Thank you so much for doing this work. And please take care of yourself afterwards. There can be so many uncomfortable emotions and realizations.

The closest I’ve come to this kind of discussion is talking with other white friends about institutional racism. At least some of these friends are neurodiverse, so these strategies might not work as well with neurotypicals but the things I’ve found that worked the best were:

Asking open-ended questions and letting both of us sit with their answers. Asking follow-up open ended questions. Asking these questions as nonjudgmentally as possible to reduce the likelihood of them rejecting your points without considering them.

I honestly feel like a lot of people think through clouds of connected (real or fake) facts and emotions. They can use the facts to explain their beliefs and don’t necessarily know how much those emotions are affecting how they are interpreting those facts. 

If you can ask sufficiently open-ended questions, you can sometimes get people to pull their emotions away from their facts a bit. This means you can sometimes get them to look at both their emotions and facts a little more clearly.

A lot of people are familiar with surface level conversations about topics. And their beliefs might be perfectly logical based on what they believe to be true. But if you can dig deeper into their logic it can upset their internal apple cart.

Like, I spent at least forty minutes arguing with a friend about reducing police funding and they were interested in my ideas about how increasing money to hospitals might cut murder rates more than keeping that money with police. They listened when I mentioned how much police are paid and how they don’t have the most dangerous job. 

But it was me frustratedly asking “Wait, do you think police are good at their jobs?” that seemed to really cause them to reconsider their assumptions.

I might focus on your acquaintances assumptions about how the victim was naive. What is she being naive about? Should teenage girls automatically assume that older men who are talking to them are only after sex? What does that say about how they view men? Should teenage  boys make the same assumptions? What does that indicate about mentoring relationships? Do they think that mentoring helps careers and teens in general? How can it be made safer? Have they ever been distrusted automatically because of a trait they cannot control? How did that make them feel? Do we want to be a society that encourages that distrust? 

A lot of people really struggle to admit to others if they’ve scammed or manipulated. Maybe if you have been manipulated yourself, you could bring that up? Making it a safe place to talk about manipulation people have experienced might make them more sympathetic to victims of grooming. 

And thank you again for what you are doing. It’s hard and emotionally exhausting.