Many sexual predators confess to using a classic playbook to target, groom and abuse their victims, making them feel powerless and complicit. Understanding it is the key to keeping our children safer. Warning: This op-ed includes details of sexual abuse against children.
In South Africa,33.9% of girls and 36.8%of boys have been sexually abused. Although not all abusers are paedophiles, research cited by theKarolinska Instituteindicates that paedophiles who target girls have about 25 victims in their lifetime, while those who target boys can have more than 200. Many of these cases go unreported, though, especially when children have been groomed.
In 2010, Oprah Winfrey spoke tofour convicted paedophilesabout grooming and abuse. They described how they selected their victims, identifying a specific need, either emotional, or because they could help them achieve a goal. They then created trust, isolating their victims, none of whom were strangers, using manipulation (both of the child and their caregivers) and gaslighting to make the child doubt their reality and establish control.
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Thereafter, they sexualised the relationship. Beginning with intimacy, they established a “special” relationship, making the child feel seen and heard. Seemingly innocent touches progressed to “accidental” sexual contact, which they used to normalise boundary violations, and finally, more obvious sexual contact.
Using her own experience, Oprah explained how grooming makes a violent act pleasurable to the child, resulting in them feeling both confused and complicit. She described how the child’s body betrays them and how abusers reframe these experiences to make the child believe that if it felt good, it must have been their fault. As Oprah attests, “sexual abuse changes who you are”.
One of the paedophiles confessed: “I killed who she could have been, I murdered a person. Just because she is still alive today, doesn’t take away from what I have done.” Annemarie Gillmer has an intimate understanding of grooming. As someone who has spent her life riding horses, she describes it as the gradual process of breaking down a young horse’s boundaries, making it comfortable with contact so that you can ride it.
Nonetheless, admitting that she was groomed from the age of 13 by a man 30 years her senior, a man who decades later she still calls “Oom” (an Afrikaans term of respect for an older man), is much harder. But it was so successful that it has taken her years to recognise that she wasn’t responsible for her own sexual assault and rape. Annemarie, who recounted her experiences in an interview, began riding at the age of 11 and quickly showed promise.
But to her disappointment, her horse was injured the following year and her plan B also fell through when her friend Niels* left home and she could no longer ride his family’s horses. So when Niels’ father, Oom Hendrie*, told her parents that Annemarie was very talented and he’d like to coach her, the family was delighted. Not only could she continue to ride, but Hendrie was a former Springbok rider in the discipline that Annemarie liked most, long-distance endurance riding.
Endurance riding requires three or more hours of training a day, and Hendrie proved very committed, spending hours alone with the little girl. He also befriended her parents, meeting regularly and even inviting them over for braais to talk about Annemarie’s progress. When their long working hours made getting Annemarie to the stables a challenge, Hendrie offered to fetch her.
He was even willing to collect her from school when she had extramurals, explaining that it was warranted because she had so much potential. He kept reinforcing how special Annemarie was and what a gift she had with horses.
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