Negotiating stigma

Negotiating stigma is a doctoral thesis by Terry Leahy, based on nineteen semi-structured interviews with people who, while they were from eight to sixteen years old, were involved in voluntary intergenerational relationships with adults from seventeen to fifty years of age. The interviewees were between ten and more than fifty years old and of both sexes, as were their adult partners. All considered their relationships as positive experiences and were well aware of the fact that they transgressed against the prohibition against intergenerational sex.

In this study Terry Leahy poses the question how they dealt with this transgression, minimizing it, in fact.