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.