Re: Um... maybe I'm not as smart as all of you

I will agree with Baldur and Dante that sheltering children from the existence of meanness/evil/cruelty, even after the time when they start to interact regularly outside the immediate family, doesn't help them. I will also agree that the capacity to marvel is not childish, not related to naivete or inexperience about evil in the world, and can be present together with adult age or lacking any overtly "magical" thinking.

And I will still argue that sexuality has nothing to do with it, ultimately.

Why would a child discovering pleasurable feelings in their own body, or sharing such activities with someone else, for mutual pleasure and showing of love, be part of that evil? What is evil in that? Everything that there is to it, is some sense of inappropriateness that society believes, but I don't see any kind of ethical violation there. Sure, I see an ethical violation in sexual abuse, but really, sexual abuse is but a subset of physical and psychological abuse, when you get down to the root of it. If it is not abusive, I don't see the evil.

So I wouldn't see a sexually active child, who shared their body and its pleasurable feelings with their freely chosen partners, child or adult, as any less innocent, in the sense of naivete against evil, to a child who had no concrete, conscious idea of sexuality. Indeed, the most common awakening to evil of such a child comes when someone else decides about their life and intervenes to split the child from their lover. That is a loss of innocence in the sense you mean. Not the sexual activity.