What I learned by reading “Phenomenology of the Spirit”.

“Phenomenology of the Spirit” was written by Hegel. Below, I share what I learned from reading this book.

1. The fact that philosophy gives different answers to the same question does not indicate a lack of method or seriousness.
2. Science must be universally intelligible.
3. If we keep repeating what has already been said, we will not go beyond the beginning of the investigation.
4. When a philosopher speaks against formalism, he may end up creating a new formalism.
5. A subject without predicates is unknown.
6. All principles, when they are considered basic and universal, expose themselves to error.
7. The object of the Phenomenology of the Spirit is the birth of science.
8. The path to a higher science passes through the search for knowledge in ourselves.
9. Knowledge that was considered complex in the past is common sense today.
10. Each moment in the rise for knowledge is necessary, one can not skip steps.
11. You should take your time in each step for as long as it takes.
12. One should not put as a reasoning principle something that is not well known, just because it is something that one is accustomed to.
13. Dogmatism, the philosophical tendency to hold that there are immutable truths, works only for certain things (such as mathematical truths).
14. Even obvious information needs to be researched or tested, because no one is born knowing something just because it is obvious.
15. Truth is not necessarily obvious.
16. To know something without experiencing or seeing the demonstration is to know only from the outside.
17. The results of a theory can validate it or disprove it.
18. Philosophy should not aspire to be like mathematics, because mathematics offers only quantitative information.
19. Mathematics alone is superficial, but coupled with other knowledges, such as physics and chemistry, it shows its real potential.
20. Working without mathematics isn’t the same as working without reason.
21. It is typical of the idiot to accept what he does not understand as a truth, as long as it’s said by someone with “authority.”
22. There are people who are ashamed to learn.
23. If philosophy makes little to no progress, that is because many philosophers are presumptuous .
24. Such presumption is characterized by the hasty study of things and the use of superficial data as unquestionable truth.
25. Not everyone can dedicate themselves to philosophy, but only those who have an interest in obtaining clear knowledge about something.
26. There are those who think that it is not necessary to study to practice philosophy.
27. Philosophizing “with the heart” leads us to say what everyone already knows or to say things that we suppose to be latent in the hearts of others.
28. This philosophizing with the heart is presumptuous in the extreme: “it is true because I feel it is.”
29. When philosophy concludes something far from common sense, the conclusion is taken as folly, even if it is right.
30. Thinking without reason, but with feelings alone, is to think like an animal.
31. Sometimes you make less mistakes when you are not afraid to make a mistake.
32. The fear of error prevents a man from believing himself.
33. Hegel wonders if the fear of making mistakes is a mistake in itself.
34. The fear of making mistakes is a fear of truth: “If things aren’t like how I think they are, I will suffer the consequences.”
35. Do not assume that others always know what you are talking about.
36. Not being sure is called “doubting”.
37. Being sure that it’s impossible to reach a true answer to a problem is called “despair”.
38. Trusting oneself is safer than trusting an authority if an authority does not satisfy .
39. The art of the skeptic is to doubt, to look for errors of reasoning and to criticize.
40. Knowledge ends when the concept corresponds to the object, that is, when the idea we have of something is completely correct and there is nothing else to know about it.
41. There is no problem in taking notes: they will not be less real because they have been written down.
42. The “here” walks with us and its content changes depending on where we are.
43. There are truths that are only valid for me.
44. Time can be infinitely divided.
45. Also the space can be divided as much as you like.
46. We have to determine the extent of the “here” and the extent of the “now”.
47. To perceive is to feel characteristics.
48. General laws are superficial.
49. A thing is not their function: I can act in another way and continue being what I am.
50. The natural state of consciousness is life.
51. Stoicism is very general in preaching that truth is in rational action.
52. Consciousness is unhappy when in contradiction with itself.
53. I’ll do a bad job if I don’t know what goal I aim to achieve.
54. The reason is capable of reliable generalizations.
55. Generalizations fail so often that it is possible to generalize that generalizations are flawed.
56. “Probable” is not the same as true.
57. Abstraction allows us to separate elements from their accidental conditions.
58. Superficial rules easily find exceptions.
59. Two related concepts are not always interdependent, even though concept A depends on B; concept B, which is necessary to A, may well subsist on its own.
60. Two related concepts may be independent from each other.
61. The problem of the superficial occult sciences, such as astrology and chiromancy, is to relate things that can not be related: personality with constellar influence, for example.
62. The hand is related to destiny because it is by hand, or by equivalent, that we act in the world: we take, we make, we touch, we transform, but it is only in that sense that we can relate hand and destiny.
63. The timbre of the voice, the calligraphy, these things are external manifestations of our interior.
64. Something must be explained by its action and not by its appearance.
65. The spirit (mind) is one extreme, the external object is the other extreme and the body is the middle ground.
66. The mind interacts with the world through the body.
67. There is a tendency to make hasty connections between actions and certain parts of the body: prophecy comes from the liver, anger comes from the gall bladder, love comes from the heart, lust comes from the kidneys, because we feel those organs when we have such or such a state of spirit (though I feel lust elsewhere…).
68. It is really possible to think until you have a headache.
69. A single symptom does not give diagnose.
70. A phenomenon is indifferent to the laws we stipulate about it.
71. By saying that a person is in such a way because of, for example, his zodiac sign, you are saying that the person is a date.
72. We are not our signs of the zodiac, nor are we any detail of our body, such as physiognomy or hormonal configuration.
73. You can not analyze a person if you consider only one aspect, especially if you disregard that person’s actions.
74. It is possible to justify a prejudice with scientific arguments and this has been done many times in history.
75. If you hate science and philosophy , that is, if you reject reason, you have surrendered to the devil and will likely end up going to hell, says Hegel, with Goethe.
76. There is no middle ground between life and death.
77. If everyone acted only according to their own laws, there would be no harmony.
78. When you make a speech knowing that a particular word needs to be ambiguous for the speech to work, you probably will not explain the meaning of the word that has to be ambiguous.
79. If someone asks what that word means, the person giving the speech could dismiss the question by saying “Ask your heart.”
80. You can not act without a goal in mind: think about what you want before you think about how to get there.
81. Something is “bad” when it fails to be good.
82. Everyone should speak the truth if they know …
83. “To lie” is to say something incorrect knowing that the information is incorrect.
84. The usefulness of love is to provide good to the beloved, at the same time as it removes the evil from said beloved.
85. There is no “inactive love”: if it is love, it is active.
86. To love someone, you have to treat them according to the knowledge of what is good for that person.
87. The absence of contradiction doesn’t ensure justice.
88. No one is innocent because everyone is responsible for their actions as agents.
89. We would not recognize our mistakes if they did not cause suffering .
90. An impostor priesthood takes advantage of the stupidity of the faithful to instil superstitions that favor an ideology.
91. An impostor priesthood often sits on the side of corrupt rulers and acts like a perverse think tank, not unlike the traditional media .
92. An impostor priesthood can only do what it does because the people are ignorant .
93. “Concept” is a simple information that explains a thing and its opposite.
94. If something is real, it is thinkable.
95. “Faith” is knowledge that depends on testimonies, but which can not be proven by you.
96. Faith may or may not depend on text.
97. Why would someone regard an impossible goal as “virtuous”?
98. It is not enough to erradicate the lie unless truth is established in the process.
99. One can only count on reason to know for sure if something is lacking or in excess.
100. The man needs to be useful because everything is useful to him.
101. Helping others is helping yourself.
102. Some people say that fasting can help you to dominate the hunger, but it doesn’t change the fact that you will need to eat eventually.
103. Thinking about the usefulness of things is not reprehensible, even in matters of faith or feeling.
104. Sometimes we do things without knowing that such actions could bring us joy… or suffering.
105. If you are poor, you can only be happy for free, not that your happiness would be stable.
106. It is permissible to be a coward if it does not go against your duties as a person.
107. The wounds of the spirit heal without leaving a scar.
108. It is only possible to know God by reflecting on what he reveals of himself .
109. Thus, although it is possible by reason to infer that God exists, the exact characteristics of God are not within the reach of simple reason.

What I learned reading “Handbook of Child and Adolescent Sexuality.”

“Handbook of Child and Adolescent Sexuality: developmental and forensic psychology” was edited by Daniel S. Bromberg and William T. O’Donohue. Below are some things that I learned from reading that book.

1. Different cultures, at different times, have different sexual morals.
2. For example, masturbation is acceptable today, but has been considered disease before.
3. As sexuality is present in all of us every day, and since childhood experiences have a profound impact on adult functioning, it is important to take a honest look at child sexuality.
4. Studying human sexuality in general is something that can not be done without practical and ethical obstacles.
5. Unfortunately, we know more about the sexuality of children and adolescents who have passed through the legal system than about the sexuality of children and adolescents who have not gone through such a system.
6. Little is known about “normal” child sexuality.
7. The purpose of the book is to provide a synthesis of what is already known about child sexuality and to point out what may undermine the child’s sexual development.
8. The book is open to changes as new data on child sexuality come out.
9. In the case of adults, freedom matters more than well-being.
10. But children are not adults.
11. If the treatment is considered to be beneficial to the child, the child must take the treatment.
12. The only people who can stop this are the parents and they can not always do it.
13. For many things , parents decide for the child.
14. Your judgment should be based on the child’s best interest.
15. Often, we do not know what is best for the child.
16. Family consent may be limited: the father has no right to deny treatment to the daughter he raped.
17. Even if the child can give consent to certain medical treatments, she often can not pay for them.
18. If someone else has to pay, then the other person has to consent as well.
19. Consent (informed) is necessary in cases where risk of harm is real.
20. Consent is valid when the person who chooses is aware of the available options and understand each of them.
21. In order to give valid consent, the choice must be voluntary, not pressured, with practical reasoning and with acceptance of the social consequences involved in the act of choice.
22. These requirements should not be understood literally .
23. Firstly because we are never fully aware of the consequences of our choices.
24. In addition, some important choices must be made under pressure.
25. Why consent to a treatment when I am asymptomatic ?
26. It is not always possible to point out sources of coercion.
27. The reason for making the choice, as well as the consequences of choice, may not count as coercion (if my illness impels me to treatment, it can not be said that I am coerced by my illness to treat myself, nor can it be said that I am coerced by the side effects to refuse treatment).
28. When an action is coerced, it is not always easy to say whether or not it is coerced.
29. When an action is not coerced, it is usually easy to see that it is not coerced (implying that the more difficult it is to pinpoint consent, the more believable is the hypothesis of force).
30. Theoretical reason seeks truth, while practical reason seeks acceptable private conduct.
31. Practical reason implies the ability to use what is already known, in what is already believed, in the attainment of a healthy goal.
32. Because there are people who are not capable of practical reason (such as demented patients, people in coma or people with severe Alzheimer’s), it turns out that there are adults unable to give informed consent.
33. Some children also can not give informed consent because of this.
34. In order to obtain informed consent, in addition to these requirements, it is necessary to go through a routine that involves explaining the process, its benefits, its risks, its alternatives and a time to resolve doubts with the professional.
35. The child is more capable of informed consent the older he or she is.
36. The boy is pressured by society to grow in a certain way, even though he discovers, often very early, that his sexuality is not what adults expected it to be.
37. A six-year-old child who discovers that he or she is homosexual is still under parental care.
38. Then, if the parents are homophobic and if they só decide, would it be ethical to put the child on conversion therapy?
39. A therapist who deals with the transgender child, for example, would have four options: deny hormone therapy without giving a reason, deny hormone therapy because he judged himself unable to provide the expected result, deny hormone therapy because he concluded that it would be harmful to the child, give hormone therapy because they believe the child is sufficiently informed and determined to get such treatment.
40. The same thing can be applied to parents who believe they can cure their son’s homosexuality.
41. There is no treatment for homosexuality or transsexuality.
42. Despite this, “gay cure” institutions still exist today.
43. If a homosexual seeks treatment for his homosexuality, he must be informed that such treatments have never worked and that he can only proceed at his own risk.
44. Thus, treatment for transsexuals can not, from an ethical point of view, be used to “fix” their gender identity, but only to help them to accept and live well with the gender identity they have (would be a treatment for self-esteem and self-realization, not to abandon one’s gender identity, which sometimes called “LGBT affirmative therapy”).
45. No therapist has a duty to “cure” a transsexual or homosexual child, just as he has no duty to “cure” a left-handed child.
46. This is because the doctor is not required to offer treatment for conditions that do not threaten the patient’s life.
47. It is difficult for the religious mother to accept this.
48. We do not know what is best for the child when we do not know what is best for ourselves.
49. As a general rule, do not do to the child something that can harm your physical or mental well-being, whether you are a parent or a doctor.
50. The task of science is to provide accurate information, but it does not serve as a moral determinant.
51. Thus, moral decisions are taken outside of science, with science being an element of these discussions.
52. But because it is an element of the discussions, scientific data are used as arguments for long-term ethical or political decisions.
53. Cigarette was once considered safe, but how are things today?
54. If the child or adolescent has the competence to decide alone, at least on that particular issue, it would be immoral for the parents to make the decision for him.
55. But that does not mean that parents are required to pay for treatment that they do not agree with.
56. Because we do not study child sexuality, we do not even know what “normal” child sexuality is.
57. Without knowing what constitutes “normal”, clinical procedures are bound to fail, since they have the “normal” as reference.
58. In the West, we only study child sexuality in terms of abuse, as if the child had to be abused to become sexual, which is not true .
59. Child sexuality is an important area of ​​human development and can not be studied in the light of our adult prejudices.
60. One of these prejudices is that the child does not have sexuality, so there would be nothing to study in the first place.
61. There are ethical and institutional issues, such as obtaining parent consent to have the child participate in a study on sexuality.
62. Finally, small children may have difficulty completing procedures because of limited vocabulary and, if they have to fill out a form, lack of reading and comprehension skills.
63. Thus, the most used methods to research child sexuality are interviews with children, retrospective report (the adult shares his experiences when he was a kid) and interviews with parents or other authorities about the child’s sexual behavior.
64. Sexual contact between minors does not start explicitly (“hey, let’s flomp!”); it starts as a result of another activity (like truth or dare, collective consumption of pornography and others).
65. The book tells the story of a group of boys between twelve and fourteen who used to look at pornographic magazines and, after a while, they would end up masturbating each other or having oral sex.
66. The problem with interviews is that they do not provide enough quantitative information, harming their potential for generalization.
67. Interviewing adults also has their problems: although the adult may still remember the experience as it happened, he may have developed lifelong biases that undermine the unbiased recollection of the event.
68. The adult may also be ashamed to talk about the naughty things he did as a boy, even when he tells the experiences through an anonymous questionnaire.
69. Although this type of method is sufficient, depending on the goal, it is far from the ideal.
70. The fact that a particular treatment improves a person’s life and harms the life of another person undergoing the same treatment does not mean that treatment is ineffective, but that their application needs to be more selective.
71. Some conditions are so rare that it is impossible to study them for lack of subjects who have such conditions.
72. The book gives the example of adolescent necrophilia: where will I find enough teens who get the hots for corpses, if I had to study them?
73. Different methods are used in different situations, which does not imply that this method is always better than another method.
74. The most reliable data on child sexuality comes from the direct observation of child sexual behavior.
75. But of course this method will almost never be used due to practical, ethical, and legal reasons.
76. Child sexual behavior is difficult to detect because it is displayed privately, away from adults (so cameras would be great for catching kids in the act).
77. The older the child gets, the more she refines her means of concealing her sexual behavior, so that the observation becomes less fruitful with each passing year.
78. The ethics of researching humans says that all subjects involved should be treated as autonomous people and must be protected from risk.
79. Thus, if the child does not want to continue with the research, insisting would be unethical.
80. Another item of research ethics is that the benefit to the participant should be maximized, while the possible harm should be minimized.
81. Now, if the child were recorded when displaying sexual behavior or engaged in something naughty with others, the resulting files are extremely confidential.
82. The possibility of leakage of such intimate files makes the risk too high, so that it is difficult to meet the second ethical criterion (minimization of harm).
83. To make matters worse, the results and methods of such a study could cause prosecution based on laws against child pornography .
84. Asking permission for a judge to conduct this type of study is like asking for permission to produce child porn, and it is unlikely that most judges would be willing to grant such a permit because of the moral panic concerning pedophilia (if this ever becomes legal in the future, it could become the pedophile’s dream job).
85. There are factors that modify the child’s sexual behavior, such as the intensity of the moment, conditions of the place and previous experience.
86. Recording childhood sexual behavior for future study is a strategy that has never been used to date.
87. An alternative study would be based on magnetic resonance imaging, to see how the child’s brain reacts in situations that could entice childhood sexuality.
88. Mapping the human genome could be a possibility of improvement in about child sexuality, but not in it’s current state, since this technique is not advanced enough to be used in this way.
89. The use of genetic testing in the study of child sexuality can generate ambiguous results.
90. Another direction of research is to conduct the study of child sexuality in other countries .
91. Ethnicity and environment affect the child’s sexual development.
92. As far as we know, what determines “normal” sexual behavior is culture .
93. For example, certain sexual behavior may be regarded as unhealthy in a particular culture because that culture regards that behavior as sin while at the same time it considers all sin to be unhealthy.
94. Some difficulties in researching child sexuality may never disappear.
95. If we do not study child sexuality, sexually active minors will still be neglected by science, which will be bad for these children, especially from a clinical point of view.
96. There are many studies on child sexuality today, despite methodological problems, so that you can no longer do bibliographic reviews with just a few studies (such as those tykes who only know the Rind Report and think they know everything about child sexual experiences).
97. When people who aren’t scientists need to listen to scientific opinion, they turn to research synthesis , bibliographic reviews , and meta-analyzes , which gather as much information as possible in one document.
98. Abstinence-oriented sexual education is less able to prevent teenage pregnancy compared to sex education that includes contraception techniques.
99. A lot of people lose their virginity before age fifteen.
100. If condoms are readily available, the incidence of AIDS, including among adolescents, will decline.
101. It is necessary to teach safe sex, since teaching abstinence is not working.
102. Sexual education and access to contraceptives both reduce the incidence of adolescent pregnancy.
103. Although highly requested, meta-analyzes have defects that need to be kept in mind, such as the inclusion of bibliography (which may follow some bias), the fact that the reviewed studies may vary in quality and the equal treatment received by studies with different methods.
104. Beware of statistical analysts who only review studies that do not disagree with “pet theories”.
105. Some syntheses on child sexuality include subjects up to thirty years of age .
106. Other syntheses do not reveal their inclusion criteria.
107. And there’s a third group that includes babies in the sample.
108. There are several problems related to meta-analyzes and systematic reviews of studies on child sexuality, including: selection of studies, lack of lists with included and excluded studies, problematic definitions of children and adolescents (at least in Brazil, child is from 0 to 11 years and adolescent is from 12 to 17 years, period), and inclusion of studies without quality verification.
109. There are few research syntheses (meta-analyzes and systematic reviews) on child sexuality, and the ones we have usually meet no more than three-quarters of the quality criteria (using AMSTAR as a base measure).
110. Deriving knowledge about patients “in general” is useless when the doctor ends up being forced, by his own practice, to treat each patient as a unique case.
111. Suppose a thirteen-year-old was sent to rehab because he was dating a thirteen-year-old girl ( which is a crime in Brazil), you will have to treat the boy as a unique case, despite scientific generalizations about this phenomenon.
112. Behavioral measurement is important for behavioral treatment approaches.
113. Treatment to “man up” a male child is unacceptable today.
114. If it is not possible to count how many times a given behavior occurs, calculating the time between first signs of the behavior of interest and its cessation may be more practical, if one is concerned with sensitivity to stimulation.
115. The production of sperm increases if you do not wear tight underwear.
116. Sexual research often focus on behavioral and biological aspects without addressing how sexuality transits our public or private lives.
117. Sexuality is a complex phenomenon and not limited to simple penetrative act.
118. It includes other forms of contact, fantasies, biological aspects, genetic inheritance, previous experience, morals, will, attention, and other things.
119. Sexuality is partly determined by genetics and partly determined by experience, including the child’s own experience.
120. Defining normal sexuality is as difficult as defining sexuality.
121. Sexuality varies too much between different people and even varies too much in one person depending on their stage of life, so that a definition of “normal” is very difficult or impossible to conceive.
122. The difference between the sexes begins in the karyotype.
123. From there, the differences in glands and, consequently, the differences in the hormonal configurations of male and female begin.
124. The hormonal configuration is what defines the appearance of the other organs relevant to the biological sex.
125. We were born with all devices that are necessary for sexual practice (although at an immature stage), but we still have to learn how to use them.
126. How do we learn?
127. Although sexuality begins with biological elements, it only makes sense through experience with the environment and its other inhabitants.
128. This learning begins with the motivation to learn.
129. Sexual behavior can be used to satisfy different desires: pleasure, self-esteem, love, affection, self-realization, and security.
130. Thus, sexual behavior is not always exclusively aimed at satisfying a physical need for genital stimulation (such physical need is also known as “feeling horny”).
131. The child’s motivation for sexual behavior is curiosity, which is reinforced by pleasure.
132. The manifestations of child sexuality vary from child to child.
133. Physical contact helps to form interpersonal bonds, serves to communicate emotions, and it also improves health .
134. The sexual child is a normal child .
135. However, if children are naturally curious about their own bodies and the bodies of others, they are unlikely to imitate adult sexual behavior, and since sexuality is a phenomenon unique to each person, two children may have different levels of interest in sexuality.
136. Thus, “sexual child” is not synonymous with “horny kid”.
137. Children masturbate, as long as they have genitals and functional hands.
138. They are curious about their own bodies, só they explore their bodies, finding out that some places are nicer to touch than others.
139. A child who feels that they can not ask questions about sexuality will try to learn about sexuality by observing others.
140. Research on child sexuality receives attention depending on the spirit of the times, that is, depending on the current political climate .
141. Because everyone is panicking about the phenomenon of child sexual abuse, it is very difficult to conduct research on child sexuality (after all, you may make a discovery that displeases someone).
142. The child is sexually uninformed because society does not want to inform children.
143. If you punish the boy for something, he will do it less often in the future.
144. The girl tends to imitate adults of the same sex as her.
145. Normal or natural sexuality is a social construct founded on the expectations that society has for people of a certain biological sex.
146. Children learn about sexuality through the lens of their sex (or gender, if you wish).
147. When realizing that social behaviors are based on gender, the child infers that sexual behaviors should also be based on gender .
148. An example of gender-based sexual behavior: When a two- or three-year-old boy shows the penis to others as a symbol of pride, he is usually not punished for it, but the girl who does the same with her vagina is seen as worthy of a spanking.
149. Thus the boy’s sexual behavior and the girl’s sexual behavior are separated, and the child absorbs these patterns from the earliest years of life through observation and experience.
150. It is concluded, then, that gender is a crucial concept in the construction of sexual identity.
151. In a study done in Ireland, boys and girls (between two and seven years old) usually have names to designate the penis, but boys usually do not know which word to use when referring to the vagina, although the girls know what words they should use to refer to the penis.
152. At four months, a baby is already able to differentiate the male face from the female face.
153. However, the recognition of oneself as a boy or a girl only comes at age 3 and this characteristic is only perceived as stable at age 4.
154. The boy prefers to stay with those with whom he identifies with (his own gender).
155. Interactions with the opposite sex are based on lack of experience and lack of information, since adults are reluctant to give sex education.
156. Because boys and girls spend more time with members of the same sex than members of the opposite sex, contact between the sexes ends up causing disappointment and conflict.
157. The girl who expects a boy to act as a girl will be disappointed.
158. Men’s sexual role includes performance over romance, and the woman’s sex role includes romance over performance.
159. Sexual behavior among children is simply … common .
160. A child can even use an object to masturbate.
161. In a study conducted in 2000 by Ehrhardt, 33% of girls and 44% of boys (adolescents) in the sample reported sexual experiences with same-sex peers.
162. Comparing recent studies with older studies, we see that gender-conditioned child sexual behaviors are differing less between boys and girls.
163. If a boy fights with a girl, the girl often comforms and abides, but the opposite is almost never true, when it comes to kids.
164. So the girl who wants to influence a boy to stop doing something can not use influence techniques that work with other girls.
165. She has to fight with the boy by being assertive, just like a boy would.
166. The loss of virginity is a normally negative experience for the girl, but not for the boy.
167. Similarly, early sexual experiences are more consistently remembered as negative by girls, compared to boys.
168. The self-esteem level of the adolescent boy who is no longer a virgin is generally higher than the self-esteem level of the non-virgin girl and than the self-esteem level of the virgin boy.
169. The girl is more likely to remember the experience as positive if it has occurred in the context of romantic relationship.
170. Culturally, casual sex and multiple partners are seen as acceptable behaviors when the protagonist is male, but they are reprehensible behaviors if adopted by the woman.
171. Even for people who do not support this “double standard,” the existence of such a pattern is evident.
172. As this pattern is promoted by the media and reinforced by repetition, both men and women end up regulating themselves accordingly.
173. This explains why teenage boys tend to see sex as a symbol of status and power, as opposed to girls, who see sex as something more sentimental rather than casual.
174. There are societies in which sexual relationships in childhood and adolescence are tolerated and expected.
175. There are also societies where homosexuality is socially imposed: in Papua New Guinea, the only woman you can have sex with is your wife and only as long as she’s not pregnant, but homosexual sex is fine, meaning that a man who has a pregnant wife has to turn to other men.
176. The level of tolerance to child sexuality varies from country to country.
177. More sexually positive countries do not see child sexual contacts as problematic, provided they are voluntary, legal and harmless.
178. Boys learn about sex before they learn about romance, but it’s the opposite with girls.
179. Children, both through homosociality and estrangement from the opposite sex, learn that boys and girls are members of sometimes antagonistic groups and that contact between the sexes is not only potentially sexual but potentially “contaminating.”
180. Although the girl learns about romance first, she is culturally seen as more sexualized or sexualizable than the boy, even though the boy is sexually informed earlier.
181. Girls care about their appearance before they even care about boys.
182. Boys learn from each other about porn .
183. So when child sexuality reaches its adolescent state, boys and girls come from blatantly different cultures, which makes the early romances awkward.
184. The first relationships are stereotypical: the boy acts as a boy and the girl acts as a girl, one is proactive and the other imposes limits.
185. The first relationships are marked by “tricks”, techniques that are already old, that everyone has used, but that undergo embellishments during the act itself, according to the spontaneity of the seducer.
186. Interestingly, the use of these tricks gives men more power, at least at the beginning of the relationship.
187. The change in the sex roles that has taken place in our century has not yet had an effect in the early stages of the romance.
188. Thus, gender identity, obtained in childhood and reinforced in adolescence, will obviously have an effect on adult relationships.
189. Sexual expectations are defined by the sexual roles imposed by society.
190. It is expected that the first sexual contact of a relationship is proposed by men.
191. The woman can even say what the man can not do, but if the man stops the activity, the woman will receive nothing and the relationship fails.
192. The man can turn to other women, but the women of high standards, who would want her?
193. Although the man is culturally the one who initiates and leads the relationship, it does not mean at all that all men love such harrowing expectation!
194. The pressure to do a great job is a nuisance to the man.
195. Although many men like the idea of ​​relegating the beginning of the relationship to the woman, there is less consensus among them on how to react when it is the woman who takes the initiative on bed.
196. “Having sex with strangers” is a fantasy more frequent in men than in women.
197. One reason for this is that a woman who has sex with strangers needs to take into account the possibility of rape, so that only those who are not afraid of this possibility engage in relationships with people they have just met.
198. It is the fear of rape that sets women up against recreational sex.
199. The ideal of relationship (“forever, with the right person, in perfect relationship”) propagated by the media and internalized by the youth is reproduced and accepted almost without any questioning.
200. Sexuality is the only thing we do not teach to the little ones (what was made of integral education ?).
201. If they do not learn from adults, they will learn from other places, perhaps with other children or adolescents.
202. Fear of sexual education = fear of fornication and adultery.
203. The girl deciphers sexuality through television, radio or Internet, since she is curious and the parents are silent.
204. Nowadays, aware that they can not learn about sex with their parents, the children do not ask “that kind of quetion” to parents anymore and turn to the media, which does this job better than Mom and Dad.
205. They learn from movies, music , television shows …
206. Yes, if you see these things, you will want to do it (not that you need to see them to want to do it , but the urge rises).
207. However, the media stimulus is moderated by gender, so boys and girls react differently.
208. The Internet facilitates the sharing of sexual experiences among children and adolescents.
209. Boys consume more porn than girls.
210. It is unlikely that a boy will be punished for showing early sexual behavior, but the girl suffers a lot of sexual repression.
211. The girl who dresses provocatively is criticized by adults .
212. The girl does not want to be “pure”, but can not be “naughty”.
213. The boy’s reputation is high if he is sexually active.
214. Female sexual repression directs the girl’s sexuality to romance.
215. Female sexuality is repressed even when the female is an adult: they are all judging her sexual behavior.
216. This implies that the fantasy of sex with strangers may be less incident on women not only because of the rape problem, but also because they fear bad reputation.
217. The fifteen areas of sexual development: freedom from unwanted activities (knowing what you want what you do not want), understanding consent (understanding “yes” and “no” as well as it’s validity), education on biological aspects, understanding safety, agency, constant learning, resilience, open communication, happy and peaceful sexual development, self-acceptance, acceptance of sexual pleasure (understanding that sex is not inherently shameful or taboo), understanding of family or societal values ​​(knowing that there are certain forms of sexual expression that are banned by society), awareness that there is public behavior and there is private behavior (certain things are not done in public), competence in mediated sexuality (whatever that means).
218. Sexual development begins in the womb .
219. Child sexuality exists before puberty, it is just that puberty turns child sexuality into something more visible.
220. Puberty has hormonal origin, starting in the hypothalamus, which orders the production of hormones that stimulate the appearance of the secondary sexual characteristics.
221. The first sign of puberty in boys is the growth of the testicles, followed by the ability to produce sperm (the appearance of hairs is not a “real” sign of puberty).
222. The third sign of puberty is the growth of facial hair, followed by deepening of the voice, which becomes more serious.
223. Although puberty begins at about age 11 in boys, it begins at age ten in girls.
224. The first sign of puberty in the girl is the growth of the breasts.
225. Menarche is the second sign of puberty in the girl.
226. Puberty is shorter in the girl.
227. The growth spurt that occurs at puberty comes earlier for girls than for boys.
228. Puberty is happening earlier, but why?
229. Menarche, in the nineteenth century, happened the age of seventeen.
230. One of the theories for precocious puberty is the improvement in eating: you mature slower if you are poorly fed.
231. Breast development is happening earlier for girls of this generation and the trend is for it to occur even earlier in the next generation.
232. Human puberty is influenced by environmental, hormonal and dietary factors.
233. Obesity, caused by excess of sugar, low consumption of fruits and vegetables and an increase in the amount of food, can accelerate the onset of puberty.
234. The baby that easily gains weight will mature faster.
235. If the body has enough energy reserves to start puberty, it will start the process, regardless of the subject’s age.
236. There is more than one way of producing estrogen in the body.
237. In addition, substances in the air, water, and food can alter endocrine function.
238. Family conflicts also accelerate the maturation of the body (family stress, fights with parents, divorce, among others).
239. Conversely to obesity, malnutrition delays maturation.
240. The media also have a role in early maturation: in front of the television, you exercise less, tend to eat more (while watching the show) and see those fast-food ads that make you want to eat what you should not eat.
241. That implies that games based on virtual reality, which require you to move your whole body, could provide the needed exercise to burn energy and delay puberty.
242. Most studies on child sexuality are done within the child abuse paradigm, as if the child had to be abused to become sexual, which is not true.
243. The child may already have a preliminary knowledge about pregnancy and birth at age six.
244. Eight percent of the six-year-olds studied by Volbert in the year 2000 knew exactly how to have sex (do the same study in Brazil, I dare you).
245. Some boys are born with an erection.
246. Fetuses masturbate in the womb.
247. Babies can have orgasms before the first year of life, by touching, humping or grinding on things.
248. Despite this, it is ridiculous to say that the boy does that while fantasizing about sex: he does not need fantasies to have orgasms.
249. From the age of five, the boy is already able to understand that he can only touch his genitals away from the eyes of others.
250. If left alone , children may play show and tell or touching games.
251. Tykes before the age of five may try to touch the breasts of women within reach.
252. Normal childhood sexual behaviors are spontaneous, mutual, and are not associated with negative emotional reactions.
253. The child sees those things as a game, só it’s expected that the kid will only do those things with playmates.
254. It is unusual for the young child to plan these games in advance.
255. It is also unusual for them to be aggressive (beware what you call “child-on-child sexual abuse”).
256. Children learn about sex on the Internet or through independent reading.
257. Despite this, most children (more girls than boys) try to get this information from their parents at least once.
258. As the girl grows older, she gets better at hiding her adventures.
259. There is research showing that girls masturbate more than boys.
260. Sex games in childhood, provided that they are voluntary and mutual, generally do not cause mental or physical damages in the subjects involved.
261. Although such games are rarely penetrative, Stanton et al’s 1994 study of working-class subjects reveals that one-third of the boys studied lost their virginity around the age of eleven.
262. The media shows a sexualized version of the woman and the girl.
263. However, by promoting this image of the sexy woman and girl, the interest in plastic surgery increases and the degree of satisfaction with the body decreases, but the tolerance to sexual advances increases.
264. A 2011 study reveals that a large number of teenagers (9% to 20%) have shared or received nudes at least once.
265. This can cause legal problems for teenagers, even if the subjects involved are all 17-year-olds.
266. Provided that children have sex games with each other and that there are a lot of kids watching porn anyway, one has to consider whether the laws need to be so heavy for kids who share nudes.
267. There is no consensus on what is “typical” or “healthy” sexuality.
268. So you can only judge someone’s sexuality according to a circumstantial criterion: “problematic” or “unproblematic.”
269. Child sexual behavior is affected by culture: if culture is permissive, the child will be permissive.
270. Most Western societies can not be considered permissive because we try to keep children sexually uninformed and prevent them from “getting contaminated” (but child sexuality is what it is ).
271. The child is more sexual in a family where one parent is absent, that is, in families where a divorce occurred or in which the single parent has never married.
272. Child sexuality is less shy in families in which parents do not care about nudity in the home, in which family members shower together or in families where it is acceptable to share the bed (pretty much described the family I grew up in).
273. Most children fall in love for the first time before puberty.
274. It seems that the first love occurs around the time when the hairs appear in strange places of the body.
275. The girl who hits puberty early tends to worry earlier about her body and appearance.
276. The precocious girl loses her virginity earlier and is more difficult to control, but those are problems that ease between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one.
277. Precocious puberty is a predictor of precocious penetrative sexual behavior.
278. Sex is biological, gender identity is mental, gender role is social, and there may be dissonance between the three.
279. 14% of the boys have dressed as a girl at least once, while 10% of the girls have dressed as a boy.
280. Some children abandon the gender role assigned to them: they do not want to conform to society’s expectations for males or females, which causes them discomfort, since society wants them to be something that they simply do not want or can not be.
281. The transexual child prefers to assume the gender role of the opposite sex, because they identify with the opposite sex.
282. Being transgender, however, is a very rare phenomenon (although I know three people like that, whom I consider friends of mine).
283. Treatments for transgender children are the same as those used to treat homosexuals, and we all know that these treatments do not work and are harmful to adults (let alone children).
284. Public health institutions and policy initiatives are more focused on preventing adolescents from having sexual experience than allowing them to develop sexually healthy.
285. Adolescent sexuality is more tolerated and can be seen more easily in a positive light.
286. Sexual rights, choice and consent are the basis of a healthy sexuality.
287. Abstinence is a part of adolescent sexuality, but masturbation and sexual contact with other teenagers is also and should also be considered.
288. Virginity is not relevant to the understanding of adolescent sexual development.
289. The category “virgin” is stigmatizing.
290. Family sexual culture refers to the family’s influence on the sexuality of its members.
291. Generally, family nudity has little impact on adolescent sexuality.
292. If parents discourage adolescent sexuality, friends can very well stimulate it.
293. Even parents admit that teens learn more about sex with friends than they do with dad and mom.
294. Teens see porn on purpose and do it because it is sexually exciting.
295. Prosecuting an adolescent for producing, distributing and consuming child pornography in the form of nudes shared via sexting can have serious consequences for the adolescent.
296. The more precocious girl dates more and remembers these experiences more positively.
297. Sexual openness is correlated to low adolescent pregnancy rates, higher rate of condom use, less penetrative relationships, and greater emphasis on partner consent.
298. “Sexual openness” here is defined as experiencing and communicating desire or pleasure, as well as sexual self-determination.
299. A sexually negative family environment favors negative feelings about sex, such as shame and guilt.
300. Although still socially or religiously reprehensible, masturbation is pointed by science as innocuous to the body, perhaps even healthy (if we take into account that there are physical benefits occasioned by orgasm and the fact that masturbation is an easy way to obtain orgasms) .
301. If science points out that masturbation is normal or healthy, it is strange that sex education does not talk about masturbation.
302. Parents and children, even doctor and patient, avoid talking about pawing off.
303. If the masturbation rate is high even among adults, this shows that masturbation has something that sex does not have.
304. Contrary to what Eivind Berge says , masturbation does not reduce penetrative sexual behavior among sexually active young people: in American society, adolescents between the ages of fourteen and seventeen who masturbate have higher rates of oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse compared to those who do not masturbate, that is, if you are involuntary celibate, it is not because you masturbate, but because of something else.
305. But the amount of masturbation increases if you make less sex.
306. The woman who masturbates has less difficulty reaching orgasm during sex.
307. Most adolescents have sex in the context of an established relationship with a partner, rather than casually.
308. Libidinous acts (ie, non-penetrative sexual contact) allows orgasm with less risk of pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease.
309. The first sexual contact between one adolescent and another is usually the kiss.
310. Oral sex is often seen as “safer” … but is it really?
311. Different sexual practices can be combined in one session.
312. A woman has more oral sex when she’s menstruating (obviously).
313. The first experience of vaginal sex does not make much of a difference and has little impact on behavior, unless you are forced into it.
314. Anal sex is extremely rare in adolescence, but when it happens, the receiving end is usually a woman.
315. The vaginal fluid that lubricates the vagina kills microbes and is produced by excitement and pleasure, so having sex with a woman who is enjoying the experience is healthier.
316. The first orgasm occurs, on average, between thirteen and fifteen years ( on average , since, as we saw earlier, even babies can have orgasms).
317. Abstinence, masturbation and sex are three important elements in adolescent sexual development.
318. If teens are having sex even though we tell them not to do it, can’t we at least teach them how to have safe sex?
319. It seems that child sexuality is the ugly duckling of the developmental sciences: all areas of boyhood are studied, except sexuality.
320. This is because our culture denied the existence of child sexuality (a recent fact if we take into account how long we have lived on Earth) and because our society has a bad habit of attacking and censoring research that runs counter to this belief.
321. As a consequence, many people have the idea that child sexuality, when it manifests itself, is a disease because the “normal” child is “innocent.”
322. Of the few studies on child sexuality, most are of a pathological nature: they only speak of child sexuality as something problematic.
323. There is a lack of studies on the child’s normal sexual development.
324. If we were to use only the American literature on child sexuality, which is almost entirely clinical, we would end up thinking that child sexuality is both normal and problematic at the same time.
325. A child exhibiting atypical sexual behavior may not be sick.
326. Children, if left alone, can do with each other almost all the things adults do to each other in their bedrooms.
327. If you talk about child sexuality as positive, your speech automatically becomes suspicious.
328. So no one wants to research this topic or touch it with a ten-feet pole.
329. It is difficult to know what normal sexual behavior is in a child.
330. Non-consensual sexual contact between children is prevalent.
331. Interviewing a girl about her sexual practices can be a very fruitless business, since she may be embarrassed to talk about her mischief (even when kids become adults, they may feel ashamed to talk about what they did as a child).
332. No parent would give informed consent to a researcher to allow the researcher to observe the sexuality of their son or daughter.
333. Politics makes it harder!
334. Fortunately, there are studies that achieve good qualitative results on child sexuality (even though the best research on sexuality in general isn’t produced in United States).
335. It is possible to get horny inside the uterus.
336. It is possible to have orgasms inside the uterus.
337. The typical manual movement of adult masturbation has been observed in children of two and a half years.
338. Boys masturbate more than girls.
339. Despite this, sexual contact between two children is more common among girls.
340. These little games have no influence on adult sexual development (as far as they were voluntary and harmless, of course).
341. The girl’s orgasmic cycle is very much like the woman’s orgasmic cycle, whereas the boy’s orgasmic cycle is very different from the man’s orgasmic cycle (especially since the prepubescent boy is unable to ejaculate).
342. Although it is a very common practice, there are few studies on masturbation.
343. When the boy has his first ejaculation, the parents generally do not find it important, but everyone pays attention to the menarche in the girl.
344. It is possible to receive sexual information without knowing that such information is sexual.
345. If children do not have privacy to play sex games, they will have them in public.
346. A child may end up learning about libidinous acts by watching other children doing such acts.
347. The licentious girl is discriminated by other girls.
348. But those who have no sexual experience are laugh matter for other girls (“look how innocent she is!”).
349. The girl who practices libidinous acts with people whom she does not love is seen as a pervert.
350. Girls learn to be attractive and romantic, boys learn to be picky and casual, which means that the adoption of traditional sexual roles is still prevalent in adolescence.
351. Oral sex usually precedes vaginal sex.
352. A homosexual man, when having a sexual contact, acts as a homosexual man, not as a woman.
353. People are starting to study minor-attracted adults, but how many people study minor-attracted children (lets not get started on teleiophilic children)?
354. Studies on desire and sexual excitement exclude children.
355. Most adults confess that their first love occurred before puberty.
356. It is even more difficult to study the girl’s sexual desire, as she seems reluctant to describe her wishes in physiological terms, even if she admits interest in boys or sex.
357. Sexual fantasies come earlier for the boy.
358. The girl has a greater chance of feeling embarrassment at having sexual experiences.
359. The girl tends to see her first experiences as negative or ambiguous, but this phenomenon becomes less frequent in subsequent relationships.
360. A study of eight- and nine-year-olds reveals that most kids enjoy physical contact and are interested in knowing what the romantic experience is like, especially if it offers physical proximity.
361. Thus a positive experience can mitigate the effect of negative pressures that come from the environment.
362. The media makes sex look even more attractive.
363. Few things make a man horny, but a lot of things can make a woman horny.
364. It is safe to infer that the girl can feel desire for a lot of things as well as to infer that a boy’s objects of desire are more limited in number, although there are no studies that support this thesis.
365. The female body and the female mind can demonstrate different degrees of attraction for the same object!
366. In a 1999 study in the United States, 32% of women reported low sexual desire, 26% could not reach orgasm, and 27% were unable to experience sexual pleasure, but those percentages are not seen in studies with adolescents.
367. There are few studies on women who commit sexual offenses.
368. Part of the reason for this is that we are reluctant to blame the woman.
369. Thus, studying women who commit sexual offenses is taboo.
370. The definition of paraphilia is inaccurate: normal sexuality varies according to time and place, that is, according to culture.
371. Because the boy is expected to be sexually active and the girl is sexually passive, there is always more attention to the boy’s sexual behavior (the little attention that the female sexual behavior receives is generally negative, however, whereas the boy’s sexuality is more tolerated).
372. Most teens who send nudes are girls.
373. When the media talks about sexuality and children in the same story, it is likely to speak exaggerations.
374. The use of technology to show the body of children or youth is only the modern manifestation of children’s games from decades ago that had the same purpose: to show and tell (“if you show me yours, I will show you mine”).
375. The way we see the girl prevents us from properly studying her fetishes when they occur.
376. The man dresses as a woman more often than the woman dresses as a man.
377. Girls constitute between 5% and 10% of the adolescent population prosecuted for sexual offenses.
378. We seldom blame the girl, even when she is rightfully arrested and convicted.
379. The minor-attracted girl can hide a sexual contact with a baby under the mask of taking care of him.
380. The girl who commits an offending sexual act usually commits with an accomplice, is younger than boys who commit the same offense, commits the act with younger people, commits the act with both boys and girls, but employs force less often .
381. The girl left as a nanny can give in to temptation if she is attracted to minors.
382. Girls also consume pornography.
383. Not all girls who have sexual contact with children exhibit psychotic behavior.
384. Some sexual crimes are motivated by a desire for physical affection, not out of spite, but out of “love” for the “victim.”
385. Thus, it is not that the criminal has a desire to hurt and probably will not hurt, it is just that his “love” is socially unacceptable.
386. Sex education should also be given to adults.
387. It is necessary to establish the normal to establish the abnormal.
388. Without the study of child sexuality, both the legal system and the public health system will continue to use inconsistent and contradictory when dealing with the phenomenon.
389. Parents, teachers, medical professionals and even the young should receive sex education.
390. Sexuality manifests itself not only in the form of obviously sexual behavior, but also more discreetly in social relations.
391. The teenager gets conflicting messages about sexuality: the church and parents do not want him to express himself sexually, but he sees in the media in circles of friends that sexual expression can be positive.
392. The demonization of sexuality prevents us from exercising it constructively and safely: Unless we recognize it as normal, we will not talk about things like contraception or safe sex.
393. We need to see sexuality as a positive aspect of life, if we want to have healthy sex lives.
394. HPV causes cancer in various parts of the body, sooner or later after infection.
395. If you can not stop teens from having sex, let’s at least teach them to have safe sex.
396. Adolescent sexuality is a subject to be highlighted in public health discussions.
397. Most people lose their virginity before they are nineteen.
398. If the relationship occurs too early, the teen is unlikely to use a condom.
399. The adolescent pregnancy rate in the United States is the highest of all first world countries.
400. There are 50,000 teenagers and adults with up to twenty-four years who are contaminated with AIDS in the United States.
401. It is necessary to reduce risky sexual behavior among adolescents (which implies sex education).
402. A condom is more commonly used than a pill.
403. If you are a teenager and wants to have sex, do it safely or don’t do it (this also implies respecting age of consent laws, since breaking them is not safe either).
404. Have you tried family planning?
405. If you want to be sure, use both a condom and a pill.
406. Did you know that the pill helps in the treatment of pimples?
407. If the pill is used correctly, the chance of pregnancy is 0.3%.
408. But a lot of people do not know how to use it properly.
409. For example, you can not use the pill if you are being treated with antibiotics because the antibiotic reduces the effect of the pill.
410. The pill can cause weight gain.
411. To this day, there are people who do not know how to put on a condom (something I learned when I was six).
412. Low autonomy and social pressure reduce the use of contraceptives.
413. Thus, it can not be said that the adolescent only has unprotected sex because he does not want to have safe sex.
414. Adolescents take more risk than children and adults.
415. But when a teen has sex without a condom, he may well be aware of the consequences.
416. Another reason teenagers engage in unsafe sex is parental behavior, which often expects their child to fall in love before talking about contraception, when the ideal would be to talk about it before something actually happens.
417. Parents, talk about sex with your kids.
418. Teenagers turn to male parents when they want sexual information (or older male siblings).
419. The more friends use contraceptives, the more the individual feels encouraged to use them too, so having friends who have unsafe sex increases the chances of you also having unsafe sex.
420. Confidentiality influences the adolescent’s desire to seek family planning: if family planning clinics are forced to notify the boy’s parents that he sought help there, very few teens would seek such service.
421. State restrictions applied on the child’s access to contraception methods does not reduce their level of sexual activity, but because the child can not easily gain access to these methods, the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases and adolescent pregnancy increases .
422. Sexual education focused solely on abstinence does not work.
423. States that only have sex education focused on abstinence have higher adolescent pregnancy rates than states in which education deals with both abstinence and safe sex.
424. Moreover, offering honest sex education does not necessarily increase the teenager’s willingness to have sex.
425. But if these inexperienced teens are lectured on sexuality, they will make healthier decisions when they decide to have their first time.
426. Most new cases of sexually transmitted disease in the United States occur among adolescents.
427. The cost of this is not a joke.
428. If these diseases go from person to person, neglecting sexually active minors is bad for the whole society.
429. If you give a condom to a kid, he will not mount on someone just because of it.
430. It is unethical not to tell the teenager that condoms and pills exist, and it is unethical not to say how they work and how to use them.
431. Thus, education is the only effective weapon in combating adolescent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
432. It’s no use giving condoms to the boy after he’s done what he wanted to do.
433. Part of our reluctance to give sex education to teenagers comes from the fact that we think it is abnormal to be sexually active while still being so young.
434. There are teenagers having sex when drunk.
435. There are teenagers having sex when high.
436. The girl who consumes drugs or alcohol takes more risky sexual behaviors than the boy who does the same.
437. Many people have their first contact with alcohol before the age of thirteen.
438. Some teens have unplanned sex when they get drunk.
439. Alcohol or drug use is correlated to high chances of assuming sexually risky behavior and thus contracting STDs.
440. Most teenage pregnancy cases are “accidental,” but some are planned.
441. Teenage mothers are less likely to complete high school.
442. In the United States, about half of the cases of sexual harassment occur after drinking alcohol.
443. Teach your boy to resist drugs and he will also end up resisting other risk behaviors on his own.
444. The only treatment that may work for sexual minorities is one that focuses on their well-being, not on changing their sexuality.
445. The fact that adolescents engage in sexual or gendered behavior that does not conform to what society expects does not indicate that youth are “at risk.”
446. Just as homosexuals are not all the same, transsexuals and transgenders are not all the same, so these sexual categories are not monolithic.
447. The criteria for qualifying a person as homosexual vary.
448. Sexual orientation is multidimensional, composed of fantasies, attractions, behavior and feelings.
449. If I do not behave as gay , but I have desires for men, fantasies with both sexes, and yet I can only fall in love with women, am I gay or not ?
450. You can tell yourself “I’m gay ” and tell everyone you’re gay , but someone might surprise you by saying “you actually look bi for me.”
451. Homosexual experience in adolescence is not a sure sign of future homosexuality.
452. You can stigmatize yourself.
453. The circunstances and options for a homosexual/bisexual may change depending on if he is out or not.
454. Do not rely on the potential for generalization of clinical samples even when studying homosexuals, since homosexuals who seek such services do so because they already feel bad, so that the researcher who uses samples found in a doctor’s office may end up concluding that every homosexual suffers.
455. Restricted population studies also have restricted generalization.
456. Sexual attraction is not always discovered in childhood and it is rarely exclusive.
457. Although a sexual attraction is stable (resistant to change), the expression of an attraction varies.
458. Most people who have same-sex attraction are also attracted to the opposite sex , so heterosexuality is the most common orientation followed by bisexuality and then homosexuality.
459. Thus, bisexuality is more common than homosexuality.
460. As bisexuality is less popular in media or news, the young bisexual may take longer to identify as bisexual than the young homosexual would take to identify as homosexual.
461. The bisexual can receive more prejudice than the homosexual.
462. Many (including myself) reject all identity labels: “I know what I like, I do not need a name for it.”
463. Bisexuality is more common in women.
464. Your sexual attraction, your sexual identity and your sexual behavior may be incompatible.
465. This is not to say that a person has a problem, but that the binary fixed labels “heterosexual,” “bisexual,” “homosexual,” and “asexual” are problematic because they are archetypes.
466. Any minority group feels pressured for not participating in the majority, so there is a unique stress that only affects minorities.
467. This stress can occur acutely in adolescence, when the teenager feels he is gay , but then concludes that it was a false alarm, or when he feels he is gay , but then thinks “well, that’s not very important.”
468. Stigma and discrimination are not uniform experiences: different people react differently to the prejudices that other people have of them.
469. In addition, different people can suffer different levels of discrimination, so that one gay person can receive more discrimination than another, even if both are gay .
470. The worst form of discrimination is that promoted by the parents and siblings.
471. Discrimination within the family increases the chance of suicide in eight fold .
472. The homosexual does not feel a member of the opposite sex: the homosexual man feels like a man , but a homosexual man, not like a woman.
473. If gender identity and sexual orientation are distinct things, it is clear that there will be males (biological sex) who identify as women (gender identity) and are sexually attracted to women (sexual orientation), ie a person whose body is male, who is attracted to women and yet identifies herself as a woman, for example.
474. Many children exhibit behaviors of the opposite sex, but as they grow up and realize that there is a gender role for people of a particular sex, they come to conform to social expectations, most of the time, so that the boy who plays with the dolls or with the lipstick of the mother will not necessarily grow transsexual.
475. The masculine girl is tolerated and perhaps accepted, but the feminine boy is seen as sick and rejected.
476. Homosexuality and transsexuality are different things.
477. A homosexual man does not necessarily act in a feminine way, but the feminine man may well not be homosexual.
478. Someone’s sexual identity can not be enforced by a third party; only you can define your identity, whatever it may be.
479. To complicate matters, transgender and transexual are not the same thing: transgender is a comprehensive category that encompasses transsexuality, ie, all transexuals are transgender, but not every transgender is transexual.
480. If the person does not identify strictly with their biological sex, the person is transgender, but they’re only transsexual if they identify with the opposite sex.
481. It is possible not to identify with their sex and still not identify with the opposite gender, transiting between the two genders freely, for example, without belonging to either of them (they are a transgender who is not transsexual, often called “genderfluid”).
482. Because of this, there are transgenders who are not interested in sex reassignment because there are things they like in their bodies.
483. What makes the transgender sick isn’t the identity mismatch, but a society that wants them to live in way that goes against their nature, a nature that is pretty much harmless.
484. In the United States, prejudice is responsible for at least one-fifth of all murders.
485. It is difficult to combat child sexual abuse when there is no solid definition for this term.
486. A lot of sexual relationships between adult and minor are not reported by the child.
487. Without a clear definition of child sexual abuse, it is difficult to conduct reliable studies on the subject.
488. As a number of disciplinary areas deal with child sexual abuse, a perfect definition that serves all spheres is difficult to conceive.
489. Researchers disagree on what constitutes child sexual abuse, which leads us to produce contradictory studies.
490. The legal definition of child sexual abuse often prevails (in Brazil, the equivalent definition is “rape of vulnerable”, according to which any relationship between adult and child or adolescent or between two children is abuse , insofar as at least one of the parties is under the age of fourteen, even if the act was positive, harmless, voluntary and even if the victim loves the criminal and does not want him to be arrested).
491. Legal definitions have not been made to apply to clinical cases and the use of legal definitions in clinical settings is problematic, especially when court cases are used as quantitative study samples (forensic samples).
492. In addition, forensic samples only relate to cases that have come to justice, so the use of these samples results in studies with a limited generalization factor.
493. Touching a child’s genitals is already abuse, depending on the person who evaluates the act.
494. Another problem is that studies of child sexual abuse that use the judicial definition of abuse in the United States suffer from an overload of incest samples: “sexual abuse” is a definition reserved only for cases between child and mother, elder brother, parent or other that is responsible for the child, while “harassment” (literally “sexual assault”) is when the criminal is a stranger or person who is not in a position of authority over the child.
495. So using forensic samples for an study about “abuse” without paying attention to this distinction will give you a lot of incest cases, again hurting the generalization factor.
496. Even if a study does not use legal definitions, there is no official clinical definition, so each child sexual abuse study uses its own definitions .
497. So to understand a report on child sexual abuse, you need to know what that report calls abuse.
498. Most clinicians are not interested in precise definitions, but in inclusiveness: to get the largest possible clientele, recovery clinics for victims of abuse use highly comprehensive definitions.
499. That’s only one of the multiple problems of using clinical samples.
500. A lot of tykes who have sexual contacts before the age of fourteen, with an adult or with another minor, takes the secret to the tomb.
501. Because this type of relationship is not often mentioned by the parties involved, statistics may be wrong.
502. For many, abuse happens when the age difference is five years or more between the parties, even in the absence of harm or coercion.
503. The number of child sexual abuse cases is declining.
504. The older the child gets, the higher is the chance of the kid getting themselves in an illegal sexual contact.
505. In cases of sexual intercourse between adult and minor, the adult is a woman in more than 11% of cases.
506. Only five percent of all cases of adult/child sexual contact involves strangers; most of the times, the adult is someone the child already knows.
507. These experiences are only forced in a third of the cases, that is, the minor is voluntary participant most of the time.
508. It is not surprising then that such contacts are often not reported.
509. Because cases that are not reported do not enter into forensic samples, studies focused on forensic samples can not be generalized to cases that are not reported.
510. In addition, cases that are not reported also end up not entering the clinical samples.
511. The minor may not report because he does not feel like it.
512. The boy is less likely to report sexual contact with an older partner.
513. Developing a bond with the adult may make the minor less likely to report.
514. Fear of the consequences may also make the minor less prone to report.
515. If sexual contact occurs between siblings, it is unlikely to be reported.
516. The minor will probably not report if he likes the adult and if such bond with the adult is not damaged by the sexual contact experienced.
517. The child or adolescent who has sexual contact before adulthood can look at experience and think “I have not been abused.”
518. Thus, minors may not feel the need to report.
519. If experience is forced or painful, it is likely that the child will report it.
520. The adult who becomes aware of the child’s sexual experience may not report the incident to the police if the child speaks of the experience as something of small importance.
521. False allegations of child sexual abuse occur more often in custody battles and are motivated by a false interpretation of an event that may not have been sexual (eg, accusing the father of sexual abuse after a tickle fight).
522. Interviewers who use skewed questions may coerce the girl into confirming sexual abuse, even when no abuse occured.
523. The effects of an early sexual experience vary according to the environment in which the child is.
524. There are people who have these experiences in childhood or adolescence and do not feel any negative effect.
525. A gigantic number of people who have had sexual contact in childhood or adolescence, even if with older partner, do not develop symptoms of clinical relevance.
526. In addition, a lot of those who develop negative effects recover from said effects in about a year and a half.
527. Clinical and legal definitions of “abuse” are not literal definitions.
528. The number of relationships between adults and minors that are not reported is, as it is speculated, thirty times higher than the amount of relationships between adults and minors that are reported.
529. Most adult-to-minor relationships involve adolescents , not children.
530. Sexual abuse is never caused by the child.
531. Again, many of these contacts do not leave sequelae and, when they leave, usually the individual recovers.
532. According to data seen by the author of one of the chapters, boys are slightly more likely to have sex for money in their teens.
533. The evaluation of the sexual behavior of the child or adolescent can not be made without taking into account their cultural context .
534. There is no effective therapy capable of delaying the age of first intercourse.
535. 20% of illegal relationships are initiated by the adolescent, with another teen or even a child as a partner.
536. This type of relationship, in which both parties are underage, is rarely prosecuted or reported.
537. A mere invitation, made by an adolescent, can already cause problems.
538. The crime of teen dating may very well not involve force and be committed with mutual agreement.
539. A girl can force another teenager or a male adolescent as well, but the use of force has a frequency that ranges from 1.3% for girls to 5% for boys, so that most illegal teenage relationships do not involve any kind of coercion (in Brazil, you can not date before the age of fourteen).
540. If someone who has had a precocious sexual relationship engages in reprehensible behavior, it is necessary to ascertain the contribution of sexual contact in the formation of this behavior (if any), rather than assuming that the sexual experience is the only thing to blame.
541. When a suspicion of relationship between adult and minor is brought to justice, the child’s testimony is taken as primary evidence … but how do you know if your testimony is true?
542. Considering the consequences for the person accused of having a sexual contact with a person under the age of fourteen, distinguishing fact and fantasy is crucial.
543. Using the “right questions,” a child can say whatever you want them to say (see, for example, the movie The Hunt ).
544. In addition, prosecutors may be more concerned with proving that abuse occurred than knowing whether it occurred or not (after all, in times of feminism, there is no presumption of innocence for those charged with sexual offenses).
545. Arguments contrary to the idea that the child can testify gravitate the child’s cognitive ability, which, it is assumed, is insufficient to give a reliable account.
546. Favorable arguments, however, gravitate the child’s sexual misinformation (the child who talks about sex does so because he had sex, since he is “innocent”).
547. How can you be innocent if you have access to the Internet?
548. You also can’t be innocent if you attend to the same school as kids who already have sexual experience.
549. So the idea that the sexually informed child is a sexually abused child is wrong: it is possible to learn about sex without having sex.
550. The boy can lie in court to screw up the adult he does not like.
551. On the other hand, the boy can also lie to free the adult he likes.
552. The boy who does not report has his reasons.
553. The satanic sexual abuse scandals created the fear of the interviewing process itself, because many interviews to prove that children were abused in the context of sex ritual were degrading and invasive, traumatizing in themselves (and it turned out that a lot of those abuse cases did not happen ) .
554. Three types of memory: sensory, long-term, short-term.
555. There is an unconscious filtering process, whereby we forget what we do not consider important or impressive.
556. The more times you remember something, the harder it will be to forget later.
557. An experience is not always put into the memory: often only details of the experience are put into the memory, with varying degrees of association.
558. To remember something, it takes matter (memories) and form (succession of details, how each memory connects with another).
559. Perfect recalling is to put the details inside the form in order to reproduce an event accurately.
560. If the form seems clearer than the details, the tendency is to exclude details that do not fit well into the shape of the event that should be remembered.
561. If the form is wrong, the memory of the details of the experience will be distorted.
562. Thus, through captious questions, the interviewer gives the girl a ready-made form in which she must put the details, but she is going to omit details that do not fit the form given by the interviewer, a form that was imposed by suggestion!
563. If the girl remembers that something has happened, no question will make her doubt about what she saw, but special questions can make her answer that something that has not happened may have happened.
564. Thus, it is possible to make the girl “remember” something that did not really happen , but it is not possible to make her “forget” what happened.
565. This is because, when the girl has no memory of something that has happened, she tries to deduce the correct answer by analyzing the question that has been asked, that is, it is possible, with the right questions, to extract any kind of confession from a child, but only as long as the event has not actually taken place.
566. Another way of manipulating a child’s responses is by giving them preconceptions: a child who has never seen a certain man will more accurately describe his behavior than the child who heard that said adult is “bad”, for example.
567. Thus, a child is more inclined to make false accusations when the accused is someone who is regarded as “bad” by other adults.
568. However, if the girl who said that the “bad man” did a certain thing is faced with the question “but did you see him do it?”, the girl might turn back on her word.
569. Thus, trick questions and preconceptions give the child artificial forms in which they put the details remembered and filter the details that do not fit in the form.
570. Depending on the pressure put on the girl during an interview, she may accept the false narrative as true and her memory may even adapt to it, considering the false narrative to be “official,” even if she does not remember the event in that way.
571. If the interview is not recorded, there is no way to know if the interviewer employed biased or misleading questions…
572. Some interviewers go so far as to say, “If you do not collaborate and tell the truth , there will be consequences for you, ” but the boy, if he is already telling the truth, has no choice but to lie .
573. Biased questions, asserting that others have responded differently, saying that there are consequences for certain types of responses, re-asking questions already answered by the girl, and asking the girl to “guess” something she has not witnessed are all reprehensible interview practices.
574. Rewarding favorable answers and punishing undesirable answers is operant conditioning, not interviewing.
575. The child tends to lie when other children also lie (if the forensic interviewer says “your friends gave different answers to this question”, consider that as a big red flag).
576. No matter what you say to the girl or how skewed the questions you use are, she will not deny the violence that was done to her or the pain inflicted on her if the event was truly traumatic unless she was forced to answer in such a way.
577. Thus, the belief that “the brain erases bad memories” should not be taken as absolute; we can’t say that the child who denies the existence of pain or coercion during sexual contact ” forgot ” those details because they were too traumatic (repressed memory).
578. But she can forget about such pain when she reaches adulthood, if pain has occurred (“overcame it”, or simply forgot because it was not intense).
579. If the event is recent, the child will remember more reliably of the event, but the memory of details not directly linked to the pain decays over time.
580. But lack of memory is a risk factor for wrong answers.
581. It follows that it is easier to manipulate childhood memories when the event has occurred long ago.
582. In such cases, you can even tell the girl how she felt when the event occurred, so that if the memory of the feeling from the event is not strong, she may be led to believe that she experienced it differently.
583. Again, there are “abuse” experiences that are remembered as positive .
584. Memories of traumatic abuse are less detailed and have greater emotional impact than memories of positive sexual experiences .
585. To say that an experience was “positive” is to say that “the minor did not interpret this experience as negative”, that is, it’s the minor’s judgment.
586. This type of judgment is more common among boys .
587. The memory of a “positive” early sexual experience is clearer and has no negative impact on the child’s functioning.
588. The younger the child , the greater the difference between the child who has had positive sexual contact and the one who has had negative sexual contact, but the difference between the two decreases with time (perhaps because they forget what happened).
589. If the interview is conducted correctly, the testimony of the child may be as valid as that of an adult.
590. Even if an interview is well conducted, there is no guarantee that the child is telling the truth.
591. The forensic interviewer must accept when the child says “I do not know”.
592. Tell the girl that she can say she does not know when she does not know the answer, so she knows there is no need to lie when she has no answer.
593. The boy may lie because he was threatened (or because his parents or possessions were threatened).
594. The kid needs ample room for response.
595. The child must not feel that a certain type of response pleases the interviewer.
596. Attention when the boy contradicts himself.
597. When the child says “I do not know what happened,” do not ask “but can you guess what happened?”
598. If the child says what happened without describing (“he molested me”), ask for details rather than assuming that the child is using the term accurately from the start (the child might be using the term “molested” in the literal sense, rather than legal sense).
599. See if something important to the girl comes into play during the interview: if she feels that something important depends on the “right” answers, she is more likely to lie.
600. If the interview is poorly-conducted, it is invalid.
601. When training the person in charge of interviewing children, it is not enough to tell them to avoid “leading” questions if you do not explain what a leading question is.
602. Open-ended questions, in which the child can describe what happened, rather than responding from a limited number of options (“yes”, “no”) are great for spontaneous, genuine responses.
603. You need to know how to end the interview.
604. Again, there are relationships between adults and minors that result in no harm.
605. If the child or adolescent has a sexual contact with someone, the reaction of other adults around the child plays an important role in overcoming the trauma, if it has occurred.
606. Knowing that the child or adolescent has interacted with an adult can affect the child’s father, making him feel that he “failed” as a father.
607. If the boy has suffered, the father must learn to respond correctly to the boy’s suffering in order to not make his situation worse.
608. If the child exhibits precocious sexual behaviors as a result of sexual contact with the adult, it is important that the father also knows how to handle it.
609. It is necessary for the father to know how children learn behaviors, if what one wants is to correct behaviors presented by the child.
610. If the child learns by observation, it must be taught by role models.
611. If the child interacted with an adult, his / her interpretation of the fact is decisive in his / her response.
612. Thus, if she has associated experience with negative feelings, she will begin to fear anything that reminds her of experience, but if she does not associate experience with negative feelings, she will not exhibit such behavior or have that behavior minimized.
613. If the child disobeys you because you want to have control, a good tactic is to give two or more ways to accomplish the task; so the child feels autonomous for choosing, although, in the end, the kid is only doing what you want.
614. Make the girl feel good for being obedient and she will collaborate with the treatment if she has to go through it.
615. If the girl is being annoying, but not in a way that puts her at risk, ignore her.
616. Always reward the child for their good behavior.
617. If the child had a sexual contact with an adult, do not change your life because of that: by acting as if nothing had happened, the child sees the event as irrelevant, reducing the chances of psychological damage .
618. If your boy is older, a good way to punish misbehavior is by giving him household chores and, if he does not comply, remove privileges.
619. The treatment should desensitize the child to the occurrence; encouraging negative feelings about what happened will worsen their situation.
620. The same can be said of other unwanted situations: the importance given to these things can account for much or even all of the damage.
621. Desensitization also works with other traumatic experiences, not just unwanted sexual contacts.
622. The child may begin to feel bad only after the contact is discovered.
623. Recovering a child who has been sexually abused does not imply promoting sexual repression .
624. The treatment is more focused on any behaviors or feelings that the child has acquired because of the event, not talking much about the event itself.
625. There are thoughts that hinder you or that only serve to make you feel bad, those must be forgotten.
626. Cognitive triangle: thought, feeling and behavior.
627. A child who engages in sexual behavior that is harmful to others can not be punished as if sexuality were a special area of ​​behavior, but as if harmful sexual behavior were any other type of harmful behavior.
628. Otherwise, if the boy understands that sexual misconduct is different from other types of misconduct, he will pay more attention to his sexuality and that of others, which may increase the incidence of behavior.
629. Give more rewards for good behavior than punishment for bad behavior.
630. Instead of making a scandal for bad behavior, simply tell the girl what she did wrong and give the punishment without shouting, without losing your temper.
631. Parents should also receive treatment.
632. Children are able to feel pleasure, so a child who has a sexual contact with an adult or another child may have enjoyed the experience.
633. This is a concern that some parents have when they discover that the child has had sexual contact with an adult: “what will I do if my child has enjoyed the experience?”.
634. If a man has a sexual contact with a minor, one can not say “he did because he is a man”.
635. If the child is able to speak of the experience with indifference, it is a good sign because it means that the child has not suffered or overcame suffering.
636. Medical examination to find signs of abuse should be done responsibly and sensibly.
637. “Abuse” may be voluntary and harmless, but it can still be considered abuse if the act was immoral (as homosexuality was once immoral) or if the person is not able to give informed consent (as was the case with women).
638. If the parent is more upset than the child, the parent should not be interviewed with the child to prevent the child from ending up suffering as much as the parent.
639. In this case, father and son should be interviewed separately.
640. If the boy has really been abused, he may have also been threatened, so it is important for the interviewer to state that the boy is protected against the person who threatened him.
641. Sexual contact before the age of consent results in physical damage at most eight percent of the time.
642. If we are working with the hypothesis of abuse, we must know if there was a change of secretions among those involved, to order STD screening tests.
643. The more open the question, the more reliable the answer.
644. If the child’s genitals or anus are injured, take the child to the doctor.
645. If the girl has to be examined, the doctor and the parents should not lie to her to make her receptive to the examination or force her to accept it.
646. The child undergoing the examination must be fully informed and cooperative.
647. The child should not be immobilized during the examination, especially if the child has been immobilized during the abuse, which can cause secondary damage.
648. The child can be sedated, however.
649. The medical examiner should answer any questions the child may have about the examination process.
650. During the examination, talk to the child, even if the subject is the exam itself.
651. If your boy does not want to have his parents present during the exam, parents do not need to be present during the exam.
652. If the girl goes through exams, tell her what the exam will look like and what she can expect from the method and results to reduce or eliminate her fear.
653. The examination to detect abuse may end up also detecting parental neglect (if the child is poorly cared for by the parents).
654. Some conditions have symptoms that mimic symptoms of sexual abuse, it is necessary that the examiner knows how to differentiate when it’s a real sign of abuse or a sign of something eles.
655. The boy should choose the pose he will adopt while taking the exam.
656. More often than not, the examination for signs of abuse does not find such signs, even when the child had a sexual contact with an adolescent or an adult.
657. Thus, medical examination alone can neither confirm nor deny the possibility of sexual contact between child and adult.
658. After all, penetration is a rare occurrence in this kind of contact, so many contacts, though illegal, are not remembered as negative or particularly traumatic.
659. The child may say that the event was a minor occurence.
660. Depending on the condition of the girl, there is no need for examination: if she is well, she probably was not forced or injured, which would make the examination a waste of time.
661. In a study with 2384 subjects, the test to detect signs of abuse was only able to detect such signs 4% of the time (implying that only 4% of 2384 sexual contacts between adult and minor caused physical damage).
662. In another study with thirty-six teenage pregnancies, only two had penetration signs that could be detected by forensic medical examinations (even though all of them were penetrated, obviously, or they wouldn’t be pregnant in the first place).
663. The sexually active child and the sexually inactive child may receive identical results in a forensic examination.
664. Sexual contact between child and adult is very rare, most small children will not have such experience.
665. Although the boy knows what adults expect him to do in situations where there could be sexual contact with an adult, there is no guarantee that he will act as expected.
666. In addition, even if the girl receives training on how to avoid sexual situations and how adults expect her to respond to this possibility, she may simply not do as she trained if she is in a real situation.
667. Whoever thinks that child prostitution only has adults as clients is dead wrong: there are teens selling sex to other teens.
668. In the United States, you may be arrested for having sex with a seventeen-year-old.
669. Child prostitutes often verbally challenge society’s view of them, arguing that they are not victims.
670. Some say they are doing what they like or that they like the person with whom they have sex more often.
671. Because of this, a number of prostitutes refuse to be labeled a victim.
672. Thus, people who reject prostitution, seeing that there are girls and boys who see nothing wrong with the practice, stigmatize prostitutes as “immoral people.”
673. This makes sex for money a bigger offense than sex for pleasure.
674. The attitude of adolescent prostitutes calls age of consent laws into question.
675. Not much research is done on this phenomenon.
676. As far as girls are concerned, many prostitutes begin at the age of twelve.
677. When being serviced by institutions, a child prostitute may ask the authorities to keep his prostitution history as secret.
678. That, of course, if the minor decides to prosecute.
679. A lot of prostitutes have no place to live.
680. This is also because a lot of these minors are rejected by their parents or run away from home (the home life of these children is often very bad, which would explain their life on the streets).
681. Children and adolescents must have a voice of their own (participation and political importance).
682. Because the life of a thrownaway or runaway is very difficult, prostitution ends up imposing itself as a means of subsistence.
683. Some thrownaway children eat from the trash.
684. Some prostitutes say that the attention of an older person sometimes degenerates into coercion.
685. Prostitution may be marginally normalized by the media itself, which shows female sensuality as a means of securing money from conquered men.
686. The prostitute who enters these child support services may feel that the help they receive there is insufficient, só they turn back to prostitution in order to get more money.
687. Although there is a lot of talk about sex between adult and child, little is said about sex between adolescent and adult, because adolescents, having a more solid identity and, consequently, greater assertiveness , are more difficult to deal with.
688. Even if the child or adolescent denies being forced to have sex and even if the absence of violence is proven, the partner may still be arrested only because of the child ‘s age .
689. Despite this, most sexual contacts between adult and minor or between two minors go unnoticed .
690. This is due to the nature of those relationships and also to the nature of the legal system.
691. Most cases of sex with a minor do not have adult participation (child on child sex).
692. Because these cases most often involve two minors, the minors involved may decide not to report.
693. Of all adolescents who have sexual contact with other adolescents or adults, only a very small percentage report.
694. Thus, the law is unable to totally prevent these juvenile sexual experiences.
695. The legal system may conflict with child protection systems.
696. The legal system is responsive: it acts after complaint.
697. The problem with mandatory reporting is that the legal system can be overloaded with confusing or ridiculous causes , as it is not clear what a ” libidinous act ” is.
698. The legal system must then investigate each of these complaints.
699. In addition, unnecessary legal intervention in relationships can be construed as privacy violation, opening the opportunity of suing the state.
700. Finally, these investigations are not for free, being afforded with state money.
701. Again, a lot of relationships between minors or with minors do not cause any negative effects on anyone involved.
702. If the kid sees nothing wrong with what happened and still functions as usual, no one would notice that a crime took place.
703. To make matters worse, you have the problem of false accusations.
704. False allegations of sex with minors are devastating.
705. Police intervention can interfere with the child’s right to privacy and the right of parents to educate the child as they see fit.
706. Thus, a lawyer can argue on these points to put the police and the state in danger for violating rights granted to children and parents.
707. If there is not enough evidence that the act has occurred, it is not possible to convict anyone.
708. Medical examination can’t be used as the only proof that something has not happened.
709. Despite this, there is a real possibility that the medical examination will traumatize the tyke or increase his discomfort if he was really violated.
710. The main device for conviction is the victim’s testimony.
711. An investigation can be aborted by lack of evidence, lack of cooperation or incorrect procedure.
712. Do not exaggerate the police’s ability to deal with such cases .
713. The prosecution is rarely initiated by the minor, and is most often initiated by the state (for example, through public prosecution).
714. In situations like these, the minor is not one of the “parts” of the process, but a litigated object.
715. Ending the relationship can be worse than arresting the person, but the legal system does not think about these things, because it was not made to think about them.
716. As this type of sexual contact (between adult and minor) is rarely reported and generally does not leave marks neither mental nor physical, it is clear the inability of the police to punish all these cases, either for lack of complaint or lack of evidence.
717. The low rate of complaint is also due to the child or adolescent’s refusal to tell what happened.
718. The fundamental limitation of the legal system is that, being a human institution, it can only punish what it sees.
719. The number of reported cases is low compared to the total number of cases.
720. More than half of the cases of sex with minor do not involve adult participation, but two minors who had sexual contact.
721. The prosecution can not be conducted without weighing the consequences for the child.
722. A case of sex with a minor may not be punished when the minor’s family opposes to it.
723. Another factor that hinders the prosecution is the lack of witnesses.
724. It seems that the cases have a greater chance of being judged if there is an implicit profit in it …
725. If the child is a teenager , sexual contact is unlikely to end up in jail for anyone.
726. But if justice does convict you, you are dead.
727. Severe punishments do not reduce the incidence of behavior, but hinder the rehabilitation of the individual and his reintegration into society.
728. By offering protection against the perpetrator to the child, the kid will be less inclined to conceal facts even if they have been intimidated.
729. The child and the adolescent have the right to interfere with the prosecution process and with the judgment, in the form of the law.
730. When the child develops atypical sexual behavior , the parents do not know what to do about it.
731. Not all sexual behaviors are problematic and there are normal sexual behaviors among children and adolescents.
732. Sexual behavior can be divided into three groups, arranged in a continuum: typical, worrying and problematic.
733. A behavior can be seen as problematic when it harms the little boy himself or others who interact with him.
734. Abusive, painful or forced sexual behavior does not occur in children outside the clinical population .
735. There are kids who are into adults.
736. There are kids playing doctor with their pet dogs.
737. Because the interaction between children usually occurs between individuals of the same sex, much of the sexual behavior among children is homosexual, but that does not mean that the child who has these contacts will grow homosexual , given the experimental nature of such games.
738. This kind of play is normal.
739. Despite this, the boy can not give legally valid consent, because he has no right to consent.
740. Normal sexual behavior among children is made by mutual agreement and is harmless, both mentally and physically.
741. Any child sexual behavior outside these patterns (harmless and mutual) can be considered problematic.
742. There is a difference between age and maturity: two children of the same age may have different levels of maturity.
743. The problem with some sexual behaviors is the emotional response of society: the child has inadvertently violated a taboo.
744. The social response can traumatize the boy, who does not understand why everyone sees some things as “bad touch”.
745. In addition, those behaviors are not always motivated by sexual desire, but they can also be motivated by curiosity, anxiety and tension (some children touch themselves to calm down).
746. Thus, sexual games are not always motivated by ” libidinous ” reasons .
747. The child may engage in sexual behavior to challenge parents.
748. Those who suffer most from those behaviors are the parents, not the children.
749. In the past, it was thought that the boy who exhibited sexual behavior learned such behavior because he was sexually abused, but today we know that this is not true.
750. One of the proofs of this is that most children who have ever had sex with someone do not develop troublesome sexual behavior after contact.
751. Child sexual behavior can be motivated by genetical reasons.
752. It is easier for sexual contact to be traumatic if it involves penetration or multiple partners.
753. If the family is more sexually liberal, the child will be more sexually liberal.
754. Thus, in more liberal societies, sexuality doesn’t scare children.
755. Acceptable parent-child behavior varies by culture: not all families in the world are American or European.
756. So do not assume that the sexual child has been corrupted.
757. Fear of child sexuality leads to disproportionate reactions to problematic child sexual behavior, causing more harm than good to the child.
758. The response to child sexual behavior should be based on the risk posed by the behavior: if there is no risk, there is no need to respond, but if there is risk, the intervention must be proportional.
759. It is totally unreasonable for child sexual behavior to be punished by the judiciary system.
760. If sexual behavior occurs within the family, intervention can destroy the family balance or even the family itself.
761. The child should not go through a treatment designed for adults.
762. It is possible to be a pedophile and a minor.
763. Being attracted to children and having sex with children are different things .
764. Thus, the person who has a sexual contact with a child may not be a pedophile.
765. There are several reasons that lead someone to flomp a child and pedophilia is just one of them.
766. If you know the methods to produce diagnostic, you can manipulate the results.
767. Diagnostic methods are flawed and their results need to be carefully considered before being brought to court.
768. The problem with the legal system is that it is not up to date with science.
769. There is more pressure to control the girl’s sexuality than the boy’s sexuality, but this pressure is morally motivated, based on the concept of “appropriate,” not on the concept of effective harm .
770. The boy can be considered a victim only because of his age, as in cases where there was no force, pain or even penetration.
771. A consensual relationship is criminal is the consent isn’t legally valid.
772. Two minors in consensual relationship can be prosecuted for dating.
773. The main purpose of such a law, when it attacks the very minors it should protect, is the control of adolescent sexuality.
774. Historically, the focus of age of consent laws was to control female promiscuity.
775. Most cases of sex between minors are ignored by the police.
776. A judge may choose not to prosecute ridiculous causes.
777. There was a teenage boy tried in the US Supreme Court for sending a sexual telephone prank to an old woman.
778. If a teenager and an adult commit the same crime (or infraction), the teenager could get a harsher sentence depending on the judge.
779. Adolescents need to be protected from arbitrary legal acts.
780. Teens should be entitled to constitutional benefits as well.
781. The granting of rights to the child has priority over the rehabilitation of the juvenile offender.
782. The consequences of the prosecution may be stigmatizing for the minor.
783. The rights of child and adolescent offenders should be extended to other minor offenders (and minors in general).
784. In United States, there are crimes that can only be committed by children, such as running away from home.
785. Unfortunately, the different treatment given to children and adolescents compared to treatment given to adults in criminal proceedings can be used as an excuse to punish the child arbitrarily.
786. The use of vague terms in the law has political utility .
787. The population fears, and this includes the judiciary, that giving adult rights to the prosecuted child may reduce state control over female child sexuality.
788. The exception swallowed the rule and the rights of the child and adolescent are being ignored.
789. There are teenagers raping adults.
790. Although the level of personal maturity is not taken into account in sexual relationships between minors, the level of personal maturity is taken into account in American legal proceedings, which may determine that an adolescent may be tried as an adult if he is ” mentally sophisticated .”
791. An infrequent occurrence , if frequently mentioned , seems frequent .
792. The boy sued for sexual contact with another teenager may end up becoming infamous in the community in which he lives.
793. In countries with a record of sex offenders , the names of these teens appear online.
794. Sexual regulation is often implemented hastily, regardless of its consequences for ordinary citizens.
795. In fact, sexual regulation is implemented even without proof of its effectiveness.
796. All in the name of protection.
797. Scientific evidence against these measures multiplies, but they are still there.
798. Part of the reason is the desire of the population for harsher punishment.
799. Protection may conflict with your best interest .
800. The legal treatment of sexual offenses committed by adolescents can be counterproductive.
801. More than that: no one seems to care if prosecuting a kid will do them any harm.
802. The sex offender risk classification needs to be revised.
803. In fact, scales of risk classification fail to predict recidivism.
804. It is rare for a juvenile offender to become a criminal adult (unless he is profiting or being encouraged).
805. Contrary to popular belief, the rate of recidivism of a sex offender is not higher than the rate of recidivism of other offenders, on average.
806. In addition, stigmatizing a teenager prevents him from forming social bonds that could help rehabilitate him.
807. The teenager who is seen dating , is punished for it and sent home ends up without family or community support, because he committed statutory rape and no one wants to associate with a rapist (remembering that an act does not have to be forced or penetrative to be considered “rape” anymore).
808. We need to review what we are calling “rape” or “sex crime.”
809. There are already sectors of the population that are concerned about the criminalization of child sexuality, especially since it is normal and often uncontrollable.
810. The problem is that no one has a better idea that could replace the idea that the sexually active adolescent should be punished and controlled .
811. Nothing is more absurd than condemning a teenager to death or life imprisonment.
812. If a person’s judgment improves with maturation, then the tendency is for the offending teenager not to incur the same offenses as an adult.
813. Is the law fair ?
814. A relationship before the age of consent can be consensual .
815. What is the meaning of a punishment that worsens the punished person’s moral state?