It is emphatically NOT my responsibility, as a sexual abuse survivor, to educate those who falsely label YA lit "grooming" just because it contains sexual content of some kind. But I'm sick of the slimy implications being wiped like snot over our books. So I will spell this out.
"Grooming" is manipulative, predatory behavior, usually of a minor, with the goal of blurring the lines between appropriate and inappropriate touch or interaction. Why? A disoriented, gaslit, self-blaming target is much less likely to be able to identify, or report, abuse.
It is absurd to say that the mere presence of some sexual content means a book is "grooming" readers. Is the sexual content of the Bible "grooming" readers to be gang raped? to sleep with their fathers? Do TV shows with love-making scenes or song that refer to sex "groom"?
It is most absurd of all to slander as "grooming" those books that shed light on the lived reality of sexual abuse. Literature allows readers to see subtle, insidious dynamics. It supports targets of abuse in naming it for what it is, in knowing that only the abuser is to blame.
I'm sick of attacks on books that suggest that the problem is the PORTRAYAL of something awful (like sexual abuse) rather than the REALITY of that harm in our world.
Yes, my books engage with the world that IS, so it can't corroborate denials of reality (e.g., that sexual abuse doesn't exist). Naming realities--dramatizing them so they can be considered, challenged, unmade--isn't an endorsement or celebration of them. And it's not "grooming."
Using words and story to engage with the world in all its beauty and ugliness, to open minds and hearts to what needs to change, to imagine other ways--that has a name, and it's not "grooming."
It's "literature."
It's "literature."
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