By Olga Khazan, Photo: Oskar Poss/ullstein bild/Getty, The Atlantic, April 14, 2022
If you ask some (okay, many) conservative pundits, Democrats are “grooming” children. As in, grooming them to be abused by pedophiles. Some Republicans have even accused Democrats of being pedophiles themselves.
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. 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. Versions of the measure have been proposed in at least a dozen other states. 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.
But bills such as Florida’s are also likely to have a chilling effect on comprehensive sexual education in schools, with deleterious effects. 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. Compared with abstinence-only sex education or no sex education at all, comprehensive sex ed helps reduce teen pregnancy rates. 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. Sex education is “the exact opposite” of grooming, says Nora Gelperin, the director of sexuality education at Advocates for Youth, a sex-ed nonprofit. “Sex education, even when started in the earliest grades, has shown to be protective for kids, especially around child sexual abuse.”
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