There is no feature to sexual activity that makes it importantly different from all the other things children are brought to be involved in by their parents and caretakers. They don’t need to consent to anything else their parents have them do, and so you’re unjustified in your belief that children can’t have sex for the reason that they can’t consent to it. It’s a wrong belief anyway because of course children can consent to sex. Consent just means to express a willingness to be involved in whatever one is brought to be involved in. There is no stage during human development when that isn’t possible. It’s practically a young child’s job to let you know if they don’t like something.
Sexual activity isn’t some kind of complicated social contract that requires deliberation or special knowledge of any kind. The dumbest of wild beasts have sex. Having an orgasm does not require special knowledge. The belief that children can’t consent to sex for lack of an ability to make an informed decision is one of the most schizophrenic things a person could possibly believe when compared to other things children are allowed and even expected to do. Since when has a lack of understanding been a moral barrier to being educated about something? If a child doesn’t understand calculus, is it immoral to teach them math? If a child is not sophisticated enough to engage in the polemics of politics, should they be guarded from watching a political debate like how they’re guarded from viewing pornography? If a child cannot understand complex theological arguments, should they not be permitted to partake in religious practices? After all, many religions believe that choosing the wrong faith will have permanently negative consequences lasting all of eternity. Can a child make an informed decision about that? And it can’t be because of dangers that children are prohibited from sexual activities with an adult. There is no danger to sexual activity that a responsible caretaker can’t protect their child from. Just try and name one.
Parents and caretakers are perfectly capable of watching over their children and making sure they don’t come to harm in things like car rides and swimming and walking around public places and learning to ride a bike and crossing the street and boating and hiking and camping in the wilderness and whitewater river rafting and rock climbing and handling firearms for sport and even skydiving for god’s sake. No, children don’t need to be able to make an informed decision about anything at all in order to avoid unfavorable and harmful consequences when doing something dangerous; that’s what parents and caretakers are for. But some things are far less dangerous than others. When has it ever been the case that someone has died from masturbating or looking at porn? If it were really true that the possibility of injury was the reason a person believed pedophilia was wrong, then they wouldn’t be opposed to adults who did those two things with children. There is no such thing as a scientific study that controlled for societal factors when investigating pedophilia. That’s clearly inexcusable. If homosexual youths who killed themselves left suicide notes that said they did it because they hated themselves for being gay, would you believe that being homosexual was inherently traumatizing, or would you demand that societal factors be taken into account to explain why they were psychologically suffering? Obviously, societal factors need to be taken into account when scientifically investigating the effects of pedophilia.
From the earliest of ages, children are taught that nakedness is wrong and that playing with one’s genitals or the genitals of others is even more wrong. In the same way that children learn early on that hurting others and murder is wrong, they learn that sexual activity with other children and with adults is wrong. It’s little wonder that children respond negatively to something for which they were conditioned to respond negatively towards. And when such accounts of negative experiences are given as evidence of the harm pedophilia causes, the people who give them and those who value them can immediately be shown to be hypocrites simply by asking them if they are as willing to value positive accounts of sexual activity with a pedophile and to let those accounts change their beliefs about the inherent harm pedophilia causes. Anyone who doesn’t show guilt and shame for breaking a rule is punished more severely than someone who does, if they’re even punished at all. Punishment causes distress. The greater the punishment, the greater the distress. Pedophilia is one of the most punished things on earth. No one is even allowed to not be traumatized by pedophile sexual activity. Anyone who doesn’t show guilt and shame and fear and trauma—or at least a deep sense of wrongness—for being sexually involved with a pedophile, but instead expressed defiance and a desire to do it again, would be positively vilified. Try and name even just one psychological harm believed to be inherently caused by pedophile sexual activity and that isn’t far, far better explained as the result of endless crushing anxiety and sickening fear at the thought of the ultra severe punishments for being involved in the violation of one of the most hated and punished sexual taboos on the planet.
The primary purpose of sexual activity in the human species is that of social bonding. If you doubt that, just consider what the average number of children a married couple has, and then think about the number of times they have sex throughout their relationship. They aren’t doing it to make babies. Bonding with others is arguably among the most beneficial of things a human could possibly do. In fact, it’s probably the single most important and beneficial thing. There’s nothing about sexual activity that prevents a child from sharing in that benefit. Also, it’s immensely pleasurable, which is a benefit all on its own. Many of the things people do, they do simply for the pleasure of it. Intimate familiarity of sexual activity from an early age through hands-on experience with a loving and responsible caretaker would solve much of the immaturity and unsafe behaviors that plague so many people’s sex lives. It is socially irresponsible to treat public health concerns such as unwanted pregnancies, STDs, sexual bullies and violent rapists with the secrecy and shame in the way that they are due to misguided public attitudes about sex. Radically liberal sexual values would provide the benefit of properly addressing these public health concerns instead of keeping them an endemic problem because of how everyone treats sex. As with all things beneficial for a human to do, the earlier they are introduced to it, the better. Laughing, walking, talking, reading, writing, mathematics… all are good to begin doing as soon as one is able, and sexual feelings and activities, something a human can do from even before birth, is no different. There is no stage during human development when sexual feelings and activities crossover from being distressing to being pleasurable. Almost every person on earth who can recall their childhood can recall exploring themselves sexually in private and not being harmed by it. Almost any parent could report observing their toddlers playing with themselves at some point. There have been sonogram videos of both male and female fetuses masturbating to the point of orgasm. Just Google fetal masturbation. The biology which allows for sexual experiences is something that gets developed before birth. It is deeply stupid to believe that something harmless which so many children do in private would suddenly become one of the most damaging things known to medical science just because another person who happens to have been alive for more years than they becomes involved. Children are forced against their will into doing a very lot of things and yet they aren’t traumatized for it. Are you going to use language that carries as much condemnation and hate as does the word rape to describe all the other things children are forced to do? As already mentioned, sexual activity is immensely beneficial, and the benefit of all the things children are forced to do is given as justification for why it isn’t wrong to make them do as they’re told. There is no feature to sexual activity that makes it importantly different from all the other things children are brought to be involved in by their parents and caretakers. If you can’t say what makes it importantly different, then you aren’t justified in treating it differently. Sexual activity with children is not wrong. Even masturbating an infant in order to soothe them or even just to create a positive bonding experience with them is not wrong.
The punishments you are a supporter of and the bigotry you feel towards pedophiles is entirely the reason children are traumatized when they come to be involved in not only harmless, but profoundly beneficial sexual activity with a loving and responsible caretaker. You are the reason little children suffer. You are a child abuser, and you are the reason why their suffering turns into a lifelong struggle. If you believe that cultural conditioning can shape a person’s powerful gut reactions about things that are intensely punished, and if you are motivated by a desire to protect children from psychological harm, then why don’t you react with a sense of urgency at wanting scientific studies to be conducted investigating pedophilia and which take cultural conditioning into account? If it were true that the punishments you support are actually the source of harm in children, wouldn’t you want to know so that children could be kept from harm? And if you don’t react with a sense of urgency, doesn’t that mean you don’t care if you’re harming children?
The values of society are that tolerance and acceptance and fairness and kindness and love and the right of parents to raise their children in whatever harmless way they choose are held to be more important than intolerance and hate and disgust and bigotry and the value of sexual purity. In this way, it is against the values of society to support the criminalization of pedophilia.
If none of this convinced you to change your beliefs, then tell me: would anything? Can you even say what criteria would be needed to convince you to change? Or are your beliefs not based upon evidence and reason?