Throughout last year I ran a survey on age gap romantic/sexual experiences. I closed it in January and finally found time and motivation to post the results to my blog.

The questions were formulated in the following manner:

1. At the age of 15 or below, I had a sexual/romantic experience with a peer. I perceived it as willing/consensual at that moment. This experience…
   1) left a negative impact on me.
   2) did not leave a negative impact on me.
2. At the age of 15 or below, I had a sexual/romantic experience with a peer. I perceived it as forced, coerced, or pressured at that moment. This experience…
   1) left a negative impact on me.
   2) did not leave a negative impact on me.
3. At the age of 15 or below, I had a sexual/romantic experience with a person 5 or more years older. I perceived it as willing/consensual at that moment. This experience…
   1) left a negative impact on me.
   2) did not leave a negative impact on me.
4. At the age of 15 or below, I had a sexual/romantic experience with a person 5 or more years older. I perceived it as forced, coerced, or pressured at that moment. This experience…
   1) left a negative impact on me.
   2) did not leave a negative impact on me.

In addition, I asked people to only report experiences that ended at least 3 years ago. The survey was spread in youthlib adjacent communities with the help of 3 pro youthlib bloggers (two on Tumblr, one on Twitter) and received a total number of 273 experiences logged.

These are the results:

The most important thing to note here is that, while forced experiences of any kind are rated approximately similar, the evaluation of willing experiences differs depending on the age of the partner. Willing experiences with older partners are aligned closer to forced experiences than to willing peer experiences.

This survey did not include an option to report the specific type of negative impact, because I wanted to make it as brief as possible to test whether the format of the question itself is working, so there is potentially still more information to seek for. One of the things I want to find out more about is the correlation between family and youth intimate abuse, including abuse by non-family members.

Youthlib communities were chosen by me for more age related analysis (and self analysis) of their members. It would be interesting to see how this would look like on a larger sample of average people, and I’m currently looking for someone with access to a bigger audience to offer this poll to.