[TW: SA] I keep seeing threads about how children are innocent and shouldn't be taught about sex and consent, so I'm going to share about what happens when you DON'T teach a child those things, because my parents didn't.

Trigger warnings for sexual assault.

[TW: SA] First, what am I responding to? Tweets like this. "Let children be children...Why do they have to be taught all this?"

[TW: SA] My parents managed that magical fantasy of a Totally Innocent Child. I didn't have older siblings to teach me things. I didn't have sex ed in school. (Private schools and homeschool.) I went to college not knowing what a penis looked like or what sex was.

[TW: SA] I was every bit as innocent and "childlike" as the evangelical church likes its girls to be. And what happened was that predators looked at me and fucking *salivated*.

[TW: SA] In my first six months of adulthood, I was sexually assaulted multiple times, choked unconscious with a rope, tricked into consuming unsafe substances, and yes, raped.

[TW: SA] Not knowing about consent didn't protect me from predators. What it did was it made the predators safe: because I didn't know how to describe what they were doing to me. I couldn't seek help. I didn't know the words to report them.

[TW: SA] When you want your kid to be "innocent" of consent, of their rights and boundaries, of what sex is and what they're allowed to NOT do, then you make them vulnerable to predators because we don't have the words to report them and protect ourselves.