Power, Control, and the Misunderstanding of Grooming: What the Diddy Documentary Reveals About Sexual Abuse Dynamics

By Amber Schroeder, ATSA Executive Director 

While watching the Netflix documentary Sean Combs: The Reckoning with my partner over the weekend, we kept pausing the film. Each time another person described witnessing Diddy causing or directing others to cause harm while insisting that they themselves were exempt from similar harm, my partner would turn to me, incredulous. “What’s wrong with people?” he asked at one point, genuinely baffled.

It sparked a long conversation between us about why this reaction is so common: how individuals can watch others be mistreated, recognize the danger on some level, and still think, “that won’t happen to me.” As those of us in the field of sexual abuse prevention know, this response is not a personal failing —it is the predictable outcome of grooming, power, and environmental conditioning.

Most Sexual Abuse Is Not Paraphilia-Driven: What Research Actually Shows

Public narratives often conflate sexually abusive behavior with paraphilic disorders such as sexual sadism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, or pedophilia. While these disorders are relevant for a subset of individuals, research consistently shows that most sexual abuse is not motivated by atypical sexual interests. Decades of empirical findings identify more common drivers, including:

• entitlement and beliefs supporting the misuse of power
• antisocial traits and behavioral dysregulation
• cognitive distortions related to control and objectification
• opportunism enhanced by permissive or unaccountable environments

Meta-analytic research (Hanson & Morton-Bourgon, 2005; Kingston et al., 2008; Mann, Hanson & Thornton, 2010) confirms that paraphilic interests account for only part of sexual offending. In many cases, sexual behavior is instrumental—deployed to dominate or punish—rather than arising from a paraphilic preference. Distinguishing these pathways is essential for accurate risk assessment and treatment.

Grooming Creates the Illusion of Safety—Until the Moment It Doesn’t

One of the most striking themes in the documentary is the number of people who said, in one form or another: “I saw how he treated others, but I didn’t think it would happen to me.” This is precisely how grooming works.
Research describes grooming as a progressive, context-shaping process involving:

• selective attention, favors, and elevation of status
• gradual normalization of boundary violations
• intermittent reinforcement that creates psychological dependency
• manipulation of organizational or social environments

(Craven, Brown & Gilchrist, 2006).
In high-power contexts, grooming becomes environmental. Systems, not just individuals, are conditioned to reinterpret harm, rationalize behavior, or defer to authority. This systemic distortion is why people can observe clear warning signs in others yet perceive themselves as safe: the entire environment is engineered to obscure risk.

Why This Distinction Matters for Intervention, Treatment, and Prevention

Misunderstanding power-driven sexual abuse as paraphilia-driven leads to interventions that miss the mechanisms of harm. Research has long shown that sexual abuse is most often associated with entitlement, cognitive distortions, antisociality, emotional dysregulation, and environments that reward control. When viewed through this lens, the documentary becomes less a story of disbelief and more a demonstration of preventable dynamics that aligned exactly with what the research predicts.
To translate this evidence into practice, our field must confront the systemic beliefs that obscure risk and ensure prevention frameworks reflect the realities of how sexual harm develops. This includes:

• embedding research-based distinctions between paraphilic and non-paraphilic pathways into case formulation
• directly addressing entitlement, coercive control, and distorted beliefs within treatment
• designing organizational safeguards grounded in research on grooming and environmental risk factors
• expanding early-intervention strategies that identify coercive or boundary-violating behavior before it escalates

The documentary reinforces a central finding of the field: sexual abuse becomes predictable when systems rely on assumptions rather than evidence. As researchers, clinicians, and prevention professionals, our responsibility is to challenge those assumptions, elevate what the science tells us, and ensure interventions and prevention efforts disrupt these dynamics long before anyone is left saying, “I didn’t think it would happen to me.”