Purity culture = grooming
The subtle ways early messaging creates harm
The RHR Digest | Publication Date: January 16th, 2026
Key Points:
Purity culture teachings are often presented as a moral framework meant to protect children and teens. However, I would argue it often does the opposite of that.
While purity culture language tends to emphasize safety, virtue, and doing what is âright,â the reality is that children are often introduced to a pathologized, one-dimensional way of engaging with sexuality that ignores their developmental needs (Pashang et al., 2017).
Over time, this unhealthy conditioning functions as a form of grooming, resulting in a negative impact on a childâs nervous system, their bodily autonomy, and their overall sense of safety and awareness of healthy boundaries.
While my own experience is rooted primarily in white U.S. evangelical purity culture, similar dynamics can show up in other religious and cultural contexts as well.
What is grooming?
When I use the term âgrooming,â Iâm not only referring to explicit sexual contact.
For this piece, Iâm using âgroomingâ to describe a pattern of conditioning that teaches children to override their instincts, normalize invasive attention, and accept responsibility for other peopleâs behavior.
At the center of purity culture is a fixation on bodies.
Children are taught, often subtly at first, that bodies are risky and charged with sexual meaning. Clothing choices are monitored. Posture, tone, and behavior are commented on. Certain body parts are framed as dangerous or distracting.
In many faith communities, modesty messaging begins in early childhood, long before a child has any real understanding of sexualityâa dynamic Linda Kay Klein documents across evangelical spaces in her book Pure (2018).
I did not have language for this when I was younger. I just had a subconscious awareness that certain things about the body were âbadâ or âshameful,â especially in regards to interactions between a boy and a girl or a man and a woman.
This early sexualization is rarely named as such. But even when sex itself is not explicitly discussed, it’s obvious the underlying message is that bodies are something to be wary ofâespecially in relation to the opposite sex.
Furthermore, these roles are usually framed within a strict gender binary, leaving no room for queer, trans, or nonbinary kids whose very existence is treated as a problem to be fixed or an identity to be erased.
Grooming & Rigid Gender Roles
Purity culture relies heavily on strict gender roles that assign meaning and responsibility in deeply uneven ways.
Men and boys are often described as having strong, barely containable sexual urges, while women and girls are cast as the gatekeepers of morality, tasked with preventing male desire from spilling over into sin (Burkett, 2025).
This dynamic creates a sexual script where responsibility is split along gendered lines rather than shared through mutual consent and care.
They teach boys to expect their desire to be managed for them and girls to absorb the blame if that desire âgoes too far.â
Within this culture, children learn early on that masculinity is linked to inevitability and entitlement, while femininity is linked to self-erasure and constant vigilance.
Both experiences interfere with the development of a healthy relationship to desire, agency, and accountability, which is exactly how grooming works: it trains children to accept unequal power, blurred boundaries, and misplaced responsibility as normal.
Grooming Eliminates Consent & Agency
Consent depends on a few core capacities: a felt sense of ownership over oneâs body, the ability to notice internal cues, and confidence that those cues matter.
One of the lesser-discussed harms of purity culture is how it systematically undermines each of these capacities in ways that resemble grooming.
When children are taught that authority figures have the right to comment on or regulate their bodies, it becomes harder to trust their own instincts.
And when modesty rules are enforced without explanation or room for dialogue, children learn compliance rather than discernment.
Over time, this can create confusion about whose comfort matters and when.
In many purity-based teachings, abstinence is emphasized without meaningful education about consent, desire, or mutual respect.
Sex is framed as dangerous until marriage, at which point it is expected to become fulfilling and easy.
This sudden shift leaves many people unprepared to navigate sexual relationships with clarity or confidence because the skills required for consent were never fully developed.
The Connection to Sexual Trauma
Many people who leave purity culture report symptoms commonly associated with sexual trauma (Klein, 2018).
These may include body dissociation, anxiety around intimacy, difficulty naming desire, or a persistent sense of shame. Yet because no overt abuse occurred, these experiences are often dismissed or minimized.
When we think about purity culture as a form of grooming, it helps make sense of this disconnect.
It’s important to understand that grooming doesn’t necessarily involve explicitly sexual acts. Instead, it often works through repeated messaging that erodes boundaries and normalizes discomfort.
When a childâs body is treated as a potential threat, their nervous system learns to stay on alert. Research shows that exposure to purity culture beliefs is significantly associated with increased sexual shame, independent of other factors like childhood trauma (Coates et al., 2025).
For some, purity culture provided the framework for hands-on abuse to go unnoticed or unchallenged. For others, the teachings themselves were the primary source of harm.
In both cases, the grooming-like environment of constant scrutiny, shame, and blame lays the foundation for sexual harmâwhether that sexual harm is psychological or physical.
Furthermore, when responsibility for managing othersâ behavior has been placed on the person rather than the aggressor, it can be harder to recognize violations or to seek help when harm occurs.
Many survivors of more explicit acts of sexual violence internalize the belief that they should have known better or done more to prevent what happened, which becomes an additional layer that can complicate recovery later on.
Recovering from grooming
When we think of purity culture as a form of grooming, it follows that healing will likely involve more than simply reclaiming your sexuality. Here are a few things that tend to more holistically support recovery.
Although healing from this kind of conditioning takes time (and possibly professional support), recognizing the grooming-like patterns within purity culture is often a critical first step toward reclaiming your body, your boundaries, and your sense of self.