Author Sonia Orchard dedicates her book GROOMED: A memoir about abuse, the search for justice and how we fail to keep our children safe (Affirm Press 2025) to: ‘… my Mum and my girls, and for carers, children and survivors everywhere’. This arresting title and cover – a bright red pair of heart-shaped sunglasses – tells us everything we can expect on the pages between.
GROOMED is a well-researched, intensely personal account of Orchard’s historical experience of abuse and her more recent foray into the justice system, searching for answers. The third part of the tagline sentence: ‘…how we fail to keep our children safe’ is menacing, prescient and telling.
This is a hard book to read, as are all memoirs of abuse, because it is one person’s intimate account of terrible things, illegal abuse, unacceptable behaviour, unhelpful responses, the frustrations of the justice system, and the long nightmare of what survivor-victims must undergo throughout the interminable and seemingly unfair processes of this system.
But it is also an important read. It highlights the failures in our systems (family, education, police, justice, society in general) and points out the flaws that prohibit a timely and fair way to address abuse without re-traumatising the survivors.
Orchard is unflinching and honest. Not once does she shy away from depicting her own behaviour and reflecting on how that affected the situation (if at all). Indeed, she opens the book (and her own investigation into this historical event) with the question – Is this even abuse? She is certain what occurred but uncertain whether that constitutes abuse in the eyes of the law. So right from the beginning, as the reader embarks on this journey with the author, we see things from her eyes and walk in her shoes. As she records her distress, anger and sadness, we are with her. As she expresses frustration, rage and disbelief, we are with her. She provides a remarkably balanced account of two particularly fraught times in her life – when she was 15 and the abuse occurred, and now, in her mid-40’s, as she attempts to find redress. Both are harrowing, both are explored with compassion, a curious and questioning mind and a belief that the truth will prevail.
Orchard was a grown woman with teenage children when she told a therapist about the first boyfriend she’d had when she was 15 years of age. And he was 25 years old. As she recounted what she had always labelled a ‘normal’ experience, her body betrayed this belief with a trauma response – she broke down in tears and began to shiver and shake uncontrollably. Her therapist gently suggested to her that what she experienced was not, in fact, an ordinary adolescent first experience of desire and sex, but abuse. She had been groomed. And part of that grooming was (as is typical) an intention by the abuser to reframe everything as ‘normal’, and to demean or ridicule her in an attempt to retain the power imbalance that allowed the abuse to continue.
Without really understanding whether or not she was reporting a historical crime, and with no knowledge or understanding of how, once the wheels were in motion, this search for justice might upend her life, she tentatively called the police to explore her options. Her accusations were simultaneously believed and reported as serious, while also minimised and justified while her own teenage actions were scrutinised and judged. Orchard is an educated woman with a loving family, a strong support system and a nuanced and intellectual grasp of navigating a difficult problem. So she asked herself, how could she have allowed this to happen? And how could she fix it?
GROOMED swings neatly between memoir and research. Her memories of what occurred when she was 15 are supported by a treasure trove of teenage diaries that she had kept in a locked box; a meticulous day-by-day account of exactly what happened when, how and with whom. Her more recent research – much of the central section of the book – examines teenage sex, assault and abuse; the mechanics of grooming; guilt, shame and blame; the March4Justice; the impact of reporting; disassociation; and the gruelling, seemingly impossibly difficult path to justice.
As readers, we feel for 15-year-old Sonia as she navigates adolescent angst complicated by the abusive grooming behaviour of an adult. We also feel for Sonia Orchard the author, now, as she is equally naïve, mystified and disappointed by the legal and justice system that is supposed to help her.
Orchard is a skilled writer and in her hands this unfortunately all too common story of abuse is ordered and presented in a way accessible, readable and comprehensible. Urgent reading for anyone in the legal or child protection system, for those in any positions of power over children, for parents. and for older adolescents or young adults who are survivors. Necessary, confronting, eye-opening and considered. This book is also angry, an anger that is entirely justified. `