For starters, what I meant by "truth" is FACTS. If you agree it's hard to find the truth, then being as sure as you are for your position with the total absence of evidence outside of the purely anecdotal should give you some pause. Now, onto your observations.
Really? Going from relatively few examples when photography was first developed in the mid 19th century to 5 million images, 100 GB websites (many others likely), 29 TB of related material and tens of thousands of websites (many commercial), numerous different means of obtaining these, vast numbers of images rating 6 on the COPINE scale and many busts of sharing networks - still rates only a "scare". What actually does rate as a serious problem? Paedophiles playing down what potentially does harm their image is understandable but I thought "truth" was the subject matter. I've pointed out several times the ways in which the worst aspects of paedophilia have been used to typify all paedophiles but this will not win many friends.
Did you read what I said carefully enough? If not, then please ask yourself these questions: Why won't the police let anyone outside of the law enforcement or higher court echelons, including several objective non-MAA journalists, view anything they claim is abusive CP? In the very rare cases this has been done to a limited extent, as with Judith Levine commenting in her book Harmful to Minors, she was largely "underwhelmed" by what she saw being considered CP by cops. Do we have any evidence that CP is pervasive when cops spread the definition so broadly, and we have a near-total absence of former child victims coming forth, or even parents of all the allegedly kidnapped kids coming forth? How about the evidence that the small amount of truly abusive CP is actually made by parents or stepparents? How about the articles, including the one in the 1988 issue of Playboy, that the CP scare--and yes, it is a scare--is heavily overrated? When you continually broaden the definition of what constitutes CP, then yea, you can easily make it pervasive that way. It's clear from your response here that the police and the mainstream media that simply repeats the words of the police verbatim is the only place you get all of your info from, which is why you really need to stretch your research net wider.
One, two or several incidents does not in itself tell us that children will lie about such matters but that they can and often will be actors directed for some particular agenda. I am sure these kinds of cases do occur all around the world but in the main children do not lie about any sexual abuse they have suffered unless they are given leading questions or feel good reasons to do so and we recognise this to be a problem now.
And this is precisely what my point was--that the once common belief that children never lie has been proven untrue, meaning that such cases need to be objectively investigated, something the McMartin case proved is often not the case. It's not just a "few" incidents, such accusations were believed in literally thousands of cases during the 1980s and early '90s, which is why I told you to read Satan's Silence by Debbie Nathan and John Snedeker. And you see cases like this in the news constantly today, which you have obviously read, and where you obviously build your entire ideology upon, so where are you getting the figure of a mere "few" from? I never in any way said that children always lie, but that if they are given such leading questions when they insisted they were not abused, and castigated under oppressive interrogation conditions until they do, then all such scenarios where accusations were obtained such be held suspect. And this occurs almost every single time a case of statutory rape is mounted, as opposed to a child bringing an accusation forth themselves. Please cease reading more into my statements than I intended to say.
Hence, children can lie when they say they have been sexually abused but usually they don't.
And where did I argue that they are usually lying regardless of the circumstances under which the accusation was obtained? Where are you getting this from?
If this is all the evidence you could find Dissident then go looking again. This tells us nothing about the level of interest - even 5-year-olds will be having an interest in "sex" when they discover how they were born and perhaps want to know by what mechanism they were produced.
Um, how long, exactly, did you expect me to make that essay, lee? The Symantec report was a good statistical example to use because the stats they obtained show that many kids are interested in the concept of sex. Curiosity often leads to experimentation. Kids are well known for experimenting with each other, and in some cases, adults, which they describe in code as "playing doctor" or other euphemisms. There is no scientific evidence that kids are largely asexual, or have largely have no interest in sex play or experimentation.
Some "kids" have sexual desire and some "kids" don't but from the paper I quoted in one thread and from the book I mentioned in another post it seems that sexual desire is not high on the activities of pre-pubescents even if playing at it is for a few.
I haven't seen the book yet, but I will look at it if you tell where you posted a link to it--but I am willing to bet it was written by someone who did no objective studies on it whatsoever, otherwise you wouldn't be supporting it like you are. The point remains, as I said before, that kids often perform their sexual experimentation in secrecy, so adults who have control over them do not see them, as kids learn very quickly that such behavior is forbidden and punishable. I certainly had to "play doctor" in secret with peers as a child, as one of the first things I learned from adults was that I wasn't supposed to be thinking about or doing that stuff--which, ironically, made me all the more curious about it. Yet you seem to think that not doing this in public means they do not do it at all. The point further remains that even if only a few wanted to experiment with either peers or adults, and initiated it themselves, that justifies the legal allowance of that experimentation for all if they so choose. Nobody here has ever supported the "right" for adults (or even peers) to foist sexual activity upon a child. And I am not talking about toddlers here; you seem to push in that direction at every opportunity, as if using them as representatives for all underagers will make a better case for your overall ideology.
I don't know if any of these cases have any basis in fact but their relevance to the overall topic of child sexual abuse is pretty limited as are those sexually abused in the making of child pornography but we do know the latter exists all too readily and they have suffered just as much as those purported to be in these "cults."
First off, the Satanic abuse hysteria was HUGE in the 1980s, petering into the early '90s, and thousands of innocent people were arrested with no evidence whatsoever, as well as countless children being bullied into being used as the instruments of this vile phenomenon. Saying that it's not relevant to the overall topic is easy to say in 2012, but not back then, I would argue that it's highly relevant still when you consider that it shows how far things can be taken during a sex abuse hysteria. Downplaying the degree of lies and tragedies based on those lies in defense of the kids helps no one, least of all the kids who are continuously being used as pawns to facilitate the victimization of innocent people and the establishment of a police and surveillance state.
And the info you get on countless children suffering under abusive CP, which you clearly believe implicitly as unquestionable fact, comes from precisely the same sources as the Satanic abuse reports did: The police, repeated word-for-word without question (in most cases) by the mainstream media. Yet you see how credible these sources often are not when it comes to how much they have to gain by proliferating this hysteria, not to mention other destructive campaigns such as the War on Drugs. By using the word "suffering," you also seem to imply the common, but completely unsupported by evidence belief, that the vast majority of what is referred to as CP by the police--a definition that increasingly broadens year after year--is all full of children forced into sexual acts on camera against their will, always by adults, probably always by adults who are not parents or other older relatives, and that the kids are all tied up, crying on camera, burned with cigarettes, etc. This emotionally charged image causes many people to cry for the end of democracy itself if a single child can be spared the suffering from this "epidemic"--which the police and courts conveniently do not allow anyone to verify, but which they know pushing the right emotional triggers in people will generate outrage and belief without any questions about veracity. Next, you will likely tell me that you routinely stumble on abusive CP while just casually surfing the Net, which would be ridiculous, because if it was that easy to find, then images of it could not be kept so readily from the public eye, because the vast majority of people would be stumbling upon it every day while shopping for housing appliances online, or surfing for adult porn. Again, you need to broaden your research. Start reading Paul Okami, Richard Green, Karen Franklin, Michael Bailey, and Harris Mirkin, all of whom are social scientists or political scientists who have studied the subject of MAAs, and none of whom are MAAs themselves.
As I've commented I remember precisely what happened to me
Okay, this may explain why you have such a strong, societally-encouraged bias against this subject. I greatly sympathize with you if you were a genuine abuse victim, and I would want to see your abuser brought to justice, but why do you not argue against genuine abuse or the conditions that foster opportunities for adults to abuse kids--like the current hierarchical nature of the nuclear family unit and the legal status of kids that often place them at the mercy of adults--instead of focusing your ire on intergenerational sexual/romantic interactions per se? Why do you connect that very general topic to abuse? I know that the law does this, and Western culture at large does this, but that doesn't make it true in essence. You would have this community as full allies if you were against abuse of children proper, but that will require you to question various aspects of the status quo, which is a much more demanding and difficult task than simplistically putting all the blame on "pedophilia" or adult attraction to minors in a general sense. It will also require you to look at much more common forms of abuse against children, rather than focusing entirely on any activity that has a sexual element to it.
Because of this I do find it difficult to relate to those who do not apparently remember any abuse they might have suffered. However, because we do know that many people will dissociate when faced with situations that are truly traumatic it is possible that memories are repressed and will only be available under therapy. I would have as much concern as yourself about such therapy to regain true memories but I would not categorically say that all such "memories" are likely to be false ones.
Even in the absence of any available evidence? And when it has been proven by memory experts and psychologists who study this phenomenon that people who suffer trauma do not typically repress the memory, but rather develop conditions like post-traumatic stress syndrome where they cannot avoid replaying it in their mind?
The problem, lee, is that you are so caught up in the emotions connected to this topic that you always bias your position in favor of things that may bolster sympathy for abuse victims and in favor of the conception of children as inherently weak and in need of protection, even if they have been disproven by science, or where no scientific evidence exists to support it. This is what happens when emotion replaces reason. And if you were abused yourself, society will encourage you to bias yourself against this subject, and to show a disproportionate amount of sympathy to anyone who is purported to be a victim over that of anyone who is accused; or any type of science that may refute some type of victim testimony; or anything that has to do with adult attraction to minors, which you have been conditioned to conflate with abuse. You say you are looking for objective information about adult attraction to minors, but like many abuse victims before you who have claimed the same when interacting with us, in actuality you seem to have your mind focused disproportionately on the matter of sexual abuse, which you again connect to pedophilia and hebephilia specifically, rather than to specific factors under which it is most likely to occur. Further, when we refute certain types of biases that lead to false accusations of abuse, your bias and fixation on abuse causes you to interpret this as claims on our part that abuse doesn't actually occur, which is something we have never claimed. This also explains why you have a strong need to believe that everything that is said by police and the media about CP is absolutely true, and why you downplay the many past lies and gross exaggerations the police and media were involved in regarding the sex abuse hysteria that have since been totally disproven, like the Satanic ritual abuse nonsense. This is not an attempt to downplay your pain or the injustice you suffered, but entirely aimed at your bias. Will you please consider all of this, particularly the possibility that you may be "too close" to this topic from a personal standpoint to view any aspect of it objectively?
I have no problem with this except that there is a vast difference in the ages of what we mean by "minors."
Did I not point this out myself earlier as part of the problem we have such a large amount of disagreement? This has occurred in the past with others who were talking about different age groups in the context of the term "minor."
Also since sexting is relatively new
Because the advent of cell phones with cameras are relatively new. The phenomenon is older on socnet sites, which have been around for close to a decade now.
it seems that there is still some scope for disagreement, with perhaps as many as 30% actually doing this but in a relatively harmless manner - slight nudity perhaps -
Sometimes more than slight. But it's considered CP and an actionable offense by the law nonetheless, which underscores my previous point that the police and the courts very broadly define what constitutes CP, and increasingly broaden its parameters all the time, so that now the rubric of CP includes pics where no minors were involved at all, including cartoon imagery; drawings; and pics of legal adults dressed like minors--in other words, anything that may possibly cause an MAA to become sexually aroused upon viewing, or in the case of the teen-to-teen sexting, anything that may facilitate the expression of underage sexuality in general. This is why I told you up above that we need to be very cautious in blindly believing that the bulk of what cops consider CP is filled with kids who were suffering from forced sexual activity; or that all the kids appearing in such material were very young rather than at least approaching adolescence; that the material was even recently produced; or that it was automatically produced by adults. Do you see my point here?
and very much less by pre-pubescents if at all.
Because pre-pubescents are rarely given access to cell phones these days. But increasingly younger kids are creating YouTube channels, and their videos are becoming increasingly expressive, which strongly suggests that pre-pubescents can be exhibitionists as much as any adolescents or adults. It's easy to say otherwise when they largely lack access to the technology in question at the present time, just as it was once easy to say that blacks couldn't learn to read when they were largely denied access to books on the plantations.
As above, I am perfectly willing to see changes in how adolescents are perceived, treated and given appropriate rights including those relating to more sexual freedoms and expression if it can be shown that these will not impact on their future welfare.
You can never predict how giving anyone rights--child, adolescent, or adult--will impact on their future welfare, because the future for everyone is one big tabula rasa. You provide them with rights on the basis of the principles that the risks that come with freedom are preferable to the way of the police state.
What I do not see changing is how we treat pre-pubescents as they are developmentally different and deserving of more protections.
The same is said for adolescents now against good available scientific evidence, and the same was said for blacks and women in the past. This is why in order to be fair, children must be allowed to prove themselves so they can be treated on their individual merits, just as they were in the past when they used to routinely take apprenticeships at young ages.
The fact is that although we might have invented the concept of "childhood" we have much evidence from all the related sciences that children below puberty are fundamentally different in many ways than adults or even adolescents and we need to treat them differently.
Where is this scientific evidence? The same statements are made abotu adolescents, with scientific evidence to the contrary ignored. Secondly, treating them differently does not mean taking away their rights to make decisions that they can be readily taught to make competently. The "solution" of taking away their rights actually causes them to be treated as property, and denies those who are truly able to accomplish great things from having the opportunities to do so for either entirely arbitrary reasons connected to their age, or because it may go against the ideological or religious beliefs of their parents.
Firstly, I do not believe that it is inevitably traumatizing but we should recognise a difference between the various classes of "minors", something which Levine does not do apparently.
First off, the law doesn't do so at all.
Secondly, evidence collected from people who had consensual relations with adults as children do not report trauma or negative symptoms developing of their own accord afterwards. Harm can still occur afterwards due to iatrogenic or sociogenic factors, which is one reason why the majority of MAAs (including hebephiles) refrain from engaging in such activity with minors of all age groups, but such harm is not due to anything intrinsic with the sexual activity itself, but based on the reactions of others to it from a moralistic point of view. Levine is well aware of this from her studies, but this is not something that your personal ideology will currently allow you to accept, hence you ignore or scoff at objective scientific studies that made these conclusions.
I don't know if the Rind report has any true validity since we will never know if those who had such sexual relationships might have looked at things differently if they had not had them.
Sound scientific methodology, full peer review of all methods used, and the fact that it was fully replicated a few years later give strong points in its favor. And how could those who didn't have the experiences be a better authority on how children may feel after such consensual interactions than those who did have them? Those who didn't have them would be judging on the basis of a vantage point they didn't possess, i.e., entirely on personal ideology or sensibility as opposed to actual feelings based on experience.
We can't assess their psychological profile to look within to see if everything was ticketyboo such that they are merely playing out a role that will not admit to any harms that might have occurred.
And we should assume they may not be telling the truth about this when reporting anonymously on a questionnaire for what reason exactly? Is it truly responsible for us to make such assumptions? Are you sure this is not your bias I noted up above that behooves you to think it's justified to make such assumptions?
What I do think is that in the vast majority of these cases the relationships were initiated by the older person, for their own sexual gratification and thus was intrusive into the lives of those children.
Mmmmhmmmm. And in the absence of any corroborating evidence, you think it's totally justified to make this broad assumption, which is based on the belief that any adults who have an attraction to minors are inherently selfish individuals who are only capable of caring about their sexual lusts if they should become involved in such an interaction, and that if children or adults who had these experiences as children say otherwise, we should assume they are either lying or incapable of understanding what they "actually" wanted for not playing into the stereotypes we have of both adults and children who may interact thusly. Now let's see you tell us that you have no bias on this subject, and that we are the ones who are making the projections and forming self-serving biases. Please understand that it's very difficult at this point to believe that you have any desire of objective learning, and that you cannot separate the complex spectra of adult attraction to minors from the specific subject of sexual abuse. How can you learn anything with your mind willfully closed, and only listening to the sources that bolster the mainstream view?
This last aspect can often be seen in those involved in child prostitution who will defiantly emphasise that their relationships are more akin to "lovers" or that their clients are just "boyfriends."
So you will read the mainstream, very non-scientific rationalizations of a writer who is known to have a powerful personal bias with the MAA community, and to have come to us under false pretenses to get our info, as gospel over those of other non-MAA writers who cite actual scientific studies rather than simply spew out mainstream rhetoric, like Levine and likely all the others I mentioned up above if you were to actually read them? No wonder you react so blindly to this subject.
Yes, the common view in society is that kids will go out of their way to please adults whom they love and look up to and do everything that adult asks without question--but strangely, only if unwanted sexual activity is involved. We routinely witness children arguing with adults they love and have at least a modicum of respect and even fear for about things like going to school; doing their homework; eating certain foods they dislike; going to bed at a certain hour; not hanging around with certain friends their parents dislike; avoiding TV shows or websites their parents forbid them to watch; etc. But when it comes to unwanted sexual activity, this is the one thing you can accept that they will comply with no matter how much they actually hate it, out of a desire not to lose the affection of an adult they care about. Politicians and parents often bemoan how defiant children are with adult authority, yet they simultaneously express fears that children always go along with what adults say when it comes to supposedly unwanted sexual activities.
This is due to your firm belief, like that of Dr. Goode's, that since there is no way children (or at least more than a "few") would actually want sexual activities with an adult, we must rationalize such behavior as being against their will (even if they didn't realize it), and to view the adults in those situations as selfish creeps who hold ultimatums over the heads of those kids to retain their company--much as white men in the South used to rationalize lynching black men whom white women had consensual sex with, because their sensibilities refused to allow them to believe that any (okay, "most") white woman could possibly want to have sex with a black man of their own volition, and that in "most" cases the black man must have used duplicitous means to convince these hapless victimized women otherwise so they could "rape" them without they're being aware of it.
It's interesting to know that you read Sarah Goode, but have yet to read Judith Levine, Richard Farson, and John Taylor Gatto, all of whom were not MAAs nor pro-pedophile, but are/were entirely pro-youth. If you deny that you are biased, then read the books of these individuals, particularly Gatto's books and Farson's Birthrights.
Sexual pleasure and enjoyment are not enough to justify such interactions - the pleasure centres of the brain are geared to seek such experiences and for them to be reinforced otherwise we would not see so many addictions and compulsive behaviours. This is part of the problem, not any sort of justification.
And enjoying mutually consensual sexual activities of a certain sort within reasonable parameters is comparable to an addiction or a compulsion for youths exactly how? Should those who dislike homosexual interactions label them as "addictions" or "compulsions" to denounce their validity? What if such interactions do not impact in any demonstrably negative way upon a child's life? Then you have to admit your problem with the interactions are based on moralism, not safety concerns.
As Sarah Goode pointed out children are not asexual neither are they sexual. Some can be either, but it seems that for the vast majority it is mostly sex-play and exploration if it occurs at all during pre-pubertal life and very, very few have what we as adults would consider to be fully sexual relationships with either another child or with an adult or adolescent.
Again, Sarah Goode is known to have a strong personal bias against intergenerational activities, and she came to this community under false pretenses, with the last two chapters of her book being about abuse, thus proving how she conflates abuse with all types of intergenerational activities. Now I know I was correct before to strongly suggest that you need to broaden your research horizons and not limit yourself to individuals who simply speak mainstream views. Which is all that Sarah Goode did. Her second book was more blatantly anti-MAA, so if you throw around her name as your chief authority on this subject, then you are not going to escape the accusation of bias, which will be entirely justified.
Okay, now here is another problem you seem to have, which makes me strongly wonder if you are actually an MAA, because discussions on the above point are conducted here often. I am not entirely sure if you ever said you were an MAA, but I was under that impression from reading some of the first posts of yours that I perused. Please clarify this point one way or another. In the meantime, I will tell you why I have my doubts.
One of the main mistakes/assumptions made about the pedophilic attraction base from Nons (including the not-very-knowledgable-Dr. Goode, whom you consider an authority on these matters) is the strange belief that pedophiles typically have an adult-like level of attraction to pre-pubescents, and that they believe most pre-pubescents have desires for actual full blown sexual intercourse and adult-like relationships. This is far from the truth. The typical pedophile (not counting child fetishists, who are not quite pedophiles in the sense we define them here) has sexual and emotional desires on the level of a child, and the social aspects of their attraction include a strong interest in and appeal for the social world of a child. The emotional and social aspects of their attraction base are generally greater than those of the sexual aspects, and they tend to limit such sexual interactions--when they have occurred at all--to the same type of sex play that children routinely engage in with peers. Genuine pedophiles do not typically want adult-level romantic relationships with children, nor expect or seek full anal or vaginal intercourse with them, let alone any of the usual "kinky" activities that adults often engage in with each other. MAAs who speak in this community tend to inadvertently cause confusion over this issue at times by referring to intergenerational "sex" rather than "sexual activity" simply due to lazy typing, even though pedophiles are generally referring to sex play, not full intercourse, as the term "sex" can mis-imply in the minds of Nons who read or hear that word.
Were you not aware of this? And were you not aware that Dr. Goode was not aware of this either? If not, then you need to quickly become aware of this important fact if you have any hope of judging this community with any degree of fairness.
Some information as to how children are affected by their early experiences -
If these are the only sources you have read to build your view on the entire fulcrum of this subject, then again, you need to immensely broaden your research horizons, and to deliberately try reading the literature from those who have provided strong, well-researched info from scientifically objective methodology. We have read all the literature you have a thousand times over, and have since learned that none of it came from actual research, but rather simple assumptions that were based on solely using forensic or clinical samples of adult sex offenders (a large percentage of whom were likely not genuine MAAs, or confined for mutually consensual interactions with underagers), or children who specifically had non-consensual interactions with adults that involved incest, violence, and obvious coercion to build opinions and data on intergenerational interactions in general. After looking at that data, the only way I could possibly understand why you would consider it remotely objective or based on research involving non-forensically obtained samples of kids or MAAs is if you never spoke to actual MAAs before, or read any of the contrary literature involved. You now have the opportunity for both, so please partake of it fairly if you want us to be fair to you in response--and we have certainly sought given you all due courtesies, because we believed you when you said you are here to learn.