Boys on Their Contacts with Men: A Study of Sexually Expressed Friendships.

In this day of rising anxieties over the possible traumas resulting from “child sexual abuse,” Sandfort runs against the tide. In 1981 he published The Sexual Aspect of Paedophile Relations ¹ which was generally savaged by American reviewers. In spite of the fact that the original Dutch edition had been published by the Sociological Institute of Utrecht University, and was a dispassionate report of scholarly findings, Sand fort’s conclusion that the 25 boys he had studied had not been traumatized by their experience with adults apparently so upset most of his American reviewers that they tried to kill the messenger rather than examine the message.