Child sexual abuse," although defined in various ways {Hauggard & Reppucci, 1988), typically is defined to include any sexual contact between a child or an adolescent and an older individual {Jones, 1990; Kilpatrick, 1987). In short, it is a catch-all term for any sort of adult-nonadult sexual contact. Other terms frequently used to describe such contacts include "sexual exploitation, "molestation," and " "victimization," sometimes all in the same article (e.g., Burgess, Hartman, McCausland, & Powers, 1984). As Kilpatrick (1987) noted, the use of such terms is often based "not on effects upon the child, but upon age discrepancy and community standards about what is an exploitative sexual relationship" (p. 175).

The terms used to describe the younger individual involved in such contacts are equally negative in their implications. The younger person is variously labeled a "victim" (e.g., Finkelhor, 1979a), "molested child" (e.g., Fritz, Stoll, & Wagner. 1981), "sexually exploited child" (e.g., Kempe & Kempe, 1978), or "survivor" (e.g., Summit, 1989).

Again. these labels are frequently employed without reference to the issue of effects on the younger individuals or to their own characterization of. their experiences. Some researchers have explicitly asserted that adolescents or children who perceive themselves as consenting or who rate their experiences as positive should still be defined as victims (Finkelhor, 1979b; Maltz, 1989; Russell, 1986). Similarly, negative terms have been frequently used without qualification to describe the older individuals involved in these contacts. The older person has been labeled with terms such as "offender," "aggressor," "assailant," "exploiter," and "perpetrator" (e.g., Burgess et al., 1984; de Young, 1982; Johnson, 1988).

Recently, some authors have begun to question the indiscriminate use of terms suggesting victimization and harm in describing all such contacts. Kilpatrick (1987) noted that researchers often fail to distinguish between "abuse" as some type of harm to the child or adolescent and "abuse" as a violation of social norms. This is problematic, Kilpatrick argued, because it is not scientifically sound to assume that violations of the social norms lead to harm for the child or adolescent. Okami (1990) argued that the use or only negative terms to describe adult-nonadult sexual contacts is based on the unsubstantiated assumptions of inherent exploitation and mutual exclusivity of erotic and affectional feelings in these contacts. He concisely stated his criticism or the indiscriminate usage of negative terms:

Assumptions such as these, and the consequent exclusive use of negatively loaded terminology such as "abuse," "assault," "attack," "molestation," "exploitation," or "victimization" to refer generically to all adult human sexual behavior with children and adolescents, confound attempts to understand such interactions and may reflect ... a serious conflict of interest between scientific inquiry on the one hand and enforcement of social norms or propagation of political ideology on the other. (p. 99)

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Going beyond the criticisms raised by Kilpatrick (1987) and Okami (1990), Nelson (1989) suggested an alternative terminology for describing adult-nonadult sexual contacts. The need for this alternative terminology, Nelson argued, is indicated by reviews of empirical investigations which have demonstrated that the reactions of non-adults to their sexual contacts with adults are not exclusively negative (Constantine, 1981; Kilpatrick-; 1987).

Based on these reviews, Nelson argued for a "continuum model" of such relationships which makes no assumptions about harm. In this model a range of experiences is acknowledged from those that are clearly abusive at one end of the continuum - experiences involving force or coercion - to those at the other end that involve perceptions of consent and positive responses from the younger participants. Nelson claimed that the unquestioned use of terms suggesting force, coercion, and harm reflects and maintains the belief that such relationships cannot be anything but harmful, thereby threatening an objective appraisal of these cases. Furthermore, Nelson claimed, in cases of nonnegative reactions, the use of negative terms risks creating iatrogenic victims. Recommended changes included the use of the non-condemnatory term "sexual experience" instead of terms such as "abuse" or "exploitation" and the non-condemnatory term "participant" instead of "victim" or "perpetrator." Nelson argued that these neutral terms should be used in describing specific cases unless and until negative terms are shown empirically to be appropriate.

In response to Nelson's (1989) recommendations, Maltz (1989) claimed that such sexual contacts should always be defined as harmful and abusive because of differences in age, size, and power. She asserted that sex with minors is by definition exploitative and that the current terminology is accurate. In this debate among professionals over the type of terminology to use, what is important from a scientific perspective is whether the indiscriminate use of negative terms actually does have biasing effects.

The possibility of biasing effects is suggested by several factors.

First, the use of value-laden terms by professionals in past discussions of other types of disapproved sexual behavior impeded a scientific understanding of these behaviors {Bullough & Bullough, 1977). The medical community, for example, typically referred to masturbation as "self-abuse" or "self-pollution" and to homosexuality as a "perversion" or "moral degeneracy".

 Second, researchers in other areas have demonstrated the biasing impact of negative labels. For example, in the area of prejudice research, Greenberg and Pyszczynski (1985) found that white college students who heard a confederate refer to a black speaker in a staged debate as "that nigger" judged the speaker more negatively than white students who heard the confederate refer to the speaker as "the pro-debator". In research on the effects of priming, studies have shown that priming individuals with words describing negative personal attributes can bias subsequent judgments of a target person. even though no association between the negative attributes and the target is stated or implied (e.g., Herr, 1986; Higgins, Rholes, & Jones. 1977).

The major goal of the current investigation was to examine empirically whether the indiscriminate use of negative terminology in professional discussions of adult-nonadult sexual contacts has biasing effects. To examine these possible effects of negative terminology, an experiment was conducted in which college students read a condensed journal article adapted from Tindall (1978) dealing with the impact of adult-nonadult sexual relationships on the nonadults. Students read a condensed version using either neutral or negative terms. Based on previous research concerning the biasing effects of negative vocabulary, it was hypothesized that negative terminology, compared with neutral terminology, would result in more negative inferences of the effects of adult-nonadult sexual contacts on the nonadults and more negative perceptions and judgments of the adults involved in these contacts.

Tindall's (1978) article was chosen because Tindall used neutral terminology to describe a series of case studies involving adult-nonadult sexual contacts that he evaluated as non-harmful based on long-term outcome data. These contacts involved relationships between male adolescents and male adults. For Tindall's article, the use of negative terms to describe the contacts would have been scientifically inappropriate according to the arguments presented by Kilpatrick (1987), Nelson (198,9), and Okami (1990) because such use might have led readers to form impressions that were not warranted by the evidence. Any negative impact on students' perceptions and judgments resulting from the substitution of negative terms for neutral ones in Tindall's article could therefore be interpreted as representing bias.

The use of Tindall's (1978) article afforded the opportunity to examine another issue. For each case study, Tindall provided non-evaluative descriptive information followed by long-term outcome information that, in every case, indicated healthy adjustment and either neutral or beneficial outcomes of the sexual relationships. These nonnegative outcomes contradict what most people in our society take for granted - e.g., such relationships are harmful.

Lord, Ross, and Lepper (1979) , showed that individuals with strong attitudes and beliefs about an issue tend to process information contradicting their attitudes and beliefs in a biased fashion. They found that

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students with extreme positions for or against capital punishment accepted uncritically evidence that supported their position, but strongly criticized contradicting evidence. Because attitudes in our society concerning adult-nonadult sexual contacts are typically negative and strongly held, people may be likely to process nonnegative outcome information in a biased manner. This possibility is support- ed by a number of examples in the professiona1literature in which sex researchers displayed the pattern of criticism identified by Lord et al. (1979).

When Sandfort (1984), based on his examination of 25 Dutch boys who were involved in sexual relationships with male adults, reported that "for practically all of the boys their sexual contact with their older partners emerged as a predominantly positive experience" (p. 136), Finkelhor (1984), Masters, Johnson, and Kolodny (1985), and Mrazek (1985) sharply criticized his research on methodological grounds. As Bauserman (1990) documented, their methodological criticisms were selectively applied to this positive outcome study, but not to negative outcome studies, and were largely flawed.

In discussing the large proportion of children and adolescents found in many studies who are asymptomatic after being sexually involved with adults, Finkelhor (1990) suggested that this finding could be because of an inadequacy of current measuring techniques to detect harm, a "denial pattern" at the time of the evaluation, or the inclusion of cases that represent less serious abuse for which the youngsters have adequate resources to cope. Noticeably lacking from this list was the possibility that some such contacts may not be experienced as stressful or negative.

Burgess et al. (1984) found in their study that a majority of the children and adolescents they interviewed showed vague or no symptoms while their sexual contacts were taking place but developed many symptoms after the intervention of the criminal justice and social service systems. These reactions were interpreted as post-traumatic stress syndrome, stemming from the sexual contacts, when they could more parsimoniously have been attributed to the intervention.

A secondary goal of the current investigation was therefore to examine biased processing of non- negative outcome information. Based on the considerations just discussed, it was hypothesized that students would process the nonnegative long-term outcome information provided in Tindall's (1978) article in a negatively biased fashion.