If there is one term I’d love to see retired from its current usage, it’s “grooming.”
It used to be the thing you were taught when you were young, that you had to shower regularly, brush your teeth and comb your hair … and that when you became a parent you passed on to your own teenagers.
As that term morphed out of fashion related to personal hygiene, it became all about making sure your pampered pet was regularly washed, trimmed and blow-dried. If a sign on a business references “grooming,” you can bet it’s about your dog, not you.
Grooming has now taken on an insidious meaning and has been weaponized to discredit the public education system, educators and to attack the LGBTQ+ community. It is bad enough when used in generalities, but when thrown around in local context, it becomes personal and only serves to divide.
This iteration of “grooming” refers to a very real practice in which predators get access to children to coerce them into sexual victimization. This is how familiar adults — not strangers — find ways to interact with children and build trust with them, such as playing games or giving gifts, in order to secretly exploit them sexually.
The rise of social media opened entirely new anonymous doorways allowing adults online to pretend to be someone else — a potential boyfriend or girlfriend or young confidante — to victimize them.
Whether in person or online, this type of grooming is a horrible and frightening but subtle attack that parents and other family members have reason to fear and about which they must be vigilant.
There should be universal revulsion for this actual, criminal behavior, but in a sick turn of events, the term has been diluted and transformed into a mode of attack in the culture wars.
Is someone you don’t agree with a member of the LGBTQ+ community? Accuse them of being a groomer.
Hear about a drag performance? Claim that it’s meant to groom children.
Have an event in support of LGBTQ+ rights? Get accused of supporting groomers.
Don’t like the sexual education policies put forth by an education department or implemented in a school district? Allege that its underlying intent is to groom children.
This strategy is being used across the nation.
It found its way into local districts over the past year via the controversy over the New Jersey Education Department’s Health and Physical Education standards put forward for districts to adopt across the state.
The overwhelming bulk of the new standards were not much different than the past standards and school districts had the ability to tailor them to their communities. The controversial (to some) portions are about sex education, gender and gender identity.
Many if not most parents struggle with how to talk to their children about these things. Nearly a half-century later, I vividly remember when my other father had “the talk” with me — not the most comfortable experience. I preferred sex education learned impersonally in health class.
The Ocean City School District, for one, has taken pains to make sure parents can opt out of anything they believe belongs in their own purview to teach their own children.
When they approved the standards back in August, the Board of Education and administration made clear that if students wanted to delve deeply into topics in the sex education and gender realm, that teachers would tell them to go home and ask their parents.
Not the most enlightened approach for educators, but one designed to tamp down the controversy and, at least in part, show the school was not trying to usurp the role of parents.
What inflamed everything locally and continues to roil the community — especially in social media forums — was turning a debate over standards into accusations of grooming and sexual exploitation, brought up most loudly during a political rally by an invited speaker who made clear his homophobia via actual and metaphorical loudspeaker.
Discussing sex education, as uncomfortable as it is between parents and their children, is valid, just as debating all other aspects of children’s education. Creating a link between education and sexual exploitation of children is not.
What fails to serve the public good is to frame a discussion here about what should or shouldn’t be taught, or when, by alleging it is all about grooming or indoctrination (which deserves its own “Schoolhouse Rock!” column).
Doing so takes something abstract and distant (government, the Education Department) and makes it personal, neighbor against neighbor. Do people really believe our teachers or school board members here are trying to sexually exploit our children? Or that our LGBTQ+ neighbors or children in the school system pose a danger because they don’t “conform” to a perceived community standard?
Those who continue to espouse those beliefs may end up being guilty of perpetrating a different type of grooming — grooming children toward hatred and demonization of others.
In our local communities, where there is so much overwhelming positive energy aimed at supporting our young people, that is not the way to do things.
David Nahan is editor and publisher of the Ocean City Sentinel, Cape May Star and Wave, Upper Township Sentinel and The Sentinel of Somers Point, Linwood and Northfield.