Research: Youth sexuality

Sexual activities among minors do not tend to damage participants. Whilst they play an important part in learning, their diversity refutes the common myth of "childhood sexuality" and "innocent sex play".

• Larsson, I. & Svedin, C. G. (2001). "Sexual experiences in childhood: young adult's recollections," Arch Sex Behav, 31(3):263-73

  In a 2002 study of 269 Swedish students, 30% of those who had a sexual experience with a peer before the age of 13 assessed the activity as having had a positive effect on them as an adult, 66% thought it had no positive or negative effects, and 4% reported a negative effect. Except one, all of the subjects who reported a negative effect were involved in coercive activities.

• Martinson, Floyd M. (1973). Infant and Child Sexuality: A Sociological Perspective. The Book Mark.

  "By twelve years of age, approximately one boy in every four or five has tried at least to copulate with a female and more than ten percent of preadolescent boys experience their first ejaculation in connection with heterosexual intercourse, according to Kinsey. Ramsey reported that about one-third of his sample of middle-class boys had attempted sexual intercourse."

• Ford. C. S.. & Beach. F. A. (1951). Patterns of sexual behavior, p. 197. New York: Harper & Row.

  "As long as the adult members of a society permit them to do so, immature males and females engage in practically every type of sexual behavior found in grown men and women." (Cited in Levine, 1996)

• Levine, J. (1996). "A Question of Abuse," Mother Jones.

  "What's wrong with these things? "They make parents nervous," says Allie Kilpatrick, a social work professor at the University of Georgia who conducted a massive review of the literature on childhood sexual experiences, both wanted and unwanted, and administered her own 33-page questionnaire to 501 Southern women. Most of Kilpatrick's subjects had kissed and hugged, fondled and masturbated as adolescents, and more than a quarter had had vaginal intercourse. Her conclusion: "The majority of young people who experience some kind of sexual behavior find it pleasurable, without much guilt, and with no harmful consequences." A similar study of 526 New England undergraduates revealed "no differences...between sibling, nonsibling, and no-[sexual]-experience groups on a variety of adult sexual behavior and sexual adjustment measures."