Why It’s More Critical Now Than Ever to Tell Our “Not That Bad” Abuse Stories

Note: this essay is Part 1 of a 5-part series I wrote over a period of years prior to Election Day 2024. Here, I describe my personal experiences being groomed and the factors that continue to allow it to happen. Part 2 goes into the role of generational trauma in child and intimate partner abuse. Part 3 describes the failures of the "stranger danger" education I grew up with. Part 4 considers how our "hero" narratives keep us from solving the problem of (or healing from) child abuse. Finally, Part 5 offers some thoughts on how healing our own traumas could help us protect younger generations.

The day of Christine Blasey-Ford’s testimony at Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, I joined the trending #MeToo voices on social media  to post about my own experiences. 

I didn't say by whom or when or how I came to be groomed, groped, or gaslighted. Those details seemed a little, well, fraudulent in the face of the ones Dr. Blasey-Ford shared. After all, I hadn’t experienced anything nearly as bad as she had — much less some of the even worse stories other survivors were sharing.

But that was always the problem.

I’ve never found it easy to talk about experiencing abuse

As a kid, I wasn’t beaten (that badly), raped, starved, chained, burned, or caged. I was well fed, clothed, attended school, came from a home with a two-parent family, and had an extended family I spent plenty of time with. For most of the adults in my life, that was plenty.

On the surface, with the physiological needs on Maslow’s famed hierarchy taken care of, I indeed had plenty to be grateful for. A layer deeper, though, I was deeply unhappy on levels I couldn’t possibly articulate.

By high school, having moved homes and schools five times thanks to my father’s government work, I had no roots. No matter where I started over, I was the weird, lonely new kid; an unsolicited identity that had painted me with a target that screamed, “Bully me.”

I was good at attracting the wrong kind of attention. I wanted to attract the right kind.

I joined my school’s Air Force Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (AFJROTC) program, hiding behind various braids, belts, and ribbons that designated me as “special,” a cut above cadets who were content to wear a plain blue uniform.

My one goal when I joined was a ‘fruit salad’: for the left breast of my uniform to be filled with rows of colorful striped ribbons. I overachieved relentlessly for four years to earn those ribbons, some of which were medals, others of which had bronze or silver ‘oak leaf’ clusters signifying I’d earned multiple honors in that category.

Yet throughout, I continued to struggle. Among my peer group of college prep “smart” kids, I still felt like an outcast. I didn’t even fit in among the other outcasts. There were social rules I never seemed to grok, ways of coming across that I was told were too blunt or too precious or too “talking out of both sides of my mouth,” as one vice principal put it; not deferential or respectful or communicative enough in the ways that mattered.

I was in JROTC to learn how to be more. So when adult men noticed me, I felt I’d arrived at the threshold of adulthood I’d been waiting for.

There was just one problem: these men were not actually interested in mentoring me toward any kind of future that served me, professional or otherwise.

I wasn’t as much of an outlier as I believed. In 2022, the New York Times detailed the sexual abuse of numerous teens in Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) programs across the United States:

“Victims have reported sexual assaults in classrooms and supply closets, during field trips or on late-night rides home, sometimes committed after instructors plied students with alcohol or drugs. One former student said her instructor told her that sexual submission was expected of women in the military. A recent cadet in Tennessee said her J.R.O.T.C. instructor warned that he had the skills to kill her without a trace if she told anyone about their sexual encounters. In Missouri, a student said she was forced to kneel at her instructor’s bedside, blindfolded, with a gun to her head.”

Had any of that happened to me, I’d like to think I’d have reported it. I was also a Law Enforcement Explorer, another program I’d joined in an effort to belong somewhere. Then again, there too, I felt like little more than a dumb kid who didn’t know how to “keep my eyes and ears open, and my mouth shut,” as the police officer who groomed me advised early on.

Still, my experience paled in comparison to the kinds of details the Marshall Project reported in May 2024:

“In Connecticut, an officer first tried to ply a 17-year-old Explorer with compliments and a silver bracelet. After her repeated rejections, he took her into a vacant house, handcuffed her and sexually assaulted her, according to police records and her lawsuit. In South Miami, police records show a detective offered to teach teenagers about sex before he assaulted them — so often that some older Explorers warned new recruits against being alone with him. And in Porterville, California, a sergeant who led his department’s Explorer program took a 17-year-old alone on ride-alongs and complained about his marriage before having sex with her, according to a now-settled lawsuit.”

These kinds of details make it easy to miss the kind of slow-burn grooming that leads up to such incidents. Especially when you’ve been conditioned to believe you deserve the bullying, that the only way to get love is to earn it,  and the only love you get are breadcrumbs of affection. That you’re lucky to receive any affection at all.

I was easy prey.

1. The (much) older married man

As an overachieving outcast, I naturally sought out roles and titles that set me apart while demonstrating my competence. In JROTC, students can learn leadership skills through “command” positions that mimic the hierarchy of traditional military organizations.

These roles existed both in our schools, and at the summer encampment the instructors ran each year, that drew Air Force JROTC units from all over New England.

I didn’t see myself in a leadership role, so I gravitated to the behind-the-scenes “officer staff” work of communications and logistics and safety; things the cadet commanders needed to make sure the cadets under them were properly informed and clothed and safe.

But because our days were filled with the obstacle course and the firing range and the orienteering we’d participate in later in basic training, the behind-the-scenes work got held until after hours.

While other cadets enjoyed free time in and around the barracks, we were in the offices, supervised by our instructors, preparing the orders and plans for the next day, often until well after dark.

Child predators look for kids like us, the ones who want to contribute yet don’t have the self-esteem to try actual leadership.

So it was that I ended up at a desk one night, getting a neck and shoulder rub complete with earlobe nibbles from a man with 30 years, a wife, and at least two kids on me.

I enjoyed the attention. What didn’t sit right with me was the potential to “have an affair.” As a "good girl" I didn't want to lead this man astray. Not for a moment did I think I wouldn’t be blamed for, once again, my lack of discipline.

Nonetheless, feeling uncomfortable, I talked to another cadet about it, one from his school. She looked likewise uncomfortable and told me some things had happened but nothing she'd ever felt the need to report.

So I didn't either. After all, I was in that room by choice. I felt trusted and important, which were not things I felt in other key areas of my life at the time.

Who was this guy’s wife? Probably, one who had learned to follow orders behind her husband, someone who enjoyed the teaching salary he brought in after his retirement from the military and probably told all her friends about how great with kids he was.

So many of them don’t have positive male role models, I can imagine she told her friends.

The things we need to believe to maintain the illusion we have about someone.

2. The traveler

I wish I could say that instructor was the only inappropriate contact I had at that encampment. But there was another, more predatory presence; unmarried, calculating in a different way.

He was what I later learned child abuse investigators call a “traveler,” someone who’s willing to travel interstate — or even internationally — to abuse a child. Which indeed he was, years before the internet made it easier for predators to meet prey.

I met him while he served as one of the encampment’s two medics. That meant he got to have inordinate amounts of contact with teens, both girls and boys, suffering from heat exhaustion, various athletic injuries, dehydration and conditions requiring medication.

Again, he made me feel special, cared about, listened to. At some point we exchanged phone numbers. I told my parents he was someone I’d met at camp, and I’m sure they thought I meant another cadet. 

I don’t recall having many calls with him, but I do remember one conversation in which he told me, “A woman’s vagina is set like an open wound” which immediately skeeved me out, so that I didn’t respond. It would take me decades to realize that this was a classic “freeze” response to feeling unsafe.

Back then, I just thought it meant my social ineptitude was showing.

Before long, he (said he) was being deployed to Iraq during the Gulf War. I purchased a pin with a yellow ribbon on it, standing shoulder to shoulder with a young woman whose boyfriend had also been deployed, borrowing a sense of solidarity for a world I longed to be part of.

When he came back, he told me he wanted to come up and see me again. We arranged to meet at the McDonald’s across the street from my high school. I was excited and nervous and curious what our afterschool “date” would be like. 

But while I sat on the hard plastic, watching him wolf down a burger and listening to him tell me that eating fast was what you learned to do in a war zone, I realized I didn’t want to be alone with him.

He must’ve read me, because he left to go back home without my having to tell him to go. He didn’t call me again. The following summer, after I’d graduated and served at encampment in my own cadre role as a university-level ROTC cadet, he targeted another girl, a high school senior. 

Of course, I thought his discarding me was my fault. If I’d been more flirtatious or conversational, I believed, things might have been different.

3. The advisor / mentor

As an Explorer, I confess I was interested in meeting cute single cops closer to my age group. Like JROTC, my parents trusted the program to keep me out of trouble. But also like JROTC, at least one questionable influence installed himself in our sphere of trust.

The cop whose attention I ended up attracting wasn’t as old as the JROTC instructor, but he was married. And he, like the medic, seemed to calculate his approach.

Here, the “not that bad” grooming included a ride home after my bicycle and I got caught in a surprise thunderstorm. Later, it also included a just-the-two-of-us paddle around a secluded pond in an inflatable kayak.

This grooming built on other grooming: the times he invited all four of us in the Explorer post over to his house for post-related training; the beach trip where we giggled about his itty bitty bikini and the gay men ogling the package; the order and discipline with which he approached our training, his confidence in what he was doing.

As I’ve written previously:

“The program was poorly organized, and most of the cops were too caught up in their own personal and professional dramas to bother much with ours.

“Their major concern was the extent to which we did or didn’t open the department to liabilities.

"So, when one of the field training officers (FTO) stepped up to become our formal post advisor, it felt like everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

“That was part of the problem. Adults who aren’t thinking about kids’ vulnerabilities — who are happy to let kids be someone else’s problem — can miss the signs that other adults think a little too much about kids.

“Thus, nary an eyelash was batted when this FTO took us on solo as well as group outings.”

In short, we trusted him. No one, not the man himself nor his wife nor any of the department’s supervisory or command staff, had given us any reason not to. A career cop in Texas before his move to New England, he blended in perfectly.

At least, until he overplayed his hand and showed up at my house, looking for me off duty. Then, my parents’ instincts kicked in.

Of course I thought they were being overprotective, isolating me from an important source of support.

I thought they were trying to override my own sense. That my instincts were perfectly fine as they were. After all, my hypersensitivity to being perceived as “in the wrong” had twice already given me back the gut sense I needed to discern when situations felt “off.”

I wasn’t thinking in terms of trusting the wrong men (though I doubtless would’ve blamed myself for doing so). Remember, I thought I needed to be kept in my place. If anything, I couldn’t fathom that men I trusted might not be as protective as my father.

The neverending reckoning

As part of what TIME described as “a massive reckoning on sexual harassment,” Christine Blasey-Ford’s “experience was at once a galvanizing illustration of how much had changed and a poignant reminder of all that had not,” wrote Haley Sweetland Edwards in an editorial.

Jessica Howard, an accuser of former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar, was quoted as saying:

“I’m still struggling with the fact that it almost takes hordes of people to make it out of the ‘he said, she said’ realm for a woman or girl or child to even be taken seriously.”

Witness the backlash to Blasey-Ford’s testimony, which had been deemed credible due in part to her extensive education and experience as a psychology professor. In spite of her socioeconomic status — a privilege many survivors do not have — she experienced much the same kind of disbelief, vile threats, and other abuse from Kavanaugh’s supporters that other, less advantaged survivors also experience.

These outcomes were not on my radar when I was groomed. Mostly, I believed adults would be too busy blaming me for letting it happen. I believed I’d be told I was exaggerating or making things up.

And on some level, I also believed it was just a thing that happened to women and girls. Not even, in the 1990s, worth reporting.

It isn’t that I blame myself for not stopping child predators when I had the chance. The odds of that happening would have been slim to none. The beginning of the precipitous drop in reported U.S. child abuse and neglect cases had yet to occur.

The 2022 report “Updated Trends in Child Maltreatment,” a product of the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center (CCRC), cites “some economic improvement, expansions in medical coverage, increases in the numbers of law enforcement and child protection personnel, more aggressive prosecution and incarceration policies, growing public awareness about the problems, and the dissemination of new treatment options for family and mental health problems, including new psychiatric medication” as some potential reasons for the decline.

And yet, child abuse continues to occur. The 2021 edition of the same report noted that although physical abuse had declined by seven percent and neglect by four percent, sexual abuse rose four percent. (The following year, sexual abuse declined by one and a half percent.)

Even after that dramatic decline in abuse reports, by 2005, the CCRC’s Developmental Victimization Survey found that one in 12 (82 of 1000) youth experienced sexual victimization, including sexual assault (32 per 1000) and attempted or completed rape (22 per 1000).

Meanwhile, nearly two decades later, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports that its Cyber Tip Line reports continue to rise since the pandemic. While this does suggest that more people are paying attention, it also suggests something else is amiss: either the U.S. state systems’ reporting isn’t accurate, or most of the abuse is happening overseas.

These details are important to tease out in a political landscape that continues to devalue women and girls by restricting reproductive and marital freedom, as well as immigration for victims of violence.

At the same time, climate change and war destabilize families further, creating ever more vulnerability and desperation. Finally, the current moral panic over sextortion, transgender “groomers,” and even youth seeking mental health support online suggests young people are as vulnerable as they ever were.

Few of these — or other — victims will ever see actual justice. Our systems are too bogged down to ensure it. Legal and logistical technicalities prevent it. And when parents aren’t the ones perpetrating the abuse, they’re often too personally overwhelmed by life and their own internal wounding to effectively address it.

So if anything, I want to use this series of essays to describe how grooming happens: not just what the incidents themselves look and sound and feel like, but also the social norms that made it possible then, and the ones that persist today.

We need to be able to create and support communities that value humans enough to notice not just when predators target them, but also when conditions exist that turn people into targets.

Knowing what to look for means owning our own complicity

None of the situations I experienced progressed past grooming. Nonetheless, they left lasting marks on my ability to trust; to discern healthy from unhealthy interest, for one. For another, living under the weight of this shame kept me, like Blasey-Ford, from reaching out for guidance — across decades.

That's just one reason why we need to talk about “not that bad” abuse. The other reason is for more people to have a better road map of how it looks, sounds, acts, and feels like before it gets to the point of criminal activity.

That includes owning the ways in which adults can be complicit. Take, for example, the “chosen one” trope in film and TV. In these stories, “special” — orphaned, bullied, and/or abused — children are whisked off by elder mentors who see their potential and want to encourage their growth.

Child predators often first appear as kindly and caring as Dumbledore or Hagrid or for that matter, Obi-Wan Kenobi. It’s when you’re alone that the mask falls away. By the time you realize your “potential” is only to be exploited, it’s too late to get away.

(Is it worth pointing out here that as decades of systematic abuse by Hollywood bigwigs have been revealed, these storylines and dynamics may have been exactly the point?)

Grooming is insidious because it happens in spite of our best and most vigilant efforts, beneath the surface of interactions we generally encourage. We all know that it takes a village to raise a child, but our villages have become atomized, our relationships fractured.

We’re busier than ever, and while we welcome any support we can get, we’re hardly around — much less undistracted enough — to notice wrongness.

Indeed, both the New York Times and the Marshall Project described vulnerable teens disadvantaged by poverty, the loss of family members, and mental illness to name just a few factors.

Again, none of these factored into my grooming. If anything, I was overprotected. That made me a target because I was naive, with a better sense of how things “should” be than how they actually are, and not a lot of social experience to make up for it.

Thus I grew up simultaneously too naive to know what was good for me, and old enough to know better — an impossible contradiction that I of course sought to solve for myself, through my own life experience.

That’s how the grooming I experienced delivered — to use the word I imagined my mother would use — attention I wasn’t getting at home, with a side of adult “relationship” skills I thought I would need.

Part of owning our complicity as adults means laying a better groundwork for both children and adults to report abuse. Speaking up about “not that bad” abuse is less about getting external validation than it is a necessary first step towards beginning to heal. As YouTube-famous therapist Patrick Teahan put it:

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