About
For years, Anna Sonoda sat across from convicted sexual offenders asking one question: How did you get trusted?
The answers reshaped her career.
While much of the public conversation about child sexual abuse centers on what happens after abuse is discovered, Sonoda became interested in what happened before anyone knew a child was being harmed. Working with offenders, she saw that abuse was rarely described as a single decision. It unfolded through a series of ordinary-looking interactions that built trust, created access, and gradually changed how adults and children interpreted behavior.
She left those conversations convinced that prevention had been aimed at the wrong end of the timeline.
Today, Anna Sonoda, LCSW, helps parents, educators, clinicians, youth-serving organizations, and faith communities recognize the patterns that often precede child sexual abuse. Her work focuses on grooming as a sequence of observable behaviors that families can learn to recognize together.
A licensed clinical social worker, Sonoda has worked in offender treatment, community mental health, trauma recovery, domestic violence intervention, and anger management. That range of experience informs a practical approach to prevention that replaces vague advice with clear behavioral patterns. Rather than asking families to rely on instinct alone, she teaches them how to recognize when trust, influence, and access are being intentionally cultivated.
She is the author of Duck Duck Groom: Understanding How a Child Becomes a Target, Duck Duck Groom: A Guided Journal for adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, and the award-winning children's book Wait... That's Weird!, a parent-child guide that helps families build a shared language for recognizing grooming in everyday life. She is also the creator of the G.A.S. Model (Grooming. Access. Space.) and the 4F Formula, frameworks used in her trainings to help communities understand how grooming develops over time.
Sonoda speaks nationally to schools, healthcare systems, conferences, faith communities, and professional organizations. Her presentations combine clinical insight with practical application, giving audiences a framework they can use long after the event ends. She is also the host of the Known & Trusted podcast, where she explores the psychology of grooming, prevention, and child safety through conversations grounded in research, real cases, and everyday family life.
A graduate of Emory University and the University of Georgia, Sonoda lives in Atlanta with her family.
Her work is built on a simple idea: if grooming follows patterns, those patterns can be recognized. And when adults learn to recognize them earlier, children are safer.