There’s no faster route to acceptance, even canonisation, in the post-modernist, feelings-trump-facts contemporary world than the path of victimhood. Don the mantle of victimhood and the Wokerati will welcome you into the fold, applauding your courage in speaking up about whatever hitherto unheard-of persecution you’ve been subjected to.

The latest and most abhorrent example of this is the attempt to rehabilitate paedophilia – to project abusers as poor, misunderstood souls who simply want to express their sexual preference. The speed with which this movement is gaining momentum must concern anyone who cares about children, or anyone who can recall the vulnerability of their own childhood and their total dependence on the adults around them.

The first step in the rehabilitation of any behaviour is language, in this case, how to turn abuse into something warm and fuzzy sounding, like ‘minor-attracted persons’.

Language is crucial in framing and shifting public opinion. Paedophilia has such negative connotations, involving the abuse of children and babies. If paedophiles become minor-attracted persons, it’s harder to distinguish who the victims are. Sounds pretty harmless really… Who could argue with such a mild-sounding epithet that obscurs the nature of the attraction and the harm to the minor?

There was outrage in Scotland when it came to light that police were working on a project ‘to develop understanding and approaches to avoid the victimisation of children by engaging Minor-Attracted Persons (MAPS) and providing them (the MAPS) with the necessary support, treatment, and guidance to help prevent criminal activities’. However, they have since released a statement that clarifies their opposition to the term MAPS and their subsequent lobbying to have it removed from use by 20 European partners.

While police in Scotland are not to blame, someone involved in the initial report changed the language to MAPS. Why change the terminology from paedophiles to MAPS? We don’t medicalise burglary, so why are we doing it with paedophilia; the psychiatric literature is not optimistic about changing the predilections of paedophiles…

The next step in the rehabilitation of any behaviour is to make it fashionable. Maybe you can get a fashion house or a celebrity to endorse the objectification of children and paedophilia as cool or edgy? Couple that with sexualised material being presented to children by sexualised presenters and the barriers to grooming start to fall. The normal protective behaviours of children towards those who might want to harm them are undermined – it’s discriminatory to question the motives of anyone presenting sexual material to kids, and providing a parody of womanhood to little girls.

How old-fashioned it has become to believe that kids deserve a childhood and they don’t exist to serve the wishes of MAPS.

It’s necessary to remind ourselves what abuse does to children and that it’s not just a matter of semantics and adult preferences. When children are abused, they find difficulty making friends (which comes from not knowing who to trust), they lose interest in things that kids normally enjoy, they may become aggressive or lethargic, they lack the ability to concentrate, they do poorly at school and they become hyper-vigilant (trying to anticipate the next danger). Their play is interfered with, and it’s through play that kids discover the world. Anxiety and depression are common symptoms. This apart from the physical injuries that abused children suffer, which can be long-lasting. Anyone who has had contact with victims of paedophilia knows that the damage is persistent, severely interfering with the child’s ability to engage with the world. That the perpetrators of abuse can frame themselves as the victims, and find defenders, says more about where our societal moral compass sits than anything else.

The soft-sell promoters of paedophilia need to be confronted with the reality of what they are selling. That it’s not just about a Woke social movement tinkering with labels, but the lives of real children who can do nothing to protect themselves. Sexual abuse of children has long-lasting effects. It’s the first betrayal that affects how a person views the world. But it’s never bought up in discussions about re-examining paedophilia, as if the victims just fade away without any consequence, or as if there are no victims at all. It’s a victimless crime… I guess it is, if the victims can’t put into words what has happened to them and advocate on their behalf. The goal is to treat paedophilia as just another sexual preference along the continuum of adult sexual presentations, consent is implied, no matter what the law says.

I’m reminded of the generals of the first world war who sent millions over the trenches as cannon fodder. They were kids faceless, never to be heard of again. There seems to be a similar attitude developing towards children in some quarters. They exist to serve adults. What happens after they’ve been used as sexual fodder doesn’t even engender curiosity? Kids have once again become expendable in the service of adults.

One of the problems with the victim-driven ideology of the Left is that real victims get ignored. There’s no place for children in the elbow-jostling arena of the grievance industry, they will never be heard.

Kids can’t speak up, but their silence does not mean consent, as so many advocates of paedophilia would have you believe, it just means they’re kids.

Childhood abuse is a human rights issue, but it’s never couched in those terms. It’s the first betrayal that anyone can experience, but there are no social justice warriors highlighting it. There are few programs to help those affected, and no widespread push-back in the general community against those wanting to promote paedophilia as a harmless lifestyle choice.

We’ve ceded too much in the cultural Marxist/woke take-over of Western society, realising too late what we’ve lost. It’s time to draw a line in the sand and declare that our children will not be ceded.