The taboo of all taboos, as far as our society is concerned, is that of adults engaging in specific sexual activity with children. We recognize that even people who consider themselves open-minded about sexuality might come down on us pretty hard for raising this issue.
Are we discussing these things in order to find justification for adult-child sexual activity? The reader will have to make up his or her own mind as to our motives. We are not raising this issue to offend anyone or to propose such activity, but it is critical to remember that we discussed earlier the difficulty of drawing a clear line between childhood and adulthood from a cultural/historical point of view. We then pointed out that in reality children are sexual adults at puberty.
It must also be said that in older cultures, before children began to be regarded as excessively fragile and in need of a kind of care that has reached pampering stages in our culture, sex between "adults" and "children" was not at all uncommon. Marriages between very young girls and much older men have been common throughout history in many cultures. I say this without passing any particular value judgment on the wisdom of such unions.
It should also be noted that both religious and social rules and laws on this issue are culturally conditioned and not God-given. Among all the sex laws of the Old Testament, for example, so far as I know there is not even one on the subject of what we would call adult-child sex.
Is the whole religious, social and legal pattern, which so severely stigmatizes adult/child sex, really an improvement on the patterns of the past? We might wonder in the light of the practices of other cultures and the silence of the Scriptures.