Normalizing child grooming?

A British TV show is sparking backlash for what some viewers see as normalization of child sexual abuse. Britain’s Channel 5 released a promotional video last week for the upcoming season of Age Gap Love with a clip of a couple whose relationship began when the man was 44 and the girl was 16.

The documentary series first chronicled Andy and Beth Telford’s relationship in an episode that aired last November. The season premiere of the show, which features a variety of (usually older) couples with large age gaps, airs this month. “Their 28-year age gap may make them look like father and daughter,” a narrator cheerfully announces in the promo. “But they are, every bit, a married couple.”

The Telfords had already been married for three years when the episode first aired. They met through Andy’s friendship with Beth’s mother. Beth and Andy also became friends, and she developed romantic feelings for him. Andy claims ignorance: “I didn’t know that Beth was getting these thoughts that she wanted me to be her happy man forever sort of thing.” When Beth turned 16, they started dating. Soon after, they declared their love for each other, got married, and now have two children, Timothy and Conway. Beth is now 19.

After the video aired, some viewers began to criticize Channel 5 for portraying child grooming for sexual abuse in a positive light. Marie Gardiner, a U.K.-based writer and photographer, tweeted that parts of the story “make this sound an awful lot like grooming rather than just a couple with an age difference.”

Channel 5 defended the show, telling the Manchester Evening News, “With tens of thousands of couples across the U.K. today involved in relationships where there is a significant age difference, Age Gap Love is a nonjudgmental observational documentary series which examines such relationships through the eyes of those involved.”

But the show signals a wider movement to normalize pedophilia, with perpetrators increasingly embraced as part of the LGBTQ movement. Last year a German medical student made international headlines with a lecture she gave calling pedophilia “an unchangeable sexual orientation, just like … heterosexuality.” A Slate article published in March questioned whether it is “a crime or an illness.”

Snapchat introduced its “Love Has No Labels” campaign this month in honor of LGBTQ Pride Month. Along with photo filters featuring labels like gender, sexuality, religion, and disability, users can choose a “Love has no age” filter. Many users expressed outrage over the inclusion of age, and Snapchat removed the filter with no explanation.

In the United States, pedophilia is still a crime, and the #MeToo era has shed light on widespread child sexual abuse cases. But as society increasingly abandons Biblical sexual morality, expect the lines to blur and child exploitation to increase.

Earlier this year, actress Barbra Streisand dismissed two men’s claims that pop icon Michael Jackson groomed and sexually abused them as children. “His sexual needs were his sexual needs, coming from whatever childhood he has or whatever DNA he has,” she said. Streisand later apologized for her remarks.

John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, warned about the increasing sexualization of children. “No culture wakes up and decides to exploit its children,” he wrote in an article earlier this year. “But the decades-long process of redefining human beings according to our sexual ideologies rather than their God-designed dignity is what brought us here.”