Harm Caused by Sexual Abuse

Nobody denies that nonconsensual sexual experiences may be harmful for the children involved. There are a lot of descriptions of such abusive experiences which show such negative outcome. And there are a lot of investigations which show a statistical correlation between childhood sexual abuse and various negative outcome.

On the other hand, there is a widely distributed opinion that scientific research has shown also that even consensual childhood sexual experiences are often harmful and highly dangerous. But this seems to be not correct. In addition, the probability and severity of the negative impact of sexual abuse seems overrated, and the role of other factors instead of sexual abuse seems often underestimated.

I have started to look into the related "sexual abuse" literature with the aim to verify these assumtions. My literature research is far from being complete, but up to now in coincidence with the assumption that consensual sex is not harmful (see a summary of the results below).

Special Considerations

• Bulimia Nervosa
• Borderline Personality Disorder
• Hypochondriasis
• Anxiety disorders
• Sexual functioning
• Suicide attempts
• Problems in the school

General Literature

Let's start with the results collected by David Finkelhor:

• Sexually Victimized Children (1979),
• Child Sexual Abuse (1984), especially chapter 12.
• A Sourcebook on Child Sexual Abuse (1986)
• a review of the impact of child sexual abuse by Browne and Finkelhor 1986.
• his Response to Bauserman (1990)

For me, the aim of this research is not only to verify, that there are really no results which establish harm caused by consensual experiences (this has been done already by other researchers), but to allow you to verify this by yourself without going into the library.

I hope, this will be useful not only for people who want to find out if and which harm may be caused by consensual sexual relations, but also by others, like victims of real child abuse who want to find information about possible lasting effects.

I recognize that I have a personal bias - I'm not interested in finding results which show damage caused by consensual sexual experiences. To minimize the influence of this bias on the results, I try to include a lot of the text of the original, and at least the abstract of every relevant paper. This requires a lot of time, much more than simply to verify for myself that there are no "critical" results in a given paper. That's why at the current moment only a small number or papers has been included. But I have not "selected" between "good" and "bad" papers. I know, I cannot prove this until I have included them all, but I hope you believe me in this point.

Summary

• Negative outcome was found for real sexual abuse, not for consensual sexual experiences. There are studies considering consensual sexual experiences as abuse too, and they have found negative outcome too, but this negative outcome may be explained also assuming that only the nonconsensual experiences have contributed to the negative outcome.
• The negative outcome is often correlated with other traumatic childhood experiences too. This gives evidence that it is the traumatic aspect (which is nearly absent in undetected consensual experiences) and not the sexual one which causes the correlation.
• Moreover, the correlation with sexual abuse is comparable with the correlation to such other negative childhood experiences. Thus, a detailed analysis may simply show that the correlation between (real) sexual abuse and other forms of abuse or childhood trauma may be sufficient to cause the correlation with sexual abuse (f.e. Rorty et al. 1994)

Negative outcome is mostly found only for women. Considering the fact that coercion and violence is much more common in man/girl relationships compared with man/boy relationships, this gives additional evidence that only the nonconsensual experiences cause the problems.