I would disagree with some of that. Childhood shame has traditionally made things easier for predators because of kids learn that anything about sex or genitals is shameful they will be too ashamed to talk about abuse. This is what helped abuse grow in a lot of fundamentalist religious environments (along with an untouchable class of people who can’t be accused without the victim of abuse getting attacked; I’ll come back to that)
The healthiest thing to do for kids is to give them the information they need without shame and without introducing anything sexual into it either. A lot of kids like to touch themselves: this isn’t sexual, because they’re kids, and like you said it’s actually a demonstration of innocence because they don’t know it can be something sexual in an adult.
The old way of doing it is to basically shame kids for touching themselves (I remember my parents scolding me just for resting my hands in my lap the wrong way; it’s an extremely vivid memory because I remember being so confused and embarrassed). A kid who has been told that anything about the genitals = being shamed is less likely to tell their parents about a predator.
So what you do if a kid is doing that is say in a neutral tone “no, we don’t do that around other people.” That, plus introducing kids early on to the concept of private parts that adults aren’t allowed to touch, plus letting them know about warning behaviors in adults (“looking out for tricky people”). The kid then has tools and knowledge without being exposed to adult sexuality.
Parents worry. It’s part of being a parent. We worry about all the things that could possibly harm our children. We do all we can to protect them. But sometimes our efforts to keep them safe …
gooddayswithkids.com
One big issue now is that a lot of religious and other traditionally predator-heavy environments are finally getting better about screening for and kicking out predators, but no one seems to be able to grasp that the predators are just going to move on to the next place that welcomes them. And right now that is the movement that has created a new untouchable class of men that you are not allowed to accuse because you are hurting the
Catholic Church LGBT movement and the scandal will result in
souls being lost transgender women of color being murdered!!
Surprise surprise, adult men who were willing to go to seminary and spend their lives as priests in order to access kids are
also willing to put on a dress and call themselves Jessica. The infiltration doesn’t surprise me, it’s the fact that so many relatively normal people are falling for it.
