This thread is a direct follow-up to
CHILDHOOD SEXUALITY III: PERSONAL (itself following on
CHILDHOOD SEXUALITY I: LEGAL and
II: MORAL). While reading the other threads is not prerequisite to participating in this one, the discussion is somewhat developmental.
CAUTION: I intend this to be a NAMBLA-free thread. If you wish to discuss this group or their agenda, go here. If you wish to discuss the Curley case (in which they were being defended by the ACLU), go here.In discussing childhood sexuality, age of consent, and "child sexual abuse" (CSA), there are three areas to be addressed: the legal, the moral, and the psychological. In this thread, I'd like to look at the psychological impact of CSA. In the previous thread, I outlined why I became interested in the subject and, perhaps, indicated some of my own bias.
A few things which need to be understood in relation to childhood sexuality, some of which has been addressed in the previous threads, especially regarding relations between adults and adolescents or children: just because an act is illegal does not mean it is necessarily morally wrong; just because an act may be deemed morally wrong, does not mean that it is necessarily harmful. When the Rind Report was released in 1998, there was such an outcry (outlined in
Thread I of this discussion) that it received not only unprecedented congressional condemnation, but also a disclaimer from the very journal which published it, the
Psychological Bulletin, which included the assertion that CSA "should never be considered harmless". The
Bulletin and the American Psychological Association (APA) which publishes it, also ignored one of the Rind Report's most important recommendations: that abusive sexual behavior should be distinguished from non-abusive (or consensual) sexual behavior.
As to whether adult/child relations are always necessarily harmful, the APA's position does not have much support. One of the most important observations about CSA, to me, appeared as long ago as 1975 in David Walters'
Physical and Sexual Abuse of Children: Causes and Treatment. In that work, he identified lasting psychological harm as a result of the prevailing myth of "abuse" and further stated that what harm might be experienced was often due to
extrinsic factors:
"Most of the psychological damage, if any, stems not from the abuse but from the interpretation of the abuse and the handling of the situation by parents, medical personnel, law enforcement and school officials, and social workers."
One of the earliest child advocates, David Finkelhor, has published widely on the subject. More than twenty years ago, however, he proposed that the prohibition of adult/child sexual behavior should be founded on
ethical rather than scientific arguments
because justification based on psychological harm lacked empirical support. According to an article he wrote for the
American Journal of Orthopsychiatry in 1979, "it is possible that a majority of these children are
not harmed".
In a review of twenty-five studies in 1985, J.R. Conte concluded that "a review of the literature describing the effects of sexual abuse on children leads irrefutably to the ambiguous conclusion that sexual abuse appears to affect some victims and not others". In a review of twenty-eight studies in 1986, Finkelhor found that less than 20% of "victims of abuse" evidenced serious psychopathology. In a review of forty-five studies in 1993, Finkelhor was still advocating the condemnation of adult/child relations on ethical grounds because so many "victims" of such "abuse" displayed
no symptoms. As they found that up to 49% of such "victims" suffered no harm whatsoever, the evidence of harm should be ruled out because "there are too many sexually abused children who are apparently asymptomatic". He also noted with concern that non-professional child advocates tend to exaggerate the harmful effect for political purposes as this did not appear to be a constructive approach.
In a 1994 book,
What You Can Change and What You Can't, by past APA president, Martin Seligman, the case for CSA being "a special destroyer of adult mental health" is declared "far from proven". Seligman concludes that "the case for childhood trauma - in anything but its most brutal form - influencing adult personality is in the minds of the inner-child advocates. It is not to be found in the data". In 1995, E. E. Levitt and C.M. Pinnell published an article which asserted that, in their review of the literature, the link between "abuse" and psychopathology "lacks empirical verification".
In 1997, Bruce Rind and Philip Tromovitch conducted a review of seven studies, based on clinical samples, and found that CSA "is not associated with pervasive harm and that harm, when it occurs, is not typically intense". Their study (with Robert Bauserman) a year later, essentially confirmed their earlier findings - but on the basis of fifty-nine non-clinical studies - the largest such analysis ever undertaken.
So why did this report in particular reap the whirlwind and end up in a congressional resolution of denunciation? After all, it merely reiterated a consensus which had been forming for more than twenty years - even among child advocacy professionals. Well, there are several reasons. First, the evidence was more conclusive than in any previous study - and the Rind Report analyzed
more studies than prior analyses; they were drawing from the largest sample to date. Second, their study was primarily non-clinical - i.e., their sample was drawn from the general public (primarily college students), not just those whose "abuse" was reported in the context of therapy. Third, they suggested that, on the basis of their research,
distinctions should be made between types of sexual behavior involving adults and younger partners (and child advocates must disregard the fact that they made this recommendation in an effort to more easily identify and curb cases of abuse). Worst of all, their report indicated that in the non-clinical population, not only were incidents of "abuse" not always harmful, many of the subjects - especially males (like myself) - actually found the "abuse" to be pleasurable and recall it as a positive experience! Oh,
horror!!!For these reasons, the Rind Report was an enormous threat to both the absolutist cause of child advocacy as it has been fought since its inception and the coffers of the professional psychiatric community itself. Before looking at the reaction of the lobbyists, let's look at the evil Report itself.
I should mention here that I have a working background in public opinion analysis (for Louis Harris & Associates, among others) and market research (for Irish Market Surveys, among others) and currently work as a research specialist for one of the six major media conglomerates. I am currently a statistical analyst by profession. The "flaws" which have been publicized in the Rind Report are almost entirely in the
extant studies which Rind, et al. were reviewing. They
identified these shortcomings themselves and
weighed them in their analysis. Other "flaws", such as some of the studies containing data which others lacked were also duly weighed in the report. Most of their data was drawn from studies done with college students. Student responses in other types of studies were compared with national probabilities in the same areas to identify any key representative departures from a broad demographic norm - and those differences were also weighed in the final review. Speaking professionally, the Rind Report is one of the most scrupulous works of statistical analysis I've ever come across. I wish the people I'm working with were half as good.
Foremost, the Rind Report was free of the usual sampling bias. Most previous studies and all previous reviews had been based almost exclusively on clinical and legal samples - which is hardly representative of the population at large. "Proof" that masturbation caused mental disease was once based on the observation that institutionalized psychiatric patients masturbate. Until recently, investigations into CSA were about as disciplined - and no more sound.
The Rind Report also screened the studies in question prior to analysis. Only those studies which had key questions in common were compared, with the adjustment variance factored into their final results. They also filtered the data on the basis of demographics - comparing, say, the reactions of those who had sexual experiences between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, rather than lumping together the experiences of everyone between infancy and "adulthood" - or, in looking at coercive sexual encounters, only those who reported "unwanted" experiences were collated, rather than analyzing their reactions on the basis of all respondents who ever had
any sex before their official majority.
I should point out that the data I'm quoting is selective (as is that of the opponents of the Rind Report - though we tend to be looking at the same things). The
bulk of the report has to do with demographic breakdowns: age at which CSA occurred, the nature of the "abuse" (exhibitionism, fondling, oral sex, intercourse), the extent of incest involved, duration, level of force, frequency, gender breakdown, etc. And the
intent of the report was to better define "abuse" and its effects. The controversial aspects of the study - on which both myself and the report's critics are focusing, are almost incidental to the main thrust of the study. Indeed, some of the most interesting "findings" are simply in the re-publication of existing reports. Below, then, are some of their findings which I find most noteworthy.
The most interesting result of the study is the extent to which gender seems to affect the reaction. In short, males are much less likely to have a negative reaction to CSA than females. Until the Rind Report, it was generally assumed that the impact would be equivalent between both sexes (though this did ignore studies which had already been published).
For example, the Landis Report of 1956 produced these self-described effects (and my own reactions would fall with the majority in each instance):
Time to recover - male:
no shock = 68%; little/no = 10%; days to years = 22%; never = 0%Time to recover - female:
no shock = 25%; little/no = 17%; days to years = 51%; never = 3%Damage to emotional development - male:
none = 81%; temporary = 19%; permanent = 0%Damage to emotional development - female:
none = 66%; temporary = 30%; permanent = 3%Another interesting indicator had to do with gender combined with age. The meta-analysis found that in terms of the child or adolescent being Encouraging, Passive, or Resistant, there was a big difference between the pre-pubescent and young teens - especially in girls. In children aged eleven or younger, 52.3% of males (like me) were Encouraging, but only 13.4% of females. In twelve- to fifteen-year-olds, though, 70.3% of males were Encouraging and 69.0% of females.
Fifteen of the studies examined actually asked whether the reaction of the "victim" was Positive, Neutral, or Negative - including one of Finkelhor's. Again the gender difference in terms of the results is compelling evidence that boys and girls have very different reactions to "abuse":
Male:
Positive = 37%; Neutral = 29%; Negative = 33%Female:
Positive = 11%; Neutral = 18%; Negative = 71%I must say that I, personally, was somewhat relieved to discover that my reaction to childhood sex with an older partner, at least on the basis of the most comprehensive study yet done, was shared by 37% of those who have had such experiences - and that, indeed, there was more positive response to such encounters than negative - for boys. I would've thought that this might have been of interest to the social scientific community as well. But rather than the study prompting further research into gender and age, it prompted
"WHAT!!! HOW DARE YOU REPORT THAT ANYONE FIND CHILDHOOD SEX A POSITIVE EXPERIENCE!!! HOW DARE YOU REPORT THE FACTS!?!?!?!"Next I'd like to look at
why Rind got such an untoward reaction. But I have to pause here 'cause I'm getting tired - as, I'm sure, is anyone who's read thus far. Maybe people would like to respond to some of the findings of the Rind Report before moving on...