Re: The Importance of Truth (major essay from me)

1) Children never lie when they say they have been sexually abused.

Bullies in the legal system certainly do try to force kids to say what they want to hear, and will also try to twist whatever they do say to fit their agenda. A friend of my family's was in this position a few years ago, after drawing the ire of the local child "welfare" agency due to her "interference" with a teen girl. What she was actually doing was trying to help a teen girl who was facing emotional abuse by her father, but the father had some influence and complained about it. Next thing she knew, social workers were trying to fabricate proof that she was abusing her foster kids, and they tried to bully the kids into saying that. Fortunately their bullying tactics were unsuccessful (and unfortunately nothing was ever done about the girl's emotionally abusive father, as far as I know), but this is a typical example of how legal authorities can and do try to fabricate cases of child abuse for political reasons. Do a search for "child protective services makes false allegations" and you'll find plenty of stories like this.

2) Every adult who commits genuine acts of sexual abuse against kids have and are primarily motivated by a sexual attraction to kids.

Of course, abuse of any form is about exerting power over someone else. It really shouldn't be a surprise that those who commit abusive acts are often in a position of power over their victim. On the other hand, attraction has nothing whatsoever to do with exerting power over someone else, and implies quite generally that someone views the person they are attracted to as an equal.

3) Kids have no real sexual desire.

I've always wondered how those that make this claim can do so with a straight face. Do they not remember anything at all before the magic age? And is their doublethink really good enough that they can deny that their own sons and daughters have sexual desires, especially when their spying software logs the kids searching for sex and porn and notes that they are top ten search terms?

4) Kids were being sexually abused in truly horrific and often preposterous ways in the U.S.--and possibly across the world--by groups of mysterious and diabolical cultists who worshipped Satan and were abusing these kids in "honor" of the ultimate Lord of Evil.

Mass insanity at its finest.

5) Innumerable people who were sexually abused in their childhood were so traumatized by the alleged abuse that they repressed the memory deep into their subconscious, which could subsequently be retrieved at any point in their adulthood by deep hypnosis.

This idea was always so laughable that it should have been rejected by serious psychologists without consideration. I think "repressed memory syndrome" is just another symptom of a larger problem within the study of psychology, in that any "theory" is automatically true until proven false. It should be the other way around.

6) All cases of what is legally considered child pornography are always produced by adults and never by the minors themselves.

Kids were taking sexual pictures of themselves long before cell phones were invented. The sexting cases are simply the modern way of doing this.

7) The brains of adolescents are inherently faulty due to innate biological factors and thus they have an inherent tendency to make poor decisions that necessitate denying them most of their civil rights and keeping them under the control of their parents and other adults for their own good.

The proponents of this claim always like to use cases where teens "act out" to justify it. Of course, they never mention that this is almost universally in response to the unjust, broad denial of their civil liberties. And they never even attempt to justify their claim that a person can go from being incapable of making any decisions to being a fully capable human being in a single day.

8) Mutually consensual sexual contact between anyone today considered to be 'minors' and those who are adults is always traumatizing for the younger person and will likely cause lifelong psychological 'damage' to them, no matter how much the minor in question may have enjoyed and desired the experience.

The thing that people desperately need to realize is that the only valid definition of "wrong" is that which brings harm to someone.

Mutually consensual sexual contact itself cannot be traumatizing for the very simple fact that it is consensual. Trauma from the contact can only occur where there is some kind of force or manipulation used, but if it does, the contact is no longer consensual in any way.

The treatment that 'minors' get if they happened to be involved in a consensual relationship that is discovered is what is traumatizing. Moreover, hearing over and over again that any sexual contact between adult and child/teen is inherently harmful will have a severely negative impact on those who had some consensual contact that went undiscovered. And for the victims of genuine abuse, the way that they are treated by the legal system only traumatizes them further, in some instances far more than the actual abuse itself ever did.

I'd love to see someone who supports this ignorant claim struggle (and inevitably fail) to refute this: The idea that sexual activity is the one thing in the world that underagers will engage in if they don't want to with adults, let alone those particular adults who do not live with them or have any particular degree of strict power over them, is quite baffling and entirely devoid of common sense, to say the least.

a) Children have an inherent lack of ability to consent to sexual contact with adults because they do not understand what sex is.

Knowing if something is pleasurable is not a difficult concept, at all. And moreover, it is awfully hard to say with a straight face that kids don't understand what sex is when they are frequently searching for sex and porn online, as noted by the Norton study of kids' surfing habits.

b) Children are "pre-sexual" (yes, one of the commenters actually uses the latter term).

A convenient term to begrudgingly acknowledge that kids, in fact, do have a sexual nature, while keeping it fully separated in their minds from "real" sexuality.

c) Even if children can receive pleasure from mutually consensual sexual contact with adults and are not magickally traumatized by it, it's still always a form of abuse on the part of the adult because children cannot understand the full ramifications or consequences of engaging in such activity.

How could something mutually consensual ever be considered abusive? Moreover, learning about the possible risks of sexual activity is not difficult, and those risks can also be largely negated by some simple precautions.

d) Intergenerational sexual contact is always a form of abuse by the adult because of the inherent power differential between adults and children (a situation that could include teens under the age of 18 also).

A power differential which exists solely because divisions based on age exist.

e) Sexual activity that occurs between adults and minors is always initiated by the adult because kids "don't do that stuff."

Wishful thinking doesn't make it so.

f) Pedophilia is a mental disorder.

A "mental disorder" which does not meet the DSM's definition of what constitutes a mental disorder.

g) The word "trauma" can have many different meanings or conceptions, and Susan Clancy only uses one of them in her book, hence her research and the main premise of her book is therefore faulty.

Only if "trauma" is taken to mean something completely different than what any reasonable definition of the word would say. And in any event, playing a game of semantics with a word does not undermine what someone claims if one looks at what the person is actually trying to convey.