I think there are some things that are sort of "borderline" and will amount to nothing if nothing is made of them. If my parents had gotten all up in arms and launched a search for the guy and called the police, THAT would have been much more traumatic and harmful to me than the little that happened.

Your incident... I'm not sure where it falls. The fact that it was an adult man in a setting like that... seems more sinister.

When I was about this age, there was LOTS of "playing doctor"-- not boy-girl contact, but for example, running around naked in the woods because it was exciting-- we didn't exactly know why. When I was 12-ish, my girlfriends and I fondled each others breasts, practiced kissing, even sucked each other's breasts (this was at slumber parties). I'm sure our parents would have been horrified. We fooled around like this, because we were curious but the idea of such contact with a boy was out of the question for my friends and me. My first real intercourse/oral, etc. was with the man (boy, really) I married, and I was 22 when it happened. Today, alas, there is opposite sex contact at very tender ages... \:\( as witness the push to have all girls age 9 vaccinated for HPV.

Anyway... I was thinking about that incident in Dallas or somewhere where that little boy gave the little girl a kiss and it hit the national media and was labeled "sexual harrassment." It seems to me that the publicity was more harmful to both children than the kiss.

It's hard to know where to draw the line between harmless (and necessary) sexual exploration and bullying, abuse, power trips, and victimization.

This kind of stuff makes me grateful I'm not a parent today.