Red Flag Grooming Behaviors by Perpetrators (2021)

I feel you man. In my hometown's high school there was this man who everyone loved and trusted. He was the student life animator. He would organize most extracurricular activities, voyages, camping, theater, etc.

Then 10 years after I left school I see in my news feed that he was caught having sex with a teenage girl.

We should have known. The adults should have fucking known. Students, especially girls, would pass hours in his office.

I trust no man alone with children ever since.

First of all, I’ve unknowingly seen this “grooming” toward a few others growing up in scouting. But seeing these young scouts later as adult (and scout leaders) they were not “groomed” or worse. As disturbing as it was, we were amongst the lucky ones.

This has change greatly for Boy Scout, now called Scouting (because of inclusion of all genders).

The biggest stop to this problematic issue of grooming by such a trusted position of authority (scout leaders) is the two-leader deep. All participating adults must undergo numerous trainings before even engaging with a scout and only with at least one Scouting-trained adult nearby.

As an assistant scoutmaster of 24 years, it is not only embedded deeply in all adults having received training from Scouting but also tested and reinforced yearly that no one adult may be alone with any number of scouts, Scouting-trained or not.

Scouting Youth Protection Training program includes being proactive in ensuring two-deep leaders by writing up (citing) against any (non-guardian) adult being caught just standing alone near a scout or even a group of scouts. Reporting is deep and far and onerous. Chastising is never an option. And we are trained to view reporting as a matter of fact and not even problematic. No hesitation, just do it. The Council legal staff takes all report seriously and take in all inputs into consideration and decision is final.

Our troops do a self-imposed three—adult rules because our deep-expertise troop sponsors insist on upon this. It is irksome at first to tolerate this 3-adult-deep but after awhile, we quickly learn rotational duty for 3-deep coverage.

And amongst the 5 troops, have not seen a report more than once in 24 years (for questionable hand on shoulder) of which the parent-leader was then excluded from further outings by the Scouting Council.

I truly hope we got this licked but this OP report is refreshing in terms of exposing methodology so that we know what to look for and proactively prevent them.

Scouting is fun, for the youth. Adults must be Scouting-trained yearly and just do have to do a team-up, not only for the protection of all youths but for their own protection against reporting (and any legal repercussion that may accompanied such report). Leaders do do take breaks from leaderships during outings and have learned to have fun but must be with another one adult, so off to fishing we go.

Be prepared.

https://www.scouting.org/training/

I share your frustration. But I also suspect this research focus on ‘grooming’ is only part of a much larger picture. As you point out, trust is the bedrock of many relationships.

The problem is not building trust alone, but the reasons for doing it, right? What is your intent? Who authorized your actions?

If your job has you working with money, you will find there are many procedures that require witnesses. And if you work in B2B you learn to communicate in such a way as you can later show proof of authorization.

So, all is not lost, but community is important. And what people do when they shy away from accountability is for anyone to guess.

Higher percentage have been reported:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/10/almost-all-you...

Seems about right. My secondary school had one maybe-borderline aggressor, PE teacher that would segregate girls from boys, send boys to play football outside, stay with only the girls. No idea if / how many fell... The difficulty is where to draw the line, and clearly in this day and age "no adult alone with the kids ever" seems totally appropriate, not just for the kid's safety but also against rumors. In his case, we will never know.

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Unless you've been living under a rock, stories about "grooming" abounds. Here is a study made by experts on this topic, before it became a meme.