I think it's really damaging to children and teenagers to attempt to try to create an environment where they never feel uncomfortable. The world is full of uncomfortable situations. How are children and young people ever going to cope with the real world if they have never experiences stressful or uncomfortable situations when they are young? We need to prepare them for the road ahead. There are bumps and dark places on the road. We should try to get rid of the monsters but we can't cosset them from reality and denying them the opportunity to learn coping mechanisms is a disastrous idea.
Being hugged by a crinkly-faced granny with a few of those bristly chin hairs is entirely different to sexual assault.
The new category of "sexual violence" is so broad ranging that it undermines the serious nature of sexual assault as it ranges from violent rape to "verbal, or non-verbal conduct of a sexual nature that violates a person's dignity". The latter is so subjective and nebulous as to be meaningless.
The same phrase should not be used to describe feeling uncomfortable because someone is looking at your breasts and being raped, because when a conversation starts and a women starts talking about sexual violence she can have a totally different set of criteria in mind than the man she is talking to who is rolling his eyes and thinks she is talking about someone looking at her bum in the supermarket.
Now the serious issue of consent, which to my daughters means not being raped or groped or pressurised by a partner to have sex, now includes being hugged by your grandparents. Cue the teenaged boys and young men rolling their eyes and being drawn into the Manosphere.
Bad and lose categorisations create an environment where two people can think they are having a discussion about the same thing when in fact they are talking about two different things. It is virtually impossible to find agreement of common ground in such circumstances.
As a "woke liberal", in the real sense of both words, I despair of this sort of thing.
