7/4/02

Delay Delay Delay

When it comes to adults engaging in 'consensual' sexual activities with young children they are most certainly abusing those children, but NOT because such children will later be traumatised psychologically by the 'consensual' events.

Children cannot possibly consent to the long-term effects that sex can have on them. They can certainly give legitimate consent with regard to how they feel about what is actually happening to them at the time, or to what they, themselves, wish or wish not to be doing, but they cannot possibly give any legitimate consent to the effects that lie beyond their current experience; for they can have no real understanding of the pathways through which their sexual events, psychological or otherwise, might lead them in the future. This is difficult enough for adults in their twenties to understand, and for children it is plainly impossible.

Children are also not aware of how their sexuality can be guided down particular pathways based on the experiences that they have. And, further, they cannot appreciate (and, therefore, avoid) fully the many serious problems and pitfalls that they are likely to encounter by being seduced into being sexually active at an early age. They are also nowhere near developing sufficient understanding of how highly intimate experiences can have lasting emotional and cognitive consequences for them - good or bad. 

And, in all the above respects, 'consensual' sex could hardly be more influencing - given that welcome physical intimacy self-evidently opens very wide the doors that lead deep into the psyches of those who engage in it. 

Further, of course, certain forms of sexual activity can lead to diseases being transmitted, and while it is quite one thing for adults to take the risks of getting them in order to gain pleasure from physical intimacies, it is quite another to impose these risks upon children. And the fact that adults can never really know whether or not they are carrying any such diseases - and these include some very serious ones - makes any actions which might inflict such diseases upon children as negligent with regard to the children's welfare as would be the case if a doctor knowingly risked using unsterilised needles upon them.

Well, the evidence seems to show that there are millions of adults who do not bear any scars from having indulged in consensual sexual antics at an early age, but there are also many millions who do!

And so, for example again, in much the same way that drinking and driving proscriptions are clearly important for the safety of people even though accidents mostly do NOT arise when journeys are undertaken by drivers who have been drinking, so it is that proscriptions in the sexual arena when it comes to children are necessary in order to protect a significant number of them from crashing into walls!

In summary, children cannot possibly consent to any risks or consequences of sexual intimacies (many of which reach into the long term) given that they can have no realistic notions about them. In this respect, they are equivalent to being passengers enticed into cars driven by adult drivers who have drunk too much. 

Nothing bad might happen, but it might! And the high increase of risk entailed in the childhood sexual arena is significant enough to warrant the proscription of activities therein.

Children cannot read nor understand all the small print that goes along with sex.

And there's quite a lot of it!

Also, of course, from society's point of view, and statistically speaking, sexualised children are also going to end up causing an enormous number of problems (disease, teenage pregnancies, abortions, child prostitution, criminality, drugs, loss of education etc).

Indeed, one of the best pieces of advice that one can give to parents regarding their children is to delay, delay, delay. Delay for as long as possible all those things that might more readily lead to unhappiness; the child's first sexual exploit, their first cigarette, their first ecstasy tablet, the first time that they play truant from school, the first time that they have a boyfriend, the first time that they fail to do their homework, their first trip to the nightclub. And so on.

Delay is the best in such areas, so that these growing beings have as much experience, understanding and resilience (mental and physical) as possible, before engaging in activities that might lead to serious and/or long-term negative consequences.

So, in summary, there are very many seriously negative aspects to children engaging in 'consensual' sexual activities. 

But psychological trauma is not one of them.

e.g. see Child Abuse - The Real Culprits

Hello T

The reasons why so many paedophiles fail to be convinced about any harmful effects of child sex is because, firstly, there are millions of adults the world over who have not experienced harmful effects, and that includes most of the paedophiles themselves, and, secondly, though they won't readily admit to it, many people and psychologists realise that where psychological 'traumas' arise at a time AFTER the events themselves, then some kind of trauma-inducing indoctrination must have taken place somewhere in the meantime.

In my view, the focus of rebutting the paedophiles' claims is usually in the wrong place - and it is mostly the equivalent of something like telling youngsters that smoking marihuana will turn them into mad killers or that masturbation eventually makes you blind. Too many people just don't believe this; especially when they, themselves, have actually experienced these things

In my opinion, the best way to persuade paedophiles not to indulge themselves is to point out that even 'consensual' child sexual abuse is a bit like drinking and driving. Things might be OK, but there is always far too great a likelihood that the altered future pathways for the child will lead to serious negative consequences. And so, much in the same way that drink drivers are prosecuted because of their negligent attitude toward the higher probability of having an accident, so it is that paedophiles should be prosecuted for inflicting something similar on to children.

What is not tolerable, however, is for men and fathers - and, indeed, for all those whose work brings them into contact with children - to be continually demonised and put under suspicion, either in the process of deterring paedophiles, or in the process of educating the population at large about them, or when it comes to raising funds - especially when the accompanying hysteria is what actually causes MOST of the damage to the victims themselves.

e.g. see Child Abuse - The Real Culprits

AH

Finally, I would strongly urge all men to read the piece entitled NSPCC Needs To Be Stopped to see how many of those who work in the child-abuse industry poison very significantly the relationships of EVERYONE.

And I do mean EVERYONE.