The classifacation 'child sexual abuse'

A huge range of entirely divergent experiences are classified as "child sexual abuse." It does not matter whether the perpetrator is the 25-year-old male lover of a fifteen-year-old boy who lives down the street, a stepfather forcing a terrified six-year-old stepdaughter into sexual intercourse, a flasher in the park, or even - as the experts now pretend to be discovering - a child who cajoles another child into sex-play. In every case, it is the experts and the police who do the talking; it is always the same story with the same title. Sex involving minors is defined and evaluated completely out of context, amid idealizations and paradigms of mental health and power relations.

It is in the interest of the powers-that-be to work within these idealizations: they provide an excuse to meddle in ever more people's lives, with any resistance conveniently reduced to ignorant or malicious neglect. Though those who work in the sex-abuse industries will hasten to stress the unwillingness of many to face "reality" and the funding problems that prevent them from intervening more effectively, such protests serve only as testimony to their mission.

source: 'Introduction' by Mark Pascal; From the book 'Varieties of Man/Boy Love - Modern Western Contexts'; Edited by Mark Pascal; NAMBLA Journal 8; Wallace Hamilton Press, New York; 1992