Twenty-four percent to 37 percent of the men saw their abuse as having a positive influence on their current sex lives. Such numbers are heavily skewed toward homosexuality. Although there was what they characterized as a slight association between childhood sexual abuse and psychological harm, they attributed the damage to negative family factors rather than to the sexual experience as such. As long as the sexual contact was not coerced and was enjoyed, concluded the authors, sex between children and adults may not be harmful at all. We should therefore not be so judgmental.
Science is supposed to avoid value judgments.
An adult who has sex with a minor is therefore committing rape. That it is morally wrong for adults to use children sexually should be self-evident. But debates about moral issues are often battles over the language we use to think about them. And this is coming from the American Psychological Association. In 1973, the American Psychological Association removed homosexuality as a category of mental illness.