the thing that drives me up the wall about “anti/proship” discourse is that it frames grooming as like, primarily an ideological practice in which the threat is that kids will “think adult/minor relationships are morally ok”. which sure maybe that happens idfk but the thing is that grooming is in practical almost entirely divorced from ideology and is so much more about individual exceptionalism… which I think is especially true for fandom-aged demographics! these aren’t kids who are just freshly learning the basics of right and wrong, most of them probably already generally know what pedophilia is and think it’s bad, it’s just that they’re also particularly susceptible to individualized attention that makes them feel uniquely special and mature.
like. I don’t know. it’s just incredibly frustrating to see people continually talking about CSA like it only happens because the perpetrators and victims believe pedophilia is morally permissible rather than because they think that their own personal circumstances exonerate them and make it uniquely acceptable and not harmful.
it is overwhelmingly my experience that kids and teens who met and then “dated” adult partners struggle to think of themselves as victims of CSA because for whatever reason it just didn’t count—not when it was them. they were too precocious, they had too much agency, their abuser didn’t mean any harm, and what would have been a terrible criminal travesty if it had happened to anyone else was just a weird but understandable fluke situation that they brought upon themselves.
sort of related—lots of kids do not actually see themselves as children. a child who sees themself as mature, different, and sensitive to condescension is not going to Identify As A Child™️ and will hold themself to (what they think is) an adult standard. any effort to protect them that relies upon their seeing themself as A Child™️ and accepting their status as a being of lesser agency is doomed to fail. and I think that’s true whether they’re punished or rewarded for their apparent maturity because any kid who perceives being a child as a bad thing is… well. they’re right. to be a child is to be a second-class citizen with very limited rights who is, functionally, private property. any child who becomes consciously aware of this will be traumatized by it and I don’t think that Good Parenting will ever fully prevent that. so of course they’re not going to conceptualize themselves as victims of CSA because CSA can, by definition, only happen to real children.
