Over the last few years, “groomer” has become one of the most casually deployed slurs in American politics. It gets aimed at teachers, at parents of transgender kids, at drag performers, and reliably, at gay people simply existing near children. The accusation carries a specific, ugly implication: that being gay makes someone more likely to sexually abuse a child.

We’ve been doing prevention and trauma-treatment work at Stop Abuse Campaign for years, and we’ve read the research this claim is supposedly based on. It doesn’t hold up. Not a little bit — not at all. Here’s what actually happens when you look at who abuses children, using the data child-protection researchers have been collecting for decades.

The people who abuse children are, overwhelmingly, straight men known to the family

Dr. Gene Abel’s research on offense patterns — some of the most widely cited work in this field — found that roughly 80% of men who sexually abused boys were heterosexual or bisexual in their adult relationships, and most were married fathers. Only about one in five identified as exclusively homosexual.

A 1994 chart review at Denver Children’s Hospital looked at 352 cases of confirmed child sexual abuse. Offenders who were gay or lesbian showed up in fewer than 1% of identified cases — two out of 269 identified abusers.

And the Child Molestation Research & Prevention Institute’s broader finding tracks with both: about 90% of people who abuse children target kids already inside their family and social network — a relative, a family friend, a coach, a neighbor. Most are men married to women. Sexual orientation isn’t the variable that predicts risk. Access and trust are.

Attraction to children isn’t the same thing as being gay

This is the part the “groomer” talking point depends on people not understanding: pedophilia (attraction to prepubescent children) is its own distinct pattern, separate from adult sexual orientation. A man who is attracted to boys is not “gay” in any meaningful sense — he’s not attracted to adult men. Researcher A. Nicholas Groth, whose work on offender typology is still foundational in this field, described most offenders as “regressed” rather than fixated: adults who, under stress or dysfunction, target children they see almost as extensions of themselves, regardless of the child’s sex.

Gregory Herek, a research psychologist who spent years reviewing the literature on this exact question, put it plainly: he found no evidence that gay men molest children at higher rates than heterosexual men do. The American Psychological Association has said the same — children are not more likely to be molested by gay adults, whether parents or acquaintances.

Where the “gay predator” myth actually comes from

Some of the studies still circulated to support this claim don’t hold up to scrutiny. One frequently cited 2001 survey reporting elevated “homosexual molestation” numbers has since been flagged by its own publisher with a formal Editorial Expression of Concern over its methodology. Older, more explicitly activist research — like Paul Cameron’s work in the 1980s, built on a non-representative sample pulled from gay newspaper obituaries — was discredited decades ago and has been disowned by the professional associations Cameron once belonged to. It still gets recirculated anyway, because it tells people what they already want to believe.

Meanwhile, sexual-minority adults report meaningfully higher rates of having been sexually abused as children themselves — not because they abused anyone, but because kids who are perceived as different are often more vulnerable to being targeted, and less likely to be believed if they disclose. The myth doesn’t just malign an entire community; it obscures the fact that LGBTQ+ kids are frequently on the receiving end of the very harm the myth pretends to prevent.

What actually protects children

None of this is abstract for us. Prevention work only works when it’s aimed at what actually causes harm. That means:

• Age-appropriate, ongoing conversations about bodies, boundaries, and consent — not a single “stranger danger” talk.
• Reducing one-on-one, unsupervised access between kids and any adult, regardless of who that adult is or who they love.
• Teaching kids that secrecy from a trusted adult is itself a warning sign, and that they’ll be believed if they say something.
• Screening and accountability practices for any organization working with children — schools, faith communities, sports leagues, camps — built around behavior and access, not identity.

Blaming an entire community for a threat the data says they don’t disproportionately pose doesn’t protect a single child. It just gives abusers — the actual ones, in the actual demographics the research describes — one more reason to go unexamined, because everyone’s looking in the wrong direction.