All offenders need secrecy to sexually assault children and they enforce tactics to maintain and ensure that silence. This grooming process, (Christiansen & Blake, 1990), involves carefully planned strategies implemented by the offender to entrap the child in the abuse. It is a refined process of strategic planning by an offender to observe and assess what would make a child keep the secret of sexual abuse. These tactics may involve confusion, threats, games, favouritism, manipulation and bribery. This deliberate process emerges from the offender identifying signs of vulnerability in a child and using his power of adult status and his relationship with the child to entrap and capture them, (Reid, 1997).

Recent studies about why and how children often delay disclosing about the abuse indicate that : older children fear the negative consequences of disclosing more than younger children and children who are sexually assaulted by a family member are likely to delay telling. Goodman et al., (2003), found that factors contributing to children delaying disclosure included heightened fears about the consequences of disclosure and heightened feelings of responsibility for the abuse. Goodman’s work regarding children’s disclosures of sexual assault found that factors concerning the age of the child, the offender’s relationship to the child and the child’s fear of negative consequences and perceived responsibility should they disclose, contributed to predicting the time children took to disclose the abuse. The study found that older children took longer to disclose and it was more difficult for them to tell than younger children and this was attributed to grooming and perpetrator tactics around responsibility and repercussions for telling by their offenders.

Research has shown that very young children rarely lie about sexual abuse. Statistics show that