By pedohysterical UK standards, the organization has a fairly "liberal" view of youth sexuality, accepting as matter-of-fact and harmless that young children masturbate, and that teenagers flirt, sext, and have intercourse with each other. It also has a fairly tolerant perspective on teenagers viewing online pornography.
The schizophrenia of the current laws and mores is visible through the cracks when "teen sex" is described as an "inappropriate search term" for teens (!) to look for on the Internet due to the claimed risk of stumbling upon PIM. Sigh.
That said, what's most interesting of all, from my point of view, is this paragraph:
This can be interpreted in at least two ways, respectively what I'd call a "hard anti" and a "soft anti" position regarding the love of a MAA for a minor. (Here, however, it's worth pointing out that most incestuous CSA is not committed by preferential MAPs, but rather by opportunistic/situational offenders taking advantage of their position of power.)Sometimes people who abuse a child believe they truly care for and even love the children they have abused – whether the abuse happens inside or outside the family. They give the child lots of attention that makes them feel special. So, in many cases, the child may love the person who has sexually abused them – especially if this is a family member– and might not want to lose contact with them by disclosing.
(From the page "Why children do not tell about abuse", emphasis mine)
The "hard anti" argument: the presence of sexual desire itself invalidates the affection, such that anyone who experiences such lust cannot be said to genuinely love the child they desire.
The "soft anti" argument: the affection is genuine at first, but is invalidated in practice through the actions of the abuser, such that anyone who engages in sexual contact with a child can never be said to love that child.
Which of the two perspectives is implied in the wording above is thoroughly unclear.
I believe that neither of them does justice to the situation, neither for MAPs nor for victims of CSA, especially in cases of incest. Even in cases of opportunistic sexual abuse of a prepubescent girl by a father figure (consistently ranked by studies as the most harmful form of CSA), I see no convincing reason to claim that the father necessarily does not love his daughter. That may well be the case in some instances, but in many others (such as my mother's case), the father did not realize how much harm he was doing. He most certainly put his self-interest above his daughter's in a particularly horrifying way, but it does not invalidate his feelings altogether.
The intuition that seems to underpin the "soft anti" stance is that any adult who loves a child should know that engaging in sexual contact is extremely harmful, and that nobody would deliberately harm a loved one. Reality is more complex. Even adults in committed romantic relationships can hurt each other with or without realizing it, sometimes deeply, and sometimes in ways that are well-known to be hurtful, such as cheating. This does not invalidate the love they feel towards each other.
For us MAPs and allies who accept the empirical fact that AMSC is far from always harmful (a possibility that the Lucy Faithfull Foundation is surely unwilling to contemplate, scientific evidence be damned), this complexity is compounded by the difficulty of determining whether the long-term consequences of sexual contact are likely to be positive, neutral, or negative. In that sense, they are essentially the same as all other intimate relationships—and rape and abuse of power are always wrong, no matter the age of the people involved.
