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This book concerns the creation of orthodoxies, of social facts so obvious that it seems incredible that they could ever have been ignored or doubted and yet which, in historical perspective, appear temporary and contingent. [*1] 

Prominent among what are accepted as self-evident facts in contemporary America is the belief that children face a grave danger in the form of sexual abuse and molestation. This menace has certain well-known, stereotypical characteristics. Sexual abuse is pervasive, a problem of vast scope; molesters or abusers are compulsive individuals who commit their crimes frequently and whose pathologies resist rehabilitation or cure. Sexually deviant behavior often escalates to violence or murder. Sexual relations with adults invariably cause lasting damage to the children involved; a battery of psychological explanations exists to account for any failure by the victim to perceive harm from the abuse or to recognize its severity.

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Finally, sexual molestation results in what is called the cycle of abuse: molestation so disturbs the victim that he or she usually repeats the same act later against children of the next generation. 

Any or all of these ideas may be objectively correct, but what is striking is how very recently they have been established and popularized; these were not social facts twenty-five years ago. 

In the sizable literature from the 1950s through the 1970s, one can easily find writers then regarded as leading experts making statements that are diametrically opposed to current beliefs and that would be roundly condemned if they were published today. A book from the 1960s, for example, would state what was then orthodoxy: molestation was a very infrequent offense unlikely to cause significant harm to the vast majority of subjects (the word victims seemed too harsh), and molesters were confused inadequates unlikely to repeat their offenses. Children were often regarded as seducers who provoked such offenses for their own psychological reasons. According to this perception, child molestation was as innocuous as it is injurious in the modern image. In turn, the benevolent view of these years was in sharp contrast to the more sinister notions of the 1940s and early 1950s, when many believed that children were under a vast social threat from predators who killed their victims or scarred them for life.

Images of the sex offender have changed dramatically and cyclically over time. Originating in the Progressive Era, the imagery of the malignant sex fiend reached new heights in the decade after World War II, only to be succeeded by a liberal model over the next quarter century. More recently, the pendulum has swung back to the predator model; sex offenders are now viewed as being little removed from the worst multiple killers and torturers. And in each era, the prevailing opinion was supported by what appeared at the time to be convincing objective research. One reality prevailed until it was succeeded by another.

The current formulation of the child abuse problem is sometimes presented as an evolutionary stage in social development: the contemporary package of beliefs is true, whereas its predecessors were not. Because one can argue that recent realizations have been made possible by both the steady accumulation of new knowledge and the rending of taboos that had restricted research in the past, the campaign to establish the new orthodoxy becomes a heroic struggle for truth against prejudice and obscurantism. [*2] 

In this view, refusal to acknowledge the scale and danger of sexual threats is dismissed as denial, a term borrowed from psychology to suggest 

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that one's opponents refuse to accept a reality that seems obvious to the speaker.

But the cyclical nature of public interest shows that we need a more subtle and complex explanation. Theories about sexual abuse have not evolved in a simple or linear way; rather, they have ebbed and flowed -- we forget as well as learn. Public willingness to accept claims has also fluctuated over time, and together these changes have affected how not only the mass media but also legislators, judges, medical experts, and criminal-justice professionals have approached the sexual abuse of children.

Constructing Problems 

The child abuse problem is one of many that have varied enormously in the amount of attention they have received in different eras. Sometimes the degree of public concern may change for quite logical and comprehensible reasons. Sexually transmitted diseases, for example, which were a recurrent nightmare before 1910, were considered far less dangerous once medical science had them substantially under control by the middle of the twentieth century, but fears revived with the discovery of new incurable illnesses in the 1980s. 

In other instances, the perceived significance of a given problem grows or diminishes without any change in the real threat-potential of the condition itself. In the past decade, stalking, elder abuse, and sexual harassment have all become major social issues without any evidence that the behaviors themselves have increased, whereas other, once frightening issues like homosexuality, racially mixed marriages, and the eugenic decline of the race have all but disappeared as sources of alarm. And although there are far more people on the planet now than there were twenty or thirty years ago, overpopulation is no longer seen as the devastating "population bomb" that it was in those years. 

Another category of problem rises or falls according to an intermittent cycle that shapes public fears over, say, drugs, juvenile delinquency, or immoral music. Although a phenomenon may remain more or less unchanged over time, it can be seen as a problem or a social fact in one era but not another. [*3]

We can see that the stereotypical sex offender who provided a nightmare image in the 1940s had become a semi-humorous figure two or three decades later, but why did this change occur? How did the obvious facts of one generation become the arrant nonsense of the next, and vice versa? 

Many explanations are possible. The sexual revolution that began in the late 1950s increased tolerance for many once-stigmatized behaviors, while

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there was also a natural reaction, and perhaps overreaction, against earlier hysteria and hyperbole. But whichever theory proves most convincing, the change of attitudes can be explained without supposing that anyone period has a monopoly on truth or falsehood. That an issue is approached through social and behavioral science does not exempt its interpretations from the influence of broader cultural and political trends.

Scholarly approaches to social problems usually fall under one of two broad headings. 

The first and more familiar view is objectivist, which accepts that something is a problem when it harms or disturbs a significant section of society. A social scientist aims to quantify that problem, to explore its roots, and to suggest possible ways of removing or solving it. 

The second view, constructionism, may or may not accept that the phenomenon exists or, if it does, that it is indeed harmful, but the central question is how the condition comes to be viewed as a problem in the first place. For constructionists, 

"our sense of what is or what is not a social problem is a product, something that has been produced or constructed through social activities." [*4] 

It is impossible to define a problem in an objective or value-free way, since talking about a "problem" or "crisis" ipso facto implies that there is a solution, that change of some kind is necessary or desirable. If we ask how society can deal with the menace of sexual predators, we have already phrased the question in such a way as to preclude many possible approaches to the complex issues surrounding sexual offenses. To speak of a response to "sex offenders" without further definition implies what is far from clear: that anyone who violates one of the myriad statutes prohibiting sexual misconduct must be suffering from some kind of personality disorder.

In this book I contend that all concepts of sex offenders and sex offenses are socially constructed realities: all are equally subject to social, political, and ideological influences, and no particular framing of offenders represents a pristine objective reality. Each in its way is instructive for the light it casts on the concerns, prejudices, and fears of the society that thus defines its deviants and outsiders. 

The changing frames of the sex offender provide an index of shifting social attitudes to matters as diverse as the status of children, the structure of the family, the range of acceptable sexual behaviors, and tolerance of alternative sexual orientations. By definition, deviance supposes a norm: we can speak of what is odd or different only when we agree on what is normal. In order to understand changing notions of sexual deviancy, then, we must first understand fluctuating concepts of

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sexual normality. Abuse is meaningless without a standard of proper use . Constructionism means more than simple debunking. Although a constructionist might challenge the factual claims used to support a particular cause, he or she does not argue that the problem itself has no basis in reality. Child molestation does occur and can cause severe physical and psychic damage; there are in fact human predators who rape, mutilate, and kill children. Similarly, a problem like drug abuse or drunk driving does have an objective basis. 

The questions are why issues are perceived as social problems in particular times and places but not in others and what methods are used by groups and individuals to make and establish their claims. In the case of child sexual abuse, the most important activist groups include therapists and psychiatrists, criminal-justice administrators, women's groups, sexual reformers and libertarians, and moral traditionalists and conservatives. A constructionist study examines the means by which their respective views were projected, whether through the news media and popular fiction or academic and professional sources. Also critical is the question of audience, of why people are prepared to accept one rather than another of the given models offered to them at different times.

The idea of applying a constructionist approach to successive sex crime crises is far from new. One of the most cited studies in social-problem literature, Edwin Sutherland's skeptical analysis of an earlier sex crime panic, was published in 1950, and Nicholas N. Kittrie's monumental The Right to Be Different, which critiqued the sex psychopath legislation passed in mid-century, appeared in 1971. Sex crime waves of the 1930s and 1940s have been discussed by cultural historians like George Chauncey, John D'Emilio, and Estelle Freedman; who all see the furor over the sex fiend as a veiled defense of particular concepts of masculine identity; each pays due attention to the changing roles of professional groups like psychiatrists and to the bureaucratic interests of law-enforcement agencies. 

David Finkelhor, one of the best-known advocates of the seriousness of the contemporary abuse problem, plausibly attributes the extreme claims of the 1940s to 

"moralists ... campaigning against other kinds of progressive reforms, ... e.g., sex education, humane treatment of sex offenders, end to censorship." [*5]

Given this skeptical tradition, it is remarkable that when concern about child sexual abuse surged during the 1980s, so few scholars applied the same analytical approach to contemporary perceptions. We have masterly constructionist studies of the abuse issue and especially of the more bizarre

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fringes of that topic, but few have drawn historical analogies with the much maligned attitudes of the 1940s or the earlier crisis of the Progressive Era. [*6] The consensus is that although earlier panics arose from ignorance, hysteria, and self-interest, contemporary formulations of child abuse are sober depictions of objective truth.

Meanwhile, the generation of scholars that grew up believing that sex psychopath laws were a catastrophic failure has scarcely responded to the effective revival of these measures across the United States during the 1990s. In neither our conceptualizing of the problem nor our devising of countermeasures is there much evidence of our having learned from history. 

Examining past crises over sex crimes shows us not only how claims tend to be exaggerated and distorted but also that policy responses exhibit the classic signs of panic legislation, namely, poor conception and drafting, overly broad scope, and inadequate consideration of likely side effects. Ideally, studying past failures would help us to avoid making the same mistakes in the new generation of sex law.

In this book I refer to panics over sex crime, a term derived from the moral panic theory formulated in the 1970s by British sociologists like Stanley Cohen and Stuart Hall. They argued that a wave of irrational public fear can be said to exist 

"when the official reaction to a person, groups of persons or series of events is out of all proportion to the actual threat offered, when 'experts' perceive the threat in all but identical terms, and appear to talk 'with one voice' of rates, diagnoses, prognoses and solutions, when the media representations universally stress 'sudden and dramatic' increases (in numbers involved or events) and 'novelty,' above and beyond that which a sober, realistic appraisal could sustain." [*7] 

But what, in the context of child abuse, might be considered "a sober, realistic appraisal" of "the actual threat offered"? In the opening years of the twentieth century, social and medical investigators argued convincingly that American children were being molested and raped in numbers far higher than had been imagined in any earlier era, and this basic insight remains unchallenged. For all the caveats that can be raised about their methods and definitions, victimization surveys of the past two decades have consistently shown that millions of children are subjected to different forms of sexual maltreatment. The phenomenon demands public concern and an appropriate policy response. Why should we not panic? 

The word panic, however, implies not only fear but fear that is wildly 

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exaggerated and wrongly directed, and this is what can be observed quite spectacularly in eras like the late 1940s and the mid-1980s. 

At these times, concern over sexual abuse provides a basis for extravagant claims-making by professionals, the media, and assorted interest groups, who argue that the problem is quantitatively and qualitatively far more severe than anyone could reasonably suppose.

Statements that in calmer years would mark the speaker as hyperbolic or paranoid suddenly acquire the status of incontestable fact, while skeptics are pitied for their callous denial. It comes to be believed 

Ideas develop an organic life of their own, as one set of outlandish charges becomes the foundation for still more bizarre claims, and activists compete for the attention of a jaded mass media demanding ever-higher levels of shock value. [*8] 

In response, lawmakers implement policies that may cause harm in areas having nothing to do with the origil1al problem and that divert resources away from measures which might genuinely assist in protecting children. According to these criteria, the area of child molestation and sexual abuse has repeatedly produced panic responses during the past century or so.

Characteristic of such eras is the use of extreme language to portray the problem, to escalate the harmful and predatory quality of the behavior. The English language lacks an accepted value-neutral vocabulary for adults who engage in sexual acts with minors, and the commonly available terms make little distinction depending on whether the young person in question is a small child and or an older teenager. T

his is important, because public opinion draws a sharp distinction in the blame that can be attributed when the younger party is fifteen rather than five, and very different personality types are involved in each instance. 

What exactly should we call a man sexually interested in younger teenagers? The favored medical word, ephebophilia, is obscure, and the archaic pederast has virtually dropped out of common usage. Moreover, pederast usually applies only to man-boy interactions; no equivalent term exists for similar behavior between opposite sexes, because not until the twentieth century was this latter behavior

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regarded as pathological or illegal. Nor can we properly use a term like boylove, inter-generational intimacy, or even relationship, which suggests elements of consent and mutuality unacceptable to the vast majority of observers. Although a pedophile is properly defined as someone sexually interested "in a prepubescent child (generally age thirteen years or younger)," the word is popularly extended to a man who carries out a sexual act with an adolescent, making him a "molester," a "baby-raper." [*9]

No signifier used to describe sexual acts between adults and children represents a neutral consensus view, and most are either metaphors or reflect a discredited science. An adult man who has sex with a twelve-year-old girl or a fourteen-year-old boy is not literally a fiend or a predator; which are figurative terms designed to express horror at actions considered despicable or dangerous. 

In panic eras, the terminology of "objective" science is used, with the act being attributed to a pervert, a degenerate, a defective, or a sex psychopath, but in each case the word represents a scientific or medical worldview that is now obsolete. When technical terms enter general discourse and the mass media, their meanings become vastly aggravated through frequent retellings and come to imply compulsive violence and monstrous perversion directed against the youngest and most vulnerable. There is a constant cycle whereby experts introduce new and more objective words to describe sexual criminals, only to find that later the terms acquire the worst connotations; this is the fate that has befallen, in succession, sex offender, moIester, and pedophile.

Problem construction is shaped by the activities of competing interest groups. Different groups perceive social problems differently, depending on how far a behavior or phenomenon contradicts their ideal of how the world should be and what values should predominate. When a group succeeds in convincing a broad section of society about the gravity of that problem, it is also disseminating a portion of its distinctive worldview. 

This is achieved either by raising awareness of a newly discovered issue or, more commonly, by imposing the group's particular interpretation of an already recognized problem. When multiple groups wish to co-opt the same issue for their various purposes, construction is negotiated through rhetorical and political conflict, as factions enter into transient coalitions in order to promote their goals. 

The process of constructing a social problem begins with an event or condition that represents a serious challenge to accepted values. Different 

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activists try to link that issue with other conditions that they believe to be harmful or threatening, so that the original incident is used to support a moral or political lesson and the narrative is embroidered with appropriate cultural cross-references. 

In the case of child molestation, genuine public horror is aroused by sexual attacks against children, but the problems constructed around these incidents address issues not immediately connected with sexual violence. Because child murder and forcible rape are already treated with the utmost gravity, claims-makers must turn their attention to behaviors that, while not obviously harmful in themselves, are cited as precursors of violence. Activists present minor sexual offenses as stepping-stones culminating in unacceptable violence and therefore deserving of our condemnation. Outrage at random violence is transformed into a largely symbolic crusade against the nonviolent and thus squanders resources on the mildly deviant.

This process is illustrated by the case of Westley Alan Dodd, who was hanged in 1993 for the sex murders of three young boys in Washington State. While societies vary in how seriously they treat particular acts of violence, it is difficult to imagine any community that would fail to view crimes of this sort as the gravest form of moral evil or social pathology. 

But not all communities agree in how prominent a role someone like Dodd should play in shaping social policy and criminal law: some societies view an act like his as an isolated expression of individual evil, whereas others place it in a broader context of moral, political, or societal failure which must be urgently remedied. 

In recent years, American policymakers and media have seen such crimes as developing inexorably from lesser sexual offenses, and association with so menacing a figure gives rhetorical urgency to the demand that these activities be curbed. 

This approach is not new, as an "escalation theory" of sexual offenses has been the prevailing orthodoxy for most of the twentieth century. While the 1990s uses Westley Dodd, the 1930s and 1940s were haunted by the image of Albert Fish, who was executed in 1936 following a career of child homicide and extreme sexual perversion. The crimes of both men are taken to represent the predictable, if extreme, consequence of the conduct of the "ordinary" child molester. 

From this perspective, there is no such thing as a minor sexual offense, in that acts like exhibitionism, voyeurism, and sexual interference with children are potentially all symptoms of damaging pathological violence; homosexuals have repeatedly been stigmatized in this way. It is not obvious, however, that sex crimes are linked in a logical

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chain, and we do not have to go far back into history to find a time when the molester or child abuser was viewed very differently.

Child Murder 

Because child-protection movements are commonly detonated by sex murders, it should be emphasized how extremely rare these incidents are. Using statistics to put such a phenomenon in context can invite charges that one is trivializing an utterly horrible event, that even a single case is far too many. Also, focusing on murder ignores grave crimes that injure but do not kill, like the act of rape and sexual mutilation, which provoked an upsurge of legislative activity against sex offenders in Washington State in the late 1980s. But a quantitative measure is useful in assessing the popular stereotype of the child molester as a man who repeatedly rapes and assaults children until finally he kills, perhaps claiming many victims. Although we can never know how many children are molested in a particular year, we can know with some certainty how many are murdered and in what circumstances, and the results are surprising. 

Children are at very low risk from homicide, making nonsense of the claims, aired frequently in the 1980s, that many thousands were killed each year by serial murderers, pornographers, or pedophile rings. The proportion of children killed by strangers is small, as is the number killed in circumstances of sexual assault. 

Consider children below the age of twelve, the age-group of interest to pedophiles: between 1980 and 1994 in the United States, 13,600 such individuals were murdered-about 900 per year. Of these, more than 400 each year were infants under the age of one and were usually killed by their parents; indeed, 54 percent of all the child victims were killed by parents or other family members. 

In contrast, strangers accounted for the murders of just 6 percent of the annual total, or about 54 children per year, though some stranger homicides were also found in the "unknown relationship" category, 130 victims a year. But even the strangers were not necessarily sex killers. In only 3 percent of the crimes, or 27 cases each year, did "a sex offense either [occur] simultaneously with or preceded the murder of a child." One-fifth of these cases, about 5 victims per year, involved the murder of a child by a stranger in a sexual assault, the sort of crime carried out by a Westley Dodd; about 9 more deaths each year were attributed to neighbors or acquaintances. 

xamining cases of young people under the age of eighteen, a recent survey has estimated that about one hundred abduction murders annually can be

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attributed to strangers. These figures for sex killings can usefully be set alongside the hundreds of child murders caused each year by physical maltreatment, neglect, and torture, usually at the hands of parents or other family members or intimates. Framing the child abuse problem exclusively in sexual terms diverts attention and resources from this other lethal problem. [*10]

Although recent debate about sex offenders has focused on child killers like Westley Alan Dodd and sex murders committed by strangers, like the men who killed Megan Kanka and Polly Klaas, these atrocious crimes represent a tiny proportion of homicide activity and of sexual offenses in general, and we should not use these cases as typical examples in shaping social policy toward sexual deviance.

The Cycle of Legislation 

In the aftermath of these notorious crimes in the 1990s, nearly all states have undertaken a fundamental revision of their statutes concerning sex offenders, providing for harsher sentencing and long-term incapacitation for those seen as irredeemably dangerous. Other measures involve forms of community notification, mandating that released sex offenders be subject to close surveillance by police and be required to notify neighbors and community groups who might be affected by their presence.

Here, too, the historical record can offer a useful perspective, as these recent laws strongly recall the sex psychopath statutes that were passed with so much enthusiasm between about 1937 and 1957. In that era also, an offender could be designated as a sex psychopath, a judgment that could earn him (or, very rarely, her) an indefinite period of institutional confinement. A nuisance sex crime, even a misdemeanor, could in theory result in an accused person being incarcerated for many years, far longer than what would have been required for even a grave act of personal violence. 

These sex psychopath statutes echoed an even earlier wave of legislation passed to regulate those who were then called defective delinquents, a category that caused public panic between about 1908 and 1922. The modern rebirth of the sex psychopath laws powerfully illustrates the cyclical nature of concern about sex crime and the same popular tendency to seek legislative panaceas that also shape reactions to juvenile delinquency and substance abuse. [*11]

In the sex offender laws of the 1910s, 1940s, and 1990s, each wave of legislation contained elements likely to invoke constitutional challenge.

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The conditions that earned commitment under the respective statutes were very loosely defined, with the label sex offender often applied to those whose acts were not in themselves violent or predatory. Vague definitions gave authorities wide latitude in penalizing individuals guilty not of serious crime but of moral or sexual unorthodoxy, so that the impact was most sharply felt by minor offenders with little potential for violence. 

Procedural issues were also murky: deviants were subjected to a mixture of civil and criminal devices so that de facto criminal penalties were imposed without due process, and often retroactively. Finally, once enacted, these laws were so rarely invoked as to suggest that they did not fulfill a genuine social need.

What is remarkable about legislation beset with such difficulties is not that it ultimately fails but that it survives for any period in the first place; and the collapse of the sex psychopath laws in the 1960s might well presage the likely fate of legislation passed in the 1990s. Once the initial furor passed, numerous cases demonstrated the absurd or unjust effects of the laws. 

Mounting opposition from legal, judicial, and libertarian sources resulted in the acts being overturned or becoming inoperative. The panic atmosphere surrounding the passage of the laws itself produced a reaction, and rhetoric that once sounded plausible came to seem overblown and even ludicrous. While historical comparison is risky, the downfall of the earlier laws suggests that contemporary sex predator statutes are likely to meet a comparable fate and to achieve a similarly malodorous historical reputation. 

Fathers and Predators 

When it comes to the safety of children, societies vary not only in the degree of danger they perceive but also in the nature of the threat, and the modern emphasis on predators means that other forms of danger receive less notice or are neglected altogether. The idea of child protection as such is politically neutral, for the belief that children need defending says nothing about from whom or what. 

In the Middle Ages, many Europeans believed firmly that children were in constant peril of being abducted by Jews, who supposedly offered up children as victims in their ritual sacrifices, and also by witches and gypsies. In keeping with the religious ideology of the age, the absolute certainty of these perils was confirmed by the divine signs and miracles associated with missing and murdered children, who were venerated as saints. [*12]

Today, while few would deny that millions of American children are 

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vulnerable to sexual exploitation, there is much room for disagreement about the roots of the problem and the nature of the solutions. One central question is, does most of the danger come from within the family or from outside? 

Throughout the past century, identifying the offenders responsible for sex crime has been a perennial debate. In 1950, few doubted that the problem was one of outsiders, of sex fiends or sex psychopaths, near-demonic figures satisfying their baneful sexual urges at the expense of women and children unknown to them. This idea was found in the Progressive Era and again in the 1970s and 1980s, but in both these periods, predator imagery existed alongside rival interpretations that emphasized the distinct problem of incest or abuse by family members and acquaintances.[*13]

The rival approaches differ vastly in their appeal and in the policy solutions implied: if the incest view lent support to far-reaching critiques of current social organization and gender roles, the stranger-molester concept was compatible with a conservative rhetoric of law and order, public decency, and moral reintegration. 

In the tumultuous controversy and claims-making of recent years, between about 1992 and 1995, American public opinion has shifted quite dramatically from the radical implications of a focus on incest back to an emphasis on "stranger danger," on the crimes of serial predators like Westley Dodd. The ascendancy of the predator theme involves major ideological compromise or concession by some child-protection advocates and a clear victory for moral conservatives. As so often in the past, the ever-flexible concept of the molester, the abuser, or the predator provides an invaluable gauge for the state of current social ideologies.

Saving the Children 

Few people live their lives without engaging in some conduct that has been defined as either criminal or deviant in some context and (with surprising frequency) is so regarded in current American jurisdictions. At different times and places, the following acts have all been characterized as sexually deviant and often criminal: 

The term sodomy has proved infinitely flexible in comprehending such acts. As

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recently as 1986, the U .S. Supreme Court upheld the principle of sodomy statutes; some twenty states still have enforceable laws, and half of them classify the behaviors as felonies. Adultery remains an offense in half of the states and a felony in Michigan, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and elsewhere. [*14] 

Nor has the blame for a deviant sexual act consistently been placed entirely on one or other party. For much of the twentieth century, in cases involving incest or molestation the child victim has been regarded as a sex delinquent quite as assuredly as the adult perpetrator was defined as a sex offender.

Sexually appropriate behavior is a socially constructed phenomenon, the definition and limits of which vary greatly among different societies, and this is especially true where children and young people are concerned. 

Perhaps a billion people alive today have been subjected as children to some form of genital mutilation or circumcision, which is demanded or approved by religious consensus, is virtually never regulated by secular law, and is never mentioned in literatures on sex crime or ritualistic abuse. Nor is there a natural age of sexual consent. Although a biological imperative dictates restrictions on the behavior of prepubescent children, no universal rule determines that sexual readiness properly begins at twelve or sixteen or twenty-one; before the 1880s, the age of consent for girls in most American jurisdictions stood at the alarmingly low figure of ten years. [*15]

Anthropological literature shows huge disparities in attitudes toward sexual contacts between adults and children or adolescents, both in contemporary preliterate cultures and in the Christian societies of pre-industrial Europe. European parents in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries treated infants and toddlers with a playful sexual frankness that today would be not just wildly inappropriate but criminal. At the start of the seventeenth century, the child who later became King Louis XIII of France lived in a family environment in which adults frequently touched and played with his genitals. [*16] 

After the age of seven, Louis was expected to conduct himself with greater sexual reticence, but he married, and consummated the marriage, at fourteen. Child-rearing practices in this case were unusual only in the detail with which they were recorded, and similar behaviors still prevail in many parts of the globe.

It is not self-evident that asexual act between individuals of widely differing ages constitutes immoral or criminal behavior, that it causes grave harm to either participant, or that it involves a compulsive psychological condition. 

The selective nature of sex laws is suggested by the ancient double 

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standard whereby relationships between an adult woman and an underage boy have always been regarded as far less reprehensible than those in which the gender roles were reversed. The young male faces no danger of becoming pregnant, nor does he risk the loss of honor or marriage-ability. For boys, such relationships are depicted as coming-of-age rituals rather than abuse, and these liaisons are fondly depicted in Western popular culture. Even with our heightened contemporary sensibility about exploitation, prosecutions of women who have had these encounters are still risky ventures for authorities. [*17]

The fact that the notion of what constitutes sexual deviancy fluctuates over time is what makes the issue so useful as a means for understanding social attitudes. 

Chapter 2, "Constructing Sex Crime, 1890-1934," describes the history of American attitudes to sex offenders through the early twentieth century. The modern category of sex crime is little more than one hundred years old, and the idea that sexual misdeeds were symptoms of underlying sexual perversion owes much to the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing in the 1880s: terms like homosexual, pervert, and pedophile entered the English language shortly afterward. The oldest American accounts of child molestation as a widespread social problem date from 1894, when we find the then-astonishing claim that "rape of children is the most frequent form of sexual crime. [*18] 

In these same years, the national movement to raise the age of consent persuaded most state legislatures to enact America's first wave of statutes specifically aimed at defending children from sexual exploitation. Although it was scarcely noticed in America at the time, in 1896 Sigmund Freud formulated the epoch-making theory that many girls from respectable families had genuinely been traumatized by sexual abuse and incest. Concern about a pervasive sexual danger to children survived into the early 1920s, when it largely dissipated.

Chapter 2 also examines the earliest attempts to design special legislation against newly identified sex criminals. By 1910, social investigators were confirming the worst speculations about the prevalence of child sexual molestation, and panic about sex killers and perverts became acute about 1915. As in the 1970s, a proactive social work campaign against physical abuse uncovered numerous cases of sexual maltreatment, and as in the 1990s, a period of concern about children exploited within their families was followed by a new alarm about stranger predators. The response was the defective delinquent statutes, which provided the matrix for later measures against sex psychopaths and predators.

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Although fears of sex crime reached a low ebb in the early 1930s, they swiftly revived around 1935. 

Chapter 3 describes the panic that ensued over the issue during the next two decades, when the phrase sex offender ceased to be a generic term for everyone who violated a sex law and came to signify sexually violent aggressors. Ideas of a public menace were initially nursed by the FBI and the newspapers and then popularized in books and magazine articles, in films and popular fiction. 

The intensity of public fears is all the more striking when set beside the number of other potent issues causing alarm in these years, including constant war scares, nuclear threats, and rumored domestic subversion. Claims struck a powerful chord among large sections of the population: the sexual menace focused ill-defined fears resulting from social upheavals at this time, which were causing a radical redefinition of gender roles and family obligations.

In reaction, sweeping sexual psychopath laws were passed by more than half the states, and these measures are studied in Chapter 4, "The Sex Psychopath Statutes." That the statutes were never applied to a large number of offenders suggests that their main function was symbolic rather than practical, but the laws did inspire acrimonious debate within the therapeutic community. 

Although some psychiatrists expressed wholehearted support for the underlying principles of the laws and the associated notion of the psychopath, others were more hostile, and complained about the misuse of psychiatric terminology. 

In reaction to the sex crime panic, scholars and academics of the late 1950s and 1960s underplayed the scale and seriousness of the sex offender issue and urged a movement away from punitive public reactions. Molestation was seen as a non-threatening symptom of sexual inadequacy, meriting therapy rather than punishment under an outdated legal system that harked back to more puritanical times. A sexual episode would cause little harm to a child, provided the police or courts did not "make an issue" of it. 

After the mid-l960s, liberal jurists reinforced this attitude by limiting the powers of forcible civil commitment and discretionary sentencing that had earlier been fundamental to official policies toward sexual deviants. 

Chapter 5, "The Liberal Era, 1958-1976," examines this libertarian attitude to forms of sexual expression once regarded as gravely deviant.

After the mid-1970s, public opinion moved in the opposite direction, with renewed perceptions of alleged threats to women and especially children. A new and unassailable social orthodoxy held that abuse was widespread and resulted in lasting damage. 

Between about 1976 and 1986, the 

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casual attitude prevailing in the early 1970s changed so radically and swiftly, as to constitute the "revolution" described in Chapter 6. 

Public opinion went far toward accepting what had recently been a distinctively feminist view: the most serious danger came not from strangers but from fathers and other family members. Responding to the new mood, legislators rushed to pass new measures protecting children from abuse and incest and reforming courtroom procedures. Although new techniques of interviewing children and presenting evidence were initially welcomed, they would soon have questionable consequences in the form of allegations that abuse was occurring in bizarre or ritualistic settings.

The child-protection issue appealed to moral conservatives as well as feminists, and some important claims-makers used the abuse threat to advance traditionalist viewpoints about moral decadence As in the 1940s, homosexuals found themselves among the main targets of the new campaign against pedophiles and sex offenders, for it was suggested that homosexuality was closely aligned with predatory behaviors directed against children. 

Stigmatization of this sort was a common phenomenon in the framing of sexual offenses, as claims-makers drew attention to one issue because it symbolized another that could not be attacked directly. There have long been moralist groups who wished to denounce and stigmatize homosexuality, the sale of pornography, or the activities of fringe religious cults. They achieved little support for these views in the prevailing moral climate of the 1970s or 1980s, which emphasized adults' freedom to determine their private conduct. 

Shifting the focus to children's involvement fundamentally changed the moral and legal environment and made it impossible to claim that these actions were either victimless or consensual. In these years we find morality campaigns directed not against homosexuality but against pedophilia, less against pornography in general than against child pornography, not against cults and satanism but against ritual child abuse. In each case, claims-makers raised the stakes by arguing that real physical harm resulted from these offenses and that the perpetrators were conspiratorial gangs, sex rings, or devil-worshiping covens.

The success of these rhetorical strategies is illustrated by the moral debates of the 1980s, described in Chapter 7, "Child Pornography and Pedophile Rings." Notions about organized pedophilia enjoyed an ideological significance far beyond the real scale of any documented sex rings, relocating concern about molestation outside the nuclear family and diverting attention from incest to external predation. In contrast to earlier

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concepts of the molester as a species of defective, the newly reconceived pedophile possessed a dangerous criminal intellect, with access to the latest forms of technology, communication, and even behavior-modification techniques.

One popular version of the conspiracy idea appealed to religious and political conservatives because it blamed the abuse crisis literally on agents of the devil, that is, on satanic and ritualistic rings. 

Chapter 8, "The Road to Hell," examines the menace of pedophile rings said to be operating in America's preschools, a concept that became a reasonable facsimile of the medieval ritual murder threat. 

As before, allegations sprang from a coalition of interest groups, including therapists, feminists, religious and anti-cult groups, and theorists of political conspiracy. This abuse scare ultimately led to a setback for the child-protection movement, as growing incredulity about the charges and the techniques by which they had been produced resulted in unprecedented criticism of child advocates. Linked to this was the assault on the incest-survivor movement, particularly the idea that repressed memories of abuse could be recovered through therapy. 

In the new climate of the early 1990s, both adults' recovered memories of childhood and children's testimony concerning preschool diabolism were viewed with skepticism, and the entire survivor movement came to be seen as a pressing social problem in its own right.

While concern about sexual threats remained undiminished, doubts about abuse by parents and intimates led to a renewed emphasis on external predators. 

As Chapter 9 describes, in the 1990s molesters and pedophiles were again portrayed as alien and deviant, as monsters and predators. Fears found a novel focus in the Internet, which was viewed as means whereby pedophiles could stalk and seduce children on line, and the personal computer became a Trojan horse within the home. If molesters were so sophisticated in their methods and so compulsive in their behavior, they could be dealt with only by an emergency  response, perhaps the lengthy preventive detention provided for by predator statutes.

Chapter 10 traces elements common to these successive panics and describes the complex interpay of the interest groups who defined and publicized the  sex offender issue. Child protection is such a politically appealing theme that it is surprising to find eras when it is not at the forefront of public debate, and periods of panic can be accounted for more easily than can times of complacency like the 1920s or 1960s. 

The difference between eras is explained in terms of changes in the audience to whom activists are 

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seeking to appeal. Fluctuations in public attitudes reflect demographic changes, which determine the assessment of social threats, and changing demographic patterns also decide how much latitude can properly be allowed to the young in their personal conduct. 

As we shall see, panics about sex offenders are closely related to other fears, from anxieties about youth crime to worries about drug abuse, a link that partly explains why concerns about sex crimes have so frequently acquired similar ideological directions, emphasizing external monster figures, psychopaths, and predators.