Because if they don’t learn it from you, they will hear about it from these sources. Is that where you want your kids to learn about sex? If you wait too long, you’re not protecting their innocence as much as you are creating an opening for someone else to teach them a worse version.
That’s the winner right there. Kids who are not isolated or lonely and who know they are loved and supported are kids who tell you about grooming behavior at the very start. They have adults they trust in their lives and are connected to people who would be more likely to notice the grooming and to believe the child who tells them about inappropriate behavior.
That’s the best tool we have to prevent child sexual abuse.
The sexual abuse of children was something that happened when dudes in vans kidnapped children. No one mentioned that you could be sexually abused in your own home. If you asked me as a kid if I was being abused, I would have said no, even as every definition of that word applied to me. There was no education, no awareness programs, and no discussion about sexual abuse anywhere in the public sphere, so I didn’t know until I met someone in my early twenties who talked about being the victim of sexual abuse.
I think she’s right about that last point. I’ve written many times about the stories I hear, over and over again, where people don’t want to hear about child abuse and sexual abuse. It’s too sad and dirty. It isn’t very pleasant. People don’t want to know about how much sex trafficking goes on right around us every day and the hard work we could do to solve the problem. They’d rather believe conspiracy theories and look to their “heroes,” who are nothing but con artists, to fix it for them by going on rescue missions or attacking the “elites” who are supposedly controlling all sex trafficking around the world. That seems simpler than solving the problems that make kids vulnerable to trafficking: poverty, abuse, racism, a lack of support for kids transitioning out of foster care, or LGBTQ kids whom their own families do not accept.
Those are real problems that create vulnerable kids who go on to become real victims. Fixing them will require hard work and resources from all of us.
Penelope gives a very detailed explanation of how trafficking starts online, in chat around popular online video games, and how it spreads. Most of all, however, she provides an incredibly important look into what a trafficker looks for in a kid playing video games:
That’s our blind spot. We’re so busy looking for creepy, anti-social, stereotypes that we miss the charming abusers right in our midst, and we miss all the signs and hints that our kids might be dropping because we just didn’t stop to consider that adult to be dangerous. We just assumed they were safe, and our kids would somehow know better anyway.
Clearly, that strategy isn’t working.
