The new scientific silence on child-adult sex and the age of consent
by Mark Regnerus, MercatorNet:
A disturbing push to rehabilitate sex with minors.
The Archives of Sexual Behavior, a journal I respect and have recently published in and reviewed for, has printed a pair of studies by Bruce Rind in the past year. The recent publication of his work marks a significant, unnoticed, and unnerving turn in the dissemination and consumption of research on sex and sexuality.
Almost twenty years ago, both houses of Congress and the American Psychological Association condemned Rind’s claims, published in the August 1998 issue of Psychological Bulletin, that the long-term damages caused by child sexual abuse are overestimated. I would have thought that nearly twenty years, a concurrent resolution of Congress, and a fair bit of social trauma would have convinced him to shift topics.
But I was wrong. His new studies are on the same theme: sex between adults and minors as young as thirteen. Rind is banking on a more amenable political and scholarly atmosphere in which to conclude comparable things. And from the sound of it—or rather, the utter lack of sound—he has gotten his wish. There has been no congressional concern, no APA scrutiny, just silence.
So what do the studies say?
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