Re: Rind et al.

I'm not done reading yet, but I have a few comments about the Rind et al. paper. I had a chance to read the full test of this paper some time ago. My memory is a bit fuzzy on it, but in general I think you summarized its main points well. However, there are a few potential corrections. You say that the paper did not consider the issue of consent; I remember otherwise. I'm not sure if they differentiated by consent in the main part of the study (this may have been impossible due to the fact that they were using other people's data, and so could have no influence on the questions asked), but they definitely recommended in the discussion section that future research should attempt to differentiate by consent.

What I meant to say is that the Rind Report did not do a separate study for consenting or non-consenting individuals so as to measure the differences in responses to each, but instead lumped all sexual contact between adults and minors as "abuse." They did indeed suggest that perhaps different terms should be used upon reflection of the data, but a study that did not set out from the onset to diffrentiate the two inevitably ends up causing confusion, and they later did conclude that there was a great difference in reactions to and perception of the contact in kids if the contact was consensual rather than non-consensual. However, I understand by your response here that I did not make this clear enough, and I thank you for pointing this out to me so that I can make my final draft more clear on this point.

In terms of girls having more psychological trauma, i believe they found that when they removed cases of father-daughter incest, the remaining girls showed the same levels of trauma as the boys.

Thank you for letting me know this, as I strongly suspected based on a lot of personal observations (which were mentioned in some detail in my essay) and a thorough reading of other studies of girls who had mutually consensual sexual contact with adult men (such as the one conducted by Susan Thompson, mentioned in my essay) that there must have been some aberration in regards to many of the girls interviewed for Dr. Rind's report, and I was also wondering what type of questions he asked them specifically because I have read no other report that studied the reactions of underage girls to mutually consensual contact with adults who were not closely related to them that suggested girls are much more likely to perceive the experience negatively than boys who do the same. Unfortunately, as I noted in my essay, this statement made in the Rind Report about girls, which many BLers have read, has been used as an excuse by some of these BLers (especially during the days before the GLers entered the movement and BLers had little if any contact with female gerontophiles, but much less of an extent now) to conclude that man/girl love is not on the same moral plane as man/boy love, and this was used by these BLers to justify them not working with GLers to validate GL in addition to BL, and to avoid fighting for equal sexual rights for girls as they did for boys. It's quite obvious that BLers who still carry this attitude never bothered to read any study that interviewed specifically girls about this subject, such as Thompson's meticulous study that appeared in Chapter 7 of her book Going All The Way, otherwise they would have likely questioned the rather odd statement about girls' reactions to contact with adults in the Rind Report. Is it possible you can find me a link to any online reference that confirms what you said up above? I believe what you said is certainly the case, but I would prefer to have a citation to back up this statement.

I see you mention the issue of family environment; this was another thing that stood out to me from the study. I think there might have been a statement in there about physical abuse being a better predictor of future psychological state than sexual abuse, but if you mention that I haven't read it yet (I could also not be remembering it right).

Thank you for letting me know this, as I will do more research on it in the future. There is also very good evidence, discussed in the literature of the youth liberationists, that emotional abuse of kids, which is by far the most common type of abuse initiated against kids by both parents and teachers, is also much more damaging to kids than sexual abuse that was not overly violent, as it's an incessant amount of emotional abuse that most often causes kids to run away from home and it magnifies whatever stress they may be experiencing with significant others, their schoolwork, any afterschool job they may have, etc., a thousandfold. Sadly, very few people outside of the youth liberation movement, including MHPs and those who work in the legal profession, consider emotional abuse inficted upon kids by their parents or other adults who work closely with them to be an actual form of abuse, as it's instead considered to simply be what is often called "tough love," a valid form of discipline, or a valid method of parenting, even though the many forms this type of abuse can take is readily recognized as abuse if done from one spouse to another. However, unlike the case regarding society's expected conduct between spouses, it's more or less perfectly acceptable for parents to routinly insult their kids, tell them they are worthless, tell them they will never amount to anything, shout at them for every little thing, jump on their cases in a major way when the make even minor mistakes, and to tell them they are "bad" in general, as all of this can have a severe blow to kids' self-esteem and confidence, sometimes even contributing to factors that lead to teen suicide. Yet our society is so fixated and obsessed with lurid tales of sex abuse, and often with the most extreme cases of physical abuse, that it totally ignores the far more rampant problem of emotional abuse against kids, unless of course it's done to them by their peers. In the latter case, it's recognized as bullying and considered a major problem these days, but when parents routinely say the same kinds of things to their kids that some of their less humane peers say to them in school or in comments on Facebook, it's not considered a form of bullying or abuse at all.

I'll keep reading and post more comments later. Thanks for all the time spent on this. You are an asset to the community.

Thank you very much for reading as much of the essay as you had time to do and for leaving responses to it bit by bit, and also for the compliments. All were much appreciated!!