Disclaimer: The issue here is repression of research and denial of the truth. One still may defend the laws as they are, but should not repress free research that could challenge one’s personal political opinions.

http://www.emory.edu/ACAD_EXCHANGE/2002/decjan/silenced.html

Another clash between highly charged political rhetoric and scholarly discourse concerned Associate Professor of Psychology Scott Lilienfeld. It began with a 1998 paper in Psychological Bulletin, a journal of the American Psychological Association (APA). Temple University’s Bruce Rind and two colleagues had conducted a review of quantitative literature, finding a weak link between childhood sexual abuse and later psychopathology. Radio talk show host Laura Schlessinger blasted the article as an effort to normalize pedophilia. Both houses of Congress passed resolutions condemning it, and finally, the chief executive of the APA wrote that the findings “should have caused us to evaluate the article based on its potential for misinforming the public policy process. This is something we failed to do, but will do in the future.”

Lilienfeld submitted an article to another APA-sponsored journal, American Psychologist, criticizing the apa’s capitulation to political pressure. The protests and their impact, he argued, detract from scientists’ ability to report their findings without undue interference, undermining all research on controversial topics.

Lilienfeld’s article, titled “When Worlds Collide,” was reviewed and accepted for publication following revisions to “tone it down.” It was slated to appear in the June 2001 issue. On May 10, however, Lilienfeld received a letter from the journal’s editor. “My article had now been unaccepted for publication,” Lilienfeld says. “He asked me to write an entirely new article removing all material dealing with the Rind et al. article and its aftermath, which amounts to about 60 percent of my article.”

Facing strong protests from the psychology community and some negative press, American Psychologist agreed to publish the article in a special section, along with several commentaries, in the December 2001 issue, at the earliest. “The APA never acknowledged that something was seriously amiss, even though it was clear that this action was politically motivated,” Lilienfeld says.

See also the excellent article by Wikipedia on Bruce Rind controversy

The authors’ stated goal was “…to address the question: In the population of persons with a history of CSA [child sexual abuse], does this experience cause intense psychological harm on a widespread basis for both genders?” Some of the authors’ more controversial conclusions were that child sexual abuse does not necessarily cause intense, pervasive harm to the child;^[3] that the reason the current view of child sexual abuse was not substantiated by their empirical scrutiny was because the construct of CSA was questionably valid; and that the psychological damage caused by the abusive encounters depends on whether the encounter was consensual or not.^[1]

Rind et al. concluded with a statement that even though CSA may not result in harm, this does not mean it is not wrong or morally repugnant behavior and denied that their findings implied current moral and legal prohibitions against CSA should be changed.^[1] Numerous pro-pedophile advocacy organizations have quoted the paper in support of their efforts to lower or rescind age of consent laws, and defense attorneys have used the study to argue for minimizing harm in child sexual abuse cases.^[4][5] Wikipedia on Bruce Rind

The events of a single afternoon when she was 13 years old have haunted Samantha Geimer her entire life. A famous movie director allegedly gave her champagne and had sex with her.
She is 45 now, and wishes the whole matter would just go away. The arrest of Roman Polanski in Switzerland over the weekend makes that highly unlikely. Geimer is back in the news in connection with the infamous 1977 California sex case, whether she likes it or not.
Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/09/29/polanski.victim.profile/index.html

Of course, if the worst allegations were true, that Polanski drugged the girl without her knowledge, and raped her while she told him to stop, everyone agrees this is a serious crime. But, where is the proof? It is strange that with sexual crimes against minors, the alleged perpetrator is “guilty until proven innocent”. Many times a minor gets caught by the parents, and instead of admitting she did it willingly, she decides to cry rape. So in normal cases, the legal rule is “innocent until proven guilty”. That is the rule that should be valid for all legal cases, even if a few guilty people were to be set free unjustly.

Quaeludes were a recreational drug, not a date rape drug, so if the girl were conscious of the fact and not underage, there would not be a maior problem. Note also that there is no proof for all the allegations that he gave her quaeludes
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methaqualone

So Polanski did a plea bargain, admitted to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. Yes the girl was fairly young, but millions of men would go to jail if this would be enforced regularly. I think it is worse to get a minor pregnant, when she is not ready for a child physiologically, psychologically, and financially.  As shown in other posts here, it seems that the hysteria about underage sex is not supported by scientific facts. Worse, scientific research about underage sexuality is actively suppressed and shunned. The link before shows how prestigious scientific research (not a fringe publication but the American Psychological Association) showed that most underage sexuality causes no problems. This research was rejected by unanimous vote in the US senate. Where else would the US senate repress research? Well, Clinton repudiated the Bell Curve, racial differences are another no-no.

Also notice that in the 70ies, times were different. Holland legally published porn movies with 16 year old actors. The blue lagoon with nude scenes of very young actresses has not even been out yet. In most parts of the world, all these things became criminalized later 

And finally, most crimes would have prescribed after 35 years.

So is there a problem: yes. But I don’t see it as a huge problem that is being made out of it. And, often forgotten, there is a problem when adult women (or men) take recreational drugs and drink alcohol, and maybe they end up doing things they would not have done otherwise.  Independent of being underage or not. Aclohol-related loss of self control is a huge problem.

Enough playing devils’ advocate today. This is not the complete discussion of the issue, just some points that are often omitted.

Judge:  “You have a duty of care to your son and that is to look after his moral welfare not, as you might think, to break him into the ways of sex through a prostitute.”

Cited from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/nottinghamshire/8052090.stm

Devil’s advocate comments:

• This behavior certainly is somewhat of a bad taste
• I doubt the kid is a poor victim of a father who wanted to push a prostitute upon him.  Surely the kid was interested in this, most likely he begged his father to get him laid.
• In many Latin countries it was common for male kids to lose their virginity with prostitutes
• I doubt the kid would have suffered grave damage from that
• In other posts we will see that there is no scientific support for the idea that kids in puberty suffer any damage from consensual sexual activity (see Bruce Rind study)
• If this had happened in the moralistic USA, he probably would have gotten a much stiffer sentence
• Of course, issues like pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases etc. need to be taken into consideration.

[Disclaimer: My main topic is "defense of free research", "freedom to find the scientific true facts" without getting death threats. This is not a crusade for underage sex, it is rather about unbiased truth & freedom of research versus dogmatic preconceived ideas]

http://www.radicalleft.net/blog/_archives/2006/6/5/1990675.html

In the only instance of a U.S. Congressional resolution against a scientific paper, the House of Representatives, with only minimal opposition, denounced a study by Dr. Bruce Rind & others, published in the scholarly review, Psychological Bulletin, in 1998.

This “meta-analysis” reviewed several research protocols about adult-child sexuality, and summarized them as showing that relationships in which force was not used did not appear to cause harm, and sometimes might be beneficial. Rind and his co-authors have been systematically ostracized and excluded from many scholarly journals.

In 2005, a book by a major publisher, which contained another scholarly article by Rind, was withdrawn by that publisher (Hayworth) because of protests from fundamentalist Christians.

Other gay writers like William Herdt and John DeCecco who researched sexual outlaw behavior in the U.S. (DeCecco) or intergenerational sexuality in non-western cultures (Herdt) simply moved on to other topics.

This did not keep DeCecco from experiencing extreme persecution—while a Professor in San Francisco he had to hire bodyguards to protect him from right-wing attackers.

A number of women researchers and radical feminists have attempted to undermine or slow down the sex panic.

Among them have been Camille Paglia, Debbie Nathan, Joan Nelson, Elizabeth Stoney, Laura Marks, Gayle Rubin, Pat Califia, Carole Vance, Marjorie Heins, Joanne Wypijewski, Janice Irvine and Judith Levine.

Paglia has been castigated by other sex researchers and many feminist writers for her defense of man-boy sexual relationships in particular.

Although she has published lengthy, well-researched summaries of the history of sexuality and sexual research, she is seldom included in university curriculums involving these topics.

Many of the other women writers suffered similar consequences or censorship of their views. Debbie Nathan, who exposed and virtually stopped the so-called satanic cult child sex panic with her book Satan’s Silence (Basic Books, 1996), has spoken of the icy reception her work has sometimes received.

She said, “… I have often had a sense of being intellectually and professionally marginalized, and I have experienced instances of editors killing pieces I’ve written about sexual hysteria because they got cold feet, as well as refusals to assign such stories.”

One woman writer, who had never had problems with previous articles on other subjects for a prestigious national magazine, attempted a balanced look at the crusade against Catholic priests, especially the sensational case of Father Paul Shanley. She was called in by the editor who said he simply could not run her piece.

Even before Judith Levine’s Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex was published in 2002, a massive campaign by fundamentalist Christian groups, including Concerned Women for America, attacked the publisher, the University of Minnesota Press.

While the book was published, the Press created a new process for reviewing its books before publication.

Levine spoke publicly about how she was humiliated time and again in public. She said the manuscript for her book had been turned down by many publishers, treated as if it were “radioactive.”

Among other insights, Levine wrote that “obsession with pedophiles stems for the reluctance to confront incest and the rampant sexualization of children” in American culture.

“Adults project the eroticized desire outwards, creating a monster to hate, hunt down and destroy.” Of the outcry against her book she added, “What happened to me is a perfect example of the hysteria my book is about.”

Nowhere is censorship and shunning greater than against those who would describe or depict childhood or adolescent sexuality, or mere nudity.

The “victims” of the evil perpetrators must also be protected—and projected as the spotless mirror image of their violators—at all costs—their purity and innocence asserted (even in the face of post-Freudian revelations of the sexual lives and interests of children).

Anything portraying the physical beauty of children or erotic aspects of their lives must be banned. (See Bob Chatelle’s excellent summaries of the impact of the child porn crusade on freedom of expression: Kiddie Porn Panic, 1993; Limits of Free expression & the Problem of Child Porn, 1997.)