Not only do people very often feel it wasn’t that bad, not infrequently they remember it as a positive thing if it was mutually willing. I read a paper last year, titled “The Impact of Online Grooming and Sexual Abuse” IIRC, reporting a qualitative study based on interviews with eight British youths (six girls and two boys) to whom the researchers had been referred by police. Not one of them had a bad thing to say about what they’d experienced during the relationship, and at least one (a girl) remained resentful toward police for having interfered. Every single item the authors enumerated as a “negative impact of abuse” was plainly a consequence of negative social reactions to the relationship—e.g., bullying by schoolmates or embarrassment that the parents found out—rather than a consequence of the relationship itself. One of the most telling things was that, in the authors’ words, “the harms of online abuse are not less than those of offline abuse,” a backasswards way of saying that no greater harm was associated with actual sexual contact than with merely sharing words or pictures. This sort of inelasticity of sequelae in relation to their purported cause is typically a telltale sign of harms caused by stigma rather than by the thing stigmatized.
Not only do people very often feel it wasn’t that bad, not infrequently they remember it as a positive thing if it was mutually willing. I read a paper last year, titled “The Impact of Online Grooming and Sexual Abuse” IIRC, reporting a qualitative study based on interviews with eight British youths (six girls and two boys) to whom the researchers had been referred by police. Not one of them had a bad thing to say about what they’d experienced during the relationship, and at least one (a girl) remained resentful toward police for having interfered. Every single item the authors enumerated as a “negative impact of abuse” was plainly a consequence of negative social reactions to the relationship—e.g., bullying by schoolmates or embarrassment that the parents found out—rather than a consequence of the relationship itself. One of the most telling things was that, in the authors’ words, “the harms of online abuse are not less than those of offline abuse,” a backasswards way of saying that no greater harm was associated with actual sexual contact than with merely sharing words or pictures. This sort of inelasticity of sequelae in relation to their purported cause is typically a telltale sign of harms caused by stigma rather than by the thing stigmatized.