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Case 1:20-cr-00330-PAE Document 397-1 Filed 10/29/21 Page 24 of 30
Journal of Interpersonal Violence 33(1)

[Graph titled: Frequency per Year]
[X-axis: 1984 to 2016]
[Y-axis: 0 to 600]

Figure 1. Use of the term "grooming" in association with "child sexual abuse" in the professional literature accessed by Google Scholar, 1984-2016, as of 25 August, 2017.

expertly applied” (p. 558). Groth and Birnbaum accurately describe the process (at p. 142-143), but do not use the term “grooming.”

Figure 1 shows how the maximum number of publications in the database using the term “grooming” for this meaning¹ has increased since 1984. For the remainder of the 1980s, zero to nine publications per year used “grooming” for this meaning. From 1990-1999, the annual frequency rose from eight to 63, and from 2000 to 2009, from 64 to 227. From 2010 to 2016, the annual frequency rose from 282 to 533.

My own recollection of the growing use of the term “grooming” in this context during the 1980s and 1990s is that it spread not only through peer-reviewed literature and books, but also though the teaching and training being conducted by Ken Lanning, Ann Burgess, and other thought leaders of the era, and that it was gradually adopted by journalists and the general public as well. As the term came to be widely applied, it became increasingly obvious that offenders who groom children often groom the parents of those children, the organizations through which they work or volunteer with children, and the communities in which they function. The success of these offenders in doing so makes it all the more difficult for observers to overcome the false belief that such a “nice guy” could not be harming children (Lanning & Dietz, 2014).

Lanning (2018) points to some of the ways in which the term “grooming” has been misapplied (e.g., to refer to the use of “lures” in stranger cases or what might be expected parental behaviors in intrafamilial cases) but does

DOJ-OGR-00005891