I never suggested that protection was not necessary. However, the point is that “symptoms of abuse” are commonly so non severe that it is almost bizarre to conclude that these children must truly have been abused in the first place. To me this is a clear indication that these scientists are (unscientifically) simply clutching at straws in an attempt to cling onto firmly held beliefs, rather than stop to think about changing the beliefs themselves. For example, “excessive masturbation” and “age inappropriate sexual knowledge” are often used to “prove” abuse took place – often up to age 18. Might I be so bold as to suggest that soebody introduced to sex is likely to want to do it again, regardless of age? Also bear in mind that ‘abuse’ may simply be a technicality in which the age of consent has been straddled by months or ‘acceptable age difference’ . Abuse may not necessarily even involve contact, it may be something as simple as instructing a child how to masturbate.

But the other point was that even without taking this into account, we have a whole *third* of cases, potentially thousands of children every year, being coached unnecessarily into believing in their own abuse. And indeed, a whole third of cases in which adults may have been unnecessarily subjected to massively disproportionate punishment. (Of course, it is not *desirable* for children to have sex; risks such as for example STDs or pregnancy are more than sufficient to suggest it should not be a complete free for all.) But IMHO even if these scientists are correct and every one of those children was in some sense abused, it seems astonishing that a whole third of their test subjects actually showed no symptoms at all. Of *course* real abuse takes place and there must be measures to protect from it. The big problem is in clutching at any straw going to “prove” that abuse ALWAYS goes hand in hand with adult/child sexual contact.

I would also reiterate that there is much more to criticise in such studies, not least sampling methods, which tend to be heavily biased – one study used in this particular meta analysis turns out to be of satanic ritual abuse, yet they apply the same conclusions to every child regardless of the circumstances. In fairness to the authors, they do eventually exclude this study, but not before having derived conclusions from it in this way. Another common problem is inherent sample bias – in that, for example, samples are taken of patients who presumably only would have seeked help in the first place as they were suffering. Another problem is that the very fact that legal issues exist in this area also means that samples will always have the tendency to be biased – counter evidence could be out there en masse, yet who’s going to admit to it?

Another famous meta analysis, by Rind et al, which used non-sexual abuse specific studies to information, shows that a very low proportion of the sample rate actually considered their own sexual contact with adults as children abusive. (off the top of my head, I think it was around 1% – I was talking about this polarization earlier, and I suspect this may be an UNDERestimate for various reasons, but not too large of one) This study actually whipped up such a hysterical backlash that it ended up the subject of a vote in the US government, despite being peer reviewed and confirmed solid research through all the appropriate channels. In the aftermath of the 355-0 vote, senators admitted that they felt politically compelled to vote out of favour of the study, against their better judgement. I have no doubt that such horror stories provide a strong incentive for scientists to leave this area well alone, yet provide a comfortable ride for anybody else who wants to have their research recognised.

I actually entirely agree with your sentiment of “thought vs. action”, and of course there is a massive difference between the two. But then, what word do you suggest using for ‘paedophilia’ as a general sexuality? (Nowadays it is basically recognised as such by science, and defiantly so by paedophiles themselves). Is a ‘paedophile’ not somebody who is sexually attracted to children, regardless of their actions? You wouldn’t say somebody “wasn’t straight” because they made the decision to be celibate.

However, I think there is a bigger problem with using ‘paedophile’ just to refer to practicing paedophiles. It is that the general public unfortuantely makes no distinction at all. All they tend to know is that paedophiles plot to selfishly rape, and possibly murder, children. You will find it very difficult to convince the general public that a ‘non-practicing paedophile’ could exist – indeed, if we reserve paedophile for somebody who has sex with children then “non-practicing paedophile” would be self-contradictory. It leaves the public with no conception that paedophiles as a group deserve any leniency whatsoever – and the general public are the driving force behind legislation in this area.

Indeed, even law enforcement overlooks the distinction entirely. It is very common for the police to leverage any tiny excuse as “reasonable evidence” to make arrests and convictions. Sometimes arrests are made on the flimsiest of evidence. Paedophiles are commonly charged for possessing images that, in any other hands, would be counted as entirely legal. Paedophiles are targeted en masse, practicing or not, because according to the law, even non-practicing paedophiles “represent a potential risk”. The attitude is more “guilty until proven innocent” than the other way round.

I actually feel this is a more political thing than anything else – it is pretty much a fact that we will never eliminate child abuse altogether, and a plea to come down “harder than ever” on paedophiles will always be a crowd pleaser. I feel that the problem is while optimising child safety, this tactic (coming down on paedophiles in general) completely ignores the welfare of paedophiles, many of whom, as you rightly say, are quite capable of living within the law. The other problem is that it allows people with extremist views to rise to the top of the police force and engage in a form of what I like to call “legal vigilanteism”.

The other thing is, paedophiles themselves (practicing or otherwise) feel like they have an identity in their sexuality, and tend not to appreciate reading things in the newspaper such as “paedophiles are blackmailing children online” just as much as, say, a black person would enjoy reading about how “african immigrants all carry guns” or an asian that “all asian immigrants commit tax evasion”. Again, I would reiterate, I’m not trying to speak for paedophiles as a group. Paedophiles are distributed like any other group in society, some are hideous monsters and others are entirely normal. I’m speaking up for those in the latter group.

On your first point: with two thirds of children exhibiting symptoms of abuse then clearly this indicates that the protection of children is definitely required.

On the second and third points, I recognize that sexual maturation is hard to determine. The age of consent in Spain is 13 years old but is 16 years old in the UK.

Physically, puberty may start as early as 9 years old and can finish as late as 18 years old; this makes it difficult to legislate the age of consent with any scientific basis.

Each Government necessarily takes a conservative approach and the ages of consent we have in force in now reflect the need to protect the vulnerable.

Finally, on your opening point “One does not have to be ‘practicing’ to be a paedophile.”, I completely disagree. I do think there is a whole lot of difference between between thinking something and practising it.

Put it this way, I think the whole human race would be locked up in prison if you could be convicted of ‘thought crime’.

There is a fundamental, significant, enormous difference between thought and action. This is what makes us as humans.

A non-practising paedophile is not a paedophile.

There are so many angles to cover on the topic of adult/child sex that it would be foolish to try and do so in one comment; Nevertheless, I would mention that there is actually little academic consensus on this topic, and certainly not that adult/child sex always presents a psychological risk, always represents a coersive, manipulative relationship, is never desired by a child, and that the child should never have any accountability. Incredulity towards these ideas is I think largely a product of the fact that in general we only ever hear about terrible cases of child rape or murder, so much so that we try to match arguments to this highly biased set of examples, and the two just don’t seem to line up.

I wish I could sit here and write a comprehensive comment explaining this – unfortunately I know from past experience it would turn into a book! Nevertheless, I would sum up by claiming that a *range* of behaviours takes place, from the rape we regularly hear about in the tabloids, to more “adult-like”, mutually desired experiences. Whether you think that simple desire is enough to overcome more philosophical aspects of abuse such as ability to make a choice or understand the situation is a personal choice. However, I would make the significant challenge that the personal decision you make on this issue should not be as important as the personal decision made on this issue by the child themselves (more of this in a minute).

The problem with defining particular actions, ages, or age differences as abusive is that when a child then comes along and says it wasn’t abusive, we do our best to turn them round and change their mind. A good example of this can be seen in the guidelines issued by our own government, which repeat more than once that children who claim not to feel abused or take accountability for their sexual experiences should be put into therapy until they admit to their true nature, which, according to the booklet, could take “weeks or months”. Potentally, this is not only turning a non-abusive situation into an abusive one (unforgiveably IMHO), but also serves to both reinforce our own opinions that we have successfully identified abuse and should do the same thing for other children. Running with this, I think much of the ‘child abuse’ that occurs is in fact a product of societal attitudes, rather than an inherent result of particular ages or acts.

But you may ask, how do I know that such situations occur? Well, there are two reasons. Firstly, I am familiar with much of the scientific literature on this topic. This is a real minefield, and commenting properly on it would take a while. But in a nutshell, scientific results on this topic tend to be highly polarised. Some studies go out of their way to present results showing children are not always abused by sexual contact with adults, others go out of their way to show that children are *always* abused by sexual contact with adults. I will not get into analysis of either type right now – but I WILL say that both sides consistently present examples of test subjects without symptoms. One meta-analysis from the latter category (Kendall Tackett et al, 1993) and co-authored by one of the most prolific sociologists in the field, reports that 1/3 of the supposedly abused subjects showed no symptoms whatsoever. [Although it is important to note that 'symptoms' typically range down to 'age-inappropriate sexual knowledge' - this study actually has many major flaws, I am having a hard time not writing a lengthy critique. While we're here, it is interesting to note that the authors also found that children in the non-abused control group were less symptomatic than their abused counterparts. They explained this and the 1/3 of non-sympomatic test subjects for various reasons, without so much as considering that it might be their initial hypothesis (i.e. that abuse *must* have occurred) and not the data, that might be incorrect.]

Secondly, I am luckily young enough myself to have spent some time on youth oriented websites in the past, where it becomes particularly clear that many children (by which I mean 11 years old) are not only interested in sex with people significantly older (i.e. 5+ years) than themselves, but some also actively seek it out. In addition, it also becomes clear that many children of such an age are themselves scornful and incredulous towards legal and scientific parties who are trying to tell them their own capacity for handling certain experiences.

With this in mind, I actually believe that in many cases the measures we think we are using to protect children from abuse are in fact fostering it – for example, in this situation by convincing a child they had no accountability for such a situation as described above, we turn situations which might otherwise merely be regretted and used as a learning experience into situations which are abusive.

Another problem is that adults may fall into the psychological trap of (unconsciously) passing away accountability for their own longer-term misfortunes to somebody else. This is actually quite a common pattern – that adults claim to have “enjoyed it at the time” but decades later “now realise it was abusive”. By suddenly “realising” abuse, they can easily gain comfort from the sympathy of others and convince themselves that somebody else is responsible for their personal problems. (Again, there are several other possibilities here which I will not get into now – just to say though, it is difficult to imagine how experiences which are relished for decades can suddenly be recognised as abusive without some third-party driving force to do so). Unfortuantely this turns the situation into a feedback loop whereby the idea that adult/child sex is always abusive is reinforced by the idea that latent development of symptoms is unpredictable. Nevertheless, the idea of taking accountability for example for missed opportunities, failed careers or maybe simply frustration with life in general can be a hard one, and to simply hand over the responsibility for these problems to somebody else seems very tempting, even more so since society is more than willing to encourage and nurture this handover.

A third problem is in fact the age of consent itself – it turns out that by considering distributions we can see that having a strict age of consent law is fundamentally self defeating, in that the higher you set the age of consent, the more you are admitting aren’t actually abused by breaking the law, and that if you wish to protect the majority of children with an age of consent you are actually saying that the majority of illegal cases are in fact non-abusive. This argument also extends to difference in age – the lower you set the maximum legal age difference, the more people you are admitting aren’t actually abused by breaking the law. Nevertheless, we enforce the law as if anything spanning the age of consent is abusive, else it is not.

Even worse, legal constructs such as the age of consent then have the tendency to feed back into science. I think that simply defining ‘child’ using a fixed age actually causes more problems than anybody woudl reasonably imagine. The early sociological research into child abuse avoided specifically defining ‘child’ or ‘abuse’, but implicitly left such definitions to people who felt sufficiently abused to complain about it. Somehow this has by law turned into “if you are under 16 and have sex with somebody over 16, it is abuse, else it is not.”. While this particular definition may not have fed back into science, the idea that abuse can be defined cleanly about particular cut-offs most certainly has.

I could go on writing for a while here… this is only a snapshot, I am very aware of many counter-arguments which I simply have not covered here. Obviously I am not trying to say that adult/child sex never results in psychological damage. But I DO think that society should have a radical rethink over the way in which it thinks about children and ways in which we go about protecting them.