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Haven't seen a thread yet on the gay bar shooting last weekend so I figured I would start it.
Sticking to facts in this post, opinion will go in reply.
The shooter killed 5 and injured 25
The shooter is a 22 year old, Anderson Lee Aldrich
The shooter previously was charged after he threatened his mother with homemade explosives and kidnapped her, but the charges were dropped
The shooter is the grandson of a prominent local Republican
The shooter was stopped by a drag queen combat veteran, who used his high heels to stomp him
Trying to tease out this distinction feels a lot more like it's trying to muddy things than clarify them.
If the behaviour you are engaging in makes children more susceptible to paedophilic sexual attention from nefarious parties, I don't think it really matters whether that was your explicit intent or not, you are grooming them. Unwittingly or no, it's still not a good thing to be doing. If you teaching these concepts to children enables and empowers people to prey on them, facilitates those people making arguments like "children can consent, they've all been taught sex ed now!", then you are assisting paedophiles, whether that is your intent or not. If you teach children that sexual stuff is no big deal and normal, and that causes them to not flag predatory behaviour from paedophiles to the relevant adults because they've been taught it's normal and they should know about and do sexual things, then you have groomed those children for the paedophiles. Wittingly or no. And if, when this is pointed out to you, you insist on continuing your behaviour, then you've knowingly crossed the line from unwitting to willing participant.
The attempts to be super strict with the definition of grooming so that you can say "well, actually, we're not technically grooming anyone" remind me a lot of attempts to draw distinction between "paedophilia" and "ephebophilia" as if the distinction makes any kind of actual real difference to the act of fucking someone who's underage. It's a very "well yes, but actually no" sort of objection. It's patently obvious that the motivation in that case is to disassociate the acts the person is committing from the word "paedophilia", which everyone knows is bad and a very serious crime, and onto some other lesser-known word that people don't know as much about or have as much of an instinctive negative reaction to that makes it easier to defend. And nobody gains anything from that but the paedophile in question. I suspect the "well, actually" objection in the case of grooming serves the same purpose. You know it's wrong and you know it's bad, but you want people to think it's less bad than it is, so you attempt to euphemise what you're doing by preventing people from calling it out using the most straightforwardly applicable and widely understandable terms, instead trying to force everyone into using wordy circumlocutions that require laborious explanation and lose the strength of the meaning in doing so.
More susceptible than what is the question here though. Remember abusers also take advantage of cultures where sex education is not open and sex is seen to be shameful by using that shame to get their victims to hide what is going on. Is every parent and teacher and religious figure who taught kids that sex outside of marriage is sinful a groomer because they made it easier for someone to manipulate them in that framework?
I would say not. Predators will adapt to the cultural situation they are in. Some kinds of abuse are made easier with more openness, some are made easier with less, that's the ugly truth I think. Every step you take creates an attack surface. Including not taking any.
As an example, the white victims in Rotherham and the primarily Pakistani Muslim victims were both victimized by the same groups but with different attack vectors. For the white victims they were primarily working class, often from broken homes or in care. They were targeted at taxi ranks, kebab shops, bars, where underage girls were not supposed to be at night and were therefore vulnerable. They were (largely) targeted using age old prostitution gang tactics, wooed with booze and drugs and older men who pretended to be their boyfriends before pimping them out. The muslim girls were primarily targeted in the home, were friends, neighbors and family members. More of the "traditional" family abuser situation. And we had real trouble getting them to come forward, in many cases their families refused because of the shame it would bring. Both cultures enabled the abuse in different ways. If you are Muslim you can point to the decadent West as letting their girls out unprotected and if you are Western you can point to the patriarchal backwards shaming of women for being the victims of abuse, meaning they would rather die than admit it.
If your bar is "made it easier for pedophiles" then traditional Christianity is groomer to the core as is Islam, the Amish, hippies, Mormon's and Rationalist shared living houses. But at that point the term is so wide as to be meaningless.
As a PSA if you are a parent, whatever your beliefs on when or what kids should learn about sex, please make sure to teach them young about inappropriate and bad touching whether it is from family members, strangers, other kids or adults. Kids pick up on the shame around sexuality and many abusers are adept at using this to exploit and manipulate. The staggering numbers of case files I read where this was the attack vector was eye opening. For the generally (I think) middle class American Motteizens this is more likely to be a vulnerability than your 12 year old daughter being at a kebab shop drinking vodka at 2am I would guess.
As I’ve pointed out before, child protection best practices are, on an institutional level, a solved problem. I’ve given to understand that they’re more or less the law of the land for non-LGBT stuff at schools, enforcement issues notwithstanding.
Making exceptions to them(like, for example, hiding things from the child’s parents) for the sake of ‘but gay’ is very, very bad and should be criticized, just like Mormonism’s refusal to implement child protection best practices should be.
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Than not... doing... that? It's pretty much a binary choice here.
You don't think the culture of secret at-school transitions and shhh-don't-tell-mom encouraging keeping BIG secrets from parents could possibly contribute to an offender getting away with something they otherwise wouldn't?
But not doing that, means keeping the current system which in the US heavily leans towards the shame/secrecy version. There is no neutral option is my point. And yes it will give a vector space, and so does the version where we don't talk about it at all.
That is the entire point of my post. They both have failure modes.
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