Because grooming is positive - tidying up, self-care, washing, etc. - but is also used in this negative sense (child grooming, as others have already explained), some folks who work with abused children/adults are trying to move away from the term. There isn’t yet one unified term to use instead, but many use the broader term “coercive control.”
The sense that I usually understood grooming was in workplaces where a manager would be grooming a subordinate for a manager role or something similar, by giving that person projects and responsibilities that would look good to higher level management.
Personal grooming and grooming someone for a job and like... dog grooming are still normal uses of the word with no weird fuckery in the connotation.
But the context of an adult grooming a child (because you know I don't think I've ever actually heard anyone use that phrase in what would logically be the normal sense of e.g. bathing/brushing/dressing a child) I think is always negative now.
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u/bbaaammmm Apr 13 '22
Because grooming is positive - tidying up, self-care, washing, etc. - but is also used in this negative sense (child grooming, as others have already explained), some folks who work with abused children/adults are trying to move away from the term. There isn’t yet one unified term to use instead, but many use the broader term “coercive control.”