Carol Tavris briefly summarizes, satirically with the phrase “we all know,” a dogma of the “child sexual abuse industry”: “Teenagers, whom we all know have no sexual feelings of any kind until they are 16 (at which time they magically become mature adults) are incapable of wishing to have sexual relations, so if they do have sexual relations before age 16, said relations must be oppressive, traumatic, and coerced.” (Carol Tavris, “The Uproar Over Sexual Abuse Research and its Findings,” Society, May/June 2000, p. 15.)

Tavris is wrong about one detail. For most CSA victimologists, the magical age is now 18 and was so when she wrote this in the year 2000. To quote Rind et al. in The Skeptical Inquirer

…Who is a “child”? CSA came to include any kind of sexual encounter between a minor under age eighteen and someone five or more years older. And what is “abuse”? Victimologists began with rape and incest, but then stretched definitions of CSA to include non-contact episodes (e.g., flashing), sex between children of differing ages, and episodes of mature adolescents willingly participating in sex with older teens or adults. Yet they maintained that all these encounters were traumatizing, using dramatic analogies such as slavery, head-on car crashes, being mauled by a dog, and torture to convey their belief about CSA’s nature.(“The Condemned Meta-Analysis on Child Sexual Abuse: Good Science and Long-Overdue Skepticism,” The Skeptical Inquirer, July/August 2001, 68-72.)

CSA victimologists and those they’ve inculcated believe that “(a) CSA causes harm, (b) the harm is pervasive in the population of persons with a history of CSA, (c) this harm is likely to be intense, and (d) CSA is an equivalent experience for boys and girls in terms of its widespread and intensely negative effects (emphasis added).The media has created “the image that CSA produces intensely negative effects for all its victims” and “some have attempted to explain much or all of adult psychopathology as a consequence of CSA.”  (Bruce Rind, Robert Bauserman, and Philip Tromovitch, “A Meta-Analytic of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples,” Psychological Bulletin, 1998, Vol. 124, p. 22.)

For debunking such idiocies in their infamous study, for telling the truth and stating the facts and noting the obvious and living in the real world, Rind et al. were unanimously condemned by the United States Congress. Yes, there was not one dissenter, not one heretic! Differentiating between pubescents under age 18 and young children and between males and females -e.g., contrasting the incestual rape of a 5-year-old girl with “the willing sexual involvement of a mature 15-year-old adolescent boy with an unrelated adult…(Rind, p. 23.)”- was “perhaps the researchers most inflammatory finding (Tavris).”

CSA victimologists on the right as well as the left were outraged by their contention that biological men under age 18 are innately different from adolescent girls and thus far more likely to react positively to sexual encounters with adults of both sexes -with Dr. Laura and her ilk viewing this distinction as insidiously condoning the pervasive abuse and exploitation of underage male teenagers by adult homosexuals.