I am sceptical of some of the points in the linked text as well. The author mentions that there are cultures in which parents masturbate their children, but that isn't obviously harmful. Yes, an example was cited where the masturbation in question was done in a harmful and painful way, but that isn't to say that it must always be so. Young children have been documented to occasionaly masturbate even on their own, so why is it that adults helping is immeaditly abuse? And citing

"co-sleeping," with parents physically embracing the child, often continues until the child is ten or fifteen

as an example of "abuse" is getting us into the ludicrous territory. Embracing your child is abuse! The author also makes pretty big leaps of correlation and causation:

Boys in many New Guinea groups today, for instance, are so traumatized by the early erotic experiences, neglect and assaults on their bodies that they need to prove their masculinity when they grow up and become fierce warriors and cannibals, with a third of them dying in raids and wars.

Of course, there are also plenty of valid points about real sexual abuse that does take place, or has historically taken place.

Except for the fact that many, many kids grow up and report that it's harmful. These accounts are painful, emotional, sincere. So if the victims say that it is harmful, why don't you believe them?

I didn't say sexual relationships with children couldn't be harmful; I only said that not all automatically are. For instance, rape is obviously always harmful, and AFAIK a large fraction of such relations consist mainly of rape - but not all.

I don't know if I actually believe this, but I've heard reports that cause me to assign a non-neglible probability on the chance that sexual relations with between children and adults aren't necessarily as harmful as they may seem. For instance, see the Rind et al. report:

"Child Sexual Abuse does not cause intense harm on a pervasive basis regardless of gender." Simplified, Rind et al. (1998) found that 3 out of every 100 individuals in a CSA population had clinically significant problems (compared to 2 out of every 100 in a general population).

Rind et al. contended that the degree of psychological damage was based on whether the child describes the encounter as consensual or not.

Similarly, I've heard second-hand accounts about people who report that they actually had loving relationships with pedophiles as kids. That didn't traumatize them, but the follow-up "psychological care", where the psychiatrists automatically assumed that the experience must have been horrible, did.

It would seem reasonable, on the face of it. There's no automatic reason for why we should assume sexual relations with children must automatically be harmful and unpleasant to the kids, if not for the cached thought of all sexual relations being abuse. And in the current political climate, just about nobody will have the courage to voice such an opinion in public, so studies such as these should carry extra weight.