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:

• Child sexual abuse - Undermines sexually mature minors and lumps consensual sex with clear abuse.
• Safeguarding - Conflates a range of questionable measures.
• Human Trafficking - Legitimises xenophobic interventions, creates victims by conflation of real problems with imagined ones.
• 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 - A term that confuses two different things because both are easily condemned.
• 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.