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FOREWARD TO THE DUTCH EDITION In this book boys themselves tell about their friendships with men, friendships within which sexual contacts occur. Our society's perception of sex between children and adults is changing. While the late 1970s saw quite a bit of positive discussion about pedophilia, now all sex between children and grown-ups seems to be associated with "abuse". We will touch on the history and manifestations of this shift in public opinion in the course of our introduction. At the same time we will define a few concepts which are necessary to the understanding of our work, and finally we will give a short description of how our investigation was carried out. The second, and major, part of the book is devoted to the research itself and what emerged from it. Here we will describe the many different aspects of the man-boy friendships and the sexual contacts which occurred within them. In the final section we will point out some of the limitations of this project, the most important being that the experiences of these particular 25 boys cannot be considered representative of all sexual relations which occur between men and boys. Sexual abuse lies quite outside the area of this investigation. Finally we will comment on the significance of what these boys have reported for Dutch penal legislation, and we will preface this discussion with a summary of what recently has been written and said about those sections of our Penal Code bearing on the ages of sexual consent. |