LOL. Just sing what you want to.

It's just nursery rhymes (as I call them) and minstrel/blues phrases, but Hugill, that old badmash, stuck in one lecher line ("kissed her hard and proper") in his book and shifted the tone (as was his prerogative). As a personal touch, and as one might do in the moment when ad libbing a chanty, he shifted from the nursery rhyme type lyrics to his favored whore-monger lyrics (from tunes like "A-Roving," where the context establishes there is "consent" for the amorous John to make sexual advances. It's not a fully formed text meant to be read as a whole and analyzed. Did the person who called it a rape song know anything about the song's history?