I’ve been very squeamish about letting my 13-yo son spend time anywhere overnight. It’s always been with family. One retreat at his Christian school. But there is no doubt in my mind that this should be kept to a minimum by everyone. I may be mistaken, but I think grooming includes the abusers’ getting away with something “small,” and then they use the shame to keep them quiet, and it escalates. Maybe the child questions whether it is something they they are doing wrong. Too young to really understand how devastating these events are to their future spiritual well-being. Damage that’s darn near permanent. Sad. Pray that Jesus will heal them through His amazing grace.
From Socrates on down to Voltaire’s Candide (the pedigree of the “best of all possible venereal diseases”), there is a long record of grown men misusing boys, and also of girls as young as four being interfered with by boys as young as 12. And there have been plenty of institutional cover-ups. Don’t trust anyone with your kids that you don’t know real well.
That’s when my son did Boy Scouts, my wife absolutely insisted I always went on his weekend campouts. Probably a wise thing.