The History of Child Abuse (1998)
psychohistory.com
psychohistory.com
>A childhood more or less free from adult sexual use is in fact a very late historical achievement, limited to a few fortunate children in a few modern nations.
Clashes with this:
>In America, the most accurate scientific studies, based on lengthy interviews, report that 30 percent of men and 40 percent of women remember having been sexually molested during childhood—defining “molestation” as actual genital contact, not just exposure.
30-40 procent isn't "more or less free from adult sexual use" in my opinion. The numbers looks genuine from a quick search but I hope they are not. Otherwise something is very wrong.
>Adjusting statistically for what is known about these additional factors, I have concluded that the real sexual abuse rate for America is 60 percent for girls and 45 percent for boys, about half of these directly incestuous.
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That is, in earlier times, not only would the experience have been far more widespread, and likely more frequent in individual cases, but considered perfectly normal, non-deviant, and lawful. At least if you accept the author's argument (I'm undecided as yet).
But the notion that attitudes toward sexual relations with (or between) minor can change markedly over time is abundantly clear. Within recent memory, the age of legal marriage has been as low as 14 (considered "childhood") in certain US states. New York State raised the minimum from 14 to 18 in 2017:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-york-ends-child-marriage-ra...
The same article notes that two states, North Carolina and Alaska have a specified minimum age of 14, and 27 states lack any specific minimum age.
I'm not arguing that the low (or no) minimum age laws are right. I am pointing out that standards, and laws, within the US, and within the past few years, have included marriage, and presumably sexual relations, among minors. Along with (and combined with) attitudes toward race and religion (anti-miscegenation laws also being within living memory in the US, overturned in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loving_v._Virginia), little else among human norms has changed more.