First and foremost, I need to put a TRIGGER WARNING at the beginning of this one. I will be discussing the sexual abuse of children and grooming in this one, please, if you don't believe that you can read this one... don't. 

This is a work in progress, I've only just begun writing it. I believe and hope that this will turn into a much bigger project. I believe we can be doing a much better job of finding arresting child predators.

     One of our guests, the once clean-shaven teacher now has a beard. He is here for possession of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), once called child pornography. The CSAM he had was supposedly of former students, but one could guess there was more to that story than he let on. In addition to his new facial hair, he carries around a composition notebook against his chest as if it will protect him from something. The notebook is worn in the places where he is always holding it. Occasionally, he also carries a bible with him, and he can be seen kneeling by his bunk every night, praying. I wonder if he prayed this way before he came here, or if this is a new practice. That’s beside the point though, he’s not even the scariest kind of child predator here.

     When we think of child predators, the first thing that comes to mind is, “stranger danger”. The concept of stranger danger was stressed to us as children, but we typically weren’t taught about the predators closes to us. Since I’ve started working in the industry of law enforcement, I have noticed that so many of the child predators are the people who are closest to the children. Typically, they’re related to the children, usually fathers, grandfathers, uncles, or cousins. The predators closest to the children disguise themselves as safe people, the other family members are either the non-observant or absent caregiver or is another child to young and/or afraid to say anything about what they’ve seen. For some reason, our society continues to let people closest to children hurt them, we don’t discuss this with them enough; however, we must return to the subject of stranger danger. We should still be concerned about the stranger lurking in the park waiting to snatch our children away from us, but perhaps we should be more concerned about the stranger lurking behind a keyboard.

     While the internet and all the technology that has followed it has been an excellent recourse for the world, it has also been a curse. Before the internet, children were abused by the people who were closest to them, and had very little access to strangers, at least not the way that children have access to strangers today. And children continue to be abused by the people in their lives who are closest to them in the age of technology and internet, but the pool of predators now includes strangers with no face. For example, another one of our guests began a relationship with a person online. If this person had been over the age of eighteen, it would have been a socially acceptable relationship, but the person was twelve years old. She came from a broken home where her parents didn’t pay close enough attention to her or her internet usage. She met our guest using an app, and he began grooming her. According to Daniel Pollack and Andrea MacIver (2015), grooming is the, “method used by offenders that involves building trust with a child and the adults around a child in an effort to gain access to and time alone with the child”. In other words, they, “prepare the child for sexual abuse” (Kloess et al., 2013). They go on to identify the key elements of grooming as targeting the victim, securing access to and isolating them, gaining their trust, and controlling and concealing the relationship with the child (Pollack and MacIver, 2015). In an article written by Amparo Cano Basave and his colleagues (2014), they describe three different stages of grooming in the process of child sexual abuse. They name the first stage, “deceptive trust development”, and define it as the time after the predator has gained access to the child. The predator will exchange personal information and anecdotes in order to gain the child’s trust and build common ground with them. During this stage, the predator also gains information about the child’s support system. In the second stage, the grooming stage, the predator triggers the child’s sexual curiosity using sexual terms in their conversations and begins to isolate them from their friends and family. The process intensifies as the child becomes more isolated from their friends and family. In the third stage, the predator attempts to approach the child physically. The predator asks the child about their schedule and their parents’ schedules as well as their location. The predator might say something like, “’I’m sorry your parents are home all the time’”. Throughout the development of the abusive relationship, the predator seems charming, and kind. For some children, the predator may even seem like a knight in shining armor come to rescue them.