Is Child Sexual Abuse Harmful by Itself? V2

• Pro is arguing that the sexual abuse of children is not harmful in any capacity. For me, as the contender, to win this debate, I must simply exhibit that it is harmful. 
• I have no particular idea as to why pro is trying to direct our attention to their argument in another debate. This should obviously be ignored. Evidently, as pro has not made a constructive case, con will simply resolve this round as an extension of our opening parameters. 

• Analyzing the sole definition in the description, pro has given us a definition of child sexual abuse that seems to be incorrect (mostly because abuse doesn't tend to be a choice). I suggest rather than using fake and/or made up definitions we use real ones. 
• Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) labels it as: Child sexual abuse is a form of child abuse that includes sexual activity with a minor.
• Wikipedia defines it as: a form of child abuse in which an adult or older adolescent uses a child for sexual stimulation. 
• Either one of them should suffice, but the goal here is simply to establish one that is not fundamentally incoherent. In addition:
• Harmful: causing or likely to cause harm.
• Harm: physical or mental damage or injury : something that causes someone or something to be hurt, broken, made less valuable or successful, etc.
• injury, damage, or problems caused by something that you do
  

• The Burden is somewhat shared, however pro bears the larger burden in proving that child's sexual abuse isn't harmful. 

If you are familiar with philosophy then you have probably heard something like "the burden of proof lies with someone who is making a claim and is not upon anyone else to disprove.

I am saying that something is not existing in the world.

I'm not going to waste time arguing about semantics. If you don't want to argue about child sexual abuse as I defined it then you should not have agreed to this debate.

No. From the description of this debate: "Pro argues that the vast majority of the harm that is correlated with kids having sex with adults stems from the stigma against it and failing to control for other confounding variables." 

"Vast majority" is vague. It could be anywhere from 70% to 95%. I define it as 75%. In fact, the whole quote is vague.

Lmao. So by that logic, everything that kids do is damaging to their phycology because they don't really make real choices and every choice that they make is a form of slavery. 

Re. ""To my knowledge" doesn't mean anything."

I should have been more specific. I mean't that I had read through 100% of the boywiki links and I did not find anything that showed that the minor-adult sex was harmful. 

I only read roughly 1/10th of it...

This is a valid point, as I am pretty sure that I mentioned. However, why would adult-minor and minor-minor sex continue to be permissible and practiced by kids in any society if it was harmful

Why does using a "pedophile source" violate the code of conduct? What specific quote(s) from the code of conduct can you give to support this claim.

No, I never said that. I sure have not seen any and I highly doubt it. All I saw was a boy with their shirt off on the home page (which was not sexualized). This is not child pornography.

If you want to make this argument, you can since technically, I didn't make the description specific enough to ward against someone making such a pointless argument (ex there is .0001% of harm when children have sex with adults so technically there is harm) for no good cause except for winning the debate. I am not going to try to argue against this argument because I find it to be a waste of time, I simply don't care about it, and this is basically not what I meant to debate about.

I would personally look at this from a perspective of whoever shows that minor-adult sex is not harmful 'within reason' 

"This was not predefined. I define it as 95%."

Fair enough.

I specifically excluded forced CSA in my definition of CSA. Also, you got a source for that?

The authors of the article do not cite any sources to back up this claim.

You are misunderstanding what I argued or are misrepresenting it. I will write the argument here again...

"you still have not responded to X, Y and Z"

I actually agree. Didn't think that one through.

Pro agrees, thus we have set the baseline for the "vast majority," at 95%. Pro must argue that 95% of child sexual abuse isn't harmful. I only need to show that over 5% is harmful and as I have already shown that 100% of it is harmful, I have already won this debate. 

My argument was that the imposition of such actions upon an individual who cannot rationally consent is a form of force or coercion.

Also, what do you require a source for? I am arguing that this is damage to the child's perceptions because it stipulates the involuntary imposition of the will of innocent children, (already said in round one), especially in actions that relate to their intimacy and the violation of their body. Have you even rejected any aspect or premise of my argument thus far? (The answer is no)

Um, what? The website is the source. It is literally run by the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) and the information was reviewed by a medical doctor (Deepak S. Patel, MD, FAAFP, FACSM- viewable on the source), so this is clearly not only valid but an extremely credible source for this debate.

You also dropped my previous point that showed 75% of women report experiencing pain from sex as well as the feeling being very common.

In addition, sex has side effects like discomfort, exhaustion, tensed muscles, and cramps, that can be somewhat temporal or lasting [1]. 

I will also add that "STIs are extremely common, with roughly 1 in 5 people in the U.S. having a sexually transmitted infection at some point during the year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)" [4]. It is a truism that such diseases are harmful. Upon all the harm I have given around 20% of people will contract such diseases through sexual contact. 

All these arguments show that in some way, the major overwhelming majority if not all sexual activity is harmful.

You are only objecting to the number of children who actually get pregnant from child sexual abuse, correct? You are not objecting to the premises and conclusion. I am only saying you conceded the argument, which is true.

You also dropped my point on less developed countries: This is even more prolific in less developed countries. In Africa for example "children who undertook the research discovered that when girls became pregnant, it was often as a result of sexual abuse by an adult, including school teachers" [4 round 2].

Dropped. Extend that half of my opponent's links are dead.

Well, first of all, you are using a pedophile source which is against the code of conduct, secondly literally half of your links are dead, thirdly a lot of your case is irrelevant because we are debating whether the majority of child sexual abuse is harmful at all. 

"In my study—no differently from other research— the exact amount of time it took for victims to reconceptualize what had happened to them varied. It depended on the individual victims, on how old they were when abused, what educational and life experiences had taught them about sex, and what kinds of cues had triggered their thinking about what had hap- pened and recognizing it as abuse. Victims described the point of realization in different ways: “A light went on.” “It was like, aha!” “I said, ‘Oh my God.’” For more than a few it was “like a bomb went off. . . . Holy shit! I was abused!” For many, the realization was a “long, drawn-out process” that slowly built up to a new perception of the abuse. One thing did not vary: only at this point—when victims understood the abuse as such, once they had reconceptualized these formerly ambiguous and confusing events—did the experience become psychologically traumatic and begin to exert its negative effects. . . . It is the retrospective interpretation of the event that mediates subsequent impact . . . . there is almost always a period in which the victim reports a lack of awareness that they were abused and then subsequently reconceptualizes the experience . . . ."

"As I discussed at length in chapter 2, according to victims, they did not experience the abuse as awful when it happened because most simply did not understand clearly the meaning or significance of the sexual behaviors they were engaging in. That being said, at some point later on in life, they do. Over time, the “cloak of innocence lifted,” as one victim described it. Victims reconceptualized the formerly “confusing and weird experiences” and understood them for what they were—sexual in nature and clearly wrong. Only at this point—when the sexual abuse is fully apprehended— does it begin to damage victims. . . ."

"If you experience psychological distress after sexual abuse, then the sexual abuse must be the cause[, right?]. But it is not actually that simple. What, specifically, about the abuse has triggered the distress? Does it have to do with objective characteristics of the abuse (for example, how many times it happened or whether penetration was involved)? Does it have to do with subjective characteristics about the abuse (how painful, frightening, or shocking it was)? Perhaps it has less to do with the actual abuse and more to do with, say, the particular child (how old he or she was and how genetically predisposed to long-term psychological problems) or the environment. the abuse occurred in (one characterized by poverty, physical abuse, or neglect). Maybe it has to do with the cognitive or social consequences of the abuse (how the victim’s family or health professionals handled it or how the victim understood or conceptualized it later on in life). There are numerous ways to understand how and why sexual abuse damages victims. [In other words there are many different theories that claim to know why when a child has sex with an adult the child is harmed in the short term or in the long term.] For decades, however, the main focus has centered on one—the incident itself. . . .

Lucy Berliner and Jon Conte in their 1990 study noted that a majority of the children they interviewed reported not knowing initially that they were being sexually abused. Berliner and Conte quoted victims as saying such things as . . . . “I didn’t know there was any- thing wrong with it, because I didn’t know it was abuse until later. I thought he was showing me affection.”10

More recently, two cognitive psychologists, Michelle Epstein and Bette Bottoms, specifically hypothesized that due to the confusing and secretive nature of the abuse, many victims may fail to understand the meaning of the sexual acts committed (and subsequently forget them for periods), but then, at a later point, come to “relabel” the experiences as “traumatic.”11

In my study—no differently from other research— the exact amount of time it took for victims to reconceptualize what had happened to them varied. It depended on the individual victims, on how old they were when abused, what educational and life experiences had taught them about sex, and what kinds of cues had triggered their thinking about what had happened and recognizing it as abuse. Victims described the point of realization in different ways: “A light went on.” “It was like, aha!” “I said, ‘Oh my God.’” For more than a few it was “like a bomb went off. . . . Holy shit! I was abused!” For many, the realization was a “long, drawn-out process” that slowly built up to a new perception of the abuse. One thing did not vary: only at this point—when victims understood the abuse as such, once they had reconceptualized these formerly ambiguous and confusing events—did the experience become psychologically traumatic and begin to exert its negative effects. . . . It is the retrospective interpretation of the event that mediates subsequent impact . . . . there is almost always a period in which the victim reports a lack of awareness that they were abused and then subsequently reconceptualizes the experience . . . ."

That is not what I meant. I stand by my vast majority means 75% but you can think it means 95%.

You are making an assumption. 

However, for the sake of argument let's say that this is true. Now by that logic kids cannot rationally consent to anything. Everything a kid does is now coercion (or "slavery" as you said earlier). So by that logic everything a kid does is wrong/harmful to themselves.

con has provided no evidence whatsoever that supports the assumption that kids cannot rationally consent.

Although the overall size and gross organization of the brain is similar in adolescents and adults, dynamic changes in brain structure, function, and features of neuromodulatory systems are occurring throughout adolescence. Structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies have revealed developmentally normative reductions in the volume of gray matter across adolescence [1,2] that are thought to reflect experience-dependent pruning processes. Lagged structural development of the prefrontal cortex, particularly dorsolateral regions, has been linked to a number of functional outcomes during adolescence, including continued improvement in impulse control [3], working memory [4], and complex reasoning [5]. As such, late development of the prefrontal cortex could constrain components of decision-making that rely heavily on deliberation or integrating complex sources of information.

By contrast, certain properties of dopaminergic signaling exhibit adolescent-specific peaks. Structurally, there is a proliferation of D1 and D2 receptors in various targets within the mesolimbic dopamine system, which prune 50% or more from the transition of adolescence to adulthood [6] paired with a peaking tissue concentration of dopamine [7]. Corresponding studies in humans using functional MRI have demonstrated an adolescent-specific exaggeration of response to various forms of reward [8,9**] and stronger parametric tracking of expected value [10] in the ventral striatum, a key target of dopaminergic signaling.

if you were to say that since "75% of women report experiencing pain from sex as well as the feeling being very common" child-sexual abuse is harmful overall 75% of the time than you would also be arguing that adult-adult sex is harmful overall 75% of the time which is obviously false.

You are arguing against people having sex right now.

I intend to argue that child sexual abuse is not as bad as people think it is. 

Of course there are some amount of people who get pregnant from CSA. However, for each sexual incident (in terms of both CSA and adult-adult sex) there is not necessarily more pregnancy from the CSA than from the adult-adult sex.  

Other rebuttals

Pro: Dropped. Extend that half of my opponent's links are dead.

Con: The links that were dead are not important for making my points. If anyone finds a dead link that they feel is important just request an unbroken one and I will provide it.

Again, first of all, con has not responded to my conversation with wylted about The Trauma Myth (book)