Good Intentions, Dangerous Definitio...

Every child protection professional shares the same nightmare: that a predator slipped through the system because no one recognized the warning signs. That fear is what drives legislation like Minnesota’s HF 3489, a bill currently moving through the state legislature that would make grooming a standalone felony. The bill is born from real pain—the testimony of survivors and the frustration of investigators who have watched predators exploit gaps in the law. And on its face, the bill’s goals are unimpeachable. But buried in the statute language is a definition so broad that it threatens to criminalize the mentoring relationships that research tells us children need most to thrive.

A Bill Born from Real Harm

HF 3489 was introduced in February 2026 by Representative Peggy Bennett and several co-sponsors, and it arrived with powerful testimony about the devastating effects of grooming separate from the effects of sexual abuse. The bill proposes a series of changes to prevent those situations: making grooming a felony punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, requiring automatic revocation of teaching licenses upon conviction, mandating law enforcement notification to licensing boards when educators are charged, developing new mandatory reporter training through the Minnesota Department of Education, removing the three-year limitation on investigating student maltreatment, and prohibiting school employees and volunteers from being alone with students during field trips.

Many of these provisions are straightforward and long overdue. Delayed disclosure is the norm in child sexual abuse cases and better training for mandatory reporters addresses the problem of adults who see concerning behavior but simply don’t know what grooming looks like.

Where the Language Gets Dangerous

The trouble begins with how the bill defines the crime it seeks to prevent. Under HF 3489, “grooming” applies to any person 18 or older who “knowingly engages in a pattern of conduct that seduces, solicits, lures, or entices, or attempts to seduce, solicit, lure, or entice, a child to engage or participate in unlawful sexual conduct.” The bill defines “pattern” as just “two or more instances of conduct.”

Read that again. Two instances.

Now think about what healthy mentoring actually looks like from the outside. A teacher who gives a struggling student a ride home after practice—twice. A youth pastor who sends encouraging text messages to a teen going through a family crisis. A coach who takes a young athlete out for pizza after a tough loss, and then does it again the next month. A camp counselor who writes letters to a homesick kid during the school year.

Every one of these scenarios involves repeated one-on-one contact, personal attention, and emotional connection initiated by an adult toward a minor. Every one of them could, under a sufficiently aggressive interpretation of this statute, constitute “two or more instances of conduct” that “entices” a child. The bill’s authors almost certainly did not intend to sweep up these behaviors. But intent and statutory language are different things, and it is the language that prosecutors, investigators, and—critically—risk-averse school administrators will read.

The terms “seduce,” “solicit,” “lure,” and “entice” are doing enormous heavy lifting here, and they are not clearly defined in relation to ordinary mentoring behavior. Predatory grooming and genuine mentoring can look remarkably similar in their early stages: both involve building trust, creating emotional connection, offering special attention, and establishing a pattern of communication. The difference lies in the adult’s intent, which is precisely the kind of internal mental state that is hardest to prove—or disprove—in a legal proceeding.

The Chilling Effect We Can’t Afford

The most disturbing unintended consequence of such broad language is not a wave of wrongful convictions. It is something quieter and, in its own way, more devastating: the slow retreat of good adults from the lives of vulnerable children.

We have seen this pattern before. When policies become so broad that ordinary caring behavior could trigger an investigation, reasonable people don’t parse the statute and calculate their risk. They simply step back. Male teachers stop mentoring female students. Coaches stop offering rides. Youth volunteers decide the liability isn’t worth it. The adults who are most conscientious about boundaries—the ones who would never harm a child—are precisely the ones most likely to be deterred by the threat of a felony charge.

And the predators? They are not deterred by statutory language. They are deterred by the very thing this chilling effect destroys: a community of engaged, watchful adults who know what healthy relationships with kids look like and can recognize when something has gone wrong.

What the Research Actually Tells Us

The irony of a child protection bill that discourages mentoring is profound, because the research on resilience could not be clearer: the single most consistent protective factor for children facing adversity is the presence of at least one stable, supportive relationship with a caring adult.

This finding is one of the most replicated in all of developmental psychology. The landmark Kauai Longitudinal Study, begun in 1955 by psychologists Emmy Werner and Ruth Smith, followed every child born on the island of Kauai that year from birth through adulthood. Nearly a third grew up in poverty or in households marked by mental illness, addiction, or family conflict. Yet roughly a third of those at-risk children grew into competent, well-adjusted adults. The common thread among these resilient children was not wealth, intelligence, or temperament alone—it was connection to a caring adult who believed in them.

Decades of subsequent research have confirmed and expanded this finding. A 2019 meta-analysis by Yule, Houston, and Grych, published in Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, examined 118 studies involving over 101,000 participants and identified supportive adult relationships as a key protective factor across multiple ecological contexts for children exposed to violence. Research from Southwick and colleagues at Yale University has demonstrated that natural mentors—neighbors, teachers, coaches, and other non-parental adults—can enhance resilience, reduce problem behaviors, and decrease delinquency among at-risk youth. A multilevel meta-analysis by Van Dam and colleagues confirmed that both the presence and quality of natural mentoring relationships are significantly associated with positive youth outcomes, with particular benefits for youth who lack other social supports. And a 2026 scoping review of community-based mentoring programs found that mentoring relationships promote resilience by improving social support, interpersonal relationships, emotional functioning, cognitive development, and identity development.

The science is unambiguous: mentoring relationships are a developmental engine that promotes resilience by strengthening social support, emotional functioning, cognitive development, and identity formation. These relationships don’t just help children feel better in the moment. They fundamentally alter developmental trajectories and build the internal resources children need to navigate adversity throughout their lives.

What Good Legislation Would Look Like

None of this means we should abandon the effort to criminalize grooming. Predatory grooming is a distinct and devastating form of abuse that deserves its own place in the criminal code. But the definition must be sharp enough to distinguish predatory behavior from the caring attention every child deserves.

Effective grooming legislation should define the specific behaviors that constitute grooming—such as systematic boundary violations, isolation from other adults, provision of contraband, sexualized communication, or exploitation of authority—rather than relying on vague terms like “entice” that could describe a mentor inviting a student to a college visit. It should set a higher threshold than “two or more instances” for establishing a pattern, recognizing that meaningful relationships inherently involve repeated contact. And it should include explicit safe harbor provisions protecting bona fide mentoring, teaching, coaching, and youth development activities.

The goal should be a statute that makes prosecutors’ jobs easier when pursuing actual predators while making mentors’ decisions easier when deciding whether to invest in a struggling kid. Right now, HF 3489 risks doing the opposite on both counts.

The Mentor We Can’t Afford to Lose

Somewhere in Minnesota right now, there is a teacher who stays after school to help a student with a chaotic home life work through algebra problems. There is a coach who noticed that a quiet kid on the team hasn’t been eating lunch and started bringing extra sandwiches. There is a youth group leader who talks quietly to a teenager whose parents are going through a divorce.

These adults are doing the most important work in child protection, even though they’d never describe it that way. They are weaving the relational safety net that catches children before they fall. They are the “one caring adult” that six decades of resilience research tells us can change the course of a life.

We owe it to every survivor of grooming to give them real legal tools. But we also owe it to every child who needs a mentor to make sure that the laws we write don’t frighten away the very adults those children are counting on.