Everyone agrees that abuse is wrong.

What they resist is the idea that you are allowed to act on the warning signs — that you do not have to wait for the injury before you are permitted to protect a child.

The whole machinery of my childhood ran on that resistance.

Every comment was defensible on its own; every escalation was small enough to explain away; and by the time anything happened that could not be explained away, everyone had already spent years practicing the habit of explaining it.

That is how these things are allowed to go all the way to the belt: not because no one saw the early moves, but because the early moves are always, individually, deniable.

A comment about a cookie is not a crime.