Groomed: how a film-maker learned to confront a childhood of abuse

In the documentary Groomed, Gwen van de Pas reconfigures the psychological fragments of grooming through her own story of childhood sexual abuse

It wasn't until she was knee-deep in research, making a documentary on sexual assault that would later become the film Groomed, that the film-maker Gwen van de Pas learned the word for what happened to her.

Van de Pas had scaled back her consulting job in San Francisco in January 2016 to make a film about sexual assault, informed by but not centered on her experience of sexual abuse in the late 90s, as a 12-13-year-old, by an adult coach, then in his mid-20s, on her swim team. For years, van de Pas struggled to find certainty in her story: his attention had made her feel special then; now it haunted her. The nightmares left her in tears, but if she hadn't been afraid at the time, was it not scary? If he wasn't a bad guy in her memories, could his inappropriate, confusing sexualization of their relationship be a bad thing?