I was reading some of Ethan Edwards' old blogs and came across this one, which he says is the core of his anti-c argument. As he says in his conclusion:
He frames the argument entirely in terms of the costs and benefits to the child. The benefit of sex to a child is small (even if it's pleasurable, it's not necessary- many children go entirely without sexual activity prior to puberty). The cost of coercive sex that may occur (even unintentionally) is potentially high (he admits that if it's non forced sex that a moderately negative reaction of "I was wronged" is more likely than lifelong trauma). He thinks the negative reaction outweighs the positive in size, and also that the negative reaction is more likely than the positive reaction.I do not want any man to think it's OK to have sex with a prepubescent -- to diagnose her as one of the very rare ones who is truly interested. The prior probability is very low, and his desire gives him a strong bias to misperceive the situation. I want a blanket prohibition. I certainly do not want his legal defense to be that she consented at the time, and is now either lying or has rewritten her memory -- a legal defense that would likely succeed because of the reasonable doubt standard. The cost? Some very few girls somewhere don't get the sexual activity they might have enjoyed because the man refused, fearing adverse consequences. It's a trade-off I'm entirely willing to make.
Up until this point I can follow his argument. If thinking about the welfare of children, there are very good reasons for MAPs to be celibate.
He seems to miss a number of very important points, however. Most noticeable of all there seems to be an implicit assumption that prohibition works! He is also ignoring the process and costs of prohibition.
If we only focused on the welfare of children, then we would arrest every single registered member of VirPed and every other MAP community. Even though most people won't offend, if we don't care about the welfare of MAPs and we want to avoid risk to children then it's better safe than sorry. If we could imprison 1000 MAPs for life in order to save one child from a slightly negative sexual experience it'd be worth it according to this calculus. This is clearly unjust and ridiculous. Even if we prioritize children, the costs and benefits to MAPs have to be taken into consideration.
If we look solely at the sexual pleasure a MAP gets and compare that to the negative reaction a child might have, we'd likely need to err on the side of abstinence. Although there might be certain numbers you could plug into a utilitarian calculator where the pleasure of a MAPs outweighs the discomfort of children on the whole, but our sexual ethics usually tend to be more deontologial. It doesn't matter how much pleasure a rapist gets, nor how little his victim suffers- incurring a cost on someone for your benefit against their will is immoral. So MAPs' desire for intimacy isn't a strong argument for reform.
No, it's not the benefits that accrue to the MAP who has sexual contact that we need to look at. Instead it's the costs incurred as a result of prohibition. Our current punishments do not seem fair and just if referring to the kinds of negative experiences that Ethan proposes. If sexual contact with a child was inherently traumatic and soul destroying- resulting in a life of suicide attempts and inability to hold a stable job, then maybe current punishments would be proportionate. Yet for cases where force and violence are not used, that doesn't seem at all to be the case. Nor does Ethan claim that is the case. Harm in many cases is "At the time I felt confused about it and later I felt used and betrayed"- is this the kind of harm that requires decades in prison followed by a life on a sex offender registry? Despite Ethan's ideal world being anti-c, in the real world, despite a ban adult-child sex continues to occur- much like drug use, prohibition isn't going to cure the problem. The cost to MAPs under the current system seems to greatly outweight the benefits in terms of child-protection (considering that forced or violent cases would always be prohibited and could always be punished by the legal system- although as Ethan says some cases may slip through with a "not-guilty" verdict).
The final cost that Ethan fails to look at is the cost of prohibition in terms of creating a culture of silence. As I said, prohibition doesn't stop adult-child sex from occurring. It just causes the police and courts to be involved when it does occur. Is this actually better for children than dealing with problems on a social level? First take the case of children that don't want the adult to go to prison and the emotional toll they incur. If the negative of non-forced sex is relatively minor as Ethan concedes, then we need to compare that to the cost of going through the legal process- dealing with police, therapists, courts, prosecutors and lawyers. This discussion is totally absent from Ethan's analysis. Furthermore there is also no discussion of the children who refuse to come forward because the current system is so punitive. Children that don't speak out are widely recognized as existing in substantial numbers. I don't intend to speak for all children, but if our culture was less hysterical about adult-child sex it is very likely that many of these children would find it easier to speak about their experiences.
So that's my take on Ethan's analysis and why he takes an anti-c position. I don't disagree with the fundamental premise that prepubescent children receive only a small benefit from sexual interaction, at the risk of a larger cost. I'll grant that. But the anti-c position isn't just about how MAPs should or shouldn't behave. It's about how the legal system should respond to MAPs. A naive analysis that ignores the costs incurred by the current system in cases where adults DO engage sexually with minors is a deficient analysis. Our current approach very obviously harms offending MAPs with sentences disproportionate to damage caused, but in many cases it also harms the very children that it alleges to protect.