The Effects of Child Sexual Abuse:

Truth Versus Political Correctness

Hollida Wakefield*
The Rind et al. Affair
In 1998, Bruce Rind, Philip Tromovitch, and Robert Bauserman published a meta-analysis of
the effects of child sexual abuse using college samples in the Psychological Bulletin.
Contradicting the popular view that child sexual abuse inevitably causes severe and longlasting psychological damage, the authors reported that the relationship between a selfreported history of child sexual abuse and psychopathology was quite weak. They concluded
subjects who had been sexually abused were nearly as well-adjusted as those who were not.
Their results were similar to earlier studies using community samples (Bauserman & Rind,
1997; Rind & Tromovitch, 1997). In the article, they reported even more provocative
findings-that 11% of female and 37% of male respondents retrospectively indicated their
short-term reactions to the sexual contact had been positive.
The authors were careful to emphasize that lack of harm doesn't mean the adult-child sexual
contact is morally permissible: "If it is true that wrongfulness in sexual matters does not
imply harmfulness ... then it is also true that lack of harmfulness does not imply lack of
wrongfulness ... [T]he findings of the current review do not imply that moral or legal
definitions of or view on behaviors currently classified as CSA should be abandoned or even
altered" (p. 47).

Does sexual abuse in childhood cause pedophilia: an exploratory study.

Freund K1, Watson R, Dickey R.
Abstract

The reliability of the notion that pedophilia is caused by sexual abuse in childhood was
explored by examining retrospective self-reports of 344 males. Included in the study were 77
heterosexual pedophiles, 54 homosexual pedophiles, 51 nonpedophilic sex offenders against
children, 36 sex offenders against physically mature females, 75 heterosexual paid volunteers
who erotically preferred mature females, and 51 homosexual clients who preferred mature
males. For each sex offender the differential diagnosis of an erotic preference for minors vs. a
preference for physically mature partners was made by means of the phallometric test of
erotic gender and age preferences. The analysis of self-reports confirmed that the proportion
of pedophiles who report having been sexually abused in childhood by mature persons is
larger than that of men who were not charged for or accused of a sex offense against a child
though the difference is relatively small (28.6 vs. 13.9 and 10.7% for the heterosexual
pedophiles and the two groups of gynephiles, respectively, and 25.9 vs. 11.8% for the
homosexual pedophiles and androphiles, respectively). Further analysis demonstrated,
however, that pedophiles who admitted having an erotic interest in children significantly

more often claimed that they had been sexually abused as children than pedophiles who did
not admit having such feelings. This interdependence renders the reliability of these selfreports questionable.