I'm not talking about queer people getting called groomers. I know why that's happening. I'm referring more to a more general fear of pedophilia instead of just repackaged homophobia.
I feel like I'm hearing about it like every other week. For instance, parent bloggers noticing that their engagement skyrockets when they post their kids eating hotdogs or in swimwear. Another example is an increasing trend of people on Pinterest creating walls and albums labelled "hot kids."
I know that elite freaks are all pedos, but is pedophilia an actually growing problem among regular people? It seems to me like when suburbanites freak out about any other thing like BLM or immigrants marching through and razing their communities. Or the crime freakout in the 70s/80s.
Am I being naive and we actually need to be on high alert?
I think understanding it in terms of reaction is helpful. If I understand it correctly, these panics seem illegitimate and a reaction to social progress.
The new social progress causing reaction, according to you, is children having autonomy in online spaces.
How do you square this with other opinions in the thread that argue there are legitimate concerns about groomers organizing in places like discord and tiktok? Do you think it's moving out of the realm of pure reaction?
Oh, there are real pedophiles on the internet, yeah. I don't mean to say it's just parents being strict with their kids. It's a legitimate concern, but I don't really have the expertise to say how legitimate or widespread it is. I do think a lot of the paranoia around pedohpiles does have to do with kids figuring out new ways to express themselves, find online communities, or interact with social media in a way that's very alienating to their parents. But then...
A random thought I'm having is that a lot of pedo men seem to think their decades of living without consequence will extend to an online space as well. They think it's just like the office where they hit on their employee's daughter, then get away with it. Except now there are records, time stamps, pictures, people's full names. Justin Roiland for instance was caught being a pedo using his main Facebook account listed under his real name with a picture of his face. It's absurd how little planning these groomers put into this. Maybe that's why there's more reasonable discourse about pedophiles now? There's simply more evidence of it now. It's hard to dispute pictures, chat logs, etc.
And the conservative pedophilia panic is absolutely reaction, since they're taking the feelings about the real threat of online groomers and instead focusing on teachers and fictional kidnapping gangs who want to steal white children.Every reactionary movement has to at least gesture in the direction of something that's real or something that people feel is real, then it's used to suppress social progress.
Also I've also never heard reactionaries mention the very widespread, very real issue of undocumented children getting wound up in prostitution, which is a huge part of human trafficking