Philip den Bouwmeester pours benzine on the flames of child sex abuse hysteria

I refer to the three pieces by "Den Bouwmeester: [real name: Frits Wafelbakker] on the Groningen conference last summer on child sex abuse and incest. I was not at that conference, but I have heard from people who were that it was dominated by "the American view" which holds that about one-third of today's children will be "sexually abused" before the age of 16, that any sexual act (including viewing of the genitals) between a child and someone two years or more older, whether mutually consensual or not, is "sexual abuse", that anyone under 21 (or, among "liberals", 18) is a child, that "abuse" so defined traumatises and haunts the "victim" for the rest of his/her life, and that therapeutic intervention into the lives of both the "abuser" (aversion therapy, Androcur, long prison sentences as a means of warehousing sex criminals and mental orifices by "sex abuse specialists") is necessary and must be sanctified by law. [...]

Well, now! My understanding of the purpose of NVSH is to try to achieve sexual sanity in our society, and that means, among other things, fighting unreasonable sexual hysteria and making distinctions between sex which is harmful (rape, coerced acts) and sex which is not (virtually all mutually consensual activities which do not lead to unwanted pregnancies or disease). What place, then, do these columns of Den Bouwmeester have in a NVSH publication? He seems strangely ready to pour benzine on the flames of child sex abuse hysteria and is most reluctant to make meaningful distinctions. He gives no evidence that he recognises a difference between sex with an infant and sex with a late adolescent, between an older and younger brother masturbating each other and father-daughter intercourse, between open, friendly sex involving a man and a 12-year-old boy and anal rape of an infant by a drunken step-father. All is bad, all is traumatising, and, furthermore what we read about in the press is just the tip of the iceberg, as "recent research" in The Netherlands (alas, not yet completed!) proves. [...]

A few more articles like these will surely lead to many, including undersigned, not renewing their NVSH memberships.

source: Letter to Redactie Sekstant by Francis S. [edit]; Copy to Vereniging Martijn; 6 February 1990