Perceptions and Recognition of Female- Versus Male-Perpetrated Grooming Behaviors

Most research on child sexual abuse (CSA) focuses on male-perpetrated abuse, with minimal attention paid to female-perpetrated CSA. It is currently unclear whether people can detect early warning signs of female-perpetrated abuse. The current studies examined participants' beliefs about the prevalence of male- and female-perpetrated CSA and compared participants' detection accuracy for grooming and non-grooming behaviors perpetrated by male and female adults. A sample of 38 undergraduate students completed a pilot study where they indicated how prevalent they believed various adult-child sex pairings in CSA to be. Participants believed men were more likely to commit CSA (p < .001, d = 3.51) and believed CSA involving a male adult abusing a female child to be the most prevalent form of CSA (p < .001, η_p ² = 0.58). Experiment 1 consisted of 145 participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). In Experiment 1, participants read vignettes describing grooming and non-grooming interactions between adults and children. Sex of both the adults and children were also manipulated. Participants were more likely to interpret interactions as inappropriate when they involved a male adult compared to a female adult (p = .02, η_p ² = 0.04). Participants were also more accurate in recognizing grooming behaviors when interactions described male adults as opposed to female adults (p = .004, d = 0.49). These data suggest sex roles and abuse stereotypes influence interpretations regarding potentially dangerous interactions between an adult and a child.