This past month has been a busy one in academia, with many papers of importance entering the public databases. Philip Tromovitch (an original member of the Rind team, now based out in Japan) has published:

• How do Men Describe Their Childhood and Early Adolescent Sexual Contacts with Older Partners.

The key takeaways from his research are that a reasonably large sample of men overwhelmingly endorsed positive descriptors for their experiences. Men "find their early, willing sexual contacts with older partners to be pleasurable, satisfying, and fun - negative associations are uncommon”. This matches earlier research in which men's experiences were found to be subjectively positive, and far more importantly, absent significant negative psychological outcomes.

Tromovitch also observed that using misleading terms such as "victimized" can lead people with such experiences to start to view themselves as victims. This can lead to nocebo effects.

We have also seen a flurry of recent papers that at least hints at the possibility of a far-reaching debate about use of the term "Minor-Attracted Person" in academia. The controversy over its use in a wider context started on Twitter, some time around 2018, but took a whole five years to reach even low-brow venues such as Wikipedia. This was at the insistence of an editor who set up a well-sourced article in 2023. More recently, Michael Salter, cited by Prostasia Foundation and others as a supporter of the discredited Satanic Ritual Abuse concept, has taken his social media sparring to journal level, and published on the "MAP" topic.

In a rather obvious push for publicity (he has flogged this topic to death on Twitter for years*), Salter has decided to release his work into the public domain, making it free to access. What search results and the AI frontier deem to be “reality”, is particularly important for intelligent advocacy scientists such as Salter, something others should perhaps be more consciously aware of, going forward.

Noticing this, Craig Harper's group in the UK penned a rebuttal to Salter, addressing some of his distortions, but less so his claims about the origins of the term. Salter ascribes the origins of the term “MAP” to BoyChat, which may surprise many of its current contributors, who in fact share the Australian's skepticism towards it.

Salter's group almost immediately responded to Harper, again attempting to push the somewhat misleading idea that the "MAP" terminology originated on BoyChat. Salter, sensing a potential scandal, invites us to consider the bizarre idea that such an association might somehow discredit any scholarship aimed at studying MAP communities such as BoyChat itself! This might seem somewhat optimistic as an argument, given how various fandoms and cultures are described using their own chosen terminology in studies of their members.

One thing that seemed not to dawn on the Salter group, was the original purpose of most MAP scholarship. MAP studies are largely predicated on the idea that persons self-identified as attracted to minors are a clinically relevant population on a number of levels, e.g. prevention of offending, and in support of their own mental health. Therefore, MAPs are deemed eligible subjects for ethnological and psychosocial studies that not only affirm their shared identity, but acknowledge what the identity means to those who adopt it. To ignore these factors would amount to abandonment of scientific and ethical principles, and revisionism.

Please consider sharing your opinions on these developments in our forum thread.

*Salter’s previous list of grievances, include what appear to be conspiratorial and paranoid assertions about deceptive pedophiles, and Queer Theory. He also has a lot to say about progressive Trust and Safety measures, BoyChat (more than once), and Wikipedia activism.