Two Survivors Allege They Were “Groomed,” Sexually Exploited By Staff at Scottish LGBT Youth Charity

I thought so too but there seem to be a growing number of voices that think otherwise. I suppose extreme thinking is always the inevitable result of politics. They are free and far between now but… I have little faith in these things these days. Perhaps it’s all doomed.

This is evil. That's the only word for it.

Sex ed is not what we're talking about, though.

I can't imagine many here on this board would argue against age appropriate sex ed and awareness of biology etc.

There is a balance to be had and I’ve been on the conservative extreme end of the spectrum. I grew up around girls that were easily raped and taken advantage of because of stupid christian parents with the idea that girls shouldn’t learn anything about sexual health and boys should know everything so they can “teach” the girls when it’s their time. (but somehow also be knowledgeable enough to prevent rape and sexual assault I guess 🤷🏻‍♀️) I’ve had to calm panicked friends who got their periods and thought they were dying or thought it was happening because they were sinful.

These same people also thought all gay men wanted to molest little boys and rather than wanting to romance and sleep with grown men and simply wanted rights to marry said grown men. So there is some truth to this statement. There was a moral panic. I remember it very well and I lived through it.

However the extreme opposite is also getting creepy and ridiculous. Pushing for flimsy child safety laws so pedophiles can do as they please and chipping away at women’s rights so they can’t be safe. It’s wrong.

The only reason I bring this up is because these things always seem to be a slippery slope. I saw parents arguing on gays against groomers on twitter about whether or not it’s normal for male 13 year olds to be talking about sex or having sex education to their male friends who are the same age. The answer should be obviously yes! They are going through puberty. Why wouldn’t they be talking about sex? They know their bodies are changing and they need a healthy way to express that. Obviously creepy adults are not the healthy outlet.

Let’s keep ourselves in check and make sure we don’t get lost in the fog. I don’t want my child growing up in a world where we start keeping children in the dark about their bodies again because we forgot the past for the sake of political convenience. It would infuriate me. They need a safe age appropriate healthy way to learn about their biology. My sister got her period at nine and I at 11. That information might make some parents uncomfortable. But that’s reality for you. There’s your timeline. Nature is unpleasant sometimes I know.

Same thread, via threadreader app.

Exceedingly relevant thread on twitter:
twitter

Presenting paedophilia as a child's rights movement. Fucking hell.

“Child sexual innocence has also become an important point of contention in the culture wars invoking moral panics about loss of innocence. It has also recently become one of the main topics presented by conservatives in the global anti-gender movement. While in some places the rights of children in general, transgender children, and LGBTQ+ identified children and adolescents are discussed and legal rights debated and sometimes won, in other places parliaments discuss laws that would restrict sex education and legitimize legislation against LGBTQ+. They do this via the concept of sexual innocence.”

Holy fuck. That's laying it all out rather clearly, isn't it?

The global anti-gender movement’ is pure non-speak. No one is anti gender.

This. ^^

Again, it's false marketing.

The movement is for the equality of access, inclusion, consideration and protection of women and children's rights.

If the equality of women and children = anti gender, then there is something very, very wrong with gender.

Fallingirl· Today 12:54
Academia is, as usual, at the forefront of ‘liberating’ children’s sexualities.

This is a call for papers currently doing the rounds: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/pb-assets/assets/10990860/Call%20for%20papers.%20Sexuality%20through%20childrens%20eyes-1670612934453.pdf?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=organic&HootpostID=0d651341-c2e6-4726-bd87-fdaeda9029fb&Profile=wileysociology

Re, this part from the paragraph you quoted:

Child sexual innocence has also become an important point of contention in the culture wars invoking moral panics about loss of innocence. It has also recently become one of the main topics presented by conservatives in the global anti-gender movement

That term ‘moral panic’ tells us everything about the writer. That phrase is used to break people’s protective boundaries around children and young people.

’The global anti-gender movement’ is pure non-speak. No one is anti gender. Some people (when they are aware of the following) are against men who feel they identify as women taking up women’s sports, being housed in women’s prisons, having their crimes being recorded as women’s, taking up places or prizes on all women short lists, being allowed in women’s refuges or rape crisis centres, being allowed on women’s hospital wards, and into women’s lavatories and changing rooms. They are also against the ideological brainwashing of young children into believing they may be in the wrong bodies, and the destroying of children’s bodies in the name of ‘gender identity’ ideology.

Agree. I recently overheard a mother very quietly tell her toddler not to walk along the top of a (wobbly, stony, not very low) wall to “climb down please, darling, it’s not appropriate to be up there.” Appropriate 😂

My answer to that would be ooh yes, let's compare that to the revolting document called 'the paedophile manifesto' which is in the public domain. And lets cross reference shall we?

This is no longer innocent stupidity, this is active enabling. And gosh yes, if there isn't a 'moral panic' yet, this would be a pretty good time to have one.

Academia is, as usual, at the forefront of ‘liberating’ children’s sexualities.

This is a call for papers currently doing the rounds: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/pb-assets/assets/10990860/Call%20for%20papers.%20Sexuality%20through%20childrens%20eyes-1670612934453.pdf?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=organic&HootpostID=0d651341-c2e6-4726-bd87-fdaeda9029fb&Profile=wileysociology

It includes this paragraph:

”This special issue focuses on collecting the experiences, perceptions, and meanings around the sexuality of children (understood as sexual subjects) from different parts of the world, emphasising how these experiences become entangled in other social categories - such as gender, age, social class, race, ethnicity and (dis)ability - and showing, at the same time, how children reproduce, negotiate, resist and/or subvert the dominant social constructions. The incorporation of the voices of children from different cultural contexts will allow us to understand the range of ways in which they understand sexuality, how they construct their own sexual subjectivities, how they regulate those of other children, and in what ways inequalities are (re)produced in the field of sexuality.”

A few years ago I came across this one: www.genderonline.cz/en/article/70-call-for-abstracts-for-a-special-issue-childhood-adolescence-and-sexualities

which includes the following:

“Child sexual innocence has also become an important point of contention in the culture wars invoking moral panics about loss of innocence. It has also recently become one of the main topics presented by conservatives in the global anti-gender movement. While in some places the rights of children in general, transgender children, and LGBTQ+ identified children and adolescents are discussed and legal rights debated and sometimes won, in other places parliaments discuss laws that would restrict sex education and legitimize legislation against LGBTQ+. They do this via the concept of sexual innocence.”

The second journal is a bit obscure, but its call for papers was shared in social science groups in the UK.

It isn’t only the actual pedophiles who are pushing away at boundaries around children, the idiots in universities are doing their work for them. Academics too are always looking for new boundaries to push; it wouldn’t do to keep working at the same old topics.

And at the same time as adults find ever new and interesting ways to avoid all responsibility or having to cope with uncomfortable feelings while virtue signalling to keep up with the Jones's develop their enlightened parenting...

on the ground we have an epidemic of childhood anxiety in pre teens never before seen. Kids being evacuated from the Blitz had better mental health than this current primary generation. And there is another massive epidemic of primary aged children who are domestically abusing parents and siblings.

And that's another route altogether from 'shall we all try and think a bit about why this particular political movement would really like your child to be allowed to consent to sex and to having their bodies and futures totally reshaped to fit the personal agenda of this group of adults without you being able to do anything inconvenient like saying no?'

we are demonising the very concept of adult authority or the possibility that adults should act in the best interests of children.

Yes.

Thing is, it all sounds so lovely and gentle and child centred.

Once they’re a bit older, we’ve somehow decided that they must have bodily autonomy. So they should decide whether what they wear and how they present their bodies. Or to decide who should touch them and how.

They are able to make an informed choice about these things. Indeed they have a right to be informed about all sorts of things because withholding information is childist. They need to know about breast binding and sexual fetishes. So they can make their own decisions. At 13. In a group with 25 year olds, facilitated by adults who think they need to know about furries and erotic asphyxiation and such like.

It’s not even a slippery slope argument. The problem is that we are demonising the very concept of adult authority or the possibility that adults should act in the best interests of children. It’s a problem at all ages.

I have just pinned my toddler to the ground with my leg to change a dirty nappy. He protested (hence the pinning down). He isn’t capable of deciding for himself and cannot anticipate the nappy rash that comes from staying in the dirty nappy. He can’t even properly understand that he feels uncomfortable and will simply feel nicer in the clean nappy. It’s not abusive parenting. It’s acting in his best interests and saving him from himself! Quite simply, I do know better than he does. And he doesn’t and should not get to decide.

Oh, I've had this particular argument more than once with other parents. Once when a child was out in a Tshirt in sub zero temps. 'She'll put on a coat if she's cold' was his repeated assertion.

I had to explain how hypothermia works, and that as she was shivering, pale, and confused she may not be thinking straight.

people who want to talk to children about sex need very careful looking at. most of them are fucking dodgy in my opinion.

I remember a rather brisk and breezy biology teacher showing us a video and giving a talk. she didn't enjoy it much but doing it was part of her job, so she did it.

teaching children what to expect as their bodies mature is only fair. but only weirdos enjoy it.

I’m amazed at the responsibility a lot of this rhetoric places on very small children.

All the talk of autonomy and emancipation just seems to end up with toddlers who have to make decisions about how to dress appropriately, how to manage social situations they don’t understand and so on. That’s a lot of responsibility. When we could just say, ‘it’s cold. You must put on a coat’.

who on earth thinks it is in any way acceptable to organise groups focused around human sexuality for 13-25 year olds.

This can't be repeated enough

why would you arrange groups whose focus is sex, which include adults and children as service users?

the opportunity for child sex abuse is intrinsically built in. it's obscene lunacy

Yes, I've many times had to remove children from dangerous situations while their lovely, educated, middle class parents blithely ignore the violence and aggression playing out in front of them because they say it's beneficial and healthy for their children to 'work it out for themselves'.

<puts down rant and goes to have a cup of tea>

Yes, but I think it's because they are terrified. Their responsible adults don't set clear boundaries, they are small, confused and helpless beings in a world that nobody explains clearly to them. Their behaviour worsens because they are desperate for someone to say 'no, that is not okay, and we won't allow you to hurt yourself or others'.

Thing is, there’s a spectrum of ‘gentle parenting’. There is value to some of the stuff. Of course, it tends to cherry pick the bits of child development theory that suit it, like all of these packagable approaches that can be marketed to parents.

But it is most definitely caught up in a wider ideological agenda in all sorts of problematic ways.

It is an ideological agenda about childhood that is particularly popular in sectors within Scotland (and has been for quite a long time). i can imagine Maggie chapman banging on about the evils of childism, and wielding it as a weapon against anyone who wants to discuss safeguarding.

It's straight out of the Paedophile Manifesto.

“Gentle parenting”…yawn…the kids are usually really selfish and badly behaved.