Let’s Talk Grooming

Conference Theme: Community Empowerment

Session Description

When a story breaks about a trusted member of the community being charged with child sexual abuse, the same scenario plays on repeat: the abuse has been happening for months if not years, people are in disbelief because the alleged offender is ‘such a great person’ and people wonder: ‘why did no one see anything or stop it?’ It’s because of grooming. Adults get groomed just like children do yet we don’t talk about it and interventions focus on the child saying no rather than the adult intervening to stop it from happening in the first place. In this crash course, participants will learn common problematic behaviors that predators employ to get adults to drop their guard in addition to practical strategies to interrupt those behaviors. This session is a condensed version of the longer Keeping Them Safe training (by Arpeggias LLC) currently being piloted through Extension.

Session Objectives

Participants will

1. Learn common problematic grooming behaviors
2. Identify simple strategies to interrupt those behaviors
3. Increase their understanding of their role in prevention

Presenter

Aubree Derksen, University of Minnesota Extension

Aubree Derksen is a bilingual Family Resiliency Extension Educator at the University of Minnesota. She has Masters’ Degrees in Early Childhood Education and Parent and Family Education.

She’s worked in various settings in children’s mental health, child protection, public health, school-based programs, home visiting, and ECFE. Her current work is focused on healthy relationships, postpartum support for Latinx moms, child sexual abuse/exploitation prevention, suicide prevention, and community education around mental health.