have sex, online and/or offline, with an adult – is at an alarming high. Research has found that <a href="http://enough.org/online_sexual_predators_archives">200m girls and 100m boys</a> will be sexually victimised before they reach adulthood, and a significant number of these children will be lured online. </p>
<p>However, despite its large societal impact, research into online grooming is limited, particularly when looking at the language used to influence children. Language is the main tool used by sexual predators to groom children online so this gap in our knowledge of how grooming unfolds is quite remarkable.</p>
<p>That is why four years ago we founded the Online Grooming Communication Project, with the aim of gaining a solid understanding of the verbal behaviour which underlies the grooming of children via the internet. To date we have carried out one of the largest empirical studies – based on a corpus of approximately 140,000 words from online chat-logs – of the <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211695816300095">linguistic strategies used by convicted paedophiles</a> to groom their victims. </p>
<h2>The act of grooming</h2>
<p>Grooming is developed in three phases: access, entrapment and approach. Access and approach are relatively simple: they respectively involve contacting a child, saying “hi ur cute” for example, and making the necessary arrangements to meet the child offline. Entrapment, however, is a much more complex phase where information is requested and provided to fulfil four grooming objectives: building trust with the child; isolating them and finding out how isolated they already are; testing the child’s willingness to comply with the groomer’s intentions; and obtaining sexual gratification. </p>
<p>Once we identified these phases, their objectives, and how groomers use specific language techniques to achieve them, we found that there are several “myths” society believes about grooming that are not entirely true. </p>
<p>For example, groomers rely on persuasion, not coercion. Our figures showed that gaining the trust of the youngster is of paramount importance for groomers, and they devote the highest amount of words and therefore time – around 45% – to it. </p>
<p>All groomers in our study were skilled and sophisticated communicators, interacting with their targeted child as if they cared about him/her, making them feel special. They complimented the children regularly on a range of topics, rather than only on sexually-oriented ones. Because of this, many of their interactions with children can go undetected by existing protection software.</p>
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<p>Furthermore, online groomers do not always masquerade as children or adolescents in cyberspace. In fact, none of the conversations included in our database involved a sexual predator pretending to be a youngster. Some online groomers misrepresented their true age by taking around four or five years from their real age – but they still made it clear from the very start that they were adults. Not all online sexual predators are middle-aged adults either. In the data we examined, online groomer age ranged from 18 to the late 60s.</p>
<p>Though online grooming is often considered to be a long process, taking several months from initial contact to sexual exploitation, it is actually alarmingly brief. In our research database, it sometimes took just a matter of minutes.</p>
<p>A few studies have investigated the <a href="http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-632111.pdf">characteristics of children and adolescents</a> who are solicited for sex online. In terms of gender, for example, 75% of the victims are <a href="http://www.cybercrimejournal.com/bergenetalijcc2013vol7issue2.pdf">reported to be female</a>. As for <a href="https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=250455">personality and behavioural traits</a>, low self-esteem and spending long periods of time online have been identified as high risk factors. </p>
<p>However, regardless of how high the risks taken by a group of children are, the threats faced by all are deeply concerning. All children are vulnerable to online sexual predation by adults and so our efforts must be devoted to ensuring that all children are safe online. </p>
<p>Technologies such as filtering system software can help to restrict childrens’ access to known sites where grooming has occurred. However, they do not resolve the problem of online child sexual exploitation altogether. Increasing our awareness and understanding of online grooming behaviour is a vital component in our endeavour to protect our children and provide a safe internet environment.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/66243/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Cristina Izura has received funding from the ESRC. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nuria Lorenzo-Dus receives funding from AHRC, ESRC and EPSRC</span></em></p>New research offers valuable insights into the linguistic strategies used to groom child victims.Cristina Izura, Associate Professor of Psychology, Swansea UniversityNuria Lorenzo-Dus, Professor of English Language & Applied Linguistics, Swansea UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/693772016-11-25T14:01:25Z2016-11-25T14:01:25ZWe must challenge the culture of silence about child sexual abuse in football<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/147412/original/image-20161124-15344-1npnwse.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">matimix/www.shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Professional footballers, including the former Crewe Alexandra player Andy Woodward, have <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/football/2016/nov/22/steve-walters-andy-woodward-crewe-alexandra?CMP=share_btn_tw">been speaking out</a> recently about their experiences of sexual abuse as children. They include alleged <a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/two-more-footballers-come-forward-9331020">victims of football coach Barry Bennell</a>, who <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-38007412">was sentenced</a> to nine years in prison in 1998, and are waiving their right to anonymity.</p>
<p>The NSPCC <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/38087552">said</a> a special hotline, set up after four professional footballers spoke out about their abuse, received more than 50 calls in its first two hours.</p>
<p>These developments follow the conviction in March 2016 of former Sunderland footballer Adam Johnson, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/mar/24/adam-johnson-should-be-jailed-for-up-to-10-years-court-told">found guilty of grooming</a> and sexual activity with a 15-year-old girl.</p>
<p>Sports, such as football, can be an ideal environment for trusting relationships between coaches and athletes to be developed – and exploited. <a href="http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/526">Research</a> has highlighted the “grooming process” in sport, in which a coach could abuse their position of authority to gradually erode the personal boundaries between athletes to subject them to sexual abuse.</p>
<h2>Some coaches abuse their power</h2>
<p>A large amount of power is invested in a sports coach. They can impose their version of reality on athletes. In this context, perpetrators of abuse can isolate victims from potential sources of support within that reality by controlling the psychological environment. This can be through direct emotional manipulation, psychological abuse, and the creation of a highly volatile, psychologically abusive <a href="https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780203851043.ch32">training environment</a>. </p>
<p>A recent <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13573322.2015.1063484?journalCode=cses20">study</a> I worked on with Andrew Sparkes at Leeds Beckett University, focused on the story of “Bella” – not her real name – a female athlete, who was groomed and then sexually abused by her male coach. We drew on previous <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13573320802614950?src=recsys&journalCode=cses20">research</a> to explore three main types of harrassing coaches:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>The flirting-charming coach: someone always flirting, joking, or trying to touch the athlete. </p></li>
<li><p>The seductive coach: someone who went further, trying to “hit on everyone”.</p></li>
<li><p>The authoritarian coach: someone who used his power over the athlete. He was also characterised as having psychological problems and often had a degrading and negative view of women in general.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Bella’s coach was able to shift between the personae and tactics of the different coaches in order to groom her and have “power over” and <a href="http://www.springer.com/gb/book/9783319467948">own her for many years</a>. </p>
<h2>Jock culture hides abuse</h2>
<p>While sexual abuse exists in many different sports, football embraces masculine characteristics which act like a cult – a subculture adhering to its own list of commandments situated in a type of “jock culture”. In the past, the commonly accepted ethos of “suffer in silence” and the traditional belief that children’s voices should not be heard, could too easily be used to disguise sexually abusive behaviours.</p>
<p>Often athletes believe that the “<a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13573320701464150">jock culture</a>” of which they are a part takes precedence over any other authoritative structures outside their <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-tyson-furys-sexist-and-homophobic-comments-make-him-unfit-for-bbc-sports-personality-of-the-year-51929">sporting world</a> – a bubble which can cut them off from external support.</p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/is-the-not-so-beautiful-mens-game-putting-people-off-womens-football-43722">Men’s football</a>, in particular, provides a platform to global celebrity, bloated salaries, corporate sponsorship and fan adulation that can catapult male footballers to fame and fortune. Football coaches, similar to other positions of power, are the gatekeepers to this dream and this status comes with power that has the potential to be abused.</p>
<h2>Breaking the silence</h2>
<p>This power is reinforced when they are found to have committed serious violent or sexual offences – but not punished. Evidence from the NFL in the US regarding violence against women <a href="http://harvardjsel.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/JSEL-Withers.pdf">suggests that</a> sportspeople are less likely to be “punished by the leagues, teams, or criminal justice system as harshly or consistently as their general public counterparts”.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"801703376304140288"}"></div></p>
<p>The overwhelmingly high value placed on men’s sport, specifically men’s football, might mean that abusers think they can get away with abusive behaviours which might include sexual or child abuse. Many victims are made to believe by the perpetrator that they were the only one who was abused – that they were “special” and would not be believed if they came <a href="http://irs.sagepub.com/content/32/2/115.short">forward</a>. It can also be extremely difficult for men to admit to <a href="http://www.kim.etherington.com/book1.html">being a victim</a>. Speaking out about abuse means breaking codes of masculinity and camaraderie that are closely tied to <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13573320500254869">sporting identity</a>.</p>
<p>While it is important for people to tell their stories, <a href="http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/OU-Sport/?p=541">we need to be careful</a> that the news does not create moral panic which leads to a culture of fear around coaches as “dangerous individuals”. While the footballers who have spoken out are very courageous, it’s important not to cast suspicion on all coaches.</p>
<p>Many of the effects of abuse on victims – <a href="http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001349">such as</a> drink and drug abuse, depression, suicidal feelings and sexual disturbance – are misunderstood. The culture of silence surrounding sexual abuse in sport can perpetuate feelings of isolation for victims of abuse. Speaking out about their abuse enables victims, bystanders and other sportspeople to become <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mike_Hartill/publication/265216298_Concealment_of_Child_Sexual_Abuse_in_Sports/links/565d6c4608aeafc2aac78621.pdf?origin=publication_detail">whistleblowers</a> who challenge the culture of silence that seems to exist in football and other sports about this kind of abuse. After all, the shame lies completely with the abuser, not with the abused.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/69377/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Helen Owton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Jock culture has often stopped people talking about abuse.Helen Owton, Lecturer in Sport & Fitness, The Open UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.