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Nobody worries about a purported rape affect when describing gang members "grooming" kids to act as runners for their gang, or when people talk about cult members "grooming" prospective converts into going along with questionable practices by the cult leadership, or when people talk about an emotionally abuser grooming their victims into rationalizing their reactions to abuse.
Nobody worries in these contexts, because "groom" as a pejorative has a long and entirely uncontroversial use to refer to a specific sort of abuse of trust, whereby a person in a dominant position induces a vulnerable individual into granting them a special and unaccountable position of trust, increasing the victim's vulnerability and isolating them from others who might object or intervene. One of the more pernicious examples of this is grooming for sexual abuse, but the pretense that grooming kids for rape is the only possible meaning of the phrase is absurd to anyone who's spent more than five minutes on google.
This lie persists because it is rhetorically useful to progressives, and for no other reason.
Nobody worries about a purported rape affect in the cases you mentioned because people don't tend to throw around pedo accusations in the same sentence with grooming accusations in those cases.
If it's a lie, then speak plainly and specify what kind of grooming you're talking about. Right now it looks all too much like a gotcha - shout "grooming pedos, grooming pedos", then smugly proclaim "ah ha, but grooming doesn't just mean 'sexual'!" when people rightfully assume that "grooming" and "pedos" is the same accusation.
Building secret relationships with a kid* outside the circles of trust of their parents, family and other authority figures, for purposes of encouraging them to take actions that that their parents and family would not approve of. That's the understood, central definition of "grooming" across all contexts, from sexual to emotionally abusive to criminal to fringe-ideological, and always has been. It is a profoundly fucked-up and hostile thing to do, completely irrespective of the reasons why one chooses to do it, because it is a direct attack on the parents' relationship with their child. There is no context when any authority figure should be encouraging and assisting my kid in keeping secrets from me, ever, under any circumstances. That this fact even needs to be stated is a complete travesty. They are my kids, not the teacher's, and while we have all accepted that some parents are so bad that the government needs to step in, that is emphatically not the case here or the teachers would be reporting the parents to the cops rather than lying to them.
*The same principle generalizes to adults as well, as seen in discussions of emotional abuse in relationships and cult recruitment, but with adults it's murkier because they are empowered to make their own decisions. This doesn't actually prevent them from being groomed, but it makes the situation murkier than it is with kids, at least from the outside.
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