The impact of pedosexual contacts

There are clear differences between public opinion and scientific research. Only one point seems to be correct in the public opinion: there are significant correlations between various negative impact and sexual abuse. But correlation is not cause, and significant does not mean the effect is great.

• The effect size is much lower: CSA accounts only for 0.49% of the adjustment variability for males and 1.00% for females. For comparison, family envorionment accounted for 8.41%
• There is a correlation between sexual abuse and adverse family environment (physical, psychological, verbal abuse, neglect). Therefore, every impact caused by these other types of abuse and neglect leads to correlation between sexual abuse and this impact.
• This explains an essential part of the correlation between sexual abuse and impact. Many significant correlations disappear if family environment and other abuse is controlled.
• An essential part of pedosexual relations, especially with boys, are volitional.
• The remaining impact depends on the quality of the relation (use of force, incest), but much less (not significantly) on sexual variables (duration, frequency, penetration).

My thesisis that the main cause of impact is the trauma caused by unwanted, uncontrollable, unpredictable experiences.

Predictions

If this thesis is correct, the following predictions should be observable:

• Unwanted sexual contacts have negative impact, independent of the age of the prepetrator.
• Comparison with other types of abuse: Physical abuse has comparable negative impact. It seems reasonable to assume that the type of negative impact may be different for different types of abuse.
• There is no comparable negative impact of volitional pedosexual contacts.
• Comorbidity: There should be high comorbidity between different types of negative impact (different diseases) especially with PTSD.

Research Results

In the following files, we compare these predictions with research results:

• General
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
• Bulimia Nervosa
• Borderline Personality Disorder
• Depression
• Dissociation
• Psychic Pain
• Irritable Bowel Syndrome
• Suicide attempts
• Anorexia Nervosa
• Anxiety disorders
• Problems in the school
• Aggression
• Alcoholism
• Drugs
• Homelessness
• Self-esteem
• Self-defeat
• Sexual functioning
• Sexual Assaults in later life
• Prostitution
• Other

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.

See also

• Relation between Child Sexual Abuse and Hypochondriasis
• Multiple Personality Disorder
• impact of force
• gender differences
• mix of rape and volitional sex
• obesity
• pervasiveness
• power difference
• risc factors
• Dependence on Severity