A hill I will die on is that colloquially collapsing the distinction between "pedophile" and "predator" has had a genuinely negative impact, both on our ability to protect children and young adults, and on community discourse. I understand why it happened - pedophile is clearly the stronger term, and when it comes to, say, a fortysomething adult attempting to date someone under eighteen, we want the word we use for that to reflect our disgust - but the end result has been a massive spike in highly reactive, deeply puritan anxiety around acknowledging normal teen sexuality, and it's causing genuine problems.
Because the big, vital distinction is that, whereas it is never developmentally appropriate for a pre-pubescent child to have any form of sexual contact with another person, it very much is developmentally appropriate for teens, and particularly older teens, to be doing that. So while this doesn't mean that it's always advisable for specific teens to be doing specific things, the fact that they might be doing them is not, in and of itself, wrong - and particularly not when their partner is around their own age.
But when we start casually referring to, say, a twenty-year-old having consensual sex with a sixteen-year-old as pedophilic rather than predatory, we are implicitly suggesting that it's fundamentally wrong for that teen to want sex at all, let alone to actually have it - and that simply will not keep anyone safe. Instead, it creates a sense of shame, fear and uncertainty around teenage sexuality; as though anything they might be doing must, of necessity, be done in secret. And worse, it can lead to them thinking, for instance, that a seventeen-year-old being sexually attracted to someone a year or two younger constitutes pedophilia - which is, to be clear, completely fucking untrue. But that's what a lot of teens and young adults have absorbed from the way the term is used: that a pedophile is anyone who's sexually attracted to a teenager, even if they themselves are also a teen.
Which means, among other things, that when these same young people encounter art that features fictional teens in sexual contexts - even age-appropriate, positive, consensual encounters, let alone anything darker - they have no moral framework for what that means other than pedophilia. There are - and I say this with zero exaggeration - teenagers legitimately and full-throatedly accusing other teens of being pedophiles for having read or written mildly horny fanfic about fictional teens. It's absolute madness, and judging by the current state of subcultural play, it's only getting worse.
But when you create this level of anxiety around sex? You make people vulnerable to exploitation, and that's especially true of young people. Because if someone feels that their desires are shameful, and they confide those desires to another person - an internet stranger, a peer from school, a youth pastor, a friend's older sibling - then they're handing that person the ability to harm them, not because those desires are actually wrong, but because the threat of disclosure can now be leveraged against them. Which is - forever, for all time - a favoured tactic of predators: to make their victims believe that speaking up will see them suffer more than if they just endure their abuse in silence.
And right now, far too many people are reluctant to so much as mention teens and sex in the same breath, even for safeguarding purposes, for fear of being branded pedophiles - because why would you even think about that gross, icky stuff in the first place, unless you yourself are gross and icky? Why would you want to write a story about CSA if you don't enjoy hurting children? Why would you exclude minors from your adult-oriented discord server if you're a safe person to be around? Why would you bother to draw a distinction between pedophilia and predatory behaviour unless you're a a pedophile looking to justify yourself? Why would you think it's okay for teens to have sex unless you want to have sex with teens?
snowghoul
pixelskylines
tangentwithtanner
dailybridgerton
