> The harm a pre-teen suffers from sending nudes to internet strangers is likely substantial trauma for the rest of their life.

Was that ever researched? Or is it something that adults just find reasonable?

From my experience people are fairly good as adults, with dealing with memories of their own youth voluntary stupidity especially if it didn't result in damage to their bodies or didn't alter their life in significant manner.

This by no way excuses the behavior of a person that misled a kid into something like that, but I think one can abhor somebody doing something that has potential horrible consequences while at the same time observing that damage their managed to inflict in that case was actually minimal.

But do you have a lot of experience with people that were groomed into cyber sex abuse?

There probably isn’t a lot of research wrt OP’s example since it’s such a new(ish) phenomenon.

Of course not. But I have experience of being a kid and doing potentially life threatening and borderline criminal things because of my youthful stupidity that may have ended horribly.

I was never groomed but I managed to screw up my perception of romantic relationships all by myself with little help of same aged friends as I grew up.

Do you have the experience of being a kid who didn’t do those things and seeing how you turned out.

It’s good to survive and thrive. It’s another thing to say that traumatic events in childhood shouldn’t be avoided. And perpetrators of those crimes shouldn’t be punished.

Adults soliciting nudes from minors seems pretty bad to me. The fact that most victims don’t have dire outcomes doesn’t convince me that adults soliciting nudes from minors is ok.

I completely agree with you on all accounts. None of that is ok. And traumatic events should be avoided. I just ask about how founded is the automatic assumption that sending naked pictures to someone on the internet, possibly adult, is automatically traumatic for a kid who does that.

Or at the very least a major shift in their development… and why allow that?

> The harm a pre-teen suffers from sending nudes to internet strangers is likely substantial trauma for the rest of their life.

My point was that if they have substantial trauma, that should show up in e.g. higher rates of depression

Maybe it does. Depression is rampant and also under diagnosed. Or maybe it’s treated and recovered from.

I can’t find a study of people with depression to see who was sexually groomed as an adolescent vs who wasn’t.