@xxyzz
Ie the criticisms being made are of pervy, exploitative adults, not of the children in the film who are the victims in this story.
Implying that those who object are criticising the children rather than those who exploit them is just outrageous.
I think this gets lost because people who are film critics, for example, are looking at it as if it's a book. Like Lolita, Or Death in Venice, or whatever, which include a sexualisation of some kind about a child, but doesn't directly present a real, sexualised child, because it's text. The story is clearly about what is going on with that.
If films were like that, you could take that kind of stand back literary approach, and you might well see someone criticising the sexualisation of the girls in the story as totally missing the point.
I actually don't think that rape scenes are necessarily the worst part of the way films sexualise women - in most cases there is at least some narrative reason for them, though showing them is typically unnecessary. Worse is simply the casual nudity and depictions of sex, they are basically eye candy, unrelated to the story, and they are increasingly ubiquitous.