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Notes -
Nobody worries about a purported rape affect in the cases you mentioned because people don't tend to throw around pedo accusations in the same sentence with grooming accusations in those cases.
If it's a lie, then speak plainly and specify what kind of grooming you're talking about. Right now it looks all too much like a gotcha - shout "grooming pedos, grooming pedos", then smugly proclaim "ah ha, but grooming doesn't just mean 'sexual'!" when people rightfully assume that "grooming" and "pedos" is the same accusation.
Building secret relationships with a kid* outside the circles of trust of their parents, family and other authority figures, for purposes of encouraging them to take actions that that their parents and family would not approve of. That's the understood, central definition of "grooming" across all contexts, from sexual to emotionally abusive to criminal to fringe-ideological, and always has been. It is a profoundly fucked-up and hostile thing to do, completely irrespective of the reasons why one chooses to do it, because it is a direct attack on the parents' relationship with their child. There is no context when any authority figure should be encouraging and assisting my kid in keeping secrets from me, ever, under any circumstances. That this fact even needs to be stated is a complete travesty. They are my kids, not the teacher's, and while we have all accepted that some parents are so bad that the government needs to step in, that is emphatically not the case here or the teachers would be reporting the parents to the cops rather than lying to them.
*The same principle generalizes to adults as well, as seen in discussions of emotional abuse in relationships and cult recruitment, but with adults it's murkier because they are empowered to make their own decisions. This doesn't actually prevent them from being groomed, but it makes the situation murkier than it is with kids, at least from the outside.
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