I don’t know if I actually believe this, but I’ve heard reports that cause me to assign a non-neglible probability on the chance that sexual relations with between children and adults aren’t necessarily as harmful as they may seem. For instance, see the Rind et al. report:
“Child Sexual Abuse does not cause intense harm on a pervasive basis regardless of gender.” Simplified, Rind et al. (1998) found that 3 out of every 100 individuals in a CSA population had clinically significant problems (compared to 2 out of every 100 in a general population).
Rind et al. contended that the degree of psychological damage was based on whether the child describes the encounter as consensual or not.
Similarly, I’ve heard second-hand accounts about people who report that they actually had loving relationships with pedophiles as kids. That didn’t traumatize them, but the follow-up “psychological care”, where the psychiatrists automatically assumed that the experience must have been horrible, did.
It would seem reasonable, on the face of it. There’s no automatic reason for why we should assume sexual relations with children must automatically be harmful and unpleasant to the kids, if not for the cached thought of all sexual relations being abuse. And in the current political climate, just about nobody will have the courage to voice such an opinion in public, so studies such as these should carry extra weight.
A non-neglible probability on the chance that sexual relations with between children and adults aren’t necessarily as harmful as they may seem.
That’s probably the case. In western societies, it’s an orthodoxy, a moral fashion, to say that sex between children/adolescents and adults is bad. This can be clearly seen because people who argue against the orthodoxy are not criticised for being wrong, but condemned for being bad.
I am also “in the closet” on this. Sex is generally pleasurable; postulating a magic age or stage of development before which sex must be traumatic seems implausible on its face, without some other evidence. Coercion and intimidation are well-known to be damaging, but I don’t understand how merely convincing a 10-year-old to let you stick something up her vagina (and then doing it) is going to do any more harm than, say, spanking her. Furthermore, looking at the historical record, the ancient Greek custom of pederasty (sexual/romantic relationships between adolescent boys and adult men) doesn’t seem to have resulted in widespread trauma.
There are very few places in which it would be safe to propose this hypothesis, though.
Not “generally” over the domain in question. The pleasurability of sex is supported by brain-specific hardware that has no particular evolutionary reason to be active before adolescence.
Without taking a stance on the question of child sexuality—what you say is true, but is there any particular selection pressure for it to be off, either? Evolution goes for the simplest solution, and “always on” seems to me simpler than “off until a specific age, then on”.
Of course, that’s an oversimplification. The required machinery may simply not be developed yet, in the same way that you need to first grow to be four feet tall before you can grow to be five feet tall. But then, when you reach the size of four feet, you already have four fifths of your five feet-tallness in place, so it stands to reason that that at least part of what makes sex pleasurable will be in place before adolescence. Whether it’s active is obviously a separate question, but I don’t think “has no particular evolutionary reason to be active” tells us much by itself.
Anecdotal: I don’t remember having the slightest concept of sexual interest in anything before puberty.
Anyone got trustworthy better data, go ahead (but we have reason to suspect political interference, which is why I go so far as to cite my own anecdotal memory).
I personally know one girl whom, when she was 8, actively went into sex chat rooms and flirted with older men (anywhere from 16 to 40). I don’t think she actually had physical sexual experiences with anyone, though.
I personally know two girls who have had sexual intercourse with adults, one when she was aged 5, the other 8. It was rape in the sense that they were explicitly nonconsentual (they explicitly said didn’t want to do it), but it didn’t traumatized them. One theory might be that “doing stuff you don’t want to do, but adults tell you to do, so you do them anyway” is pretty common at that age (e.g. being forced to clean your room).
I suspect the sex act itself isn’t “pleasurable” for them, but having “sexual relationships” with adults may be pleasurable (since the first-mentioned 8 year old sought it out). It may be seen by many of them as a neutral act (like the 5 and second-mentioned 8 year old) and a form of curious exploration.
This is assuming, for lack of a better term, “gentle loving pedophilia”. The way pedophilia is often portrayed by mainstream media is violent rape, with screaming, kicking and blood. While I don’t personally know of any girl who actually experienced “violent rape pedophilia”, I think it’s safe to assume that they don’t find this pleasurable at all.
Personally, there’s a certain fetish that I have, and I remember it causing me erections even before puberty. However, as far as I can recall, the experience didn’t feel like anything that I’d call sexual these days. It was something that was pleasant to think about, and it caused physical reactions, but the actual sexual tension wasn’t there.
I also recall a friend mentioning a pre-pubescent boy who’d had a habit of masturbating when there was snow outside, because he thought the snow was beautiful. (I’m not sure if she’d known the boy herself or if she’d heard it from someone else, so this may be an unreliable fifth-hand account.) If it was true, then it sounds (like my experience) that part of the hardware was in place, but not the parts that would make it sexual in the adult sense of the word.
The staff caring for 251 children aged two to six of both sexes observed the children’s behaviour and then answered a questionnaire on the behaviours they had observed. … A total of 6% of the children had at some time been seen to masturbate and this usually occurred during rests. Masturbation took place “often/daily” in only 2% of the children. In almost every case the staff judged the masturbation to be associated with desire and relaxation on the part of the child and not in any case as painful, while one child was considered to masturbate compulsively.
It does, however, also remark that child sexual abuse often causes sexualized behavior in children, and that very little is known about what is actually normal child sexuality. Interestingly, as it relates to the original topic, it also mentions a study that found one third of abuse victims to show no symptoms at all.
I wonder what kind of controls they had (ha, ha) that let them say that it caused the sexualized behavior, rather than just letting the children know about sex. I mean I was entirely ignorant of sex until I was 12. I knew it existed by reading and hearing references to it, and I had seen Playboys and the like, but I didn’t have any idea of what sex was.
Mostly the same here. I didn’t have any arousal-like physical reactions, though. It was mostly like the tension of roller coasters and scary stories, not sexual tension. Then, a couple years after puberty, my sex drive kicked in (in the space of days), the fetish was found impossible to handle and promptly repressed until a few years later when it could merge normally with my general libido.
From personal experience (which I am unfortunately too nervous about to go into detail about), pre-pubescent sexuality is primarily based on exposure and knowledge of sexuality. Puberty simply forces one to become aware of sex, rather than being a prerequisite for it. Similarly, sexual reactions (erections, orgasm, etc.) are definitely possible pre-pubescence, simply different. This may be an anomaly in my case, I do not have any non-personal data to share.
Although I do know that Alfred Kinsey compiled an extensive body of research on child sexuality obtained from the interview of pedophiles, in particular one pedophile who was highly active and documented his explorations extensively. I have never read this body of research myself, but I thought its existence might be worth pointing out.
Maybe no interest in anything in particular, but what of the sexual gratification itself ? Children do masturbate, it’s a known fact. Though maybe it’s not universal. But the brain-specific hardware seems to be in place already at any rate.
Anecdotal also, I clearly remember watching the same movie (Star Wars) before and after teenage—the sexual tension passed me by completely as a child but was obvious a few years later.
However, I don’t have evidence that I’d not have enjoyed sex. The desire instinct was offline, that’s all I could swear to.
I could be confusing Freudian stuff with real experimental results, but I seem to remember that children go through a stage up until about 6 where they’re somewhat sexual, and then between that age and puberty the sex drive switches off or even into full reverse. This is the reason that young boys tend to think girls have cooties and are gross, and vice versa. It’s evolution’s way of saying “Not yet”.
I can’t find the article now, but an evolutionary-psychology noticed that the “cooties” concept seems to exist across all cultures (though obviously not always given the name “cooties”), and furthermore noticed that children often don’t consider their siblings to have cooties. I.e. boys will feel that most girls have cooties, but not their sisters.
The psychologist offered this as an explanation: We evolved to find the people we grow up with to be not sexually attractive. This is a mechanism to avoid incest (which can result in genetic problems). However, if you live in a society, you don’t want to find people who grow up with you, but who do not share genes with you, to be sexually unattractive (or else you might find no one within your whole society attractive), and thus this “cooties” sensation was placed by evolution so that we can avoid people of the opposite sex during this critical period so that later on, as adults, we may be sexually attracted to them.
Anecdotal: Approximately 30% of the material on Quizilla et al. Whether they’re writing/reading about it solely because they think it’s adult and edgy is a different matter, but there are clearly many children thinking about this kind of thing at the very least.
Considering that, as has been noted elsewhere on this thread, prepubescent children (including infants) self-stimulate their genitals, this seems … ill-founded. Of course, I suppose it depends how much of the pleasure involves romance, which does seem to be restricted to adults; but I somehow doubt you can claim most of the pleasure from sex is due to romance.
I trust my memory of certain things as far back as a few vaguities before age 2 years, and I’ve read other people’s reports, and I conclude that, while children do self-stimulate, it’s typically (but not always) less pleasurable than it is after puberty.
I haven’t read any neurological studies addressing that hypothesis in particular, but of course they could exist and I could be unaware of them.
Hmm, good point—I don’t actually know anything about the topic. Sounds like actual orgasm is impossible without puberty (although note it’s possible way before adulthood.) Still, pleasure is pleasure. Kids wouldn’t enjoy it as much as adults, but some of the adaptations are clearly present—enough for sex to be pleasurable, if not as pleasurable.
Mind you, I personally wouldn’t want to change that particular norm without a great deal of thought and investigation by actual experts. But this particular claim seems to be flawed.
I’ve encountered anecdotes claiming that a form of prepubescent orgasm is possible, if difficult to achieve (especially since most wouldn’t know to aim for it). I’m less convinced of that, but I remember someone actually providing a citation for “utero orgasms in both sexes” (which I assumed to mean while still in the womb).
An aside: I catch myself committing the mind projection fallacy most often when I come across comments that make it very clear people have purged large chunks of childhood from their memory/identity. It takes me a second or so to remember that this makes sense for most people. This has had a weird effect regarding the subject at hand: I’m surprised when I run into adult males talking like they don’t believe boys can get erections, then I’m skeptical when someone else reports that prepubescent males can have orgasms. Noticing the pattern there has me updating in favor of prepubescent orgasm being possible, if difficult.
I find it ironic that ‘notmyrealnick’ got 34 points for this comment. But I suppose there are repercussions other than bad karma for posting unpopular views...
Even if the children themselves after the fact don’t consider the sexual abuse harmful, it may be considered wrong by the humanity as a whole. The babyeaters prefer eating their children, but humans would like them to stop doing that. Drugs addict continues to take drugs even if they lead to decay of his personality and health, but other people consider it a wrong thing to do. Even if it turns out that with (consensually) abused children the moral line is closer to acceptance, I still expect it to be way below the acceptance level.
The babyeater question would be substantially changed if the children didn’t mind being eaten and didn’t take harm by it—more or less from a moral crusade into parochial squeamishness. Eliezer went a long way out of his way to avoid that in the story, but here we can’t dodge it with a rhetorical flourish.
If as it turns out, kids enjoy consensual sex and take no harm by it, on what basis can society consider it wrong? There has to be a reason. Societies can’t just create moral crimes by their say-so.
Edit in Feb 2013: I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem with the above is that children are in an extremely steep power relationship—an artefact of this society, and it’s avoidable, but it can’t be wished away without a huge job of dismantling. Meaning, that right now children can’t even express a preference. “Yes” is meaningless with the ability of an adult to apply pressure that would count as felony kidnapping and torture if done to another adult, with complete impunity and even acclaim. “No” is meaningless when adults have imposed their schemas of asexual innocence willy-nilly over children’s experience, and when they have such huge control of that experience itself, up to and including maintaining “big lies” via censorship.
As such, an age of consent is a damn dirty hack that acknowledges the completely untenable position of children in making a decision that’s true to their intent, while refusing to rescue them from it. It is marginally better than nothing. If it does go, it can’t go first. A lot of rescuing needs to come first.
(Edit) During this entire thread I was misusing the word “coerce.” I meant something more like “entice.” Thanks Alicorn.
If as it turns out, kids enjoy consensual sex and take no harm by it, on what basis can society consider it wrong? There has to be a reason. Societies can’t just create moral crimes by their say-so.
I always assumed that part of the problem is that it is easier to coerce children. If I kidnap a child and do nothing but feed them ice-cream and take them on a tour of the zoo it is still wrong, even if they liked it and no harm was done.
If I seduce a child and do nothing but feed them ice-cream and have sex with them… is it still wrong? Even if they liked it and no harm was done? There are certainly risks involved and assuming things will be okay is naive. But is assuming things will be bad/evil/gross just as naive?
Suppressing the moral gag reflex is hard to do. I do not know if I can answer the question objectively. I know if I had kids I do not want anyone coercing them into having sex.
Well yes, because kidnapping involves taking a child from their parents unannounced, possibly against the child’s will too, possibly also asking for ransom, etc. Those are separate harms that happen even if the child enjoyed the ice-cream and the trip to the zoo.
But what are the separate harms of sex? There are health risks, but they don’t hugely exceed the risks in other common childhood activities such as tree climbing.
I always assumed that part of the problem is that it is easier to coerce children. If I kidnap a child and do nothing but feed them ice-cream and take them on a tour of the zoo it is still wrong, even if they liked it and no harm was done.
No ransom and not against the child’s will. If the reason kidnapping is wrong deals with parental consent, does the same thing apply to sex?
But what are the separate harms of sex?
This is actually irrelevant for the point I was trying to make. Kidnapping, with no harm done, is still very much illegal. Should it be?
Removing a child from a parent is a harm (as witness the panicked parent). It’s not so much a matter of consent, as of making people worry and separating them from their family. The parents have a protective interest in the child, which is harmed by their non-consent to the zoo trip. This is the very thing that makes it “kidnapping” and not “visiting with friends”. It is a separate harm, which is why the distinction I drew is relevant.
BTW, this line of argument doesn’t get you to “no sex”, it gets you to “no sex without parental consent”. Fair enough, now what if they say “yes”?
Removing a child from a parent is a harm (as witness the panicked parent). It’s not so much a matter of consent, as of making people worry and separating them from their family.
If the child is returned before the parent knows they are missing? I am not understanding why the correlation is so hard to see. It is an analogy, not a mirrored situation. Kidnapping is not seducing. There are differences. The original point was that seduction involves coercing children. Kidnapping can do the same thing. So can brainwashing. All three of these (kidnapping, brainwashing, seducing) can produce harm but may not and arguing about exactly when “harm” happens is not really useful. The relevant question is exactly this:
BTW, this line of argument doesn’t get you to “no sex”, it gets you to “no sex without parental consent”. Fair enough, now what if they say “yes”?
I am not arguing for any particular stance. I just saw an interesting correlation between seduction and kidnapping that involved coercion. If I remember correctly, the laws in some states get remarkably relaxed when minors have their parents’ consent. I could not tell you specifics, however. If you find this sort of thing interesting I am sure it is relatively easy to find information about sex with parental consent.
The bottom line: A child will do an awful lot to please someone. Is it okay to coerce them into doing something? Does it matter if they enjoy it? Does it matter if there is harm? Does it matter if they want to do it?
All of this also assumes “seduction” instead of a real, true romance. I would assume that a real, true romance has less coercion. (Or, at the very least, thinks it has less coercion.)
Perhaps we’re being confused by your use of the verb “seduce”, since to me that doesn’t include non-consensual means—it usually implies cunning trickery at worst and goal-directed charm at best. Can you restate without using it?
You can replace the word “seduce” with “get them to have consensual sex with you.” “Get” in the context I am using basically implies “coerce.” The point does rely on the possibility of convincing someone they want the same thing you want. The catch is that such a sexual encounter satisfies the term “consensual sex.” They completely, and of their own volition, consented to having sex.
The original point asks if there is validity in condemning sex with children because they are easy to coerce. In other words, is the criterion of “consensual” too easy to manipulate?
I don’t think the word “coerce” has the right implications here. It sounds like what you’re going for is more along the lines of “entice”. Coercion arguably invalidates consent even with adults.
Enticing would usually mean suggesting the activity is intrinsically desirable, offering a trade, asking pretty please, making a dare, or etc. We’ll assume the child’s mind is changed by the enticement.
I keep coming back to kidnapping because the I think the example fits. I have been trying to avoid getting into super picky details because I consider the details to be obvious. I apologize for being obtuse.
If I stop by the local pool and convince a kid to take a trip with me and feed it ice-cream, take it to the zoo, and then return the kid to the pool before anyone else notices, was the kidnapping wrong? Would you even call it kidnapping?
If someone found out after the fact and charged me with kidnapping, could I use the defense, “But the kid liked it! It was fun and no harm was done!”?
This is from an above comment you made:
Removing a child from a parent is a harm (as witness the panicked parent). It’s not so much a matter of consent, as of making people worry and separating them from their family. The parents have a protective interest in the child, which is harmed by their non-consent to the zoo trip. This is the very thing that makes it “kidnapping” and not “visiting with friends”. It is a separate harm, which is why the distinction I drew is relevant.
You say that the reason kidnapping is wrong is because the parents will worry. Parents worry about all sorts of things and most of them were not made illegal. Many parents would worry if their child was having sex with an adult.
If you really don’t like the example we can just skip to the abstract view. If I consciously manipulate someone into wanting a particular something, can I use their desire as a justification for my actions? Or, if I brainwash them into having sex with me, is it considered consent?
What are the current laws about consent under the influence of alcohol? That also seems relevant. What about people with mental handicaps? The basic point is that “consent” is not a cut and dry excuse. Consent can be manipulated and it is much easier to manipulate consent out of a child than an adult.
This is not an argument one way or the other, but merely asking if consent from children should mean the same thing as consent from adults.
The American Psychiatric Association explicitly states that children cannot give consent. The problem is that children are completely dependent upon adults, and they see any friendly adult as a caretaker, especially if the parent gives permission to be with that adult or there is any physical affection. Individual kids vary in their sophistication, and it depends on the age of the child, but most kids cannot tell the difference between “do this please so I will be happy” and “do this please so I will take care of you / love you / keep you safe”. It just activates the same “I-need-to-listen-for-survival” pathway either way. It is a relevant observation that when a child feels less safe with an adult, they will usually be more agreeable. A first sign of abuse is often lack of agreeability or hostility in response to requests noticed in school.
Is there a special reason the American Psychiatric Association should be considered an authority on ethics? They can inform us of the empirical facts, of which “children who feel unsafe are agreeable” is one, but “children cannot give morally relevant consent to sexual activity” does not follow instantly and obviously from that statement.
But knowledge about the psychology of a creature does not instantly and obviously lead to knowledge about the ethical boundaries around treatment of the creature. I could have encyclopedic knowledge of the empirically observable facts about, say, pigs, without being able to derive from that whether it’s okay to kill them for food. Similarly, the APA is undoubtedly an authority on child psychology. It is not at all clear that they are an authority on the implications that child psychology has for ethics, so while most of your comment was quite interesting, the first sentence was noise.
My entire comment was about whether children can consent or not. I didn’t say anything about ethical implications.
While simply giving the appearance of consent is a plain empirical fact which might or might not have ethical features, it’s obvious that children can utter consent-like words, so I assumed you were talking about consent in an ethically relevant sense. Should I not have assumed that? If you’re not talking about consent as a thing that changes what it is ethically okay to do to somebody, then I don’t know what you’re talking about at all.
Whether children can consent or not to sex is a psychological fact. Just as whether a pig can consent or not to being eaten is a biological fact.
Facts may have ethical implications (and thus ethical relevance which is why your question above is confused). The ability to give consent is not obviously and immediately connected with an specific ethical conclusion, because you can argue that it is ethical to eat a pig even though they cannot give consent. To argue that sex with children is wrong, because they cannot give consent, you need to add the ethical argument that sex without consent is unethical.
Whether children can consent or not to sex is a psychological fact.
I’m really surprised you’d claim that. Even if you could propose an experiment that you think would settle this question of fact, it’s far from clear that everyone would agree that your experiment settled it. To me it’s obvious that whether or not we consider that a given act from a given person counts as consent to something is in large part a question of values, not of fact.
Yes, we do seem to disagree. I think that “ability to do X” is factual. However, I suspect there is ambiguity in what “consent” means, and there is room for inserting values there. But I hold my position, because I think that if you define consent in a meaningful way, kids cannot do that. (For example, if you say consent means to just articulate a set of words, I will gladly abandon the word “consent” for what I do mean.)
I would define consent as (a) understanding what you are agreeing to and (b) freely agreeing.
Psychology is a soft science, surely. Which is why I felt more comfortable quoting an authority in psychology than asserting my own beliefs: I hardly know what counts as evidence or good epistemology in psychology. However, I could think of some experiments to demonstrate that children don’t understand and are not freely agreeing. For example, for the latter experiment, first ascertain what the children’s real preferences are, say, for a specific type of cookie. Then demonstrate that if an adult indicates which cookie choice will make them happy, the kid will choose the adult’s choice at a rate proportional to the perceived power imbalance and inversely proportional to their perceived environmental safety.
To be clear, I think that adult-child sex is extremely unethical.
I am motivated to contribute to this discussion, because I hope I may be able to encourage rational people to adopt a similar view on adult-child sex. However, I am not sure it is emotionally safe or that it would be effective to participate. Certain attitudes and comments on this thread make me wonder if any argument for a position that is not counter conventional wisdom will be summarily dismissed. In other words, there seems to be evidence that “you guys” are not unbiased about this.
Empathy is the source of ethics and is beyond facts and rhetoric. Do you agree?
I don’t agree. I think empathy is to ethics as tastiness is to nutritional content—it’s a reaction that makes us feel good under circumstances conducive to a valuable end and feel aversion to circumstances conducive to deplorable ends, but it’s easily fooled (just as our tastebuds can be fooled by cinnamon buns). We need intuitions and empathy to have a starting point when we talk ethics, but a purely intuitionist morality is inevitably going to be inconsistent and have poor motivations in extreme cases.
It’s obvious that you feel very strongly that adults having sex with children is unethical; you’ve made that abundantly clear. It doesn’t have to follow from that that you are correct, and it definitely doesn’t follow that we can’t consider the question, and I’m sorry to say that you seem to be under the impression that you can’t civilly discuss it with people who don’t share your opinion.
I don’t think anyone is going to read this thread and then find that, because a few people gave some thought to the issue, their qualms about raping children have evaporated. Deep-seated ethical misgivings, legal repercussions, practical concerns, and the simple fact that most people aren’t pedophiles would see to that; anyone who’d be convinced by this thread in favor of actually having sex with children was just looking for an excuse and would have found NAMBLA’s website eventually.
If you cannot stick to solid argumentation in favor of your view (which I suspect is the dominant one—it’s just fashionable in this thread to signal open-mindedness by being cryptic and oblique about the matter) and instead resort to what amounts to shrill, repetitive whining about how unethical we all are, you aren’t “contributing to the discussion” and you certainly are unlikely to make any progress in convincing this particular audience.
All of that having been said, the experiment you describe wouldn’t prove that the children aren’t “freely” agreeing to take the cookie that the adult wants them to take. You can prove that people are likely to incorrectly judge the length of lines when others state incorrect judgments aloud; that doesn’t mean they’re being coerced or that they aren’t free, it just means that humans are social animals. The opinions and wishes of the people around us are important factors in our choices, and it is deeply murky territory when those opinions and wishes turn into coercive power dynamics.
It may be even more surprising to you that I don’t think inability to give consent is a strong argument for why adult-child sex is unethical. However, to be clear, I think that adult-child sex is extremely unethical.
My personal pet peeve in this discussion is that nobody is defining precisely what “adult” and “child” mean.
Teenagers these days are getting thrown in jail (and given lifetime “sex offender” labels) for having consensual sex on the wrong side of arbitrary age lines that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
So, my empathy on this subject is much more solidly with them, and that’s the ethics I’m personally concerned with in this discussion. We may not be able to prevent all the harm that takes place from manipulation and abuse, but I’d like to see some improvement for the innocents who get caught in the crossfire.
agreed. A consequentialist, however, would not necessarily buy this—weighing the harm to innocents on the border versus harm to children nowhere near the border might well favor keeping things as they are. Not that I buy that justification.
Whether children can consent or not to sex is a psychological fact.
Just as whether a pig can consent or not to being eaten or not is a biological fact.
Facts may have ethical implications (and thus ethical relevance which is why your question above is confused). The ability to give consent is not obviously and immediately connected with an specific ethical conclusion, because you can argue that it is ethical to eat a pig even though they cannot give consent. To argue that sex with children is wrong, because they cannot give consent, you need to add the ethical argument that sex without consent is unethical.
I don’t think it this type of quibbling on semantics (for example, a perfectly good meaning of coerce is to compel) is useful to the discourse. When words have variable meanings, you need to use the context to determine the meaning, and request clarification if it isn’t clear.
Elsewhere, there is a discussion regarding using karma to measure the value of individual comments or commentators themselves. I think this entire thread needs adjustment. It is confused and immoral.
Addressing The Confusion
There’s plenty of evidence that sexual relationships between adults and children is harmful. I think the best evidence is first person: painful, emotional, sincere. There is also plenty of scientific/objective/peer-reviewed evidence (see Wikipedia for references).
Reading through the comments in this thread, there appears to be significant confusion regarding why sexual abuse is harmful. Whether adult sex with children is harmful (and wrong) has nothing to do with whether children are interested in sex or not, or whether the behavior is consentual or not. It has to do with facts specific to children: they are completely dependent upon adults, have incompletely formed ideas about character differences among adults (they can naively give an abusive adult the same continued trust as a loving one), incompletely formed ideas about sexuality (they may not care what is done now, but they will develop an opinion later) and the fact that sexual autonomy becomes an important identity issue in their late teens and early twenties, and so it is painful if that has been usurped.
The American Psychiatric Association states that “children cannot consent to sexual activity with adults”, and condemns any such action by an adult: “An adult who engages in sexual activity with a child is performing a criminal and immoral act which never can be considered normal or socially acceptable behavior.” (Wikipedia again.)
It doesn’t matter if it is the experience of some abused children that the sexual abuse was not harmful. As victims, they themselves are allowed to feel however they like about it. Also, using the examples of the ancient Greeks is a common but untenable argument for moral relativism on this issue.
Child sexual abuse is outlawed in every developed country, generally with severe criminal penalties (Wikipedia).
Addressing Immorality
This entire thread is immoral, and some of you are using karma to bond over being assholes.
To defend the full strength of this moral position, it was not immoral to consider the original question. In fact, such questions and nearby questions do need to be considered. Why is the incidence of child sexual abuse so high, given society’s unanimous position on it? As someone who finds it quite possible to sympathize with a pedophile – they have strong biological, psychological and social reasons for their moral confusion – I actually do have constructive things to say in addition to just saying “adult sexual relations with a child is evil”.
The immorality of this thread results from considering a question, considering the evidence, and not arriving at and defending the truthful answer. This thread is immoral – specifically—because it almost exclusively considered evidence in favor of the immoral position, even though such evidence is much more rare and difficult to come by. Any evidence for the moral position was weak or irrelevant. (In particular, all comments about whether children are actually sexual or not.) There is a moral obligation to defend morality wherever you see evil (or evil ideas that would result in evil).
For example: you must consider the very real possibility of confused persons reading this post and perceiving permission from the community. Permission from this community would have some value. (The idea being, for example, that someone would interpret the thread as saying that rational people agree – or at least they don’t disagree – that adult sexual relationships with children might not be harmful to them.)
Not only as “rationalists” did you not use the full amount of available evidence to arrive at the correct moral position on the original question, the comments deviated into deeper and deeper immorality without correction.
I don’t understand how merely convincing a 10-year-old to let you stick something up her vagina (and then doing it) is going to do any more harm than, say, spanking her.
This statement would have been easy to correct with some real-world common sense about the meaning of sex in most people’s lives. Instead, + 3 karma points granted for this bit of inhumanity. And no outrage.
My theory is that, somehow, “most people” didn’t notice this thread. Or maybe they thought a “closet” survey is not the place to expect or uphold morality. (Yet whenever human beings have looked the other way it is because, somehow, they perceived morality to be “out of context”.) Perhaps this isn’t something they didn’t want to think about. Me neither. I would have rather ignored it. But to the extent to which LW is a community I occasionally or frequently post on, I can’t.
You believe that the idea of adult sexual relationships with a child being bad might be a cached thought?
There’s no automatic reason for why we should assume sexual relations with children must automatically be harmful and unpleasant to the kids
Except for the fact that many, many kids grow up and report that it’s harmful. These accounts are painful, emotional, sincere. So if the victims say that it is harmful, why don’t you believe them?
Here’s a theory as to why: the experience may indeed be painful in the psychosocial context of our present society, but perhaps only in that context, or more specifically, because of that context.
That is, we have ideas of shame—that certain things are, or are not shameful—that are culturally based, and when we do things that offend our (learned) sense of shame, we feel, and remember, the associated negative emotions, without necessarily remembering their cause. We associate the negative emotions with the circumstance, instead of the long-gone prior that caused us to feel shameful in such circumstances. In some religions, you can feel shameful working on the Sabbath; in our society, you feel shameful having sex when society says you aren’t “ready” to. (I admit that that’s a bit of a stretched analogy.)
The more common reply to your argument, though, is that the children are reassigning a negative emotional weight to their memory of the experiences, after the fact, because the therapist/parent/whomever is expecting the experience to be negative. They don’t have to prompt for this verbally; they may be using completely neutral language, or simply asking “what happened?” Either way, their body language will show their emotional reaction to every word (and if a horse can do math based on our observed body language, we’re obviously not very good at concealing it.)
To demonstrate my meaning: If one of my friends punched me in the arm, I’d interpret that as playful at the time. If a stranger did it, I’d interpret it as hurtful. I literally feel more pain in the latter case, because of this expectation. Now, if, some time later that day, my friend insulted my race, or some other category to which I belong that implied that he just wasn’t my friend any more, I’d re-think that punch. I’d remember it hurting more.
Child abuse recountings are extreme versions of this. If you demonize the adult in the child’s mind, everything they do is going to take on a negative connotation. They’re going to start looking for the negative angle: a hug was really a rough squeeze; a toussle of the hair was really a hair-pulling, and so on. In this light, of course sex was a bad experience—it’s extremely physical with all sorts of pleasurable/painful connotations which can be switched around or played with to no end (for example, BDSM is simply a shared agreement on a set of altered connotations.)
Let’s see… My original question was, “if the children said they are harmed then why don’t you believe them?” Your answer sounds very much like it isn’t that you don’t believe them, but that the harm is discounted because it’s society’s fault.
Yet the original question posed was whether children are harmed or not, not whose fault it was.
Suppose that all the harm (all the “psychosocial” bad feelings) is an artifact of society, rather than society’s way of preventing the bad feelings that are a natural result of sexual abuse. What then? Is it more important for a child to experience sex with an adult than being well-integrated into society? In fact, one of the most painful aspects of sexual abuse is the child’s realization that the adult was deliberately creating a relationship outside societal norms that would alienate them from society.
Secondly, saying that the harm is caused by society and not by sexual abuse is not relevant if your intention is to keep a child from harm. (Sounds more like a rationalization of someone trying to get away with doing harm: I didn’t hurt his feelings! Society did!) In this absurd hypothetical scenario where harm is just an artifact of society, you might have three options if you want to actually prevent the child from coming to harm: prevent sexual abuse, remove the child from society (only a monster would do this), or significantly change society. Good luck with the last bit, as
child sexual abuse is outlawed in every developed country, generally with severe criminal penalties (Wikipedia).
child sexual abuse is outlawed in every developed country, generally with severe criminal penalties
And yet, other things that cause children as much or more harm (such as emotional abuse) are not similarly outlawed. This raises a strong suggestion that this has more to do with parents’ interests than childrens’ interests.
Evolutionarily, parents have a strong incentive to exert influence over their childrens’ choice of sexual partners. Actually, they have strong incentives to exert influence over their childrens’ choices, period, but this is especially true for children’s sexual choices… which is why teenage girls are now getting slapped with “sex offender” and “child pornographer” labels for sending naked cellphone pictures to their boyfriends.
Is it more important for a child to experience sex with an adult than being well-integrated into society?
It it more important for them to be a rational thinker than to be well-integrated into society, whatever that means? Are we abusing children by teaching them to be atheists?
I don’t have any answers to these questions; I’m just pointing out that your reasoning here is suspect. If we were to determine the legality or morality of relationships on the basis of possible emotional harm or social approbation, nobody would be in a relationship at all. Yet, people often choose relationships with others who their family, friends, or entire society are against.
(If we substitute e.g. “Is it more important for a person to have sex outside their race/gender/religion than to be well-integrated into society”, the fallacy is even clearer.)
An argument against large age gaps in sexual relationships due to consent issues, however, is a different kettle of fish. If we say that children below some age can’t reasonably consent to a particular activity due to lack of self-control or adequate contextualization ability, that’s a bit more reasonable, although you then get into a lot of line-drawing arguments about how young is too young. (Some people, OTOH, will likely never be mature enough to have a decent relationship, but at some point you’ve got to let it be their responsibility.)
Let’s see… My original question was, “if the children said they are harmed then why don’t you believe them?” Your answer sounds very much like it isn’t that you don’t believe them, but that the harm is discounted because it’s society’s fault.
Yet the original question posed was whether children are harmed or not, not whose fault it was.
But this was obviously a response to that question. derefr suggested that when someone asks the child about the abuse, it’s asked in such a way that the child remembers it as abusive. This isn’t a statement about society, but about why the child’s memory is not necessarily reliable.
Except for the fact that many, many kids grow up and report that it’s harmful. These accounts are painful, emotional, sincere. So if the victims say that it is harmful, why don’t you believe them?
I didn’t say sexual relationships with children couldn’t be harmful; I only said that not all automatically are. For instance, rape is obviously always harmful, and AFAIK a large fraction of such relations consist mainly of rape—but not all.
I don’t know if I actually believe this, but I’ve heard reports that cause me to assign a non-neglible probability on the chance that sexual relations with between children and adults aren’t necessarily as harmful as they may seem. For instance, see the Rind et al. report:
Similarly, I’ve heard second-hand accounts about people who report that they actually had loving relationships with pedophiles as kids. That didn’t traumatize them, but the follow-up “psychological care”, where the psychiatrists automatically assumed that the experience must have been horrible, did.
It would seem reasonable, on the face of it. There’s no automatic reason for why we should assume sexual relations with children must automatically be harmful and unpleasant to the kids, if not for the cached thought of all sexual relations being abuse. And in the current political climate, just about nobody will have the courage to voice such an opinion in public, so studies such as these should carry extra weight.
That’s probably the case. In western societies, it’s an orthodoxy, a moral fashion, to say that sex between children/adolescents and adults is bad. This can be clearly seen because people who argue against the orthodoxy are not criticised for being wrong, but condemned for being bad.
I am also “in the closet” on this. Sex is generally pleasurable; postulating a magic age or stage of development before which sex must be traumatic seems implausible on its face, without some other evidence. Coercion and intimidation are well-known to be damaging, but I don’t understand how merely convincing a 10-year-old to let you stick something up her vagina (and then doing it) is going to do any more harm than, say, spanking her. Furthermore, looking at the historical record, the ancient Greek custom of pederasty (sexual/romantic relationships between adolescent boys and adult men) doesn’t seem to have resulted in widespread trauma.
There are very few places in which it would be safe to propose this hypothesis, though.
Not “generally” over the domain in question. The pleasurability of sex is supported by brain-specific hardware that has no particular evolutionary reason to be active before adolescence.
Without taking a stance on the question of child sexuality—what you say is true, but is there any particular selection pressure for it to be off, either? Evolution goes for the simplest solution, and “always on” seems to me simpler than “off until a specific age, then on”.
Of course, that’s an oversimplification. The required machinery may simply not be developed yet, in the same way that you need to first grow to be four feet tall before you can grow to be five feet tall. But then, when you reach the size of four feet, you already have four fifths of your five feet-tallness in place, so it stands to reason that that at least part of what makes sex pleasurable will be in place before adolescence. Whether it’s active is obviously a separate question, but I don’t think “has no particular evolutionary reason to be active” tells us much by itself.
Anecdotal: I don’t remember having the slightest concept of sexual interest in anything before puberty.
Anyone got trustworthy better data, go ahead (but we have reason to suspect political interference, which is why I go so far as to cite my own anecdotal memory).
I personally know one girl whom, when she was 8, actively went into sex chat rooms and flirted with older men (anywhere from 16 to 40). I don’t think she actually had physical sexual experiences with anyone, though.
I personally know two girls who have had sexual intercourse with adults, one when she was aged 5, the other 8. It was rape in the sense that they were explicitly nonconsentual (they explicitly said didn’t want to do it), but it didn’t traumatized them. One theory might be that “doing stuff you don’t want to do, but adults tell you to do, so you do them anyway” is pretty common at that age (e.g. being forced to clean your room).
I suspect the sex act itself isn’t “pleasurable” for them, but having “sexual relationships” with adults may be pleasurable (since the first-mentioned 8 year old sought it out). It may be seen by many of them as a neutral act (like the 5 and second-mentioned 8 year old) and a form of curious exploration.
This is assuming, for lack of a better term, “gentle loving pedophilia”. The way pedophilia is often portrayed by mainstream media is violent rape, with screaming, kicking and blood. While I don’t personally know of any girl who actually experienced “violent rape pedophilia”, I think it’s safe to assume that they don’t find this pleasurable at all.
Personally, there’s a certain fetish that I have, and I remember it causing me erections even before puberty. However, as far as I can recall, the experience didn’t feel like anything that I’d call sexual these days. It was something that was pleasant to think about, and it caused physical reactions, but the actual sexual tension wasn’t there.
I also recall a friend mentioning a pre-pubescent boy who’d had a habit of masturbating when there was snow outside, because he thought the snow was beautiful. (I’m not sure if she’d known the boy herself or if she’d heard it from someone else, so this may be an unreliable fifth-hand account.) If it was true, then it sounds (like my experience) that part of the hardware was in place, but not the parts that would make it sexual in the adult sense of the word.
Googling for “child sexuality” gives me a report from Linköping University which states on page 17:
It does, however, also remark that child sexual abuse often causes sexualized behavior in children, and that very little is known about what is actually normal child sexuality. Interestingly, as it relates to the original topic, it also mentions a study that found one third of abuse victims to show no symptoms at all.
I wonder what kind of controls they had (ha, ha) that let them say that it caused the sexualized behavior, rather than just letting the children know about sex. I mean I was entirely ignorant of sex until I was 12. I knew it existed by reading and hearing references to it, and I had seen Playboys and the like, but I didn’t have any idea of what sex was.
Mostly the same here. I didn’t have any arousal-like physical reactions, though. It was mostly like the tension of roller coasters and scary stories, not sexual tension. Then, a couple years after puberty, my sex drive kicked in (in the space of days), the fetish was found impossible to handle and promptly repressed until a few years later when it could merge normally with my general libido.
From personal experience (which I am unfortunately too nervous about to go into detail about), pre-pubescent sexuality is primarily based on exposure and knowledge of sexuality. Puberty simply forces one to become aware of sex, rather than being a prerequisite for it. Similarly, sexual reactions (erections, orgasm, etc.) are definitely possible pre-pubescence, simply different. This may be an anomaly in my case, I do not have any non-personal data to share.
Although I do know that Alfred Kinsey compiled an extensive body of research on child sexuality obtained from the interview of pedophiles, in particular one pedophile who was highly active and documented his explorations extensively. I have never read this body of research myself, but I thought its existence might be worth pointing out.
Maybe no interest in anything in particular, but what of the sexual gratification itself ? Children do masturbate, it’s a known fact. Though maybe it’s not universal. But the brain-specific hardware seems to be in place already at any rate.
http://www.med.umich.edu/1libr/pa/pa_bmasturb_hhg.htm
Anecdotal also, I clearly remember watching the same movie (Star Wars) before and after teenage—the sexual tension passed me by completely as a child but was obvious a few years later.
However, I don’t have evidence that I’d not have enjoyed sex. The desire instinct was offline, that’s all I could swear to.
Also anecdotal: I have liked girls continuously since the age of 4. I do not recommend this....
This is also my experience.
I could be confusing Freudian stuff with real experimental results, but I seem to remember that children go through a stage up until about 6 where they’re somewhat sexual, and then between that age and puberty the sex drive switches off or even into full reverse. This is the reason that young boys tend to think girls have cooties and are gross, and vice versa. It’s evolution’s way of saying “Not yet”.
I can’t find the article now, but an evolutionary-psychology noticed that the “cooties” concept seems to exist across all cultures (though obviously not always given the name “cooties”), and furthermore noticed that children often don’t consider their siblings to have cooties. I.e. boys will feel that most girls have cooties, but not their sisters.
The psychologist offered this as an explanation: We evolved to find the people we grow up with to be not sexually attractive. This is a mechanism to avoid incest (which can result in genetic problems). However, if you live in a society, you don’t want to find people who grow up with you, but who do not share genes with you, to be sexually unattractive (or else you might find no one within your whole society attractive), and thus this “cooties” sensation was placed by evolution so that we can avoid people of the opposite sex during this critical period so that later on, as adults, we may be sexually attracted to them.
That “explanation” sounds awfully just-so-story to me.
Why would evolution want to say this? What harm is there in sexual relations before puberty, when pregnancy can’t result?
Anecdotal: Approximately 30% of the material on Quizilla et al. Whether they’re writing/reading about it solely because they think it’s adult and edgy is a different matter, but there are clearly many children thinking about this kind of thing at the very least.
Considering that, as has been noted elsewhere on this thread, prepubescent children (including infants) self-stimulate their genitals, this seems … ill-founded. Of course, I suppose it depends how much of the pleasure involves romance, which does seem to be restricted to adults; but I somehow doubt you can claim most of the pleasure from sex is due to romance.
I trust my memory of certain things as far back as a few vaguities before age 2 years, and I’ve read other people’s reports, and I conclude that, while children do self-stimulate, it’s typically (but not always) less pleasurable than it is after puberty.
I haven’t read any neurological studies addressing that hypothesis in particular, but of course they could exist and I could be unaware of them.
Hmm, good point—I don’t actually know anything about the topic. Sounds like actual orgasm is impossible without puberty (although note it’s possible way before adulthood.) Still, pleasure is pleasure. Kids wouldn’t enjoy it as much as adults, but some of the adaptations are clearly present—enough for sex to be pleasurable, if not as pleasurable.
Mind you, I personally wouldn’t want to change that particular norm without a great deal of thought and investigation by actual experts. But this particular claim seems to be flawed.
I’ve encountered anecdotes claiming that a form of prepubescent orgasm is possible, if difficult to achieve (especially since most wouldn’t know to aim for it). I’m less convinced of that, but I remember someone actually providing a citation for “utero orgasms in both sexes” (which I assumed to mean while still in the womb).
An aside: I catch myself committing the mind projection fallacy most often when I come across comments that make it very clear people have purged large chunks of childhood from their memory/identity. It takes me a second or so to remember that this makes sense for most people. This has had a weird effect regarding the subject at hand: I’m surprised when I run into adult males talking like they don’t believe boys can get erections, then I’m skeptical when someone else reports that prepubescent males can have orgasms. Noticing the pattern there has me updating in favor of prepubescent orgasm being possible, if difficult.
I find it ironic that ‘notmyrealnick’ got 34 points for this comment. But I suppose there are repercussions other than bad karma for posting unpopular views...
Even if the children themselves after the fact don’t consider the sexual abuse harmful, it may be considered wrong by the humanity as a whole. The babyeaters prefer eating their children, but humans would like them to stop doing that. Drugs addict continues to take drugs even if they lead to decay of his personality and health, but other people consider it a wrong thing to do. Even if it turns out that with (consensually) abused children the moral line is closer to acceptance, I still expect it to be way below the acceptance level.
The babyeater question would be substantially changed if the children didn’t mind being eaten and didn’t take harm by it—more or less from a moral crusade into parochial squeamishness. Eliezer went a long way out of his way to avoid that in the story, but here we can’t dodge it with a rhetorical flourish.
If as it turns out, kids enjoy consensual sex and take no harm by it, on what basis can society consider it wrong? There has to be a reason. Societies can’t just create moral crimes by their say-so.
Edit in Feb 2013: I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem with the above is that children are in an extremely steep power relationship—an artefact of this society, and it’s avoidable, but it can’t be wished away without a huge job of dismantling. Meaning, that right now children can’t even express a preference. “Yes” is meaningless with the ability of an adult to apply pressure that would count as felony kidnapping and torture if done to another adult, with complete impunity and even acclaim. “No” is meaningless when adults have imposed their schemas of asexual innocence willy-nilly over children’s experience, and when they have such huge control of that experience itself, up to and including maintaining “big lies” via censorship.
As such, an age of consent is a damn dirty hack that acknowledges the completely untenable position of children in making a decision that’s true to their intent, while refusing to rescue them from it. It is marginally better than nothing. If it does go, it can’t go first. A lot of rescuing needs to come first.
(Edit) During this entire thread I was misusing the word “coerce.” I meant something more like “entice.” Thanks Alicorn.
I always assumed that part of the problem is that it is easier to coerce children. If I kidnap a child and do nothing but feed them ice-cream and take them on a tour of the zoo it is still wrong, even if they liked it and no harm was done.
If I seduce a child and do nothing but feed them ice-cream and have sex with them… is it still wrong? Even if they liked it and no harm was done? There are certainly risks involved and assuming things will be okay is naive. But is assuming things will be bad/evil/gross just as naive?
Suppressing the moral gag reflex is hard to do. I do not know if I can answer the question objectively. I know if I had kids I do not want anyone coercing them into having sex.
Well yes, because kidnapping involves taking a child from their parents unannounced, possibly against the child’s will too, possibly also asking for ransom, etc. Those are separate harms that happen even if the child enjoyed the ice-cream and the trip to the zoo.
But what are the separate harms of sex? There are health risks, but they don’t hugely exceed the risks in other common childhood activities such as tree climbing.
No ransom and not against the child’s will. If the reason kidnapping is wrong deals with parental consent, does the same thing apply to sex?
This is actually irrelevant for the point I was trying to make. Kidnapping, with no harm done, is still very much illegal. Should it be?
Removing a child from a parent is a harm (as witness the panicked parent). It’s not so much a matter of consent, as of making people worry and separating them from their family. The parents have a protective interest in the child, which is harmed by their non-consent to the zoo trip. This is the very thing that makes it “kidnapping” and not “visiting with friends”. It is a separate harm, which is why the distinction I drew is relevant.
BTW, this line of argument doesn’t get you to “no sex”, it gets you to “no sex without parental consent”. Fair enough, now what if they say “yes”?
If the child is returned before the parent knows they are missing? I am not understanding why the correlation is so hard to see. It is an analogy, not a mirrored situation. Kidnapping is not seducing. There are differences. The original point was that seduction involves coercing children. Kidnapping can do the same thing. So can brainwashing. All three of these (kidnapping, brainwashing, seducing) can produce harm but may not and arguing about exactly when “harm” happens is not really useful. The relevant question is exactly this:
I am not arguing for any particular stance. I just saw an interesting correlation between seduction and kidnapping that involved coercion. If I remember correctly, the laws in some states get remarkably relaxed when minors have their parents’ consent. I could not tell you specifics, however. If you find this sort of thing interesting I am sure it is relatively easy to find information about sex with parental consent.
The bottom line: A child will do an awful lot to please someone. Is it okay to coerce them into doing something? Does it matter if they enjoy it? Does it matter if there is harm? Does it matter if they want to do it?
All of this also assumes “seduction” instead of a real, true romance. I would assume that a real, true romance has less coercion. (Or, at the very least, thinks it has less coercion.)
Perhaps we’re being confused by your use of the verb “seduce”, since to me that doesn’t include non-consensual means—it usually implies cunning trickery at worst and goal-directed charm at best. Can you restate without using it?
You can replace the word “seduce” with “get them to have consensual sex with you.” “Get” in the context I am using basically implies “coerce.” The point does rely on the possibility of convincing someone they want the same thing you want. The catch is that such a sexual encounter satisfies the term “consensual sex.” They completely, and of their own volition, consented to having sex.
The original point asks if there is validity in condemning sex with children because they are easy to coerce. In other words, is the criterion of “consensual” too easy to manipulate?
I don’t think the word “coerce” has the right implications here. It sounds like what you’re going for is more along the lines of “entice”. Coercion arguably invalidates consent even with adults.
Ooh, yes, you are very right. Apologies.
OK, so, we’ll go with entice.
Enticing would usually mean suggesting the activity is intrinsically desirable, offering a trade, asking pretty please, making a dare, or etc. We’ll assume the child’s mind is changed by the enticement.
Why would that change not simply be valid?
Is it valid when considering kidnapping?
Didn’t we already beat that one to death? The child’s volition isn’t all that’s involved with kidnapping. It isn’t directly comparable.
I keep coming back to kidnapping because the I think the example fits. I have been trying to avoid getting into super picky details because I consider the details to be obvious. I apologize for being obtuse.
If I stop by the local pool and convince a kid to take a trip with me and feed it ice-cream, take it to the zoo, and then return the kid to the pool before anyone else notices, was the kidnapping wrong? Would you even call it kidnapping?
If someone found out after the fact and charged me with kidnapping, could I use the defense, “But the kid liked it! It was fun and no harm was done!”?
This is from an above comment you made:
You say that the reason kidnapping is wrong is because the parents will worry. Parents worry about all sorts of things and most of them were not made illegal. Many parents would worry if their child was having sex with an adult.
If you really don’t like the example we can just skip to the abstract view. If I consciously manipulate someone into wanting a particular something, can I use their desire as a justification for my actions? Or, if I brainwash them into having sex with me, is it considered consent?
What are the current laws about consent under the influence of alcohol? That also seems relevant. What about people with mental handicaps? The basic point is that “consent” is not a cut and dry excuse. Consent can be manipulated and it is much easier to manipulate consent out of a child than an adult.
This is not an argument one way or the other, but merely asking if consent from children should mean the same thing as consent from adults.
The American Psychiatric Association explicitly states that children cannot give consent. The problem is that children are completely dependent upon adults, and they see any friendly adult as a caretaker, especially if the parent gives permission to be with that adult or there is any physical affection. Individual kids vary in their sophistication, and it depends on the age of the child, but most kids cannot tell the difference between “do this please so I will be happy” and “do this please so I will take care of you / love you / keep you safe”. It just activates the same “I-need-to-listen-for-survival” pathway either way. It is a relevant observation that when a child feels less safe with an adult, they will usually be more agreeable. A first sign of abuse is often lack of agreeability or hostility in response to requests noticed in school.
Is there a special reason the American Psychiatric Association should be considered an authority on ethics? They can inform us of the empirical facts, of which “children who feel unsafe are agreeable” is one, but “children cannot give morally relevant consent to sexual activity” does not follow instantly and obviously from that statement.
I was citing them as an authority on child psychology.
But knowledge about the psychology of a creature does not instantly and obviously lead to knowledge about the ethical boundaries around treatment of the creature. I could have encyclopedic knowledge of the empirically observable facts about, say, pigs, without being able to derive from that whether it’s okay to kill them for food. Similarly, the APA is undoubtedly an authority on child psychology. It is not at all clear that they are an authority on the implications that child psychology has for ethics, so while most of your comment was quite interesting, the first sentence was noise.
My entire comment was about whether children can consent or not. I didn’t say anything about ethical implications.
However, this paper makes the connection:
http://www.itp-arcados.net/wissen/Finkelhor1979_EN.pdf
While simply giving the appearance of consent is a plain empirical fact which might or might not have ethical features, it’s obvious that children can utter consent-like words, so I assumed you were talking about consent in an ethically relevant sense. Should I not have assumed that? If you’re not talking about consent as a thing that changes what it is ethically okay to do to somebody, then I don’t know what you’re talking about at all.
Whether children can consent or not to sex is a psychological fact. Just as whether a pig can consent or not to being eaten is a biological fact.
Facts may have ethical implications (and thus ethical relevance which is why your question above is confused). The ability to give consent is not obviously and immediately connected with an specific ethical conclusion, because you can argue that it is ethical to eat a pig even though they cannot give consent. To argue that sex with children is wrong, because they cannot give consent, you need to add the ethical argument that sex without consent is unethical.
I’m really surprised you’d claim that. Even if you could propose an experiment that you think would settle this question of fact, it’s far from clear that everyone would agree that your experiment settled it. To me it’s obvious that whether or not we consider that a given act from a given person counts as consent to something is in large part a question of values, not of fact.
Yes, we do seem to disagree. I think that “ability to do X” is factual. However, I suspect there is ambiguity in what “consent” means, and there is room for inserting values there. But I hold my position, because I think that if you define consent in a meaningful way, kids cannot do that. (For example, if you say consent means to just articulate a set of words, I will gladly abandon the word “consent” for what I do mean.)
I would define consent as (a) understanding what you are agreeing to and (b) freely agreeing.
Psychology is a soft science, surely. Which is why I felt more comfortable quoting an authority in psychology than asserting my own beliefs: I hardly know what counts as evidence or good epistemology in psychology. However, I could think of some experiments to demonstrate that children don’t understand and are not freely agreeing. For example, for the latter experiment, first ascertain what the children’s real preferences are, say, for a specific type of cookie. Then demonstrate that if an adult indicates which cookie choice will make them happy, the kid will choose the adult’s choice at a rate proportional to the perceived power imbalance and inversely proportional to their perceived environmental safety.
To be clear, I think that adult-child sex is extremely unethical.
I am motivated to contribute to this discussion, because I hope I may be able to encourage rational people to adopt a similar view on adult-child sex. However, I am not sure it is emotionally safe or that it would be effective to participate. Certain attitudes and comments on this thread make me wonder if any argument for a position that is not counter conventional wisdom will be summarily dismissed. In other words, there seems to be evidence that “you guys” are not unbiased about this.
I don’t agree. I think empathy is to ethics as tastiness is to nutritional content—it’s a reaction that makes us feel good under circumstances conducive to a valuable end and feel aversion to circumstances conducive to deplorable ends, but it’s easily fooled (just as our tastebuds can be fooled by cinnamon buns). We need intuitions and empathy to have a starting point when we talk ethics, but a purely intuitionist morality is inevitably going to be inconsistent and have poor motivations in extreme cases.
It’s obvious that you feel very strongly that adults having sex with children is unethical; you’ve made that abundantly clear. It doesn’t have to follow from that that you are correct, and it definitely doesn’t follow that we can’t consider the question, and I’m sorry to say that you seem to be under the impression that you can’t civilly discuss it with people who don’t share your opinion.
I don’t think anyone is going to read this thread and then find that, because a few people gave some thought to the issue, their qualms about raping children have evaporated. Deep-seated ethical misgivings, legal repercussions, practical concerns, and the simple fact that most people aren’t pedophiles would see to that; anyone who’d be convinced by this thread in favor of actually having sex with children was just looking for an excuse and would have found NAMBLA’s website eventually.
If you cannot stick to solid argumentation in favor of your view (which I suspect is the dominant one—it’s just fashionable in this thread to signal open-mindedness by being cryptic and oblique about the matter) and instead resort to what amounts to shrill, repetitive whining about how unethical we all are, you aren’t “contributing to the discussion” and you certainly are unlikely to make any progress in convincing this particular audience.
All of that having been said, the experiment you describe wouldn’t prove that the children aren’t “freely” agreeing to take the cookie that the adult wants them to take. You can prove that people are likely to incorrectly judge the length of lines when others state incorrect judgments aloud; that doesn’t mean they’re being coerced or that they aren’t free, it just means that humans are social animals. The opinions and wishes of the people around us are important factors in our choices, and it is deeply murky territory when those opinions and wishes turn into coercive power dynamics.
My personal pet peeve in this discussion is that nobody is defining precisely what “adult” and “child” mean.
Teenagers these days are getting thrown in jail (and given lifetime “sex offender” labels) for having consensual sex on the wrong side of arbitrary age lines that vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
So, my empathy on this subject is much more solidly with them, and that’s the ethics I’m personally concerned with in this discussion. We may not be able to prevent all the harm that takes place from manipulation and abuse, but I’d like to see some improvement for the innocents who get caught in the crossfire.
agreed. A consequentialist, however, would not necessarily buy this—weighing the harm to innocents on the border versus harm to children nowhere near the border might well favor keeping things as they are. Not that I buy that justification.
Whether children can consent or not to sex is a psychological fact. Just as whether a pig can consent or not to being eaten or not is a biological fact.
Facts may have ethical implications (and thus ethical relevance which is why your question above is confused). The ability to give consent is not obviously and immediately connected with an specific ethical conclusion, because you can argue that it is ethical to eat a pig even though they cannot give consent. To argue that sex with children is wrong, because they cannot give consent, you need to add the ethical argument that sex without consent is unethical.
I don’t think it this type of quibbling on semantics (for example, a perfectly good meaning of coerce is to compel) is useful to the discourse. When words have variable meanings, you need to use the context to determine the meaning, and request clarification if it isn’t clear.
This is the crux of every modern dissent to old-age prejudices: If it harms no one, it’s not a moral wrong.
Elsewhere, there is a discussion regarding using karma to measure the value of individual comments or commentators themselves. I think this entire thread needs adjustment. It is confused and immoral.
Addressing The Confusion
There’s plenty of evidence that sexual relationships between adults and children is harmful. I think the best evidence is first person: painful, emotional, sincere. There is also plenty of scientific/objective/peer-reviewed evidence (see Wikipedia for references).
Reading through the comments in this thread, there appears to be significant confusion regarding why sexual abuse is harmful. Whether adult sex with children is harmful (and wrong) has nothing to do with whether children are interested in sex or not, or whether the behavior is consentual or not. It has to do with facts specific to children: they are completely dependent upon adults, have incompletely formed ideas about character differences among adults (they can naively give an abusive adult the same continued trust as a loving one), incompletely formed ideas about sexuality (they may not care what is done now, but they will develop an opinion later) and the fact that sexual autonomy becomes an important identity issue in their late teens and early twenties, and so it is painful if that has been usurped.
It doesn’t matter if it is the experience of some abused children that the sexual abuse was not harmful. As victims, they themselves are allowed to feel however they like about it. Also, using the examples of the ancient Greeks is a common but untenable argument for moral relativism on this issue.
Addressing Immorality
This entire thread is immoral, and some of you are using karma to bond over being assholes.
To defend the full strength of this moral position, it was not immoral to consider the original question. In fact, such questions and nearby questions do need to be considered. Why is the incidence of child sexual abuse so high, given society’s unanimous position on it? As someone who finds it quite possible to sympathize with a pedophile – they have strong biological, psychological and social reasons for their moral confusion – I actually do have constructive things to say in addition to just saying “adult sexual relations with a child is evil”.
The immorality of this thread results from considering a question, considering the evidence, and not arriving at and defending the truthful answer. This thread is immoral – specifically—because it almost exclusively considered evidence in favor of the immoral position, even though such evidence is much more rare and difficult to come by. Any evidence for the moral position was weak or irrelevant. (In particular, all comments about whether children are actually sexual or not.) There is a moral obligation to defend morality wherever you see evil (or evil ideas that would result in evil).
For example: you must consider the very real possibility of confused persons reading this post and perceiving permission from the community. Permission from this community would have some value. (The idea being, for example, that someone would interpret the thread as saying that rational people agree – or at least they don’t disagree – that adult sexual relationships with children might not be harmful to them.)
Not only as “rationalists” did you not use the full amount of available evidence to arrive at the correct moral position on the original question, the comments deviated into deeper and deeper immorality without correction.
This statement would have been easy to correct with some real-world common sense about the meaning of sex in most people’s lives. Instead, + 3 karma points granted for this bit of inhumanity. And no outrage.
My theory is that, somehow, “most people” didn’t notice this thread. Or maybe they thought a “closet” survey is not the place to expect or uphold morality. (Yet whenever human beings have looked the other way it is because, somehow, they perceived morality to be “out of context”.) Perhaps this isn’t something they didn’t want to think about. Me neither. I would have rather ignored it. But to the extent to which LW is a community I occasionally or frequently post on, I can’t.
You believe that the idea of adult sexual relationships with a child being bad might be a cached thought?
Except for the fact that many, many kids grow up and report that it’s harmful. These accounts are painful, emotional, sincere. So if the victims say that it is harmful, why don’t you believe them?
Here’s a theory as to why: the experience may indeed be painful in the psychosocial context of our present society, but perhaps only in that context, or more specifically, because of that context.
That is, we have ideas of shame—that certain things are, or are not shameful—that are culturally based, and when we do things that offend our (learned) sense of shame, we feel, and remember, the associated negative emotions, without necessarily remembering their cause. We associate the negative emotions with the circumstance, instead of the long-gone prior that caused us to feel shameful in such circumstances. In some religions, you can feel shameful working on the Sabbath; in our society, you feel shameful having sex when society says you aren’t “ready” to. (I admit that that’s a bit of a stretched analogy.)
The more common reply to your argument, though, is that the children are reassigning a negative emotional weight to their memory of the experiences, after the fact, because the therapist/parent/whomever is expecting the experience to be negative. They don’t have to prompt for this verbally; they may be using completely neutral language, or simply asking “what happened?” Either way, their body language will show their emotional reaction to every word (and if a horse can do math based on our observed body language, we’re obviously not very good at concealing it.)
To demonstrate my meaning: If one of my friends punched me in the arm, I’d interpret that as playful at the time. If a stranger did it, I’d interpret it as hurtful. I literally feel more pain in the latter case, because of this expectation. Now, if, some time later that day, my friend insulted my race, or some other category to which I belong that implied that he just wasn’t my friend any more, I’d re-think that punch. I’d remember it hurting more.
Child abuse recountings are extreme versions of this. If you demonize the adult in the child’s mind, everything they do is going to take on a negative connotation. They’re going to start looking for the negative angle: a hug was really a rough squeeze; a toussle of the hair was really a hair-pulling, and so on. In this light, of course sex was a bad experience—it’s extremely physical with all sorts of pleasurable/painful connotations which can be switched around or played with to no end (for example, BDSM is simply a shared agreement on a set of altered connotations.)
Let’s see… My original question was, “if the children said they are harmed then why don’t you believe them?” Your answer sounds very much like it isn’t that you don’t believe them, but that the harm is discounted because it’s society’s fault.
Yet the original question posed was whether children are harmed or not, not whose fault it was.
Suppose that all the harm (all the “psychosocial” bad feelings) is an artifact of society, rather than society’s way of preventing the bad feelings that are a natural result of sexual abuse. What then? Is it more important for a child to experience sex with an adult than being well-integrated into society? In fact, one of the most painful aspects of sexual abuse is the child’s realization that the adult was deliberately creating a relationship outside societal norms that would alienate them from society.
Secondly, saying that the harm is caused by society and not by sexual abuse is not relevant if your intention is to keep a child from harm. (Sounds more like a rationalization of someone trying to get away with doing harm: I didn’t hurt his feelings! Society did!) In this absurd hypothetical scenario where harm is just an artifact of society, you might have three options if you want to actually prevent the child from coming to harm: prevent sexual abuse, remove the child from society (only a monster would do this), or significantly change society. Good luck with the last bit, as
And yet, other things that cause children as much or more harm (such as emotional abuse) are not similarly outlawed. This raises a strong suggestion that this has more to do with parents’ interests than childrens’ interests.
Evolutionarily, parents have a strong incentive to exert influence over their childrens’ choice of sexual partners. Actually, they have strong incentives to exert influence over their childrens’ choices, period, but this is especially true for children’s sexual choices… which is why teenage girls are now getting slapped with “sex offender” and “child pornographer” labels for sending naked cellphone pictures to their boyfriends.
It it more important for them to be a rational thinker than to be well-integrated into society, whatever that means? Are we abusing children by teaching them to be atheists?
I don’t have any answers to these questions; I’m just pointing out that your reasoning here is suspect. If we were to determine the legality or morality of relationships on the basis of possible emotional harm or social approbation, nobody would be in a relationship at all. Yet, people often choose relationships with others who their family, friends, or entire society are against.
(If we substitute e.g. “Is it more important for a person to have sex outside their race/gender/religion than to be well-integrated into society”, the fallacy is even clearer.)
An argument against large age gaps in sexual relationships due to consent issues, however, is a different kettle of fish. If we say that children below some age can’t reasonably consent to a particular activity due to lack of self-control or adequate contextualization ability, that’s a bit more reasonable, although you then get into a lot of line-drawing arguments about how young is too young. (Some people, OTOH, will likely never be mature enough to have a decent relationship, but at some point you’ve got to let it be their responsibility.)
But this was obviously a response to that question. derefr suggested that when someone asks the child about the abuse, it’s asked in such a way that the child remembers it as abusive. This isn’t a statement about society, but about why the child’s memory is not necessarily reliable.
I didn’t say sexual relationships with children couldn’t be harmful; I only said that not all automatically are. For instance, rape is obviously always harmful, and AFAIK a large fraction of such relations consist mainly of rape—but not all.