Debate Guide: Profound and lifelong scarring

Child sexual abuse is unique, in that it almost invariably leads to lifelong mental scarring. This harm is intrinsic. They/we are victims for life.

This is a generalization from what appear to be extraordinary (but highly visible) cases:

In some cases, notably the unwanted and/or coerced/cajoled activities (but not always), the younger partner will go on to suffer in some way they believe is connected to the assault or voluntary sex. This is also more likely if a young person is coerced into something they are uncomfortable with, because of an adult's abusive authority - although this may also be the case between adults.

However, where this argument ultimately fails, is that trauma (and/or the perception of being a life-long victim) is not specific to sexuality, even if it does relate to the prevailing sexual attitudes, mores and power status of minors. Subsequent memories can be exacerbated by the long-lasting memory of an experience that an individual is repeatedly told to view as dirty, shameful and profound. Understandably, this can lead to mental disturbances and depression, as can the stigma of masturbation, or even non-sexual events such as having been the sole survivor of a tragedy that took the lives of loved ones.

None of this implies that any form of willing physical contact/pleasure has a high innate capacity for harm, let alone life-long mental scarring. You could even say that what we are seeing is a social construct of abuse trauma fulfilling its own prophecy in the minds of victims, or at the very least exacerbating fundamentally harmful abuse.

This is something that any good-meaning victim advocate should be minded to investigate the possibility of, since we know from studies that the perception of ones own experiences as abusive or non-abusive is a major modifier of outcome. From this, we can conclude that changes in broader social perceptions and the promotion of youth agency over traditional authority relationships will reduce the prevalence of negative outcomes.

Challenging social perceptions of your own lived experiences

One way of overcoming bad memories may be to challenge the sex - negative foundations upon which the value judgments and feelings of shame are based. Your lived experiences are a passive vector of society's own guilt and shame; this is not a burden for you to carry. As any fair-minded therapist would tell you, carrying that burden would be doing yourself a disservice and potentially making positive relationships impossible for the rest of your life. Therapists who encourage clients to identify as perpetual victims (and therefore perpetual clients) are probably "on the grift"; there are numerous, more visible examples from history.

"Adaptive" argument

Trauma is an evolutionary adaptation against underage sex.

The evolutionary argument appears to be a rather thin rationalization of modern day antisexualism.

To humor that argument, we could ask why this trauma would delay its onset by 5-10 or more years, as famously claimed by victimologists every time they are stumped by harmless voluntary sex between minors and adults. When a dog bites you, or you hit yourself on a rock, the pain response (and disincentive) is immediate. However, when we look at the data concerning CSA, it appears that whenever researchers push the recall widow out yet further, there is no evidence of even delayed trauma. And by the time we had pushed that window all the way out to the end of life, there was still no evidence!^[1]

We should also question how this "disincentive response" appears to have evolved in the relatively short period (2 centuries, and a few generations) in which anti-sex attitudes concerning youth have become widespread in some societies. If this is in fact a longer-term genetic trend, how did all the great civilizations routinely practicing/institutionalizing these acts even survive to prosper and defeat other civilizations?

Excerpt Graphic Library

The EGL on Harm has some relevant information. Just right click/save and reproduce by uploading in short-form media to bypass character limits.

Basic Rind Paradox infographic
Summarized Rind findings
Rind and Tromovitch (2000) on Iatrogenic Harm
Research pointing to no intrinsic harm profiled in The Guardian
What victimologists say about youth perception + admissions of iatrogenic harm
Self-perception: Importance
Some reading on secondary harm and perception/situational variables
More secondary harms
Intrinsic vs secondary harm
Daly's 2021 repetition of Rind (1998), finds that self-perception is far more important that abuse status
Lahtinen Report: Most common reason for not reporting - event not serious enough
Stander et al. showing low perception of actual abuse among nominally "abused" Naval Recruits.
Bender. Sexologist's observations in 1969
College outcomes: Benefits of college samples
LGBT outcome/perception data (links to papers in this release)
Arreola 2009 - Psych outcomes for LGBT "CSA" identical to no sex
Simpler way of expressing Lesbian outcomes (ref to modern feminism)
Further distillation of Rind's Kinsey analysis
Finnish Victimization Survey
Finer analysis of Finnish Victimization Survey (Rind)
General reading on intrinsic harm
Oellerich on the self-fulfilling prophecy of iatrogenic harm
Oellerich comments further on iatrogenic harm
CSA harm was known to be confounded even before Rind
No "typical" CSA reaction or "syndrome"
Rind on methodological issues/limitations of victimology
The Lanning (1992) report - full of hysterical conjecture, nevertheless describes the "most common" forms of offender and victim in banal terms that are applicable to most relationships (in order to prepare investigators to pathologize banality)
Percy Foundation review of Chloe Taylor: "Foucault, Feminism, & Sex Crimes"
2022 debate response
Illinois state investigation finds a "pedophile" was his victims' "best friend"