The first page of this infographic illustrates the forces that lead to (mainly) girls and young women being drawn into prostitution and other forms of sexual exploitation (sexploitation). The second page summarises how the grooming process works.
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Cultural grooming
In the last couple of decades there have been some profound social, cultural, and technological developments that have led to the sex industry being increasingly normalised and legitimised and the culture becoming ever more hyper-sexualised and pornified. As a result, the values of the sex industry are now mainstream, with children inevitably being exposed to them. This grooms the entire cohort of girls to believe that women’s worth revolves around their appearance, looking and acting sexy, and having the right clothing and accessories, and that their main role in life is to please men and service their needs rather than their own.
Social media has amplified these cultural messages and driven conformity with them through algorithms and the giving and withholding of ‘likes’ and shares. At the same time, social media provides pimps and predators with easy access to girls and young women who they can attempt to lure into the industry and profit from.
High speed internet and smartphones have made free violent, misogynist and racist porn easily available and children are inevitably encountering this, frequently before puberty. Exposing children to such content is itself a form of child abuse and is leading to an alarming rise in boys’ and young men’s sexual misconduct in schools and universities.
Lobbyists have succeeded in getting the ‘sex work’ and ‘sex worker’ terminology accepted by all the main media conglomerations and in promoting the false but alluring ideas that prostitution is empowering and easy money. These ideas dominate in universities and even some school sex education classes.
This is mass grooming of girls and young women for entry into the sex industry and boys and young men as consumers and pimps. After all, if ‘sex work’ is real work, paying for sex is no different from paying for a haircut – and the only difference between being a pimp and running a barbershop is that being a pimp is a whole lot less hassle.
Vulnerabilities and triggers
However, it remains the case that it is the women with the fewest options and the least family and social support who are most likely to become trapped in sexploitation. It is a real worry therefore that austerity policies have led to an alarming rise in the numbers of people in the UK living in poverty, particularly women and children, and an associated rise in homelessness and precarious housing, along with educational underachievement, mental ill health and substance abuse.
Extreme poverty and homelessness or the risk of homelessness are often the immediate triggers for women to enter prostitution of their own volition – although this can hardly be considered a free choice when their circumstances are so constrained. Similarly, women sometimes enter prostitution to fund a drug habit – their own or their partner’s. However, it is more common for women to begin to misuse substances once they are involved in prostitution in an attempt to blot out its intolerable nature.
Old and new forms of sexploitation
Over the past decades, there has been an explosion in online platforms that provide new forms of sexploitation and new ways of arranging in-person prostitution. These have lowered the bar to entry into both sexploitation and pimping. For example, webcamming platforms have normalised men ordering up bespoke sexual performances online. OnlyFans has made getting started as easy as joining Instagram. ‘Sugar dating’ has similarly lowered the bar to entering prostitution – and the prostitution advertising websites facilitate starting a career in pimping.
All of this has made life for the pimps and predators much easier. It has increased the pool of marginalised girls and women for them to target, provided new mechanisms for them to contact and groom potential victims, and subsequently sell them, and because the culture has already accomplished a large part of the grooming process, reduced the amount of work the pimps have to do.
How grooming works
In this context, grooming is the process by which someone with more power (usually a man or older boy) manipulates a girl or young or marginalised woman to participate in prostitution – so that from the outside it might then seem that the girl or woman is participating of her own volition. This can lead to the misconception that she is freely ‘consenting’ rather than acquiescing because she cannot see an alternative. Often the perpetrator poses as a boyfriend, which has led to this form of grooming becoming known as ‘loverboy’ pimping.
Obviously, the details vary but the loverboy process typically follows a number of stages.
Initial contact: This can take place in person or online. Initial contact may be the perpetrator himself or another person, possibly another child, such as a classmate, who later introduces the targeted girl to the perpetrator, who may be a brother or cousin.
Love bombing: The perpetrator showers the targeted girl with gifts and attention so that she becomes infatuated with him and regards him as her boyfriend. The more marginalised the girl, the more likely she is to respond to this. Children who have been sexually abused or who grew up in local authority care are particularly vulnerable to this type of manipulation.
Isolating her: He isolates her. For example, he may try to convince her that her family and friends don’t care about her and he may encourage her to tell her parents she is staying over with a friend or to truant from school. He may give her cigarettes, alcohol or drugs with the aim of encouraging addictions. He may use pornography to soften her up to exploitative sex.
Sexualising the relationship: He initiates sexual contact and if she resists, he tells her that no one cares for her as much as he does, and reminds her that she owes him for all the gifts he has given her.
Control and exploitation: He starts demanding that she performs sexual acts for others. He tells her that other girls do this for their boyfriends. If she resists, he threatens her or her family members – perhaps using physical violence, perhaps by threatening to publicise photos taken of her during sexual acts or by threatening to tell her school or parents she has truanted, etc. She may or may not be aware that money changes hands for the sexual acts. She is unlikely to see much, if any, of it.
By the end of this, she is likely to be caught in a cycle of abuse, where the perpetrator alternates between abusive behaviour and remorse, typical of domestic abuse and relationships based on coercive control. This makes it extremely difficult for girls and women to escape.
There are of course many other variations of the grooming process. Drug dealers might use a similar process with the aim of getting a girl or young woman addicted to drugs rather than entering a sexual relationship with her. Once she is addicted, he coerces her into prostitution to pay for the drugs, and, again, she ends up trapped.
Husbands and partners in existing relationships sometimes coerce women into prostitution and other forms of sexual exploitation. While the initial stages of the process may differ from the typical loverboy method, the end result can be much the same.
Unfortunately, the police and other authorities often do not recognise that it is commonplace for husbands and partners to pimp women they are in relationships with, and that this makes it even harder for the woman to leave both the relationship and the prostitution. It is of grave concern that the police are so often blind to this dynamic and seldom enforce the pimping legislation.
The other factors that lead to women’s entry into prostitution also help to trap her there – particularly poverty, homelessness, social isolation and lack of family support, lack of education and skills, lack of confidence, and substance misuse – all exacerbated by the damage that prostitution causes to her physical and mental health.
Download the infographics as a PDF