How "education prevents abuse" can actually be a harmful thing to say.

Since it's child abuse awareness month, and the 21st is incest awareness day, I thought I'd take a moment to post this here because I'm fuming about a comment I saw on social media of someone saying "If children are taught about sex and know what it is, it actually prevents them from being abused, they cannot be tricked into it"

This is deeply offensive for me personally because my parents raised me with this "no secrets" way of life, meaning they didn't have anything that was "too adult" to talk about with me, they had sexual intercourse in front of me when I was a child, and explained sex to me, and left sex books laying around. I knew what sex was when I was a child and yet somehow that did not prevent me from being abused by my father.

I get that this feels like a logical take but this is coming from someone who has NEVER had to navigate the painful reality of sexual abuse, especially when it starts that young.

I think statements like these are designed to sound normal and helpful and I DO think that correct terminology for body parts should be taught to kids so that they are able to vocalize if something is happening to them but this argument feels like... they think abuse is a simple misunderstanding like teaching a child sex ed doesn't magically protect them from being sexually abused, the way it was worded "they cannot be tricked into it" sure, maybe that makes a certain amount of sense, but it leaves out grooming and coercion and forceful rape... like no amount of knowledge is going to stop that from happening because a rapist isn't just going to stop because their victim knows what sex is.

And it places this blame on the victims like... "oh well you were only assaulted because you didn't know enough", predators do not operate like that... they aren't tricking their victims with a lack of facts, they are using grooming and emotional manipulation to slowly erode the boundaries you have. I can say from experience that knowing what sex was from an educational standpoint did NOT stop me from being abused over and over again. It wasn't a lack of information that caused me to be abused.

People who say stuff like this think they are being helpful but it's really not as helpful as they think it is and it can be really harmful to promote this idea that all this abuse and sexual assault can be boiled down to like "oh they just didn't know enough" cause that's another form of victim blaming right there.