Re: My take on this

First, what you wish for is epistemologically impossible. You need to know (1) what goes on in someone else's mind, and (2) what the effects of all courses of action will be for choosing to do and for refusing/refraining from any given action, both in the world around, and for your partner internally.

If you applied your own standard to everything, you'd be paralyzed. You wouldn't be able to do anything in life. Well, anything that involved another mind.

Second, imperfect correlation. There is any number of anecdotes of children who turned out all right "in spite" of the sexual interactions they had as children with other children or with adults. The theories of harm do not allow for this.

Make a somatic analogy so you understand my point: you take arsenic, it kills you - but *there are anecdotes of people who took arsenic and lived to tell without any harm. Would that be coherent with saying arsenic is harmful?

[*Like all substances, even arsenic depends on dosage - there is a viable micro dosage that doesn't kill. But you know that's not what I mean.]

Third, sexual exceptionalism. Even with those two problems, there is nothing inherently irrational about taking that position, to some point. Except that, in real life, it's only taken about sex, and not about any other aspect of a child's life. If it really is about a child's life, it should be taken for a lot more stuff than sex. Real practice hints that the real problem there is sex, not children.

My best analogy here is the gays: many people used to, and some still do, think and say that it's acceptable if gays dress femininely or attention seeking, or if they speak with a lisp, or if they concentrate in some professions, or if they have their own bars - but not with having sex with each other. The problem there is not about a "gay lifestyle" but about sex.

Each of these objections only applies to one part of the problem: one is philosophical, one scientific and one sociological; but that is all the more salient to me because that's three different incoherences present, all arising independently and not relating to the other.