Childhood sexual development is very complex. It is also a subject that makes many adults uncomfortable. Taken together, these two facts tend to make the question of what children want, and what they enjoy, very difficult to assess. Adults make the laws that say when children reach the age of sexual majority, or when they have the legal right to consent to sex or to have access to sexual information. Children have little say in defining what sexuality might mean to them, and they are on the whole given little positive information to inform them on this subject. But children do have phases of sexual development from the time they are born, and children's exploration of their own bodies and of their physical environment is part of normal childhood development. All too often adults lack the skills to understand and support age-appropriate sexual development for children, and instead tend to silence or shame children for exhibiting normal curiosity about activities that adults might label sexual.

While children are sexual beings with complex responses to the world around them, this does not mean that children want to have sex with adults. Many children desire comfort, connection, and touch, and many are also curious about their own and other people's bodies. Children seek out this connection and express physical curiosity without a clear sense of adult boundaries between sexual touch and friendly touch. With other children in their peer group, this natural curiosity can be part of age-appropriate exploration that is guided by a shared set of expectations and limitations. But sexual offenders often deliberately misconstrue children's openness to touch and desire for physical attention as readiness to participate in adult sexuality. Offenders will claim that the child initiated a sexual encounter or enjoyed the experience while it was happening. But children often find an adult's move to explicit sexual activity deeply confusing and harmful, and frequently they do not have a clear way to understand what is happening. While children's bodies do have the biological capacity to respond to sexual touch, it does not mean that the touch was wanted or that the child liked it. If a sexual response does occur during the abuse, many children feel doubly guilty and ashamed. Child sexual abuse is an adult's use of a child to satisfy his or her own needs for power or sex, disregarding the child's needs and sending a message that the child's wishes about his or her own body are unimportant. It is always the adult's responsibility not to misuse a child's own sexual development to meet the adult's needs.

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