Now, let's talk history.
Lets jump back only a few hundred years. For a long time the fear of 'witchcraft' was curbed by a few factors - (1) witchcraft was not universally associated with the devil, (2) the Catholic Church did not endorse the notion that God would allow witchcraft to have any real power, and (3) inquisition into such matters would frequently become fixated on the sexual practices of individuals in the community, which no one much wanted investigated too deeply.
But in the late 1400s, some witch hunters were seeking endorsements from the Catholic Church. Witch-hunter Heinrich Kramer was given the Pope's blessing to hunt witches in Germany, particularly to address fears that *some* practitioners of witchcraft sought to "ruin and cause to perish the offspring of women" - the Church still recognized that not all witches were evil or capable of harm, but began to allow that *some* were, and that those individuals would be focused on converting or hatming their community's children.
With help from Jacob Sprenger (who later condemned Kramer) Kramer eventually published a lengthy and detailed conspiracy theory called the Malleus Maleficarum. It appropriated a pseudo academic tone and pushed the belief that *all* witchcraft was intimately tied to the devil, and therefore *inherently* evil, and that it could do real harm to people, justifying an actual response from legal authorities. He also devoted an entire chapter to identifying its main practitioners: women.
According to Kramer, society of his time was rife with sin (the present in any western society is always the most sinful time ever), and this was due to the corrupting influence of women, who were 'faithless', 'weak', 'carnal' 'filth' who were prone to seduction by the devil and would seek to spread the diabolical corruption to every corner of society.
So, the children were imperiled by the sexual corruption of women. Particularly those women who did not get on well with their husbands, or those who eschewed marriage altogether, preferring the company of other women. Some men could be a threat, too, but logically it was those few who were simlar too women, men perceived in someway to be effeminate.
Kramer's superficially ayuthoritative rantings resonated well with Europeans' pervasive need to be afraid of something/someone, and contributed to a centuries long attempt to purge certain types of women and men from society, for the sake of the children.
If you want a case study on this, study the Salem witch trials in detail. Everything about them bridges the traditions established by Kramer to the modern anxieties about the corruption of youth.
Although fears of witchcraft subsided with Europeans' move away from religious zeal, the fear that certain individuals were prone to corrupting and abusing children persisted. These fears were in full force when Adolf Hitler (1925) declared that,
Our whole public life today is like a hothouse for sexual ideas and simulations. Just look at the bill of fare served up in our movies, vaudeville and theaters, and you will hardly be able to deny that this is not the right kind of food, particularly for the youth...Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political, and cultural idea.
That line from Mein Kampf led on to Hitler back-stabbing his gay bestfriend and Heinrich Himmler (1937) taking this stance on homosexuality within his SS:
There are those homosexuals who take the view: what I do is my business, a purely private matter. However, all things which take place in the sexual sphere are not the private affair of the individual, but signify the life and death of the nation... I have now decided upon the following: in each case, these people will naturally be publicly degraded, expelled, and handed over to the courts. Following completion of the punishment imposed by the courts, they will be sent, by my order, to a concentration camp, and they will be shot in the concentration camp, while attempting to escape.
Of course, I hope most of us remember that did not stop with the ranks of the SS. Ostensibly over concerns of maintaining Germany's population growth, 90,000 men were arrested for homosexuality and between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps. Clearly, sending a man to a concentration camp does not improve the pace of the nation's reproduction, but (in their minds) it protected younger, more impressionable minds from his corruption.
This is exactly what is meant by "grooming" and exactly why the word is so gut wrenchingly offensive to hear being casually thrown around now. The concept has been a core component of European persecution of homosexuals for hundreds of years (if not longer).
"Grooming" has been the recurring justification for rounding up, trying, and castrating, imprisoning, or executing gay people.
and 
is basically this.
