Sex education is “the exact opposite” of grooming, says Nora Gelperin, the director of sexuality education at Advocates for Youth, a sex-ed nonprofit. One meta-analysis found that European countries, many of which offer comprehensive, mandatory sex ed, including for young children, tend to have the lowest rates of child sexual abuse in the world. Compared with abstinence-only sex education or no sex education at all, comprehensive sex ed helps reduce teen pregnancy rates.
Comprehensive sex ed doesn’t just help prevent bullying it helps kids have healthier relationships of all kinds, improves their communication skills, and even boosts their media literacy. This latest pedophilia panic overlaps with the false beliefs of the QAnon movement, which fueled the Pizzagate incident in 2016.īut bills such as Florida’s are also likely to have a chilling effect on comprehensive sexual education in schools, with deleterious effects.
As the commentator David French writes in his newsletter, “Throwing around accusations of pedophilia, sympathy for pedophilia, grooming, or sympathy for grooming is a recipe for threats and violence”-an assessment that some historians endorse. This type of rhetoric is damaging in its own right. Referring to the bill, DeSantis’s spokesperson Christina Pushaw tweeted, “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.” A pastor even organized an “anti-grooming” rally at Disney’s headquarters in California. Versions of the measure have been proposed in at least a dozen other states. In March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed what critics have dubbed the “ Don’t Say Gay” bill, a measure that discourages teachers from discussing gender identity or sexual orientation in classrooms. The grooming charges lump together concerns that kids are being introduced too early to sexually explicit material, to the existence of transgender people, and to non-heterosexual sexual orientations. Some Republicans have even accused Democrats of being pedophiles themselves. As in, grooming them to be abused by pedophiles.
If you ask some ( okay, many) conservative pundits, Democrats are “ grooming” children.
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