Understanding the Effects of Adult Grooming and sexual exploitation in Spiritual Settings
Note: Please be aware that this article contains discussion of sexual grooming, spiritual abuse, and their psychological effects. Readers who have experienced grooming or abuse in religious settings may find some content activating. If you are currently working with a therapist or psychologist, you may find it helpful to read this alongside that support. If you are not, and you find the content distressing, please consider reaching out to a mental health professional. Support is available through: Lifeline: 13 11 14 (24 hours) Beyond Blue: 1300 22 4636 (24 hours) 1800RESPECT: 1800 737 732 (national sexual assault, domestic and family violence counselling service, 24 hours). Full Stop Australia: 1800 385 578 (24 hours, formerly CASA). Beyond Blue online chat: beyondblue.org.au 1800RESPECT online chat: 1800respect.org.au
What is Adult Sexual Grooming & Exploitation
Adult sexual grooming refers to the sustained and deliberate process by which a perpetrator prepares a person for exploitation (Sinnamon, 2017). It is a process in which a person in a position of spiritual authority uses that authority to manipulate, isolate, and exploit another adult. Motivations may include sexual gratification, the pursuit of power and control, or financial gain. In religious settings, this process takes on a particular character. The perpetrator is typically someone who holds spiritual authority, a pastor, priest, chaplain, or other religious leader, and who uses that authority, along with the trust, intimacy, and vulnerability that are a natural part of spiritual community, to gain access to, and ultimately exploit, the person they are targeting. The process is gradual, often extending over months or years, and is specifically designed to make the exploitation difficult to identify, name, or report. It involves the systematic erosion of a person's boundaries, judgment, and support network over time, using the language, structures, and trust of faith communities as tools. Although adult grooming is often not well understood in religious communities, it is not an affair, or a mutual relationship that became complicated. Where there is a significant imbalance of power, genuine consent cannot occur. What takes place is an abuse of power and a breach of fiduciary duty. The responsibility for that breach lies entirely with the person who holds the power, not with the person who trusted them.
Grooming is an insidious and deliberately confusing process. Most victim-survivors of adult grooming and exploitation in spiritual settings report that they sensed, at some point, that something was not right. Some voiced those concerns directly to the perpetrator, and occasionally to others around them. But the nature of grooming means that awareness tends to be gradual, shrouded in confusion, and difficult to articulate (Garland & Argueta, 2010). Many victim-survivors report that what they lacked was not only a clear perception and understanding of what they were experiencing, but also language. They could sense that something was wrong long before they could name it, understand it, or communicate it to others. Flynn (2008) found that 88% of participants in his study did not immediately recognise their experience as abuse. In some cases, victim-survivors do not recognise that a line has been crossed until well after it has happened, a phenomenon that has been described in the research as hindsight bias (Jeglic & Winters, 2023).
It is worth noting that in the research literature, this phenomenon is referred to by several different terms, including clergy sexual misconduct, clergy sexual abuse, adult sexual grooming, spiritual abuse, and clergy sexual misconduct against adults. The variation in terminology reflects both the breadth of the phenomenon and the lack of a single agreed upon definition. For the purposes of this article the terms grooming, exploitation, and spiritual abuse are used interchangeably to refer to the broader pattern of manipulative and harmful behaviour described above.
The Disruption Caused by Grooming
Grooming is not a single event. It is a sustained process of manipulation designed to erode a person's judgment, isolate them from support, and make exploitation feel, at least for a time, like something else entirely: support, care, counselling, spiritual guidance, or a uniquely understanding relationship (Sinnamon, 2017). By the time the abuse begins, the perpetrator has typically spent months, or even years, reshaping what the victim-survivor understands to be normal and trustworthy.
This matters because the damage does not begin when sexual contact begins. Research by Wolf and Pruitt (2019) found that grooming behaviours themselves, independent of the abuse that follows, significantly predict trauma symptom severity in victim-survivor. While this research focuses on victim-survivors of child sexual abuse, the findings are consistent with what is observed clinically in adult victim-survivors. The manipulation, the gradual erosion of boundaries, and the creation of emotional dependency are not simply a lead up to the harm. They are part of the harm itself. Each stage of the grooming process involves a violation: of trust, of boundaries, and of the victim-survivor's ability to accurately perceive and respond to what is happening to them.
In spiritual settings, this process carries a particular weight. Garland and Argueta (2010) documented how religious leaders occupy a position unlike almost any other: they have access to intimate personal information shared in vulnerability, they carry the assumed authority of their role, and they are frequently unsupervised. When a person in that position grooms a congregant, they are not simply exploiting a power differential. They are exploiting the framework through which that person understands meaning, safety, and often their own worth before God.
The Particular Damage of Spiritual Grooming
One of the most consistent findings across the research is that victim-survivors of grooming in religious contexts frequently do not recognize what happened to them as abuse, sometimes for years (Flynn, 2008; Garland & Argueta, 2010). When they do begin to name it, it is often framed by others, or by themselves, as an affair, a counselling boundary violation, or something they brought on themselves. But that framing misses what was actually happening inside the relationship, and why leaving it, or even seeing it clearly, was so difficult.
What the research does not always capture is how good it felt, at least in the early stages. Perpetrators in spiritual settings are often skilled at identifying what a person most needs: to be seen, to be understood, to feel comforted and accepted by an authority figure. For those who have experienced emotional deprivation or feelings of profound shame in their family of origin, the experience of being chosen, given care and attention by someone in a position of spiritual power, can feel genuinely healing at first. And in these initial stages, there is often limited indication of any ulterior motive on the part of the perpetrator. The victim-survivor will feel a strong desire to continue spending time with the spiritual leader because, at least at this stage, it feels soothing and helpful. That experience is real. It is not evidence of naivety or poor judgment. It is the intended outcome of a deliberate process.
Perpetrators in spiritual settings also use the language and concepts of faith as tools. Sinnamon (2017) describes how religious authority figures invoke divine sanction, framing the relationship as spiritually meaningful or even God-ordained. One participant in the Garland and Argueta (2010) study was told that God had brought the two of them together for a reason. Another described feeling, for the first time, that God truly loved her, because of how the perpetrator saw her. The spiritual affirmation and the grooming were indistinguishable from each other. That is precisely the point.
Physical contact follows a similar pattern. Because spiritual leaders often gain access to victim-survivors through a counselling relationship, touch may initially present as entirely appropriate: a hand on the shoulder, a hug at the end of a difficult session. Over time, that contact is gradually intensified, conditioning the victim-survivor to experience increasing physical intimacy as a normal extension of a relationship that already feels emotionally profound.
By the time the relationship becomes overtly harmful, the victim-survivor is typically embedded in something that has met real needs, involved real feeling, and been framed in the language of faith and care. The confusion that follows is not simply about whether what happened was wrong. It is about reconciling the genuine experience of being cared for with the reality of having been manipulated, and making sense of an experience that disrupts not just a relationship but an entire framework for understanding meaning, safety, and one's own worth.
It is important to recognise that grooming in spiritual settings typically leverages a victim-survivor's spiritual longing. That longing itself was not the problem. The desire to be known, to belong, to find meaning in something larger than oneself, are typical aspects of faith communities and ordinary parts of what it means to be human. In a spiritual community, seeking support, asking for prayer and guidance, and looking for belonging and care are common and openly expressed. It is precisely because these needs are so naturally and visibly present in religious settings that perpetrators are drawn to them. They did not create the longing. They found it, and exploited it deliberately.
Judith Herman (1997) described the long-term effects of this kind of trauma precisely: victim-survivors lose trust in themselves, in other people, and in God. Often, their sense of self, formed before the trauma, is fundamentally altered. In spiritual grooming, all three losses are activated at once, and it is particularly traumatic that they are activated in the place the victim-survivor once believed was safe. First, the person who represented God, or access to God, was the source of the harm. Second, the community that was supposed to protect them often did not. Third, their internal compass, the part that senses right from wrong and safety from danger, no longer feels reliable. It has been systematically overridden. What remains, for many victim-survivors, is a profound uncertainty about whether their own perceptions about themselves, others, and God can be trusted at all.
What victim-survivors of Adult grooming and sexual exploitation in Religious Contexts Carry
The research documents a recognisable cluster of effects. Flynn (2008) found that the majority of victim-survivors of clergy sexual misconduct described experiences consistent with PTSD and complex PTSD, including intrusive symptoms, avoidance, and profound disruption to their sense of self and relationships. Garland and Argueta (2010) documented self-blame, shame, loss of community, spiritual crisis, family rupture, depression, and in some cases suicide attempts.
What the research captures less fully is the texture of these experiences for victim-survivors in spiritual settings specifically. Self-blame in this context is often entangled with theological categories. victim-survivors frequently understand their own complicity through frameworks of sin, weakness, or spiritual failure, frameworks the perpetrator may have deliberately cultivated (Shah et al., 2025). The shame is not just social. It carries the weight of what the victim-survivor believes about themselves before God. They may see themselves as defective and unworthy, and this can profoundly affect them as they seek to find a place in the same or another religious context.
The loss of community is also distinctive. In most grooming situations, isolation is a tactic. In religious communities, it is often also a consequence of disclosure. Garland and Argueta (2010) found that when victim-survivors came forward, they frequently lost not just the relationship with the perpetrator but their broader community, friendships, and sense of spiritual home. One participant in Flynn's (2008) study described it directly: "I was the victim of the perpetrator. Then, when I told, the church became the perpetrator."
There is also what might be called the hindsight problem. Jeglic and Winters (2023) found that survivors tend to recognise grooming behaviours most clearly in retrospect, after the abuse is named. This delayed recognition often intensifies self-blame. Survivors ask themselves why they did not see it sooner. Why what seems so obvious now was not clear then. Why they continued in the relationship. Why they at times experienced the attention as meaningful or even pleasurable. However, what they do not recognise is that the fact that they did not see it at the time was a sign of how effectively the grooming worked.
It is also worth noting that some survivors do attempt to set boundaries directly with the perpetrator during the grooming process. They may voice discomfort, ask for changes to the meeting arrangement, or explicitly state that certain behaviours are unwelcome. In many cases these concerns are ignored, minimised, or met with renewed persistence. This is consistent with the broader research literature, which documents perpetrators continuing their behaviour regardless of signals from the survivor (Jeglic & Winters, 2023; Shah et al., 2025). The perpetrator's failure to respond to a clearly stated boundary is not incidental. It is informative. It tells us something about whose needs were being centred in that relationship, and it is an important detail for survivors to hold onto when self-blame takes hold.
Recovery, where it happens, tends to involve slowly disentangling what the survivor actually believes from what they were conditioned to believe through the relationship. This includes not just explicit beliefs but implicit ones, the somatic responses that arise when encountering triggers, returning to spiritual community, or attempting to pray or worship. Survivors often need to untangle confusion about their relationship with God, with others in their community, and with themselves. Hypervigilance frequently develops in one or all of these areas, and an important part of recovery is gradually rebuilding the capacity to trust their own perceptions again, to notice warning signs in relationships and to feel confident that what they are sensing is real.
A Note on Reporting and Recognition
Research consistently finds that only four to eight percent of adults who experience sexual grooming ever come forward to report it (Sinnamon, 2017). The reasons are well documented: shame, fear, isolation, concern for others in the community, and, significantly, uncertainty about whether what happened even counts as abuse (Aletky et al., 2025). In religious settings, the additional fear of not being believed by a community that trusts the perpetrator adds another barrier. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for victim-survivors to report abuse and have it “swept under the rug”, and ignored by those they report to.
If you are reading this and something in it is resonating, your experience recognition matters. The fact that the process was gradual, that you cared about the person, that it was confusing, that you were not certain until much later, none of that changes what happened. Grooming is designed to create exactly that confusion. The confusion is evidence of the process, not evidence of consent.
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References
Aletky, C., Sharma, B., Carbajal, J., & Eubank, T. (2025). Adult sexual grooming: A systematic review. Journal of Social Work in the Global Community, 9, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.5590/JSWGC.2025.9.1068
Flynn, K. A. (2008). The sexual abuse of women by members of the clergy. McFarland & Co.
Garland, D. R., & Argueta, C. (2010). How clergy sexual misconduct happens: A qualitative study of first-hand accounts. Social Work & Christianity, 37(1), 1–27.
Herman, J. (1997). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.
Jeglic, E. L., & Winters, G. (2023). Adult sexual grooming: A case study. Journal of Forensic Psychology Research and Practice, 24(4), 570–594. https://doi.org/10.1080/24732850.2023.2177577
Shah, A., et al. (2025). [Grooming strategies in institutional settings]. Child Abuse & Neglect, 169, 107647.
Sinnamon, G. (2017). The psychology of adult sexual grooming: Sinnamon's seven-stage model of adult sexual grooming. In W. Petherick & G. Sinnamon (Eds.), The psychology of criminal and antisocial behavior: Victim and offender perspectives (pp. 459–488). Elsevier.
Wolf, M. R., & Pruitt, D. K. (2019). Grooming hurts too: The effects of types of perpetrator grooming on trauma symptoms in adult survivors of child sexual abuse. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 28(3), 345–359. https://doi.org/10.1080/10538712.2019.1579292
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