8.2.1 Pre-offence phase
Analysis of the build up to the abusive behaviour in the pre-offence phase identified a number of ways in which the position of trust relationship between the perpetrator and victim intensifies and becomes an inappropriate one.
In Chapter Seven it was evident that where victims have particular vulnerabilities around the time of the abuse it was common for them to confide in the perpetrator. This attempt to seek support often resulted in closer emotional connections
being established, and, in circumstances where the perpetrator was also experiencing difficulties in her own life, could lead to the sharing of her own problems as she inappropriately also used the child as a source of support.
Increasingly personal relationships then led to, or were accompanied by, communication between the two outside of the organisational environment, usually by personal text, email, instant messaging or social media. These contacts would become more frequent and personal and an increasingly inappropriate relationship would be established. Such contact often occurred late at night, at weekends or during organisational holidays; periods when the perpetrator and victim were physically separated. The perpetrator might also begin giving the victim lifts to/from the organisation or other destinations, providing a further opportunity for them to spend time alone away from a supervised environment. A male adolescent victim describes this escalation of behaviour:
I got sent to isolation and [L14] was on duty. She was talking to me about why I got sent there and telling me to calm down...Then, out of nowhere, she just slipped me her number on a little bit of paper. I was amazed and confused. I didn’t tell my mates straight away but I was texting her, trying to keep it quiet. The first one said: ‘Hiya, it’s me’ and it just went from there. (Male victim, Case L14)
In other cases, in the pre-offence phase the perpetrator began to spend more time with the victim and their peers, for example by being involved in after-school activities, sports practices or extra tuition. In these circumstances, the perpetrator typically behaved in a less formal way, overstepping professional boundaries and beginning to regard themselves (and be regarded by the victim/peers) more as a friend or peer of the young people rather than an adult in a position of authority. In some cases, the perpetrator shared personal information about her life, past relationships and sexual experiences. This increasingly inappropriate, friendship-style behaviour could lead to the perpetrator having the victim/peers visit her home, usually to socialise or watch films, or alternatively to her attending other social events with the victim and their peers. In both circumstances, it was not unusual for alcohol to be available (which the perpetrator either provided or permitted the consumption of) and for sexual and romantic behaviour between the young people themselves to occur.
In some circumstances victims displayed flirtatious behaviour towards the perpetrator that she did not discourage or report to her seniors or supervisors:
It started about a year prior to the actual relationship starting, he showed up in my class... He had started as a flirtation. He would come to my classroom and lean in the doorway and blow me kisses or whistle at me in the hallway. Or just brush my shoulder as he was walking by. Fairly, you know, inappropriate but fairly innocent stuff. (WC11)
It can be difficult to discuss victim behaviour without insinuating that the child was to blame for the abuse in some way. However, in presenting this information here there is no intention at all to blame any victims for the actions of the perpetrator. The perpetrator is always the adult with agency and responsibility in abusive situations and there is always a disparity in power between them and their victims, particularly in these cases where they are also in a formal, legally recognised position of trust. In some instances, the case data referred to victim actions which were interpreted by the female perpetrator as encouraging sexual activity and which she chose to act upon. The issue of importance here is not the victim’s actions but the interpretations and subsequent actions of adult female offenders in response.
In some cases victims and their friends would also establish social media or text contact with the perpetrator that she either permitted or actively engaged in. These contacts then developed from general communications (sometimes with more than one child/young person) to more personal correspondence which then becomes directed towards the victim specifically.
Once such personal relationships were established, it was rare for the perpetrator to actually make any attempt to cease the developing relationship. In the very few cases where this did happen these efforts were minimal and short-lived and the inappropriate relationship continued regardless. For example, in one case when the perpetrator realised she was developing feelings for the victim and inappropriately relying on him for emotional support, she told him he could no longer help out in her classroom and by doing so made some attempt to stop the one-to-one contact time they spent together. Yet within a very short space of time she then disregarded her reservations, told the victim why she had stopped their contact, disclosed her true feelings for him and proceeded to establish a sexually abusive relationship with him:
I told him he couldn’t do his school service in my class, that it wasn’t a good idea. I didn’t tell him why…I went home feeling guilty because the truth was that we had already built a relationship of sorts…I was telling him things I shouldn’t
have and I thought it was wrong of me to cut him off without any explanation…I felt really rotten the next day. By then, I realised that I liked him. It sounds crazy, and it was. I felt I owed him an explanation and told him the reason I could not have him in the class was because I had been thinking about him too much. (S3)
8.2.2 ‘Grooming’
The term ‘grooming’ in relation to child sexual abuse has been subject to definitional problems (Mcalinden, 2006). Despite being introduced in the Sexual Offences Act 2003 it was not defined specifically but was referred to in the offence of sexual grooming as ‘arrange a meeting with a child under 16… with the intent of sexually abusing the child’ (this author’s emphasis) (Sexual Offences Act 2003, s. 15). The NSPCC refer to ‘grooming’ as being ‘when someone builds an emotional connection with a child to gain their trust for the purposes of sexual abuse, sexual exploitation or trafficking’ (this author’s emphasis) (NSPCC, 2017, September, Grooming. Retrieved from https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/child-abuse-and- neglect/grooming/) (Accessed on 13 September 2017).
The new offence of ‘sexual communication with a child’ was introduced in England and Wales in April 2017 to enhance powers in relation to sexual grooming, particularly online. The offence covers both online and offline communication and makes it illegal to ‘intentionally communicate with a child under 16 where the person acts for a sexual purpose and the communication is sexual or is intended to elicit a sexual response’ (this author’s emphasis) (Serious Crime Act 2015). These definitions clearly indicate the importance of intent on the behalf of the offender in classifying behaviour as grooming. Such a view is problematic when assessing the behaviour of many of the women in this research sample. As discussed below, there are real difficulties in determining whether some women’s actions in establishing emotional relationships with children in their care were pre-planned and intentional with a specific intent to sexually abuse or rather that the sexual activity followed on from the development of emotional connection fostered through initial pastoral or educational support, where there was no initial intention or motivation to abuse. These circumstances are not generally addressed in the existing literature on grooming. For these reasons, the behaviours typically described as ‘grooming’ are referred to in this study as ‘grooming-type’ behaviour.
Grooming-type behaviour was evident in 82.3% of cases (n=112) and 11.8% (n=16) of cases solely involved this, not progressing to contact sexual abuse. However, given the nature of the data sources, it was not always possible to identify if the perpetrator’s actions constituted intentional, pre-planned grooming behaviour (i.e. that specifically employed to lead to sexual contact) or were less intentioned actions implicit in the nature of the increasingly inappropriate personal relationship between the perpetrator and victim and therefore part of the ongoing abusive relationship itself.
In cases where grooming-type behaviour was identified the most typical methods were: engaging in sexualised contact with the victim online or via text messages (50%; n=56); meeting in private outside of the organisational environment (46.4%; n=52) and the perpetrator allowing or encouraging the victim to visit her home (45.5%; n=51). Full detail of the behaviours can be found in Table 18.
Other grooming-type behaviours included: giving the victim lifts in her car; sending letters/notes or cards; providing the victim with alcohol; taking the victim out for meals; encouraging the victim to visit her classroom; engaging in (non-sexual) physical contact with the victim; dressing provocatively; encouraging the victim’s emotional dependency upon her; befriending/socialising with the victim’s family; allowing the victim to drive her car; taking a part-time job in the same business as the victim; manipulating teaching cover to teach in the victim’s class; regularly travelling on public transport with the victim; arranging a work placement for the victim and watching the victim play in sports matches. Other more familiar behaviours such as buying gifts or grooming guardians were not as typical in the cases in this study.
From this analysis of female perpetrator behaviour in the pre-offence phase, an issue clearly arises around the way some of these women progress to sexually abusive behaviour and how this differs from current understandings of ‘grooming’. Existing definitions set the expectation that grooming is a purposeful, deliberate set of conscious actions specifically designed to enable sexual abuse to occur. The findings of this research suggest that a wider definition or understanding of the term may be required. It could be argued that existing definitions and the prevailing current understanding of the term and its meaning are gendered; they result from the fact that, to date, child sexual abuse has only really been extensively researched and understood in the context of male perpetrators. Legislation and public policy documentation as well as contemporary media narratives portray grooming as deliberate, calculated actions by males who have a sexual interest in children/young
people and who use it to facilitate and enable the commission of sexual acts for their own gratification. Yet in many of the cases in this study of female perpetrators, the grooming-type behaviour does not appear to be a conscious or calculated method and the perpetrator’s emotional interaction with the child arises first (and often via legitimate means and for non-sexual reasons) which then gradually progresses to the development of a sexual relationship with the child as a pseudo-adult partner.
Table 18: Grooming-type behaviours in female-perpetrated child sexual abuse in organisational contexts
Behaviour Percentage n
GROOMING-TYPE BEHAVIOURa:
112
Sexualised contact via text/online
50.0% 56
Meet in private (outside organisation)
46.4% 52
Allow/encourage visits to her home
45.5% 51
Other 34.8% 39
Inappropriate
behaviour/boundaries with other children
22.3% 25
Meet in private (in organisation) 20.5% 23
Buying gifts 15.2% 17
Shares personal life details 14.3% 16
Grooming guardians 12.5% 14
Planning/inciting to meet 11.6% 13
Grooming victim’s peers 3.6% 4
Financial support
Sexual discussions (asks victim’s sexual history)
0.9% 0.9%
1 1
a Percentages total more than 100 as perpetrators generally engaged in more than one grooming-type behaviour
These differing scenarios in the pre-offence phase all lead to the development of an inappropriate personal relationship between the perpetrator and victim that oversteps professional boundaries and creates the background for progression into sexually abusive behaviour. Interestingly, there were no cases where the abuse occurred in a more spontaneous, or one-off, manner such as those found in other female sex offender studies and characterised as ‘Implicit Disorganised’ by Gannon and colleagues (2008, 2010).
8.2.3 Mobile phone/online contact
As discussed above, the development of an increasingly inappropriate relationship between the perpetrator and victim was often facilitated by private communication outside of the organisational context. Communication by these means is often extensive with many contacts occurring late at night or during school holidays. More than half of the cases (56.6%; n=77) involved telephone or mobile phone contact, either by text or social media messenger services or through voice calling. Online contact between the abuser and victim (usually via email, instant messaging or social media sites) was evident in 39% (n=53) of cases:
When I went to bed that night she started texting me at 11.30pm saying she really wished I hadn't had to go [off Facebook], and I replied I was sorry, too, as I didn't know what else to say…She said she'd been drinking quite a few
glasses of wine, and said there was someone she liked, but that it was wrong. I could see by now where this was leading, but I asked her several times who it was and she eventually said it was me. I remember thinking: ‘This is all a bit mad.’ I was a bit attracted to her, but not much, really. (Male victim, Case D5)
Various circumstances led to the exchange of mobile or social media communication details between the perpetrator and victim. In some cases, the abuser simply provided her details to the victim. In others, she would request the details from the victim or vice versa. In a few cases the details were originally communicated between the perpetrator and victim for legitimate reasons, such as to facilitate schoolwork assignments, or to keep in touch on organisational outings, but then are later used inappropriately by the perpetrator or victim to communicate more personally.
The use of technological communication serves to facilitate the development of closer personal relationships as well as being the medium by which grooming and
sexual abuse is actually perpetrated. This issue will be discussed further in Chapter 11. These findings emphasise the risks inherent in children’s use of technological communication where such use is not monitored or sufficiently controlled by guardians. Some organisations had policies prohibiting personal mobile or internet communication between adults in positions of trust and children and young people but others did not. Even where such policies existed the perpetrators would generally disregard them in order to facilitate an ongoing relationship with the victim. There were several instances of the child/young person or the adult creating a pseudonym or false account/profile on their personal communication devices to conceal the true nature of the inappropriate contact.
What is not clear is how aware parents/carers were of the communication between the child and the adult in the position of trust or the extent to which this was accepted. It is difficult to know whether guardians were less concerned about any such contact because the adult in the position of trust was a woman, although this is potentially the case given previous research findings around public perception of female sex offenders (Cain & Anderson, 2016; Elliott & Bailey, 2014) and parental perceptions of risk to their children from known adults in positions of trust (Babatsikos, 2010).
The findings here are consistent with those of Jaffe and colleagues (2013) in their study of sexual abuse by Canadian teachers, which emphasised the significance of increasing technology as facilitating child sexual abuse in schools.
8.3 The Offence Phase