CLAIM: Disney’s decision to incorporate LGBTQ themes and characters into its content shows that the company is “grooming” children to be gay.
THE FACTS: The term “grooming” is being used on social media to undermine Disney’s diversity initiatives, a tactic that also has been used at school board meetings across the country by parents who oppose discussions of sexual orientation in schools.
But that’s a departure from the commonly understood meaning of grooming, according to experts, who say the term refers to specific tactics that sexual abusers use to initiate contact with their victims.
“Disney’s Obsession With Grooming Children Is Nothing New, But Their Openness About It Is,” read the headline of an article that discussed Disney’s efforts to incorporate LGBTQ characters into its programs.
“Groomer-Gate: 15 Times Disney Promoted LGBTQAI2S+ in Children’s Programing,” read the headline of a conservative blog post that was later deleted.
These claims operate on a false premise that sexual orientation and gender identity are imposed upon kids, Catherine Oakley, state legislative director and senior counsel at the LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign previously told the AP. “It comes from just a really fundamentally wrong position about where a person’s LGBTQ identity comes from.”
Incorporating LGBTQ characters into Disney programming also isn’t done to coerce a child into illegal activity. That would be a necessary feature to define someone’s behavior as grooming, according to William O’Donohue, a psychologist who studies child sex abuse at the University of Reno.
Grooming refers to the “deceptive process” by which a would-be sexual-abuser chooses a vulnerable victim, gains access to them and isolates them, gains their trust and often their family’s trust and community’s trust, and then desensitizes them to sexual content and physical contact before the abuse happens, according to Elizabeth Jeglic, a psychologist who studies sexual violence prevention at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
“The way grooming has been used in the media as of late does not reflect sexual grooming as it has been described as in the research literature,” Jeglic told the AP in an email. “Dilution of the term can be very dangerous because it is only now that we are starting to understand how predators use sexual grooming strategies to abuse children.”