antifainternational:

(content warning for discussion of child sexual abuse)

If right-wingers were actually concerned about saving children from sexual abuse, they’d be focusing their efforts on where most children are being sexually abused. The trouble for them is that the same institutions they actively participate in and/or support (e.g. their fellow right-wing extremists, the Southern Baptist Convention, CPB/ICE, the Catholic Church, Donald Trump, etc.) are regularly accused of the worst examples of systematic child sexual abuse, with the accusations coming from actual people making credible allegations, usually backed by substantive evidence. There are media reports from well-respected outlets; publicly-accessible court documents and hearing transcripts; and public statement made by some of the victims that anyone could find to verify the claims with just a little effort.

But right-wingers don’t actually care about child sexual abuse. They don’t raise money for counselling and therapy for survivors of child sexual abuse (and as politicians they often block access or prevent funding for therapy for survivors). They don’t support NGOs that do credible work fighting human trafficking. They actively work against providing the kinds of supports that are the most effective at preventing children from being sexually exploited to begin with.

What they do instead is use terms like “groomers” and “paedophiles” to tar-and-feather any outgroup they want to portray as “the baddies” in an effort to rally their troops to attack a scapegoat - both to distract people from the actual problem and what could be done about it and to build their followings and encourage violence against those outgroups. Currently it’s trans people that are being subjected to this abuse; previously it was Muslims, then LGBTQ+ people before them, and so on.

We’re not saying that child sexual abuse is not horrific and that the problem does not have to be addressed, obviously. But the way the right accuses any group they’re currently scapegoating as “groomers” allows the institutions the right supports that are currently and have historically engaged in the systemic sexual abuse of children to get away with it and even continue the abuse and shelter abusers without accountability. It also does real harm to legitimate organizations doing legitimate work combatting child sex trafficking because it takes resources away from them and diminishes the credibility of the movement as a whole. It’s a cynical weaponization of child sexual abuse to gain political points against the perceived “enemy du jour” for the far right.

It is especially ironic that people holding this viewpoint would then use it to justify ostracizing and rendering their own LGBTQ+ children homeless, since doing so makes their own children extremely vulnerable to sexual exploitation and abuse.

That’s a long way to say that the right-wingers are disgusting hypocrites, but there you go!