British society has been dealing with organised child exploitation through grooming gangs for an extended period. Official data contradicts media perceptions about who engages in these criminal activities by showing Pakistani men are not the main offenders. Official Home Office data indicates that defendants facing child sexual abuse prosecution in England and Wales are predominantly white since their number reaches 88 percent. News reports on offences by South Asian individuals receive unusually high attention from media outlets thus perpetuating racial misconceptions that deepen societal rifts.

The Origins of a Racialized Narrative

Forces of public discussion concerning grooming gangs grew stronger as three important cases occurred in Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford during the early 2010s. Policing and child protection institutions revealed organisational breakdowns in their investigations while media discussion primarily focused on the racial backgrounds of the offenders. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) produces reports showing child exploitation happens throughout all racial and social backgrounds but Pakistani and South Asian men still face political accusations as chief perpetrators.

The selective nature of this presentation has occurred previously. A series of investigative reports from The Times during 2011 identified Pakistani men as responsible for most grooming incidents. The overall issue of child sexual abuse transcends specific ethnic groups even though select cases linked South Asian offenders to the crime. Statistics from the National Crime Agency (NCA) confirm that white men carry out most cases of organised child exploitation but these crimes remain substantially underreported in the media.

How the Stereotype Affects Pakistani Families

The institutionalised stereotyping of Pakistani families in the United Kingdom has produced severe negative results. The students of Pakistani descent experience school discrimination through stereotype abuse which links them to sex exploitation gangs. A 2020 Runnymede Trust report documented Pakistani students who described teacher and peer bullying together with being labelled as “rapists” and experiencing suspicion. Community members and employers also share the same prejudice toward Pakistani families that starts in educational institutions.

Research shows doses of bigotry against Muslim communities have grown because of recent media accounts. Statistics gathered by Tell MAMA demonstrate that reports about South Asian male grooming incidents led to an increase in Islamophobic incidents. Social isolation and vandalism attacks against Pakistani businesses and their families can be found in certain areas.

Systemic Failures in Addressing Child Exploitation

The genuine matter at hand concerns institutional missteps rather than the ongoing focus on ethnicity in political discussions. Vulnerable children received failed protection from both the police force and social services departments and government agencies because these institutions did not respond to abuse reports because of limited resources and poor management. The Jay Report (2014) uncovered that agency authorities neglected multiple reports of child exploitation in the Rotherham child abuse scandal for more than a decade.

The collective resources should move away from ethnic considerations so they focus on enhancing child protection legislation while training police forces and improving victim assistance services. The Children’s Commissioner has reported significant issues in both the reporting and handling of child sexual abuse incidents regardless of the racial background of abusers.

Why Pakistanis Are Targeted in This Narrative

The way grooming gang discussion has turned racial shows how British society generally views Asians and Muslims. Right-wing media together with politicians exploit this topic to advance immigration control measures and strengthen Muslim community monitoring. The English Defence League (EDL) uses Pakistani and Muslim communities as a focal point to rally their members while they organise protests that lead to violent incidents.

Throughout history the United Kingdom tends to blame minority communities for addressing broader social issues. The criminal investigation of Pakistani men for grooming gangs matches historical patterns of moral panics that previously targeted black muggers during the 1970s and Irish immigrants throughout the 20th century. Extending responsibility to an individual ethnicity creates diversion from institutional breakdowns that exist in police organisations and welfare agencies.

A Call for Evidence-Based Solutions

To combat child exploitation effectively, the UK must adopt a zero-tolerance policy that is not influenced by racial biases. Recommendations include:

• Improved police training to handle child exploitation cases effectively.

• Better data collection on grooming gangs that avoids racial profiling.

• Stronger victim support services to ensure survivors receive adequate care.

• Accountability for institutional failures, including oversight of law enforcement agencies.

The UK is implementing key recommendations to combat child exploitation effectively. These include improved police training, better data collection, stronger victim support services, and accountability for institutional failures. Police training should focus on recognising signs of exploitation and understanding grooming complexities. Data collection methods should focus on behaviours and patterns, avoiding racial profiling. Stronger victim support services should ensure survivors receive adequate care and support. Independent oversight bodies should monitor law enforcement and other institutions. Additional strategies include community engagement and awareness campaigns, partnership and collaboration between law enforcement, social services, schools, and community organisations, and the development and enforcement of robust legal frameworks. These strategies aim to move towards a more equitable approach to combating child exploitation. For more insights, refer to the UK Anti-Slavery Commissioner’s report.

National authorities in the UK execute essential recommendations to overcome child exploitation better. The UK is adopting four primary measures to enhance child exploitation combat through upgraded police teaching combined with better statistical data acquisition and enhanced victim care programs and institutional oversight systems. The training curriculum for police officers must teach them to detect exploitation indicators as well as complex grooming procedures. Data collection systems should analyse behavioural activities and detect patterns instead of adapting racially biased approaches. The delivery of victim support should achieve complete care and support for survivors through improved service approaches.

External supervision institutions need to monitor both law enforcement departments along with other institutions. Effective child exploitation prevention strategies necessitate active collaboration between law enforcement, social services, schools, and community organisations, as well as community outreach and public education programs. Strict legal systems are also necessary. Such measures work toward building a more fair method of fighting child exploitation. The complete UK Anti-Slavery Commissioner’s report contains additional detailed information about this subject.

Conclusion: Separating Fact from Fiction

The obsessive focus on Pakistani males in grooming gang stories produces misleading information which proves detrimental to both social harmony and genuine investigation. Racial stereotyping exacerbates social tensions, obscures institutional shortcomings, and places an undue burden on communities that bear no responsibility. The UK needs to stop blaming racial groups for its child protection problems while establishing complete child safety measures that approach the fundamental causes of child exploitation. Society guarantees child protection for children of every background through such measures alone.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Syed Salman Mehdi.

There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors.

— Professor Robert Gellately, author of Backing Hitler, March 2002

Are you among the 41% of Americans who regularly attend church or some other religious service?

Do you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law?

Do you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car?

Are you among the 44% of Americans who live in a household with a gun? If so, are you concerned that the government may be plotting to confiscate your firearms?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the government and flagged for heightened surveillance and preemptive intervention.

Let that sink in a moment.

If you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you have just been promoted to the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

I assure you I’m not making this stuff up.

So what is the government doing about these so-called American “extremists”?

The government is grooming the American people to spy on each other as part of its Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, or CP3 program.

According to journalist Leo Hohmann, the government is handing out $20 million in grants to police, mental health networks, universities, churches and school districts to enlist their help in identifying Americans who might be political dissidents or potential “extremists.”

As Hohmann explains:

Whether it’s COVID and vaccines, the war in Ukraine, immigration, the Second Amendment, LGBTQ ideology and child-gender confusion, the integrity of our elections, or the issue of protecting life in the womb, you are no longer allowed to hold dissenting opinions and voice them publicly in America. If you do, your own government will take note and consider you a potential ‘violent extremist’ and terrorist.

Cue the dawning of the Snitch State.

This new era of snitch surveillance is the lovechild of the government’s post-9/11 “See Something, Say Something” programs combined with the self-righteousness of a politically correct, hyper-vigilant, technologically-wired age.

For more than two decades, the Department of Homeland Security has plastered its “See Something, Say Something” campaign on the walls of metro stations, on billboards, on coffee cup sleeves, at the Super Bowl, even on television monitors in the Statue of Liberty. Colleges, universities and even football teams and sporting arenas have lined up for grants to participate in the program.

The government has even designated September 25 as National “If You See Something, Say Something” Awareness Day.

If you see something suspicious, says the DHS, say something about it to the police, call it in to a government hotline, or report it using a convenient app on your smart phone.

This DHS slogan is nothing more than the government’s way of indoctrinating “we the people” into the mindset that we’re an extension of the government and, as such, have a patriotic duty to be suspicious of, spy on, and turn in our fellow citizens.

This is what is commonly referred to as community policing.

Yet while community policing and federal programs such as “See Something, Say Something” are sold to the public as patriotic attempts to be on guard against those who would harm us, they are little more than totalitarian tactics dressed up and repackaged for a more modern audience as well-intentioned appeals to law and order and security.

The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own policing.

After all, the police can’t be everywhere. So how do you police a nation when your population outnumbers your army of soldiers? How do you carry out surveillance on a nation when there aren’t enough cameras, let alone viewers, to monitor every square inch of the country 24/7? How do you not only track but analyze the transactions, interactions and movements of every person within the United States?

The answer is simpler than it seems: You persuade the citizenry to be your eyes and ears. You hype them up on color-coded “Terror alerts,” keep them in the dark about the distinctions between actual threats and staged “training” drills so that all crises seem real, desensitize them to the sight of militarized police walking their streets, acclimatize them to being surveilled “for their own good,” and then indoctrinate them into thinking that they are the only ones who can save the nation from another 9/11.

Consequently, we now live in a society in which a person can be accused of any number of crimes without knowing what exactly he has done. He might be apprehended in the middle of the night by a roving band of SWAT police. He might find himself on a no-fly list, unable to travel for reasons undisclosed. He might have his phones or internet tapped based upon a secret order handed down by a secret court, with no recourse to discover why he was targeted.

This Kafkaesque nightmare has become America’s reality.

This is how you turn a people into extensions of the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent police state, and in the process turn a citizenry against each other.

It’s a brilliant ploy, with the added bonus that while the citizenry remains focused on and distrustful of each other and shadowy forces from outside the country, they’re incapable of focusing on more definable threats that fall closer to home—namely, the government and its cabal of Constitution-destroying agencies and corporate partners.

Community policing did not come about as a feel-good, empowering response to individuals trying to “take back” their communities from crime syndicates and drug lords.

Rather, “Community-Oriented Policing” or COPS (short for Community Partnerships, Organizational Transformation, and Problem Solving) is a Department of Justice program designed to foster partnerships between police agencies and members of the community.

To this end, the Justice Department identifies five distinct “partners” in the community policing scheme: law enforcement and other government agencies, community members and groups, nonprofits, churches and service providers, private businesses and the media.

Together, these groups are supposed to “identify” community concerns, “engage” the community in achieving specific goals, serve as “powerful” partners with the government, and add their “considerable resources” to the government’s already massive arsenal of technology and intelligence. The mainstream media’s role, long recognized as being a mouthpiece for the government, is formally recognized as “publicizing” services from government or community agencies or new laws or codes that will be enforced, as well as shaping public perceptions of the police, crime problems, and fear of crime.

Inevitably, this begs the question: if there’s nothing wrong with community engagement, if the police can’t be everywhere at once, if surveillance cameras do little to actually prevent crime, and if we need to “take back our communities” from the crime syndicates and drug lords, then what’s wrong with community policing and “See Something, Say Something”?

What’s wrong is that these programs are not, in fact, making America any safer while turning us into a legalistic, intolerant, squealing, bystander nation.

We are now the unwitting victims of an interconnected, tightly woven, technologically evolving web of real-time, warrantless, wall-to-wall, widening mass surveillance dragnet comprised of fusion centers, red flag laws, behavioral threat assessments, terror watch lists, facial recognition, snitch tip lines, biometric scanners, pre-crime programs, DNA databases, data mining, precognitive technology and contact tracing apps, to name just a few.

This is how the government keeps us under control and in its crosshairs.

By the time you combine the DHS’ “See Something, Say Something” with CP3 and community policing, which has gone global in the guise of the Strong Cities Network program, you’ve got a formula for enabling the government to not only flag distinct “anti-government” segments of the population but locking down the entire nation.

Under the guise of fighting violent extremism “in all of its forms and manifestations” in cities and communities across the world, the Strong Cities Network program works with the UN and the federal government to train local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerance within their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal.

What this program is really all about, however, is community policing on a global scale with the objective being to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police will identify, monitor and deter individuals who could be construed as potential extremist “threats,” violent or otherwise, before they can become actual threats.

The government’s war on extremists has been sold to Americans in much the same way that the USA Patriot Act was sold to Americans: as a means of combatting terrorists who seek to destroy America.

However, as we now know, the USA Patriot Act was used as a front to advance the surveillance state, allowing the government to establish a far-reaching domestic spying program that has turned every American citizen into a criminal suspect.

Similarly, the concern with the government’s ongoing anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.

Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers, data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).

This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.

For example, in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released two reports, one on “Rightwing Extremism,” which broadly defines rightwing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” and one on “Leftwing Extremism,” which labeled environmental and animal rights activist groups as extremists.

These reports, which use the words terrorist and extremist interchangeably, indicate that for the government, anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—can be labeled an extremist.

Fast forward a few years, and you have the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which each successive presidential administration has continually re-upped, that allows the military to take you out of your home, lock you up with no access to friends, family or the courts if you’re seen as an extremist.

Now connect the dots, from the 2009 Extremism reports to the NDAA and the far-reaching data crime fusion centers that collect and share surveillance data between local, state and federal police agencies.

Add in tens of thousands of armed, surveillance drones that will soon blanket American skies, facial recognition technology that identifies and tracks you wherever you go and whatever you do. And then to complete the circle, toss in the real-time crime centers which are attempting to “predict” crimes and identify criminals before they happen based on widespread surveillance, complex mathematical algorithms and prognostication programs.

If you can’t read the writing on the wall, you need to pay better attention.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, unless we can put the brakes on this dramatic expansion and globalization of the government’s powers, we’re not going to recognize this country five, ten—even twenty—years from now.

As long as “we the people” continue to allow the government to trample our rights in the so-called name of national security, things will get worse, not better.

It’s already worse.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 9/19/22) invents an imaginary phenomenon in which young children are being trained in sexual practices by elementary schools. So whose “sexual fantasies” is he really talking about here?

In front of a graphic of fluffy pink handcuffs and “Kink for Kids” spelled out in blocks and crayon font, a red-faced Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 9/19/22) ranted about the story of a transgender Canadian high school teacher whose photos went viral on social media for wearing comically large prosthetic breasts to work.

This is a specialty of Carlson’s: taking one weird example of an individual’s behavior and attributing it to an entire movement or community to stoke moral panic. Carlson declared:

It’s hard to believe this is happening, but we’re sad to tell you it’s not just happening in Canada. You see versions of it everywhere, including in this country. And to be clear what this is, children being used as props in the sexual fantasies of adults.

From this single Canadian teacher’s cartoonishly inappropriate outfit, Carlson leaps—to teachers on social media talking about how they validate children when they disclose their sexualities and gender identities to them.

Then he leaps back to talking about pedophilia. This conflation is where the danger lies, both for LGBTQ individuals, and children who are actual survivors of sexual abuse.

What ‘grooming’ is—and isn’t

The term “grooming” has become a favorite of anti-LGBTQ politicians and right-wing media. Carlson said in the segment:

Some people describe what was happening, it is grooming. We’re not exactly sure what that means. But if it’s sexually abusing children, yes, that is what’s happening.

In fact, we do know what grooming means. The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) describes grooming as “manipulative behaviors that the abuser uses to gain access to a potential victim, coerce them to agree to the abuse, and reduce the risk of being caught.” It involves isolating victims, gaining their trust, and desensitizing them to inappropriate touch, sex and other forms of abuse.

Teaching children that some kids have two moms, or that certain people identify with a gender that does not match the one assigned to them based on their body parts, is not grooming. Having a drag queen in theatrical makeup read books to them is not grooming.

Vince Everett Ellison, on Tucker Carlson Tonight (1/24/23) to talk about “endless lies,” claims Democrats “want you to castrate little boys and cut off the breasts of little girls.”

Age-appropriate discussions about bodies, boundaries and relationships have been a regular part of school curriculums. It’s the introduction of LGBTQ-related topics in these discussions that sparked hysterical headlines and TV rants. A Carlson guest, author and documentarian Vince Everett Ellison—whose latest film is about how voting Democrat will keep you from Heaven—said in a January screed (Fox News, 1/24/23):

This is a party that believes in this transgender grooming thing to a point where…they want you to castrate little boys and cut off the breasts of little girls, and they’re telling people they’re not going to be held responsible for this.

Not only is the depiction of young children being castrated and receiving mastectomies graphic, it’s also untrue. If “little” children—i.e., those entering puberty—express a desire to transition, doctors may put them on reversible puberty blockers (which have been shown to reduce suicidal ideation in trans youth). Surgeries for youth under the age of 18 are relatively rare, and generally only done with the consent of the patient, their guardian and a doctor. And of course the language aired on Fox isn’t only meant to suggest child abuse; it also deliberately denies the gender identity of the young person requesting the gender-affirming surgery.

‘Your kids are ours’

Fox‘s Jesse Watters (9/23/22) interviews Mario Presents about his “Groom Dogs, Not Kids” T-shirt.

Fox‘s Jesse Watters, towards the start of his September 23 show, discussed the story of a Florida teacher convicted of sexually assaulting her 14-year-old student (Media Matters, 9/23/22). He moved on to bemoaning Covid school closures interrupting children’s education, then rounded out his segment by arguing that educating children about LGBTQ issues, like Critical Race Theory, is a form of Democratic indoctrination:

Sex and CRT become the new math and science. Kids are learning racism instead of reading. Do you think parents are pissed off about this? Of course, why wouldn’t they be? But, when they speak up, Democrats tell them to sit down, shut up and stay out of education: “Your kids are ours.”

To help him make his argument, Watters brought on Mario Presents, a “concerned uncle” who condemned LGBTQ education at a California school board meeting. Watters asks Presents about his shirt—which read, “Groom Dogs, Not Kids.”

“We love a pretty pet, but we don’t love kids being sexual,” Presents replied. “We don’t love…confusing them. We want kids to just be themselves.”

Presents also praised the work of “Gays Against Grooming” a conspiracy theorist, far-right operative -run anti-trans group masquerading as a grassroots organization (Media Matters, 2/7/23).

Validating a child’s stated identity, preferred name and pronouns is not “grooming.” There is, of course, nothing more inherently sexual about being homosexual or transgender than there is about being heterosexual and cisgender.

Dehumanizing myths

Julia Serano (Medium, 11/29/22): “The ‘grooming’ charge—as well as the related accusation that we are ‘sexualizing children‘—insinuates that LGBTQ+ people (but not cis-hetero people) are inherently sexually ‘contaminating’ and ‘corrupting.'”

But these far-right tropes aren’t new. Baselessly accusing a group of people of one of the worst crimes imaginable is a pretty surefire way to dehumanize them. Stigmatizing queer people by claiming they are sexually deviant is an age-old tactic. As Julia Serano notes in her blog for Medium (11/29/22), the “groomer” accusation recalls late 19th-century pseudoscience that claimed stigmatized people—like queer people, sex workers, poor people and disabled people—were evolving backwards, and that the mere exposure to them could make you evolve backwards, too.

The idea that merely learning about LGBTQ people and identities “causes” children to become queer has also been debunked. As Serano points out, several peer-reviewed studies have debunked the concept of transgender “social contagion,” an idea coined by a trans-skeptical parent online in 2016 and elaborated in a 2018 paper, “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD),” by Lisa Littman. Flaws in the paper were called out in three peer-reviewed studies (Restar, 2020; Ashley, 2020; Pitts-Taylor, 2020), and the journal that published it later issued an apology and correction (PLoS, 3/19/19).

Serano also draws on earlier research to point to the likelihood that children like those in Littman’s study were most likely already trans or gender-diverse in some way, and seeking out access to information and support from peers similar to them. At least one study debunked the idea that same-sex attraction “spreads” among peer groups (Brakefield et al., 2014).

Serano also discusses the phenomenon of reduction of restraint. When a behavior is stigmatized, people who are inclined to engage in it are more likely to refrain:

In a 2017 essay, I argued that the current increased prevalence of trans people is akin to the increase in left-handedness (from 2% to 13%) during the 20th century once the stigma and punishment associated with being left-handed abated.

Hypocrisy and hatred

 The incorrect use of the term “groomer” is rooted more in thinly veiling right-wing media’s anti-LGBTQ hatred than it is in an actual desire to protect children from sexual content—or other dangers. As Serano astutely summarized in her blog:

They also often use “grooming” in reference to completely non-sexual things, such as rainbow flags hanging in classrooms, efforts to accommodate trans students, or when schools have nondiscrimination policies protecting LGBTQ+ people. While anti-trans/LGBTQ+ campaigners may frame their interventions in terms of “safeguarding children,” they rarely if ever express similar concern over actual cases of grooming and [child sexual abuse], the overwhelming majority of which are perpetrated by cis-hetero men who are family members or close acquaintances of the child.

The issue clearly isn’t about discussions or experiences involving cis-heteronormative sexuality or gender. It’s queerness itself that’s believed to be perverted. The Murdoch empire demonstrates this.

A father bragging about taking his nine-year-old son to Hooters didn’t prompt concern from the New York Post (11/23/22) about sexualizing children, but rather an array of boob puns.

A New York Post article (11/23/22) profiled a British father who took his 9-year-old son to Hooters to celebrate his good grades. “Tit for tot?” the article begins, later describing the restaurant as a “ta-ta temple.” It highlighted both critical and supportive responses to the stunt.

Teaching kids about gender diversity causes hosts like Fox’s Laura Ingraham to beat their chests in preparation for a culture war (Fox News, 4/7/22), and parents taking their kids to a drag show “normalize[s] the sexualization of kids” (10/19/22), yet this story evokes nothing more than a few lighthearted boob puns from Murdoch’s New York Post.

Meanwhile, children’s actual physical safety takes a backseat to “Don’t Say Gay” hysteria on Fox. Media Matters (4/1/22) documented Fox hosts melting down over Disney’s public opposition to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill in at least 53 segments over a week in 2022, accusing the company of grooming, indoctrinating and sexualizing children.

To compare, in December, a bipartisan bill supporting the welfare of child sex abuse victims was introduced in the House. Twenty-eight Republicans—including Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who have both referred to pro-LGBTQ advocates as “groomers” (CPR News, 11/22/22; Sacramento Bee, 11/25/22)—voted against the now-passed Respect for Child Survivors Act, which seeks to improve how the FBI handles cases of child sexual abuse (Newsweek, 12/22/22). FAIR’s Nexis search of the legislation’s name turned up no results on Fox News in the weeks preceding and following the voting.

The New England Journal of Medicine (5/19/22) found that gun violence had become the No. 1 cause of death in children and adolescents in 2020. A Nexis search of Fox transcripts found no mentions of that report in the week following its release. Only after the Uvalde elementary school shooting, which occurred on May 24, was the report mentioned in passing (Fox News, 5/29/22, 5/30/22).

Centrist media complicity 

Centrist and neoliberal media have also been slow to call anti-LGBTQ advocates’ bluff. While the New York Times (4/7/22, 5/31/22) has published op-eds that confront the term “groomer” as harmful to both the LGBTQ community and victims of child abuse, its news section continues to both-sides the issue, quoting Republican use of the term with little critique.

In a piece that sterilely chronicled right-wing political attacks on LGBTQ rights, the Times (7/22/22) reported:

Officials and television commentators on the right have accused opponents of some of those new restrictions of seeking to “sexualize” or “groom” children. Grooming refers to the tactics used by sexual predators to manipulate their victims, but it has become deployed widely on the right to brand gay and transgender people as child molesters, evoking an earlier era of homophobia.

Washington Post (4/5/22): “In the charged debate over what and how children should learn about sexual orientation and gender identity, some mainstream Republicans are tagging those who defend such lessons as ‘groomers,’ claiming that proponents of such teaching want children primed for sexual abuse.”

The article later went on to briefly cite a survey by the Trevor Project that showed the staggering suicidality rates of gender non-conforming youth. However, the piece ultimately treated the issue as a political game, outlining Republican tactics and the risks they face of losing centrist votes due to homophobia. It ended with a quote by Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon, who is calling for legislation that allows parents to sue school districts that host drag shows (despite no evidence of any district doing so). “We’re taking the first step today to protecting children,” Dixon said, getting the last word.

At the Washington Post (4/5/22), the article “Teachers Who Mention Sexuality Are ‘Grooming’ Kids, Conservatives Say” devoted its first 12 paragraphs to coverage of anti-trans bigots using “groomer” rhetoric. As FAIR (4/12/22) pointed out:

It barely matters that the Post brought in some “experts” later to offer the “other side”—that actually talking about these things in fact helps curtail sexual abuse (which in schools primarily happens at the hands of heterosexual male teachers, noted all the way down in the 37th paragraph of the Post article) and bullying against LGBTQ+ kids. In giving the GOP the headline and the (extraordinarily lengthy) lead, Natanson and Balingit gave a bigoted and dangerous campaign the right to frame the story as a debate with two somehow comparable sides.

Other outlets are sometimes even worse. NY1 (6/16/22) platformed a Queens council member who called drag queen story hours in schools “grooming.” The Salt Lake Tribune (10/21/22) dedicated a whole article to outlining Utah politicians’ moral panic about drag shows. It quoted write-in Washington County clerk/auditor candidate Patricia Kent in the unhinged headline: “They are grooming our children for immoral satanic worship.”

The real danger

NBC‘s Today (5/9/22) on “grooming”: “Misusing the term also puts people, particularly children and teenagers, at risk of being groomed and eventually victimized.”

LGBTQ people are nearly four times more likely to be victims of violent crime—including sexual assault—than their non-LGBTQ counterparts. They’re nine times more likely than non-LGBTQ people to be victims of violent hate crimes. The November 2022 mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs is only one recent example of this danger.

Misusing the term “groomer” is also counterproductive to helping real victims of child sexual abuse. While it didn’t directly address LGBTQ education, a Psychology Today piece (4/10/22) asserted that referring to Disney movies, sex education and other sexual content as “grooming” is clinically inaccurate, and has the potential to make it “more difficult to detect and identify actual manipulative behaviors and prevent actual sexual offending.”

NBC’s Today (5/9/22) published a laudable piece on the topic based on an interview with Grace French, a former dancer and gymnast whom USA Gymnastics national team doctor Larry Nassar groomed and molested. She explained why careless use of the term is harmful to survivors like her:

It’s so incredibly important to use this term correctly, because if we don’t understand it—and we have these assumptions about what it can or can’t be—then it’s harder and harder for grooming to be identified, and perpetrators are going to be able to get more access to children and to victims.

The New York Times (5/31/22) echoed this sentiment with a guest essay from a survivor, who concluded:

If we can’t agree that the use of these words is sacred and worth protecting from daily politics, we are telling one another that our deepest, most intimate, heart-wrenching wounds are empty—and that we may as well be, too.

Conservative politicians’ and right-wing media’s reckless use of the term “grooming” is intentionally inaccurate and dehumanizing. It not only harms LGBTQ people, but also the children these figures claim to be fighting to protect.

The post Right-Wing Media’s ‘Grooming’ Rhetoric Has Nothing to Do With Concern for Children appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Olivia Riggio.