Debate Guide: Profound and lifelong scarring

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2022 debate rebuttal to harm argument

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.

External links

References