List of obfuscatory terms used by authorities
Obfuscation and abuse of language is frequently used by governments in an attempt to re-draw moral and ethical boundaries, silence dissenters and hide gross abuses of power. The following terms have been used in such a way by various authorities:
Politically adopted/weaponized
- Safeguarding - Conflates a range of questionable measures. Used in public policy, but also linked to socially conservative belief systems.
- Grooming - The presence of consent or agency leading up to unlawful sex.
- Age-appropriate - A term that is used to nativize and render inevitable the withholding of knowledge that is peculiar to anglo/amerocentric western societies. Has seen some use by culture-war conservatives and feminists.
- Survivor - Equates a sexual experience, unpleasant or otherwise with being involved in a mass shooting or deadly car accident.
- Sex Trafficking - Usually consensual economic illegal immigration related to the sex industry. "Child trafficking" is now highly indicated as a conservative/radfem cause, following the actions of charities such as Operation Underground Railroad.
Untainted
- Child Sexual Abuse - Undermines sexually mature minors and lumps consensual sex with clear abuse. See also Child Sexual Abuse Material - CSAM.
- Consent - The problematic concept of "informed consent" objectifies subjective personal experiences by classifying actors according to their age. This results in gaslighting. Newgon have predicted that the term "consent" will soon be embraced by conservatives and radical feminists, and thus deployed in culture wars.
- Trauma Informed Approach - A method among mental health practitioners that assumes the client/cohort are "survivors", or suffering the effects of a traumatic event. The TIA thus encourages clients to blame existing problems on past experiences and continue seeking therapy indefinitely - benefitting the practitioner.
- Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children - This term ignores youth who depend on the sex trade and choose to take part in it.
- Adolescence - An imagined stage of life, used to extend age restrictions upward.
- Covert incest - A term used by some anti-sex feminists to bring shame upon family life.
- Feminism - Some (but not all) "feminists" promote an ideology that creates victims out of those it seeks to empower.
- Sexual Violence and Teen Dating Violence - conflatory terms that stem from and give rise to the assumption that sexual impulses and young people must be controlled in order to prevent harm.
- Rape - A term that once had a very certain meaning is now virtually redundant.
- Child Pornography - In some cases, the images do not have to be pornographic, but merely "indecent". In others, all of the participants may be sexually mature. The EU-funded IWF has attempted to re-write the language of child pornography by coining "child sexual abuse content", despite the fact that any image, regardless of content may be deemed "indecent" under British law (see Indecent images of children).
- Gratification disorder or "benign idiopathic infantile dyskinesia" - A medicalization of normal childhood masturbation.
See also
- Debate Guide: Abuse of language
- Debate Guide: Logical fallacies and intergenerational sexuality
- Debate Guide: Respond to misdefinition
- Research: Prevalence of Harm and Negative Outcomes
- Often repeated themes in anti-pedophile literature
External links
- ECPAT - Guidance on terminology: A good example of the Child Abuse Industry sanitizing language.