[old repost no. 3]
Additional notes:
“Tell a trusted adult whenever you have a problem” discourages building one’s own problem-solving skills and confidence in one’s own ability to handle one’s surroundings, creating a reliance/dependency which just exacerbates the problems;
The people who say “tell a trusted adult” label an adult as “trusted” based on their degree of legitimized authority over a youth. i.e. the further they are from “stranger” and “deviant.” They make claims of “trust” based on how well an adult follows certain social scripts, regardless of their degree of actual meaningful trust they have built with a youth by actual interactions and trustworthiness-indicating behaviors. Whereas strangers are assumed to be untrustworthy by default and thus no amount of trust-building interaction can put them in the other category (and that interaction is discouraged in the first place). Unhelpful when most of the time the people causing the problems are the “trustworthy adults,” and the people enabling the problems are all the other “trustworthy adults.”
And all of this on top of the adultism outlined in the OP (i.e. “telling a trusted adult” cannot be a solution when the problem is adultism that all adults contribute to in the first place, even disregarding other forms of oppressive violence which most IRLs of any given youth would be in favor of—if you’re like us and a freak and in freak communities there’s no help you can get IRL / from normie adults; you’re on your own, and nine times out of ten the rapists get away with it and there’s nothing we can do.)
