Across diverse societies, coercion often hides behind cultural norms, religious expectations, legal systems, and gendered power structures. This book exposes a disturbing but overlooked form of abuse: ideologically motivated sexual grooming – the manipulation of women and girls from religious minorities for both sexual exploitation and coerced religious conversion.
Through case studies from three parts of the world, the book examines how this phenomenon unfolds across different faiths and contexts. The stories shared reveal a consistent pattern: women from minority backgrounds are sometimes targeted not only because of gender but also because of their religious identity.
This book is not a critique of interfaith relationships or religious belief. It does, nonetheless, interrogate whether there is an ideological driver behind men’s insistence on women converting, even when the legal system does not require it. In all the cases of the women whose stories are told here, the same question arises: If there is mutual love and respect, why is there such emphasis on – and indeed glorification of – the conversion of the women concerned from minority to majority religion?
Ideologically Motivated Sexual Grooming is an urgent call to recognise, understand, and address a subtle but devastating form of gender-based violence – and to create conditions where all women, regardless of faith, can live, love, and believe freely.
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Content warning
This book contains material of a highly sensitive nature, including accounts of sexual, physical, and mental abuse, and other forms of violence, which may be upsetting.
Table of contents
Chapter 1: Introduction, by Mariz Tadros and Grant Sinnamon
Chapter 2: Understanding the Characteristics of Sexual Grooming and Individual Vulnerability to Sexual Predation, by Grant Sinnamon
Chapter 3: Ideological Grooming and Forced Conversion of Hindu Women in Pakistan, by Abira Ashfaq and Seema Rana Maheshwary
Chapter 4: Ideologically Motivated Sexual Grooming in Pakistan: The Phenomenon, Context, and Institutions, by Raja M. Ali Saleem and Mary James Gill
Chapter 5: Of Her Own Accord? Making Sense of Egypt’s Coptic Women Gone Missing, by Mariz Tadros
Chapter 6: Gendered Trauma of Boko Haram, by Fatima Abdullahi Suleiman and Prince Charles Dickson
Chapter 7: Sexual and Ideological Grooming in Nigeria: Untold Stories of Coercion and Complicity, by Oluwafunmilayo Josephine Para-Mallam
Chapter 8: The ‘Protection’ of Women and ‘the Vulnerable’ in Contemporary India, by M. Sudhir Selvaraj and Meghana Choukkar
Chapter 9: Conclusion, by Mariz Tadros and Grant Sinnamon
Authors
