One of my college professors, in a queer lit class actually, spent an entire class on the following argument:
“Push by Sapphire is children's literature. Prove me wrong.”
(Context if you're not familiar with the book and why this was an extremely provocative thing to say)
OP's point was exactly the bulk of my professor's argument. And imho my professor was right. Millions of children have to live through this shit every year. And I just remember my professor posing undergrads (some of them very indignant or offended about this line of argument) the question:
"So they have to live through it, but they're not allowed to read about it?"
Or, as the professor clarified, "So they have to live through it, but don't get to have access to the words and information they need to understand and process what's happening to them? They information they need to know that this is wrong, and telling the right person can (hopefully) save them from more of it?"
A lot of people tried to argue, "Well, okay then, kids who have had to live through that can read those books, but only those kids, it's not appropriate for kids who don't already know or have trauma about it."
But there is no way to reliably or completely separate out those two groups. After all, if there was, cases of csa wouldn't almost all go undetected or unpunished.
If you don't talk about csa to or in front of children, you drastically reduce children's ability to tell you when they're victims of it.
And gotta say, I spent a lot of the time sitting in that lecture (2016) thinking if a lot of tumblr users had to sit through it, they'd probably explode - and that's something to work on, if you relate to that response, because we need to be able to have these conversations - because when I say "think of the children!" I for once mean it unironically.
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