On Childhood Sexual Initiation
It wasn’t okay
I was sexual at an early age at boarding school. I’d say such interactions I had 25% control. This means that my remaining 75% of agency was spoken for. I certainly had the power to disengage and even ‘dob in’ (tell on) my abusers but I didn’t because it added some excitement to my otherwise dull early school years. It sexualised me for life. If you’ve seen interviews with sex workers and pornstars then you’ll know that they nearly all were predated upon when young. I researched the area.
Research on childhood sexual abuse consistently shows disruptions in sexual script development — the internalised template through which individuals come to understand desire, consent, roles, and relational expectations. When sexual contact occurs prematurely or coercively, these scripts can become distorted in ways that persist into adulthood. Common downstream effects include:
Confusion around consent and personal agency
Dissociation or compartmentalisation during intimacy
Compulsive or dysregulated sexual behaviour
Difficulty integrating emotional closeness with physical desire
Shame-based or performative sexuality
Two broad patterns emerge clinically. In one, sexuality becomes tarnished — associated with pain, powerlessness, and shame, disconnected from the bonding, pleasurable, and relational qualities most people develop toward it. In the other, individuals present as unusually sexually confident, available, or uninhibited. Superficially this can resemble social ease or competence. Clinically, it more often reflects desensitisation, boundary erosion, or an attempt to retroactively gain control over earlier experiences. This distinction matters, because the second pattern is frequently misread by the individual themselves and by others as a kind of advantage. It isn’t.
Figures are still difficult to pin down but as a guide: Dutch Developmental Psychologist Marije Stoltenborgh combined 217 studies and almost 10 million participants to find that 7.6% of Western males (UK’s 2025 ONS study suggested 9.1% of all children) suffered CSA. In 2025, The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School published figures suggesting that prevalance of Sexual Violence against girls is 31% in India, 28% in USA, 24% in UK. SV against boys sits at 16% in USA and 17% in UK. The highest rates are in Africa. That same ONS survey found that CSA targets are more likely to describe themselves as homosexual once adult and even more likely to describe themselves as bisexual. Child rape produces sexual non-selectiveness in the vulnerated.
Northwestern University’s Michael Curtis’s work revealed a 3.5 over-representation of survivors in the make sex work biz. A Boston phone study of MSWs in the 90s found that 46% such victims were forced into anal sex, and 76% into oral, in case you were wondering. The US office for Justice reported that between one-third and one-half of adult sexual assault victims had CSA histories. So sinister pathways exploited by violators bleed into attachment disruption, and socioeconomic marginalisation converge to influence adults’ decisions about self-prostitution and thus increase risk of further exploitation, especially in unregulated markets, where punters will chance rape to get the ‘service’ for free.
The broader idea that volume of sexual experience improves relational competence is similarly overstated. Interpersonal skill is less about quantity of partners and more about the quality of relational development: secure attachment, emotional regulation, empathy, and the ability to communicate. Trauma tends to impair precisely these capacities.
CSA is neither a modern phenomenon nor one confined to particular cultures or even species. Evolutionary accounts imply that sexual initiation of juveniles are “natural” extensions of mammalian behaviour, but where in humans the act is seen as exploitation, unilateral gratification, and, under law, banned and therefore bad, we might see a spider monkey copulate with a pre-menarche female and fawn that their ‘confusion’ about the inefficacy of their practical act rather than correctly projecting into their more likely immediate experience of pleasure-seeking, such is the brain’s shortcutting approximation for the zoological directive of procreation. In fact, sexual coercion is documented in a number of species, notably some primates and dolphins, and I’ve personally seen adult dogs mount puppies. Dogs’ first periods happen at around 12 months (later for bigger breeds).
CSA has existed across all societies and historical eras, with ancient civilisations at times openly normalising adult sexual contact with children, with archaic cultural narratives layered on top of this. In some ancient Greek framings, boys who had early sexual encounters with older, dominant partners were understood as fortunate recipients of a kind of precocious initiation. What we can now recognise in this is a defensive reframing: converting victimhood into status in order to avoid confronting harm. The cost is that it delays integration and obscures the need for healing.
A more accurate formulation is this: early sexual coercion can expand or dysregulate behavioural repertoires, sometimes creating the appearance of confidence or versatility. But these patterns are typically accompanied by fragmentation in identity, impaired boundary recognition, and reduced capacity for relational depth.
None of this implies a fixed outcome. Many people with such histories develop healthy, integrated sexual and relational lives, particularly when there is space for processing, meaning-making, and corrective relational experiences. But that process involves unwinding the adaptations formed under duress, not treating them as assets.
If there is a painful truth about early sexual coercion, it is this: what later looks like freedom or confidence is often built on violations the individual had to normalise in order to survive.
Abuse aside, perhaps non-reproductive sexual fluency is linked to being bisexual, a term that we lazily use for convenience to describe individuals rather than relationships, although confusingly a bisexual relationship would by definition need to be a throuple. Robin Baker in Sperm Wars said, “over 80% of men who are ever going to show homosexual behaviour have done so by the time they are 15 and 98% by the time they are 20.” Note that bisexuality doesn’t beget CSA, so much as CSA, remembering also that beautiful children are targeted more than less beautiful, produces a bisexual male. Boys exposed to sexual activity prematurely, especially in asymmetric power dynamics with older individuals, are more likely to:
Develop confusion around consent and agency.
Exhibit higher rates of compulsive or dysregulated sexual behaviour.
Show broader repertoires (including same-sex behaviour that is situational rather than identity-based).
Struggle with boundaries, shame, or dissociation in sexual contexts.
Baker’s take is that bi men then have access to a greater sexual market place, “allowing practice with different personalities. Experience with multiple male partners of different character types gives the bisexual an edge when interacting with multiple female partners of different character types.” Sex fosters pre-selection which fosters sex. Bisexuality opens the doors to more freeform group-sex with more than one man, so adventurous boy-girl couples are not off the menu as they might be to more squeamish males, if squeamish be the word.
I’ve discovered a Marmite-effect in disclosing bi-sexuality. When women learn that a man is bisexual, some perceive a dormant femininity. This doesn’t serve guys in certain cultures but it is being given increasingly breathing room in a softening social arena.
