Parenting & Family Quote by Tom Cole

The line lands with the blunt, retrospective clarity of someone trying to rename a wound accurately, and also trying to survive the politics of naming it. Tom Cole isn’t just correcting a term; he’s widening the moral and legal aperture. “Not sexual harassment but more sexual abuse of children” is a deliberate escalation, moving the act from the workplace-coded language of “harassment” (often parsed as boundary violations among adults) into “abuse,” a word that insists on power, predation, and a harmed victim who could not consent. The phrase “of children” detonates any lingering ambiguity about mutuality, flirtation, or miscommunication.

The telling bit is the qualifier: “because he was doing it in a sexual manner now that I look back on it.” That “now” is the hinge. It acknowledges how institutions train young staffers to downplay what’s happening in real time, to file it under awkwardness, initiation, or “that’s just how he is.” Cole’s hindsight isn’t just personal memory; it’s an indictment of an environment that made the obvious unsayable.

Politically, the sentence is also a maneuver. It signals moral seriousness while implicitly explaining delay: if you didn’t have the vocabulary, you didn’t have the leverage. By framing the past as newly legible, Cole claims credibility as both witness and accuser, and he repositions the story from scandal-as-titillation to scandal-as-structural failure. The intent is not confession, exactly, but recalibration: force the public to hear “abuse,” not “harassment,” and to reckon with what that reclassification demands.