Child Sexual Abuse: 6 Stages of Grooming, Dr. Michael Welner: Child Sexual Abuse: ¹

Grooming is the process by which an offender draws a victim into a sexual relationship and maintains that relationship in secrecy. The shrouding of the relationship is an essential feature of grooming. Forensic psychiatrist Dr. Michael Welner explains the six stages that can lead up to sexual molestation. The grooming sex offender works to separate the victim from peers, typically by engendering in the child a sense that they are special to the child and giving a kind of love to the child that the child needs.

Different law enforcement officers and academics have proposed models of the “stages” of grooming. Since there are a variety of these models, it’s best to think of the grooming by sex offenders as a gradual, calculated process that ensnares children into a world in which they are ultimately a willing part of the sex abuse.

Emily Dow Partridge Young, ‘Incidents in the Life of a Mormon Girl’: ²

It was about this time [Feb. 1843] that the principles of Celestial marriage were being taught to a few. I and my sister Eliza received it and were married to br. Joseph about the same time, but neither of us knew about the other at the time, everything was so secret. This was March of 1843. Joseph had tried to make these things known to me, several months before – I think, in the spring or summer of 1842, but I had shut him up so quick that he said no more to me until the 28th of Feb. 1843, (my nineteenth birthday) and I was married the 4th of March following.

Emily D. P. Young, Deposition, Temple Lot Transcript, Respondent’s Testimony, part 3:

He [Joseph Smith] taught it to me with his own lips. … I was living at his house at the time, and had been living there for quite a while after my father’s death, for he died there in Nauvoo. … He came into the room where I was one day, when I was in the room alone, and asked me if I could keep a secret. I was about eighteen years of age then I think, — at any rate, I was quite young. He asked me if I could keep a secret, and I told him I thought I could, and then he told me that he would sometime, if he had an opportunity, — he would tell me something that would be for my benefit, if I would not betray him, and I told him I wouldn’t.

Well it run along for a good while, — I don’t know just how long, and there was no opportunity of saying anything to me more than he had, and one day he sat in the room alone, and I passed through it and he called to me or spoke to me, and called me to him, and then he said that he had intended to tell me something, but he had no opportunity to do so, and so he would write me a letter, if I would agree to burn it as soon as I read it, and with that I looked frightened, for I thought there was something about it that was not just right, and so I told him that I would rather that he would not write to me, — that he would not write me any letter, and then he asked me if I wanted him to [not] say any more, and I said yes, that I did not want to hear anything more about it at all, for I had got a little frightened about it.

Further Study

EMILY AND ELIZA PARTRIDGE – http://www.wivesofjosephsmith.org/2021-EmilyandElizaPartridge.htm