I Asked 34 Teenagers Who Does the Grooming

On Friday I drove an hour to a high school in Orange County to talk about grooming.

I'd been thinking about it for a week and put it together over a few nights. Being in front of a room and saying these things out loud is different from posting them online. Online, you can't see their faces.

I was scared. Not of the material. Of getting it wrong — of standing in front of teenagers and talking about something this serious and not being enough.

I set it up so students could respond anonymously in real time. Thirty-four of them. Four hundred and forty reactions across thirty slides.

The first thing I asked: Who does the grooming?

The biggest words on the screen: family friend. Friend. Teachers. A trusted adult.

They already knew.

I asked what emotion someone being groomed feels.

The biggest word in the room: validated. Then special. Then loved. Then seen.

They could see it clearly — from the outside. Grooming doesn't feel like danger. It feels like being chosen. That's why a child doesn't run. They don't know there's anything to run from. I didn't. I didn't even have the word for it. But give a teenager the framework and they can name it in seconds. That's what education does. It gives you the view you can't have when you're inside it.

I asked how long the effects can last. Four choices. Every single student chose their whole life. Not one person picked anything else.

Then I asked: If you noticed a friend was being groomed, what would you do?

Most answered what you'd hope — tell a trusted adult, support your friend. One student wrote: "Ask them how they are doing, but not directly — this lets them open up."

Two responses stopped me.

"My friend has, and I told her she can stay at my house whenever she wants."

"I don't know what to do. My friend told me and I don't know what to do."

These weren't hypotheticals. These students are in it right now.

In the anonymous Q&A, one wrote: "My friend was groomed and they told me and I don't know what to do. I told them I believed them, but is there nothing more I can do? Their family doesn't believe them and still has the predator in their life, attempting to have them meet up with him."

Another: "What if I report something and I'm wrong?"

These are the questions that stop most adults from acting. These students were asking them in a room where they'd known me for forty minutes.

I asked what surprised them. One student said it was how long it takes someone to come to terms with what happened — that the timeline varies and there's no standard recovery.

But there are things we can control.

"I believe you."

"That doesn't sound right."

"You don't need proof."

Those three sentences. That's what I left them with along with resource cards.

A lot of these students already have awareness. They knew the answers before I showed the data. Some of them are standing next to friends who are living through it right now.

That's what I keep sitting with. Not the word clouds or the quiz results — the fact that these students are carrying real situations and the best I could offer them was a list of hotline numbers.

In my first post I wrote that the comment section on a two-minute reel is not built for this. That 30 people trusted me with things they'd never said out loud — and all of it happened in a scroll.

It's the same problem in that classroom. A student writes "I don't know what to do" and the answer is: call this number. Talk to this counselor. Here's a QR code.

Those resources matter. I gave them everything I had — Crisis Text Line, RAINN, Childhelp, their school's reporting system. I'm sending written responses to every Q&A question through their club advisor.

But what that student needs isn't a phone number. She needs somewhere to talk to someone who's been where she is. Not a crisis line. Not a comments section. Something in between — quieter, without an audience, at her own pace.

That place doesn't really exist yet. I'm trying to build it. It's early. But it exists because of rooms like this one.

To the student who wrote "I don't know what to do" — you already did the hardest part. You believed her.

If you want this in your school, DM me.

If you or someone you know needs support:
RAINN: 1-800-656-4673 | rainn.org
Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741
Childhelp: 1-800-422-4453

If this matters to you, subscribe. I write about grooming — what it looks like, what it does, and what we can do about it.