Age and relationship of offender/ victim in AMSC

[Pharmakon]

The Finnish data available online gives mean ages at which the events occurred for those who reported experiencing sex with someone 5 years older. These were:

2013 survey - 12.99
2008 survey - 12.66 (first experience); 12.64 (second experience)
1988 survey - 13.84 (first experience); 14.49 (second experience); 14.8 (third experience)

Rind writes:

At the time of the minor-older sex, most participants were in the adolescent range, aged 12–14 (49.0%) or 15–16 (39.1%). Relatively few were children under age 12 (11.9%).

His Table 3, however, indicates that of 977 girls reporting minor-older sex, 12.7% (124) were <12s, and of 258 boys making such reports, 12.4% (32) were <12s. This seems inconsistent with the quote above.

Rind also writes:

Considering several key variables separately by gender, mean participant and partner ages for girls were M = 13.50 (SD = 2.10) and M = 25.12 (SD = 10.10), respectively. For boys, these mean ages were M = 13.32 (SD = 2.90) and M = 24.91 (SD = 13.53), respectively. Median participant and partner ages, respectively, were 14 and 21 for girls and 14 and 20 for boys.

LINKS TO SURVEY QUESTIONS:
2013: https://services.fsd.tuni.fi/catalogue/ ... anguage=en
2008: https://services.fsd.tuni.fi/catalogue/ ... anguage=en; https://services.fsd.tuni.fi/catalogue/ ... =variables
1988: https://services.fsd.tuni.fi/catalogue/ ... anguage=fi; https://services.fsd.tuni.fi/catalogue/ ... anguage=fi; https://services.fsd.tuni.fi/catalogue/ ... anguage=fi

[Pharmakon]

Snyder's 2000 analysis of reported sex crimes against children, published by the US Department of Justice, is available at the link below. Figure 6 on page 8 indicates that the peak age for offending is 14, which if true would help debunk some of the popular mythology. (Figure 1 shows the peak age for victims is also 14; taken together these suggest horny teens, not adult MAPs, are the source of the problem.)

I tried to find support in Snyder for the claim that "more than 20% of children are sexually abused before the age of 8" and didn't find it, but maybe it is in there somewhere.

LINK TO SNYDER (2000):

https://ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh241 ... aycrle.pdf

[Pharmakon]

Rind calls for more national surveys like the Finnish, but I think we are lucky to have those three and more are unlikely. At some level the government realizes their potential to challenge erotophobic orthodoxies. It prefers data based on criminalized behavior, which permit obfuscation about consent and the ubiquitous "tip of the iceberg" claims.

If the UK is really giving out mostly suspended sentences for PIM, that's humane compared to what happens here in the US. But either way family disruption as documented in the "knock at the door" articles may be our strongest counterargument.

[Pharmakon]

Incest offences are common...

The Finnish data are making me skeptical about this. Rind writes:

Contrary to characterizations commonly conveyed popularly or in the professional literature, often based on anecdotes or clinical-forensic cases, these incidents infrequently involved overt coercion (12%), incest (6%), or children younger than 12 (11%).

and later:

Minor-older sex involving relatives was infrequent (7.0%).

His Table 3 shows that 80 of 1020 girls (7.8%) and 15 of 269 boys (5.6%) who reported age gap sexual experiences said they were with a relative, but this includes more than just caregivers.

In the 2013 survey only 20 young persons reported sex with an older relative. Of these, 9 said it was with a parent or stepparent, 10 said a grandparent, uncle, or aunt, and the remaining one said it was with a brother. In the 2008 survey, 100 reported older relative sex, 45 of them with a parent or stepparent, 15 with an uncle or aunt, 12 with a cousin, 11 with a brother, 9 with a grandparent and 8 with a sister. In the 1988 survey, there were 60 reports of sex with an older relative, of which 17 identified the relative as a parent or stepparent, 17 as a cousin, 16 as an uncle or aunt, 4 as a brother, 3 as a grandparent, and 3 as a sister. (The 2008 and 1988 surveys allowed young people to respond about up to three minor-older experiences; the breakdown given here is for their first experience only. Sex with a relative was less frequently reported for second and third minor-older experiences, and the 2013 survey asked about only their first experience.)

While Rind’s Table 3 indicates only 95 young persons reporting sex with an older relative across the three surveys (out of 32,145 kids surveyed), my compilation of the question responses publicly available online shows that 180 reported such experiences. Rind did have to discard some survey responses due to reported self and partner ages indicating a gap less than 5 years, even though the respondent answered positively to the question about having sexual experience with someone at least 5 years older, but this does not seem likely to explain the difference. Either figure would suggest sex with an older relative is uncommon. Using the Table 3 figure, 0.3% (95 out of 32,145) experienced this; using the figure I compiled, 0.6% (180 out of 32,145) did.

Of course, incest is not necessarily age gap sex. But Rind’s Table 3 indicates partners who were relatives were even less common in minor-peer sex than in minor-older sex -- only 0.7% for girls (14 out of 1904) and 1.2% for boys (18 out of 1472).