Over a period of four years, from 1951 to 1954, Judson T. Landis ... carried out a ... larger investigation among some 1800 students of the University of California. 30 % of the males and 35 % of the females had been sexually approached while they were children. After a careful analysis of 500 such cases, Landis declared (p. 108), "In general, the great majority of the victims seem to recover rather soon and to aquire few permanently wrong attitudes from the experience."
In Landis (1956) retrospective study of college students, there was the possibility of comparison with a control group of nonvictimized students, but he did not use it to much advantage. His estimate of the long-term effects os sexual victimization were based largely on uncontrolled victim self-evaluations. Of the men, "19% thought temporary damage had resulted and 81% said no damage has resulted. Of the women, 3% felt permanent damage has resulted, 30% temporary and 66% no damage." Little effort was made to compare victim or novictim groups on any outcome measure. In one departure from this pattern, Landis found that more of the victimized than nonvictimized women had had orgasms, and from this he concluded that "the present data suggest that in most cases sex deviate experiences do not do permanent damage to sex responses." However, this finding is irremediably confounded by the fact that many more of the nonvictims were still virgins, and the orgasms the victims were refferring to may well have occured in the sexual abuse they had experienced. Moreover, since sexual prommiscuity has been hypothesized as one possible response to early childhood victimization, it would hardly seem that the experience or capacity for orgasm can be treated as a complete measure of whether sexual abuse has long-term effects on sexuality. (In this regard, one could also fault Terman's 1951 study.)