She was 15. He was 26. Sonia Orchard’s Groomed Proves her Abuser was Wrong: Age isn’t ‘Just a Number’
Blog
Cantrell, Kate. 2025. "She was 15. He was 26. Sonia Orchard’s Groomed Proves her Abuser was Wrong: Age isn’t ‘Just a Number’." The Conversation.
| Article Title | She was 15. He was 26. Sonia Orchard’s Groomed Proves her Abuser was Wrong: Age isn’t ‘Just a Number’ |
|---|---|
| Article Category | Blog |
| Authors | Cantrell, Kate |
| Publication Title | The Conversation |
| Year | 2025 |
| Place of Publication | Australia |
| Web Address (URL) | https://theconversation.com/she-was-15-he-was-26-sonia-orchards-groomed-proves-her-abuser-was-wrong-age-isnt-just-a-number-247131 |
| Abstract | Sonia Orchard’s new book, Groomed, is her account of being groomed and sexually abused, at age 15, by a man almost double her age – her “first boyfriend”. S – as Orchard refers to him – was 26 when he met the teenage Orchard at a Melbourne nightclub and, one week later, started having sex with her. The relationship, which began at the end of 1985, lasted almost a year. It took the author three decades to recognise what had happened to her. “I believed that I had been in a romantic relationship,” Orchard writes. “I managed to skip over what I believed to be an inconsequential detail – that I was a child.” |
| Keywords | Childhood Sexual Abuse; Groomed; Grooming; Rape Culture; Sonia Orchard; Sexual Abuse |
| Contains Sensitive Content | Does not contain sensitive content |
| ANZSRC Field of Research 2020 | 360201. Creative writing (incl. scriptwriting) |
| 470208. Culture, representation and identity | |
| 470502. Australian literature (excl. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literature) | |
| Byline Affiliations | School of Creative Arts |
| Centre for Health Research | |
| Centre for Heritage and Culture | |
| Institute for Resilient Regions | |
| University of Southern Queensland |
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