I think our answers are generally the same, @CWOTUS. I certainly agree that this is morally reprehensible and is a step in the direction of child abuse. I also don’t deny that it has the potential to lead to other generally accepted forms of child abuse. That said, I am hesitant to label this as child abuse in and of itself, and I’ll explain why.
Firstly, I think some people who suffered through child abuse would take great offense to this. Though it is certainly arguable and probably true that this causes a form of psychological harm to a child, the would-be “abusers” don’t believe that they are harming the children, and the child doesn’t have any notion of the harm. To be clear, I am not saying that something can’t be considered abuse because the abuser doesn’t believe they are abusing the child, but that it is very subjective in this particular case.
Secondly, it hasn’t led to other forms of child abuse at this point, and we can’t yet see the effects of it as the children grow. As I said above, I don’t disagree that it has this potential, but potential is the key word. While we obviously don’t want to wait until it gets to that point, you really can’t prove that assertion until it does get to that point. For obvious reasons, this is not ideal, but there isn’t much of a choice. I would compare it to traffic lights; we all know that not having a traffic light at an intersection is very dangerous for drivers and pedestrians alike, but frequently, it is not until enough people are hurt or killed at an intersection that a traffic light is put in. Eventually, people learned to just put traffic lights in from the start, but it took that initial proof of danger to get to that point.
Thirdly, how do we define child abuse as a whole? There doesn’t seem to be one universally accepted definition of child abuse; we define individual acts of abuse, like molestation or neglect, but child abuse itself is usually more of a “you know it when you see it” term. Do enough of us “see it” to characterize it as such? I’m not so sure.
And lastly, let’s say that one of us does decide to pursue some course of action about this, to try and make this punishable by law- I can pretty much guarantee that anyone who tries to go about it by making a case for this as child abuse will get nowhere. Using a term that is so polarizing and gets this kind of rise out of people makes it effectively politically untouchable in the world of American politics. Sad, yes, but true. And the last thing we want to do is cause this argument to lose validity because of disagreements over word choice.