Being fiercely protective of minors is not a virtue if your ‘protection’ consists of

• patronising: denying their agency, treating every teenager like a delicate flower with the innocent mind of a new born child,
  shaming them for experiencing their own bodies in any sexual way.

• invalidating: talking over their feelings, claiming that what felt right to them can not have been right because it did not fit your description of what a minor should experience.
• simplification: meaningless absolutist statements about age differences, useless predator vs. safe person binaries, stereotypes about what predators look like.,hiding the complexities of power inequalities and relationships from them.
• denying information: not providing access to proper sex education to make informed decisions about their reality. Trying to suppress content that contradicts your simplifications. 

This kind of protectiveness does NOT make minors safer in any way. It creates a world where teenagers grow up with a very unclear definition of what consent means, a lot of shame about having sexual feelings before adults deemed it ‘appropriate’, and most of all it means that minors grow up with an awareness that the people claiming to protect them are either completely out of touch with their reality or purposely lying to them.