Ever since becoming aware of the terrible news about “grooming gangs” in the UK, I’ve been wanting to write something about why men succeed in manipulating women. Having a moment to read fiction during my break from classes, I have picked up Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Now that I’m past the turning point in the book where Anna and her lover Vronsky have to think about a new life outside the care of Anna’s husband, it’s clear that Anna fell for a person who will struggle to take care of her and any children. How does it work?   

Most women are unprepared concerning how desperate they are for what I’ll call love. Many women receive very little attention. More than 40% of adult women in the US are single. We have statistics on marital status, but profound loneliness can also occur within an official relationship.

Articles about the UK grooming gangs often emphasize the disadvantaged economic backgrounds of the victims. That does matter, and it did make them more vulnerable to manipulation. Vulnerability within most people everywhere is underexplored.

Anna Karenina is married, privileged, admired in society, yet she feels lonely. When Vronsky shows her focused attention she falls hard, even though she knows there could be consequences. Tolstoy shows how powerful validation can be to almost any woman, not just those who might seem the most vulnerable.

Vronsky is charming and attractive on the surface, but ultimately self-centered. He ruins Anna’s life and deprives her children of a mother. Why did he succeed in the first place?

If Anna is beautiful, some would assume that she would not be lonely. There are theories going around about the advantages of being beautiful (lookism). Even Jennifer Garner and Jennifer Aniston get cheated on. Most women are not experiencing something that feels like love to them.

In the case of the grooming gangs, folks with an understanding of emotional deprivation hacked the system for evil. None of this diminishes the responsibility of perpetrators or the reality of coercion. Because the initial phase feels so validating, grooming victims often blame themselves later. We might do better by bringing the system out into the open.

Systems can be used for good by those who understands them. Especially young people with a better understanding of the system can have a better chance of making it work in their favor.

It’s a weird conversation to have with youths (easier to assign Anna Karenina in high schools, but kids are losing the ability to read a novel). Could we educate them with something like: “You have a desire to be loved that may never get fulfilled. That does not make you special. It’s the most unoriginal thing about you. Try to make the system work for you and not get tricked.”

The red flag for Vronsky should have been his lack of family and lack of care for his community (he does not pay his tailor). The classic advice for young women to observe how a prospective boyfriend treats his mother is still very good.

Tolstoy does not give specific advice about what people should do. A superficial reading of the story would be that Anna Karenina is about duty and sin and the wages of sin. But throughout, it is a meditation on happiness. The second word of the novel is “happy,” as in “All happy families…”

In the first line of the novel, Tolstoy situates happiness within a family, not as something experienced by individuals. The characters, Levin and Kitty, who seem happiest at the end, find each other and work toward something greater than themselves.

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