grooming, csa /

ok here we go im going to explain how the culture of 'pro-shipping' communities make grooming easier, even if not everyone in the community is an abuser

to explain this im going to talk about a situation i was in when i was younger. yeah it's anecdotal, but i trust people have the common sense to be able to understand how it can be applied to other situations. please mind the triggers!

when i was about 13 i first got really into fairy tail. nowadays i have a more complicated opinion of it, but that's besides the point. a character i related to, probably because i was only 13 lmao, was wendy marvell. if you don't know fairy tail thats okay, all you really

need to know is that wendy's a kid & significantly younger than the rest of the cast. now, in one of the arcs wendy gets paired with this guy called mest, who is a grown adult. in the community back then, wendy/mest was the primary ship involving wendy

it made me uncomfortable, because despite being 13 i knew that relationships between adults and kids were meant to be wrong! but people i respected in the community were, at the very least, neutral towards the ship. a lot of my friends were even positive towards it

this made me reconsider my initial reaction, because if everyone else thought it was okay then i was probably the weird one for being grossed out by it. i pretended to like it, made jokes about it and shared fanart of it because i thought that was what was expected

no one in the community actively used this ship to groom or abuse me. i am a grooming survivor, just this wasnt a situation where it happened. however, the fact that the community as a whole was accepting of this ship made me also become accepting of it

the danger with this kind of attitude is that it then opens kids up to abuse. most kids know, in theory, that kids should not be with adults. most kids know about pedophiles. however, As A Society, our idea of what a pedophile is is very simplified

so if you use a ship to normalise the relationship between a kid and an adult, the kid is less likely to recognise it as pedophilia, and an abuser can then use it as the blueprint to make the kid think that a relationship with them, as a real adult, is okay

the important thing to note, though, is it isn't Just the abuser that's contributing to the child being endangered. it's the whole community that's teaching the child that these kinds of relationships are okay. the individuals in this community may not be actively

abusing the child, but they are still endangering them! and That is why it's important not to normalise fictional relationships between minors and adults- because, yes, it's true that the relationship is only fictional, but the impact it has on people is real

i hope this thread made sense, it was just kind of train of thought and i haven't tried to put these thoughts into words before. if anything was unclear feel free to ask & if youre genuinely coming at a place of wanting to learn i will be more than happy to explain