In the last two weeks, debate has roiled in online feminist discussions about whether Lena Dunham’s descriptions of interactions with her sister when they were children constitute abuse. Many experts and researchers on child development, abuse, and human sexuality have reported that the behavior Dunham described was within the range of normal for children. Even so, some survivors of sexual abuse say they were traumatized by similar experiences as children. Their stories must not be discounted, either. But the willingness to declare Dunham a criminal feeds into a punitive narrative that disproportionately puts children of color at risk—all while being unlikely to substantively affect Dunham herself.

When people use the term “child molestation” to describe Dunham’s account of something she did when she was seven years old, or later as a teenager, they’re applying adult standards of criminality and intent to a child’s behavior. Yes, children can be creepy and inappropriate. That’s why adults work to teach them to do better. That’s why we don’t generally hold adults legally or morally responsible for things they do as children. It’s a sound practice, one that the accumulated weight of medical and scientific evidence supports strengthening and affirming.

And as unlikely as any of this debate is to seriously affect Lena Dunham, the kind of zero-tolerance rhetoric being used to judge her past action plays into an overarching paradigm that encourages us to treat children—more often children of color—as adults. Explicitly branding Dunham as a sexual abuser goes against everything we know about how children develop and the best practices for guiding them toward having better personal boundaries; flying into rages and suggesting that they should be railroaded into the criminal justice system doesn’t serve anyone well.

In too many cases, the justice system already often treats children as adults. Zero-tolerance policies have created a school-to-prison pipeline—primarily for children of color, poor children, children with mental illness or developmental disabilities, and children with an LGBTQ sexual or gender orientation. The effects of early incarceration are usually far worse than the immediate consequences of the impulsive, juvenile behavior that can land a child in the penal system in the first place. Furthermore, in cases of more severely transgressive actions, white children who misbehave often receive counseling or rehab. Children of color, meanwhile, get jail time instead of the help or second chances that they, too, deserve.

Criticisms of Dunham do not occur in a vacuum; they are part of an overarching dynamic of punishing juveniles that leaves children of color in particular peril. With recent studies finding that police and some other adults are inclined to see Black children as less innocent than white children of a similar age, it’s not white children like the Dunham girls who stand to lose, or have lost, the most from the further criminalization of youthful misdeeds.

Meanwhile, the conservative who started this fight, a man who also believes that women who get abortions should be hanged, is a political writer hired to generate controversy; his actions come as little surprise. But given that he would condemn one in three women to the gallows over abortion, I can’t understand why any feminist would give weight to his opinions.

It’s disturbing, too, to see social workers fanning the flames of a Twitter campaign to #DropDunham from all her professional endeavors and throwing their weight behind theoretically increasing the disciplinary power of service agencies. For example, one widely quoted social worker has stated that Dunham should have been “indicated for sexual abuse” for masturbating in bed as a teen while her sister was asleep nearby. This might seem like a neutral opinion, unless you’ve considered the effects of Child Protective Services on non-white communities in the United States.

It’s important to remember that the attention of social service agencies is unevenly distributed, as are their interventions. Like society at large, CPS interventions demonstrate biases along racial lines, penalizing families of color more often and more harshly.

In some Native American communities, so many children have been taken away that it looks like cultural genocide. The Lakota People’s Law Project notes that the state of South Dakota removes Lakota children from homes at far higher rates than white children, and then places upwards of 90 percent of these children in white homes. Native communities have long protested the fact that their children can be kept away from safe, caring homes with extended family solely on grounds that can include children having to share a bedroom with another child.

Many of those Native children were taken away in the first place because of poverty categorized by the state as “neglect.” Neglect is similarly cited as the most common reason for removals of Black children, who are taken from their families up to ten times as often as white children in some places. While some claim that these standards are objective, too often “neglect” simply means “poor” and/or “not white.”

Furthermore, if it is sexual abuse for a child to ever touch his or her own body in the same room as a close family member whom the child believes to be asleep, millions of American households contain at least one offender. Expanding the definition of sexual abuse into meaninglessness by criminalizing what many individuals and child development experts have said is normal behavior, is a real danger to families subject to closer scrutiny by social services. After all, if CPS were to be granted more power, the effects of that increased authority would not be likely to make a difference in families like Dunham’s.

So when I wonder how the mass removal of children from communities of color could be allowed to continue, and then see social workers spouting alarmist opinions about childish exploration within the medically accepted normal range of behavior, it makes more sense how that happens. It’s still horrifying.

In a society set up along our existing racial caste lines, we can’t expect a fair blowback to moral panics. This kind of witch-hunting is not going to stop at the doors of quirky, white co-sleeping families or worsen our opinions of Brady Bunch reruns. Nor is it going to stop at those of disciplinarian, white, Christian families who share tips on how to avoid having their kids taken away for beating them with belts, either. Not that there’s much need. Just being a white, Christian family is generally ample protection against that.

No, the harm of adopting this online freakout as our new standard of medically unsound morality is going to further hit families whom social services and the justice system already target. It’s going to knock at homes that don’t want or can’t afford a separate bedroom for each child, or can’t disguise their poverty. That will be true even if Dunham loses a partnership over the next few months.