---- From 28 -----
Research shows that many children, especially girls, who have sexual awakenings at the hands of an adult partner, have serious emotional problems later on in life. This, in my opinion, is caused by one of three things: the activity was not consensual, the pressure of having to keep the secret (and thus not have anyone with which to discuss her feelings), or the activity was discovered and her friend was skewered on the lance of injustice, while she was brainwashed into victim status.
----------------

The maintenance of a system of laws which prohibit sexual activity, either with peers
or with persons of significantly different ages, where one is under some claimed
age of consent, is that all such encounters are going to be potential 'causes' of
problems.

The reason why the Rind study was so controversial is that even in a society where
sexual relationships between adults and youths are furtive, easily tending to
potential abuse(*), etc. many students when queried at college age, did not see
these sexual activites as significant in their current 'life situation', etc. However,
because of the inertia of certain groups, because of the outright repressive
programs of other groups, current clinical practice seems to continue to view
such sexual encounters as 'dangerous', and only because of the natural resilience
of the individual is disaster avoided.

* On the issue of 'abuse', yes, often children are coerced into sexual relationships. But
there is also the issue of 'children' knowing how such sexual relationships are viewed,
use this to blackmail the adult. It is probably teens or near teens that have the
consciousness to do this regularly, but it is as much 'abuse' as that of an adult
using their power to effect response, or override the wishes of the child.

But back to 'causality', which is really what the claim about early sexual experiences
is about. The idea tha some one event, or even a series of events is causal in later
life is extremely difficult to prove. It is easy enough to prove 'correlation', ie that
when X occurs, Y occurs in a statistically significant way. If we were to use correlation,
then such books as the Christian Bible would be highly correlated with any criminal
act seen in the US. Many children in the US attend Sunday School, and many turn
out to be criminals... therefore by the grounds of correlation, Sunday School causes
crime... Most would scoff at such a claim... and should. But when the variables are
changed to 'sexual encounter', and 'later criminal'. or 'later mental health difficulties',
many who would reject the 'bible causes crime' out of hand, take up the 'sex
causes mental health problems' as it were gospel.

In order to study causality a more complex model needs to be develop which looks at
a tree of potential causes, and traces a path through that tree. Once the tree is
developed, a cluster of factors will give a 'causal' set of conditions, circumstances,
and the resulting observed behavior.

This requires long years studies of many people who are 'completely honest' with the
maintainers of the study. In the case of sexual conduct involving children and adults
another factor enters in. That is mandatory reporting. So, no study could effectively
be done which permits the individuals to be 'observed', and monitoring 'sexual conduct'
which does not lead into a requirement for the sexual activity to be reported, and
hence will skew the results. I think it should be obvious that intervention would
result in skewing to the negative, although technically that too needs to be looked
at by scientific means...