@buncube @Mimesatwork @butchrobot my (probably considered to be problematic; and I really hope that fragments of this post won't get quoted out of context; I didn't put hours of thought into each sentence here, so some of them might be badly worded and I guess misinterpreted in bad faith) opinion about CSA is that CSA is only such a big thing in our society because sex is such a big and separate and taboo thing in our society.
Sex work is work, and similarly, child sexual abuse could be said to be just a child abuse. It's only because sex is considered to be such a special thing, that child sexual abuse gets disproportionate amount of attention (with it being used to introduce all kinds of surveillance for everybody for example), while all the other child abuse gets almost no attention at all.
And yes, children are hugely traumatized by sexual abuse (compared to other forms of abuse), but how much of that difference is caused by our society telling them that sex is such a special thing that they should feel traumatized in a very special way by this specific form of abuse? (Both explicitly and implicitly, by subjecting victims of CSA to all the experiences they have to face after the fact of CSA).
And also, yes, perhaps if sex was considered to be just an activity (although more intimate than many other activities), then a lot less people would be willing to abuse children in this specific way, because it just would not be The Thing.
@butchrobot @Mimesatwork @buncube
> How many decisions do you regret that you made at 14?
A lot in fact. Some of them I didn't know I made because society made them for me. Some of them, my parents did for me. A huge problem with a lot of these decisions is that they're not easily undone, in many cases because society deliberately makes them difficult to undo.
I can also say the same about decisions made at 16, or at 18, because I didn't just wake up one day on my birthday as a fully formed responsible person.
(None of them as bad as getting pregnant, but still.)
Also CW mentions grooming and a significant part of our society doesn't even really consider it to be abuse on a technicality, simply because no sexual act happens until technically the child reaches the age of consent. Although actually it is just as bad as other forms of CSA.
> Well, imagine getting pregnant and married at 14
If we're talking about some idealized world, well maybe then marriage should also not be what it is now (if at all), and maybe it should be unacceptable that people become pregnant at 14.
But weirdly enough, some parts of our society seem to be very interested in introducing global surveillance under the pretext of banning children from internet under the pretext of saving them from sexual abuse, and at the same time to be very interested in forcing the abused children to carry the pregnancy to term (as if this did not compound the abuse extremely, as if this did not constitute a separate form of abuse probably much worse than the rape itself).
But thank you for your perspective, I never heard this reasoning about CSA being different from other forms of abuse before. Usually it goes more like that: "OBVIOUSLY sex is an extremely special thing so OBVIOUSLY sex work is not a real work but something entirely different and OBVIOUSLY child sexual abuse is not a real abuse but something entirely different so OBVIOUSLY we need to surveil the entire population to ensure that nobody younger than 21 never hears anything related to sex in the spaces we control and that no adult ever pays transactionally to another adult for sex in the places we control, and if you disagree then OBVIOUSLY you're a pedophile and rapist and support human trafficking".