The impact of pedosexual contacts

Thesis

The main cause of negative impact of sexual abuse is the trauma caused by unwanted, uncontrollable, unpredictable experiences.

Justification

The thesis is a prediction about the main cause, in other words, about the first order effects. It does not exclude different lower order effects which are as far undetected. It is the null hypothesis in two directions: First, it predicts no difference between adults and children - for adults, unwanted sexual experiences are harmful too. Second, it makes no difference for between different types of unwanted experiences - physical or sexual violence.

1. There is strong evidence that unwanted pedosexual contacts (sexual abuse) have various negative impact.
2. The negative impact of sexual abuse is of the same order as the negative impact of other forms of negative childhood experiences, especially physical abuse and neglect.
3. Despite a lot of research during the last years, negative impact of volitional pedosexual contacts remains unproven. This failure to establish any harm, compared with the strong evidence for negative impact of sexual and physical abuse and neglect, suggests that the hypothesis of harm caused by volitional sex is simply false.
4. There is high comorbidity between various types of negative impact of sexual abuse.

Predictions

This thesis explains most negative impact by a single cause - the trauma of unwanted childhood experiences. Thus, it is very simple and should be preferred by Occam's razor. It is the null hypothesis about the differences between children and adults: what is harmful for adults - unwanted, uncontrollable, unpredictable experiences - is harmful for children too. It is also the null hypothesis about the type of unwanted experience - physical violence is as harmful as sexual violence.

Of course, the thesis gives only a first approximation. There may be other, second order effects. Current research seems unable to detect these lower order effects.

Nobody denies that nonconsensual sexual experiences may be harmful, especially for children. But in the abuse literature, we can often find statements that also consensual experiences can cause such diseases. I have started to look into the related medical literature to find out if these statements are correct. My literature research is far from being complete, but up to now in coincidence with the assumption that consensual sex is not harmful. The results of this research you can find here.

Special Considerations

Is there not enough research about volitional relations?

We observe an absence of results about negative impact of volitional sexual relations. But there is no reason to assume that there has been not been enough research in this domain.

Instead, the leading abuse specialists know the problem, and they know about the political importance of this problem (see, for example, Finkelhor's response to Bauserman (1990)). They have had an interest to find such negative impact.

Moreover, most of the original research data, of course, would have allowed to make conclusions about volitional relations too. The fact that there are no results about the harm of volitional sexual relations is therefore strong evidence that no such harm exists.

That's why I don't see any necessity for further research. The thesis of negative impact of volitional sex with children is a hypothesis without any empirical base, it is a presupposition based on anti-sexual ideology.

The value of research which mixes volitional and unwanted sex

Some part of the research mixes volitional and unwanted sexual contacts. This is a strong methodological failure. In any case, even if volitional sex is harmful too, the mechanism of harm and the probable impact would be probably different. According to our assumption, such research underemphasizes the impact of unwanted sex, because the really harmful unwanted sex is mixed with harmless volitional sex. In the average, the harm caused by unwanted ses looks less serious.

Some of this research ignores the use of force and coercion, but considers other dependencies (age, intensity, incest or not, gender, ongoing or not). Now, it is easy to guess that the probability of unwanted sex vs. volitional sex increases if the power difference becomes greater, thus, for incest and for girls. Of course, ongoing and more intense unwanted sex causes more harm.

Thus, for such mixed research we predict: In the average, it shows less harm compared with the studies about unwanted sex only. They show more harm for girls, for incestuous relations, for ongoing relations, for more intense relations.

I hope, this collection ordered by disease may be useful for various people. not only for the verification of this hypothesis. There is a long list of possible harmful outcome of sexual abuse. It seems necessary to consider every such topic separately. Here are some of them there I have already found something:

• 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.