>>510420689
James Cantor, PhD:
>The research is much more consistent with the conclusion that harm is caused instead by coercion, manipulation, secrecy, and by courting kids who already have problems, not the sexual interactions per se.
Michael Bailey, PhD:
>Indeed, the best scientific evidence suggests that the most typical experiences considered childhood sexual abuse may not be as harmful as most people think. Specifically, sexual activity that children engage in voluntarily (albeit illegally) with adults is nearly uncorrelated with undesirable outcomes
Jordan Peterson, PhD:
>Did you know that about 20 years ago the American Psychological Association published a paper showing that most people who were sexually abused as children recovered with very little psychological damage? This is an unsayable truth.
Richard Green, PhD:
>Ultimately, scientists, if no one else, must be objective in their approach to this emotional issue. Judgmental terminology regarding intergenerational sexuality is more dramatic than that in the earlier psychiatric literature on homosexuality. There, patients were labeled perverts and psychopaths. Here, the experience is always abuse, the children are invariably victims, the adults are perpetrators, and those who later report childhood sexual experiences are, without apology to victims of the Nazi Holocaust, survivors.
Bruce Rind, PhD:
>Self-reported reactions to and effects from CSA indicated that negative effects were neither pervasive nor typically intense, and that men reacted much less negatively than women. The college data were completely consistent with data from national samples. Basic beliefs about CSA in the general population were not supported.

>>509554893
You claimed that animals do not engage in sexual activities when they are juveniles, which is not true, and my post was in response to that claim. I made no prescriptive statements in the post you are responding to.

>It's very clear that children are damaged when they are raped
Yes, obviously rape is harmful, but I am not defending rape. Studies confirm that consensual adult-child sex is not correlated with psychological harm. Studies which purport a link between adult-child sex and harm do not account for whether or not the experience was consensual, lack poor statistical controls, and use unrepresentative criminal and psychiatric samples. You can read the following study to learn more:

Rind, Bruce; Tromovitch, Philip; Bauserman, Robert (1998). "A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples", Psychological Bulletin