The Pedophile Panic

“MONSTROUS” shouted the banner of the Boston Herald on October 4, 1997. For once, the paper’s notoriously hyperbolic headline writers had struck the right tone.¹ Three days earlier, ten-year-old Jeffrey Curley of Cambridge had disappeared in the middle of the afternoon while washing his dog outside his grandmother’s house. Now he was dead.

Jeffrey’s neighbor Salvatore Sicari, twenty-one, and Charles Jaynes, twenty-two, of Brockton, had reportedly lured the child into Jaynes’s Cadillac with the promise of a new bike. Sicari, according to his own confession, drove the car while Jaynes wrestled with Jeffrey in the back seat, trying to force him to have sex. For many minutes, the 80-pound boy fought off the 250-plus-pound man; finally, Jeffrey succumbed to the burning suffocation of the gasoline-soaked rag held over his face.

The men loaded the body into the trunk and made their way to a Manchester, New Hampshire, apartment that Jaynes had rented and decorated with children’s posters. In the early hours of the morning, again according to Sicari, Jaynes laid the corpse on the kitchen floor and raped and sodomized it. After that, the men mixed cement in a fifty-gallon storage container, stuffed Jeffrey’s body into it, sprinkled lime on his face to speed decomposition, and traveled north to a bridge in South Berwick, Maine, where they hefted the plastic coffin into the river.

In separate murder trials a year later, each man blamed the other. Sicari was convicted of kidnapping and first-degree murder, for which he received a sentence of life without parole. Jaynes was found guilty of second-degree murder, because the jury could not positively place him at the crime scene. No sex charges were brought. Jaynes protested his innocence to the end, even shouting out during the prosecutor’s final arguments that he had not hurt Jeffrey. His first parole hearing would come after twenty-three years’ incarceration.

The story was terrifying enough to inject freon into the veins of any parent. But terror begs for reason, and while the Curley family struggled to find spiritual lessons in their child’s demise, other parents watched their own kids pedal down the street on their bikes and looked desperately to the authorities to do, to say...something. Everyone wanted to understand how two men could commit such an atrocity against the affable, gap-toothed little guy in a Little League cap who smiled from the front page every day.

Sicari, according to his neighbors, was a menacing punk. He’d been picked up loitering near a schoolyard with cocaine on him, allegedly to sell, and been convicted of punching and kicking the twenty-year-old mother of his then one-year-old son. One of his favorite means of scaring up cash was to steal little kids’ bicycles. Jaynes, who, unlike his accomplice, was employed, nevertheless had a rap sheet and a trail of seventy-five unanswered warrants, mostly for passing bad checks and coaxing other people’s money out of ATMs.

Yet these ordinary criminal pedigrees held no warning of the cruelty the men would inflict on Jeffrey. They surely failed to supply the meaning the Curley family and an increasingly restive community longed for. It did not seem sufficient to call Jeffrey’s murder what it was: an event utterly without sense, a ghastly aberration of high psychopathology, a crime of such rarity as to be, statistically, almost nonexistent. This inexplicable tragedy needed an explanation.

No one needed to look far. Both the media and its audience were adept at fitting any happening—an election, a new food product, a child’s murder—into some sociological “trend,” and every mother and father in America had heard of this one. Experts were on hand to supply analyses, newspaper databases were searched for crimes and criminals similar, or similar enough, to this one. The monsters needed a name, and they got one, in the first phrase of the Boston Herald’s first article on the apprehension of the suspects: “A pair of sexual predators smothered a 10-year-old Cambridge boy....”

How could such a vile event have occurred? It occurred because of the kind of people Salvatore Sicari and Charles Jaynes were: they were sexual predators, “pedophiles.” From hundreds of other articles and television reports, readers already knew that kind of person and were sure these two were not alone in the world.² Indeed, the men’s photographs, reproduced scores of times atop the hundreds of columns of newsprint the story would command over the next year, suggested a crowd of compatriots, an army of murderers compelled by perverse desire.

The Pedophile: The Myth

Hear the word pedophile and images and ideas flood to mind. Pedophiles are predatory and violent; the criminal codes call their acts sexual attacks and sexual assaults.³ Pedophiles look like Everyman or any man—”a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, a judge, a scout leader, a police officer, an athletic coach, a religious counselor”⁴—but their sexuality makes them different from the rest of us, sick: pedophilia is listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the canon of psychopathology.⁵ Pedophiles are insatiable and incurable. ”Statistics show that 95% of the time, anyone who molests a child will likely do it again,” declared an Indiana senator proposing community notification laws for former sex offenders.⁶ “The only molesters who can be considered permanently cured are those who have been surgically castrated,” Ann Landers once wrote.⁷

Pedophiles abduct and murder children, and people who abduct and murder children are likely to be pedophiles. “The pedophile who kidnapped Adam from a mall and killed him in 1981....” began a feature on molesters by Boston Herald reporter J. M. Lawrence, following Jeffrey’s killing. He was referring to the still unsolved abduction-murder of six-year-old Adam Walsh, whose case helped spur the creation of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and (some say) the career of his father, John, now the host of The FBI’s Most Wanted. Even if a child survives a liaison with a pedophile, we believe, he will inevitably suffer great harm. “The predatory pedophile is as dangerous as cancer. He works as quietly, and his presence becomes known only by the horrendous damage he leaves,” stated the children’s lawyer and sex-thriller writer Andrew Vachss.

And pedophiles are legion, well-organized, and cunning in eluding detection. ”I believe that we’re dealing with a conspiracy, an organized operation of child predators designed to prevent detection,” Kee MacFarlane, director of the Children’s Institute International in Los Angeles and a premier architect of the satanic-ritual-abuse scare of the 1980s, told Congress in 1984.⁸ “If such an operation involves child pornography or the selling of children, as is frequently alleged, it may have greater financial, legal, and community resources at its disposal than those attempting to expose it.”⁹ Ten years later, after a far-reaching national network of state and federal agents had been put in place to track them down, pedophiles were still strangely invisible. “There really aren’t any figures. It’s a hidden offense that often doesn’t come to the surface,” said Debra Whitcomb, director of Massachusetts’ Educational Development Center Inc. In 1994, referring to the “child sexual exploitation” on the Net that her organization had just received a $250,000 government grant to combat.¹⁰

Perhaps it is no wonder that in a Mayo Clinic study of anxieties reported to pediatricians, three-quarters of parents were afraid their children would be abducted; a third said it was a “frequent worry,” more frequent than fretting over sports injuries, car accidents, or drugs.¹¹ And no wonder Jeffrey Curley’s murder, the crest of a wave of highly publicized criminal brutality, revived the crusade for capital punishment in Massachusetts, or that it was in this movement, as a spokesman for state-administered revenge, that his father, a firehouse mechanic named Bob, briefly found voice for his unutterable grief.¹²

The Facts

The problem with all this information about pedophiles is that most of it is not true or is so qualified as to be useless as generalization. First of all, the streets and computer chat rooms are not crawling with child molesters, kidnappers, and murderers. According to police files, 95 percent of allegedly abducted children turn out to be “runaways and throwaways” from home or kids snatched by one of their own parents in divorce custody disputes.¹³ Studies commissioned under the Missing Children’s Assistance Act of 1984 estimate that between 52 and 158 children will be abducted and murdered by nonfamily members each year.¹⁴ Extrapolating from other FBI statistics, those odds come out between 1 in 364,000 and fewer than 1 in 1 million.¹⁵ A child’s risk of dying in a car accident is twenty-five to seventy-five times greater.

Fortunately, pedophilic butcheries are even rarer than abduction-murders. For instance, in 1992, the year a paroled New Jersey sex offender raped and killed Megan Kanka, the seven-year-old after whom community-notification statutes were named, nine children under age twelve were the victims of similar crimes, out of over forty-five million in that age group.¹⁶ As for Adam Walsh, invoked by the Boston Herald as the victim of molestation murder, no defendant was ever indicted in his disappearance. According to detectives in Hollywood, Florida, where the crime occurred, Adam’s father spread the rumor that the abductor was a pedophile, most prominently in a much-quoted book about child molesters, although there was neither suspicion nor evidence of sex in the case.¹⁷

Molestations, abductions, and murders of children by strangers are rare. And, say the FBI and social scientists, such crimes are not on the rise.¹⁸ Some researchers even believe that some forms of molestation, such as exhibitionism, might be declining.¹⁹

There are, moreover, few so-called pedophiles in the population, though it is hard to say how few. “I write `1, 5, 21, 50' on the board and ask my students, `Which is the percentage of pedophiles in the country?’” said Paul Okami, in the University of California at Los Angeles psychology department, who has analyzed the data on pedophilia in America. “The answer is all of them.” That’s because a “pedophile,” depending on the legal statute, the perception of the psychologist, or the biases of the journalist, can be anything from a college freshman who has once masturbated with a fantasy of a twelve-year-old in mind to an adult who has had sexual contact with an infant.²⁰

As for the “pure” clinical species, Okami believes that the proportion of Americans whose primary erotic focus is prepubescent children hovers around 1 percent. Estimating from lists of so-called pedophile rings, arrest records, and his own experience, David Techter, the former editor of the Chicago-based pedophile newsletter Wonderland, put the number at “maybe 100,000.”²¹ Criminal records do not indicate there are large or growing numbers of pedophiles. Even as the age of consent has risen and arrests for lower-level sex crimes have increased dramatically,²² arrests for rape and other sex offenses, including those against children, still constituted only about 1 percent of all arrests in 1993.²³

Pedophiles are not generally violent, unless you are using the term sexual violence against children in a moral, rather than a literal, way. Its perpetrators very rarely use force or cause physical injury in a youngster.²⁴ In fact, what most pedophiles do with children could not be further from Charles Jaynes’s alleged necrophilic abominations. Bringing themselves down to the maturity level of children rather than trying to drag the child up toward an adult level, many men who engage in sex with children tend toward kissing, mutual masturbation, or “hands-off” encounters such as voyeurism and exhibitionism.²⁵ <p. Indeed, say some psychologists, there may be no such thing as a “typical” pedophile, if there is such a thing as a pedophile at all. Qualities by which social scientists and the police have marked him, such as his purported shyness or childhood sexual trauma, do not bear out with statistical significance.²⁶ More important, sexual contact with a child does not a pedophile make. “The majority of reported acts of sexual abuse of children are not committed by pedophiles,” but by men in relationships with adult women and men, said John Money, of Johns Hopkins, a preeminent expert on sexual abnormalities.²⁷ They are men like Charles Jaynes, who wrote in his journal about a fast crush on a “beautiful boy” with “a lovely tan and crystal-blue eyes” and in whose car police found literature from the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) but who had an adult girlfriend and was rumored to be lovers with Sicari, who also had a girlfriend.²⁸

In other words, there may be nothing fundamental about a person that makes him a “pedophile.” So-called pedophiles do not have some genetic, or incurable, disease. Men who desire children can change their behavior to conform with the norms of a society that reviles it. Pedophilia can be renounced; in the medical language we now use to describe this sexual proclivity, it can be “cured.” Indeed, contrary to politicians’ claims, the recidivism rates of child sex offenders are among the lowest in the criminal population. Analyses of thousands of subjects in hundreds of studies in the United States and Canada have found that about 13 percent of sex offenders are rearrested, compared with 74 percent of all prisoners.²⁹ With treatment, the numbers are even better. The state of Vermont, for example, reported in 1995 that its reoffense rates after treatment were only 7 percent for pedophiles, 3 percent for incest perpetrators, and 3 percent for those who had committed “hands-off” crimes such as exhibitionism.³⁰

The Enemy Is Us

All this rational talk may mean nothing to a parent. Nine in forty five million children are raped and murdered: slim odds, sure, but if it happens to your baby, who cares about the statistics? Still, most parents manage to put irrational fears in perspective. Why, in spite of all information to the contrary, do Americans insist on believing that pedophiles are a major peril to their children? What do people fear so formidably?

Our culture fears the pedophile, say some social critics, not because he is a deviant, but because he is ordinary. And I don’t mean because he is the ice-cream man or Father Patrick. No, we fear him because he is us. In his elegant study of “the culture of child molesting,” the literary critic James Kincaid traced this terror back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Then, he said, Anglo-American culture conjured childhood innocence, defining it as a desireless subjectivity, at the same time as it constructed a new ideal of the sexually desirable object. The two had identical attributes—softness, cuteness, docility, passivity—and this simultaneous cultural invention has presented us with a wicked psychosocial problem ever since. We relish our erotic attraction to children, says Kincaid (witness the child beauty pageants in which JonBenét Ramsey was entered). But we also find that attraction abhorrent (witness the public shock and disgust at JonBenét’s “sexualization” in those pageants). So we project that eroticized desire outward, creating a monster to hate, hunt down, and punish.³¹

In her classic 1981 study, Father-Daughter Incest, feminist-psychologist Judith Lewis Herman suggested another source of self-revulsion that might lead us to project outward. Child abuse, she said, is close to home, built into the structure of the “normal,” “traditional” family. Take the family’s paternal authority enforced through violence, along with its feminine and child submission, its prohibitions against sexual talk and touch, and its privacy sanctified and inviolable, she said. Add repressed desire, and the potential of incest festers, waiting to happen.³²

Herman’s work was at the front edge of a horrifying suspicion, the truth of which is now firmly established. Even if child-sex crimes against strangers are rare, incest is not. Like pedophilia, it’s hard to say how common it is, since incest figures are almost as muddied as those of adult-child sex outside the family. On one hand, child abuse statistics are notoriously unreliable; for example, of the 319,000 reports of sexual abuse of children in 1993, two-thirds were unsubstantiated.³³ The expansion of the definitions of family members, the ages of people considered children, and the types of interactions labeled abuse have jacked up incest figures. So has the popular suspicion of incest as an invisible source of later psychological distress, especially among women. Since the 1980s, self-help authors have claimed that you don’t even have to remember a sexual event to know it occurred. “If you think you were abused and your life shows the symptoms, then you were,” wrote Ellen Bass in The Courage to Heal.³⁴ The symptoms of past molestation listed in such books range from asthma to neglect of one’s teeth.³⁵

On the other hand, professionals under the influence of Freud have denied the existence of incest for decades, interpreting children’s reports of real seductions as oedipal fantasies, and still may count only cases involving physical coercion, discounting the inestimable pressures on children to yield to a parent’s sexual advances out of dependency, fear, loyalty, or love.

At any rate, reliable sources show that more than half, and some say almost all, of sexual abuse is visited upon children by their own family members or parental substitutes.³⁶ The federal government recorded over 217,000 cases in 1993 (fewer than the media hysteria would indicate, but still plenty).³⁷ Research confirms what is intuitively clear: that the worst devastation is wrought not by sex per se but by the betrayal of the child’s fundamental trust. And the closer the relation, the more forced or intimate the sex acts, and the longer and later in a child’s life they persist, the more hurtful is the immediate trauma and longer-lasting the harm of incest. Incest is a qualitatively different experience from sex with a nonfamily adult; almost inevitably, the former is a lot worse.³⁸ Even those who don’t buy Kincaid’s claim that the cultural “we” are drooling over the prepubescent Macaulay Culkin cavorting through Home Alone in his underpants or Herman’s metaphor of the family as incest incubator might be surprised to find that their own secret yearnings could be illegal. The vast majority of so-called pedophiles do not go out and ravage small children. So-called criminals are most often caught not touching but looking at something called child pornography (which I will get to in a moment). And their desired objects are not “children” but adolescents, about the age of the model Kate Moss at the start of her modeling career.³⁹ “The clients are usually white, suburban, married businessmen who want a blow job from a teenage boy but don’t consider themselves gay, and heterosexual men who seek out young girls,” said Edith Springer, who worked for many years with teenage prostitutes in New York’s Times Square. “I have never in all my years of therapy and counseling come across what the media advertise as a ‘pedophile.’” Psychologists and law enforcers call the man who loves teenagers a hebophile. That’s a psychiatric term, denoting pathological sexual deviance. But if we were to diagnose every American man for whom Miss (or Mr.) Teenage America was the optimal sex object, we’d have to call ourselves a nation of perverts. If the teenage body were not the culture’s ideal of sexiness, junior high school girls probably would not start starving themselves as soon as they notice a secondary sex characteristic, and the leading lady (on-screen or in life) would not customarily be twenty to forty years younger than the leading man. I asked Meg Kaplan, a widely respected clinician who treats sex offenders at the New York State Psychiatric Institute’s Sexual Behavior Clinic, about the medicalization and criminalization of the taste for adolescent flesh. “Show me a heterosexual male who’s not attracted to teenagers,” she snorted. “Puh-leeze.”

Rather than indict our Monday night football buddies, rather than indict the family, though, we circle the wagons and project danger outward. “Screen out anyone who might be damaging to your child. Whenever possible, assume childcare responsibilities,” the FBI’s Kenneth Lanning advised the readers of Life. “Tell your kids that if an adult seems too good to be true, maybe he is.”⁴⁰

Genealogy of a Monster

Days after Jeffrey Curley’s murder, the Boston Herald was fulfilling its public duty to provide sound-bite cultural analysis. “[S]exually oriented Internet chat rooms, the proliferation of sexual situations on TV, and easy access to hard-core pornography are creating more damaged children and possibly the next generation of pedophiles,” opined one “expert.” Another blamed welfare reform, which sent single mothers to work, leaving their kids to fend on their own. “And there are always child molesters looking for these kids.”⁴¹

Dire assessments of a morally anarchic world are not new. But they tend to crop up in times of social transformation, when the economy trembles or when social institutions crumble and many people feel they’re losing control of their jobs, their futures, or their children’s lives. At times like these, the childmolesting monster can be counted on to creep from the rubble.

He first showed his grizzly face in modern Anglo-American history at the height of industrialization, in the late nineteenth century. In the cities and mill towns, poor and working-class children and adolescents left their homes and went out to work, where they met with new opportunities for sexual pleasure and new sources of sexual and economic pain. The young working girl’s pleasures—to dance, flirt, or engage in casual prostitution to augment her meager wages—offended Victorian and religious morals. Her pains—exploitation and harassment in the factories, rape, disease, and unwed motherhood—outraged feminists and socioeconomic reformers. The English writer Henry Worsley called the factory a “school of iniquity” producing in the child an unseemly “precocity” about “the adult world and its pleasures.”⁴² The press, eager to heat up these simmering sensitivities, ”discovered” in the gutters a marketplace in which venal capitalism fornicated with sexual license. This commerce was called white slavery.

In 1885, the popular tabloid Pall Mall Gazette introduced London’s readers to the “white slaver.” Its sensationalist series “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” one of the most successful “exposés” in journalistic history, told of a black market in which virgin girls were sold by their hapless mothers to wicked neighborhood procuresses, who in turn prostituted them to eager, amoral “gentlemen.” The articles ignited one of the greatest moral panics in modern British history.⁴³

When a similar panic took hold in America a decade or so later, it had literally a different complexion. Waves of immigrants from China, southern Europe, and Ireland, as well as blacks from the South, were pouring into the cities. And while African chattel slavery had been abolished, racism was hardly dead. “White slavery” was so named to denote that its alleged victims were of northern European descent (the institutionalized rape of African slaves would not be acknowledged until a century later). Meanwhile, the sexual salesmen described in almost all accounts of “white slavery” were swarthy-sinister almost by definition-Jews, Italians, and Greeks.⁴⁴

Although adult prostitution did flourish in the new industrial cities, the trade in children on either side of the Atlantic was virtually an invention.⁴⁵ The Gazette’s editor, it turned out, had engineered the abduction of the “five-pound virgin” (referring to her price, not her weight) around whom his expose was built;⁴⁵ “the throngs of child prostitutes” claimed by London’s anti-white-slavery campaigners were “imaginary products of sensational journalism intended to capture the attention of a prurient Victorian public,” according to the historian Judith Walkowitz.⁴⁷ Rates of American prostitution were also hugely inflated: one figure reported in the New York suffragist press was multiplied tenfold from probable reality.⁴⁸ Nevertheless, both moral campaigns led to a spate of sex restrictive legislation. Following the “Maiden Tribute” articles, the British age of consent rose from thirteen to sixteen.⁴⁹ In America, between 1886 and 1895, twenty-nine states raised theirs from as low as seven to as high as eighteen.⁵⁰ Some of the laws, like the British criminalization of homosexuality, stayed on the books into the late twentieth century.

As the twentieth century progressed, the sex monster went into hibernation. He was briefly roused during the Depression, when widespread financial failure threatened an epidemic of foundering masculine confidence and sparked suspicions of a compensatory “hypermasculinity” that would burst out in pathological desires for young bodies.⁵¹ The child molester slumbered again, however, when World War II gave America a real enemy, and no little debauchery was tolerated both stateside, between the women and high schoolers left to run the factories, and near the front, where single and married fighting men took sexual R&R with the residents of the war’s scarred cities.⁵²

When the war ended, however, it was time to get gender and the family back to "normal." Men had to resume the breadwinning and women the bread baking. The homosexual culture that had seen its first sparks in the barracks and soldiers’ bars had to be extinguished.⁵³ And teenagers, who had enjoyed a taste of adult wage earning and adult sexual license during the wars and the Depression, had to be dispatched back to childhood. Lingering resistance required an antidote: a social menace to make the renewed old order more attractive. And before FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and Senator Joseph McCarthy began painting that menace red, they set their sites on pink: the first targets of their inquests were homosexuals in the State Department. The hounded homosexuals in high places stood as a public example of (and to) perverts allegedly on the loose everywhere. The photomontage running beside Hoover’s famous 1947 article "How Safe Is Your Daughter?" announced the return of the sex monster: three white girls in fluffy dresses and ankle socks fleeing from a huge, hovering masculine hand. "The nation’s women and children will never be secure," the caption read, inserting a heart-stopping ellipsis "... so long as degenerates run wild."⁵⁴

During this time, psychology was establishing itself as a profession, the apex of a centuries-long process by which the management of social deviance shifted from the purview of preachers to that of clinicians. Modern case books gave the monster a new name: the "sexual psychopath," compelled to molest children by "uncontrolled and uncontrollable desires."⁵⁵ By the mid-1950s, prewar anxieties about masculinity had zeroed in on sex between men, and in both the academy and the public imagination the psychopath took on the stereotypic characteristics of the homosexual, and vice versa. Boys were alerted never to enter public toilets alone. And after every grisly crime against a child, the gay bars were sure to be raided.⁵⁶ As they had a half century earlier, the headlines rang out alarms of a crime wave against children: "Kindergarten Girl Accosted by Man," "9 Charges against Molester of Girls," "What Shall We Do about Sex Offenders?"⁵⁷ But also like the panic of that earlier era, this one reflected no actual increase in violent sex crimes against children. Nevertheless, commissions were empaneled, new laws were passed, and arrests increased. Whereas most of these, like most arrests today, were for minor offenses such as flashing or consensual homosexual sex,⁵⁸ a few highly publicized violent crimes drew a clangor of public demand for dragnets, vigilante squads, life imprisonment, indefinite incarceration in mental institutions, castration, and execution of the psycho killers,⁵⁹ all of which were revived in the 1980s and 1990s.

During the 1960s and 1970s, sex panic gave way to sexual liberation, including, for a brief moment, the notion that children had a right to sexual expression. "Sex is a natural appetite," wrote Heidi Handman and Peter Brennan in 1974, in Sex Handbook: Information and Help for Minors. "If you’re old enough to want to have sex, you’re old enough to have it."⁶⁰ But as women’s and children’s sexual options were proclaimed, their experiences of coercion were also thrown into relief. Feminists started speaking out against sexual violence under the cloak of family and romantic intimacy; suspicion grew that child sexual abuse was epidemic. An industry of therapists specializing in unearthing past abuse and curing its purported effects began to prosper.

The cold war was melting into detente; for the first time in living memory, Americans were bereft of national enemies and native subversives. The new political-therapeutic alliance unearthed the same old nemesis to children’s sexual innocence and safety. But, in the age of media, the old white slaver-child molester wore a modern hat. Now, besides kidnapping and ravishing children, he was taking their pictures and selling them for profit. The pedophile had taken up a sideline as a pornographer.

The Modern Monster

The child pornographer, when he first came to public light in 1976, was a feeble beast and an even worse businessman. In fact, he was almost bankrupt. Raids aimed at cleaning up Times Square for the Democratic Convention uncovered only a minuscule cache of kiddie porn.⁶¹ But those few stacks of dusty, decades-old black-and-white rags, already illegal, were enough to launch a crusade. It was led by a team that would epitomize the anti-child-porn forces: a child psychiatrist, Judianne Densen-Gerber, who founded the drug-rehabilitation empire Odyssey House in New York, and a vice cop, Sergeant Lloyd Martin, of the Los Angeles Police Department.

The two careened from sea to sea, stoking outsized claims. Before a congressional committee in 1977, Densen-Gerber estimated that 1.2 million children were victims of child prostitution and pornography, including "snuff" films in which they were killed for viewers’ titillation.⁶² Martin traveled the country orating speeches of evangelical fervor, warning America on one Christian television show, for instance, that "pedophiles actually wait for babies to be born so that, just minutes after birth, they can grab the post-fetuses and sexually victimize them."⁶³ At that 1977 congressional committee, he declared that the sexual exploitation of children was "worse than homicide."⁶⁴

Within a few years, police testified that child porn had never been more than a boutique business even in its modest heyday in the late 1960s. The first law wiped out what little kiddie porn remained on the street, and by the early 1980s, the head of the New York Police Department’s Public Morals Division proclaimed the stuff "as rare as the Dead Sea Scrolls."⁶⁵ The 1.2 million figure, which Densen-Gerber subsequently doubled,⁶⁶ was revealed to be the arbitrarily quadrupled estimate of an unsubstantiated number one author said he’d "thrown out" to get a reaction from the law enforcement community.⁶⁷ Densen-Gerber would soon slip from the public eye under suspicions of embezzling public monies and employing coercive and humiliating methods at Odyssey House.⁶⁸ Martin would later be removed from his post at the LAPD for harassing witnesses and falsifying evidence.⁶⁹

But their work had been accomplished. The press continued to broadcast their bogus statistics. And hardly a year after Densen-Gerber’s first press conference, Congress passed the Protection of Children against Sexual Exploitation Act of 1977, prohibiting the production and commercial distribution of obscene depictions of children younger than sixteen. One of the first casualties was Show Me!, a sex education book for prepubescent children featuring explicit photographs of children, from around six to their early teens, engaged in sex play. When it was published in 1970, the book was showered with awards. Under the new restrictions on "child pornography," it became illegal to publish, distribute, and, eventually, even to own anywhere in the United States.

Then, in 1979, a six-year-old middle-class white boy named Etan Patz turned the corner on his way to school in lower Manhattan and was never seen again. Two years later, six-year-old Adam Walsh’s head was found floating in a Florida canal. Federal and private money began funneling toward a newly named victim, the Missing and Exploited Child. Soon, hundreds of "missing children" were beseeching would-be rescuers from the containers of that quintessentially maternal food, milk. Local police departments set up child-finding units, which distributed pamphlets and dispatched trainers and speakers. Parents and teachers were getting the message: the molester-kidnapper was everywhere.

Most frightening, he was lurking where the most vulnerable children were sent for nurture and safekeeping: nursery school. And he had joined up with an omnipotent ally: none other than Satan. In 1984, the media started following breathlessly as the trial unfolded in southern California of Peggy Buckey, the elderly proprietor of the McMartin Preschool, and her son Ray, a beloved teacher. The two had been accused by three-year-olds of bizarre tortures—anal rape with knives and pencils, animal mutilation, oral sex performed on clowns—"satanic ritual abuse" allegedly carried out in broad daylight in open-door classrooms, where parents and other teachers could walk in at any time.

No child had volunteered any such story until being interviewed by Kee MacFarlane and her team of social workers at the Children’s Institute International in Los Angeles, and the videotapes of these interviews revealed bewildered and resistant babies being hectored into assenting to the narratives fed them by their interrogators. Indeed, by the end of the longest and most expensive criminal trial in U.S. history, it was the tapes themselves that exonerated the Buckeys. But eerily identical tales began to surface in schools across the nation.⁷⁰ In 1994, the U.S. government’s National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect reported on its five-year survey of eleven thousand psychiatric and police workers nationwide, covering the more than twelve thousand accusations of satanic ritual abuse. The investigation found "not a single case where there was clear corroborating evidence," not a single snapshot or negative of the alleged rolls and rolls of child pornography produced by the deviants.⁷¹ But new accusations, all unsupported, kept coming. The latest were in Wenatchee, Washington, in 1995, where forty-three people were accused of some twenty-nine thousand counts of sexual abuse involving sixty children, all without a shred of evidence.⁷² At the beginning of the new millennium, many innocents are still behind bars.⁷³

Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker argued in Satan’s Silence that the day-care abuse scares tapped popular anxieties about women working outside the home and leaving their children with others. But these fears were given shape and heft by a certain world view, which was attached to a certain political agenda. It was that of the religious Right (who believed that Satan literally walked the earth), with the cautious endorsement of feminist sexual conservatives—the same bedfellows who would lie down together in the 1986 Meese commission.

As anthropologist Carole S. Vance pointed out, the Meese commission was not inclined to recommend any policies that feminists would champion, such as aid to women who wanted to leave abusive men or legal protections of sex workers from violence and economic exploitation. Rather, it erected a broad federal network to chase and prosecute symbolic assaults on its own ideas of morality, that is, on smut peddlers. But its offensive against adult pornography failed to generate heartfelt support in the heartland. Several municipal antipornography ordinances crafted by its prime feminist confederates, Catharine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, had already fallen to constitutional challenge. Prosecutors backed off bringing obscenity cases against "adult" material, which were almost impossible to win.

Right-wing organizations that had long fought for censorship of erotica were determined to stay the course. Shrewdly, they abandoned their old maiden in distress, "decency," and took up the cause of "families and children." Citizens for Decency Through Law (founded in 1957 by that paragon of decency through law, savings-and-loan swindler Charles Keating) became the Children’s Legal Foundation, which metamorphosed into the National Family Legal Foundation. Reverend Donald Wildmon’s National Federation for Decency became the American Family Association, and the National Coalition Against Pornography (N-CAP) spun off the National Law Center for Children and Families. The Justice Department’s National Obscenity Enforcement Unit, set up after the Meese commission, was rechristened the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section. The wide, fat enemy "pornography" began to fade from view. Now both antiporn feminist and conservative propaganda aimed at the sleaker "hard-core," the scarier "child pornography."

And where was this new pornographer? Densen-Gerber and Martin had been unable to run him down on the urban streets. He’d eluded capture in the suburban childcare centers. Now, said his pursuers, the fugitive had found his way to everywhere and nowhere. He was on the Internet, where he had joined a vast club that zipped pictures of copulating kids among them, sidled up to children in chat rooms, and enticed them into real-world motels and malls. With the family room connected by a mere modem to the wild open cyberspaces, even the home was no longer safe. As the cover of one "family-values" magazine blared, "CYBERPORN STEALS HOME."

Snared in the Web

In spite of proud FBI claims, many lawyers and journalists, including me, suspect that the child pornographer is the same penny-ante presence online as he was in Times Square. Bruce Selcraig, a government investigator of child pornography during the 1980s who went online in 1996 as a journalist to review the situation, concluded the same. In the cyberspeech debate, he said, the dissemination of child porn amounted to "a tuna-sized red herring."⁷⁴

Aficionados and vice cops concede that practically all the sexually explicit images of children circulating cybernetically are the same stack of yellowing pages found at the back of those X-rated shops, only digitized. These pictures tend to be twenty to fifty years old, made overseas, badly re-reproduced, and for the most part pretty chaste. That may be why federal agents almost never show journalists the contraband. But when I got a peek at a stash downloaded by Don Huycke, the national program manager for child pornography at the U.S. Customs Service, in 1995, I was underwhelmed. Losing count after fifty photos, I’d put aside three that could be called pornographic: a couple of shots of adolescents masturbating and one half-dressed twelve-year-old spreading her legs in a position more like a gymnast’s split than split beaver. The rest tended to be like the fifteen-year-old with a 1950s bob and an Ipana grin, sitting up straight, naked but demure, or the two towheaded six-year olds in underpants, astride their bikes.

So when these old pictures show up on the Net, who’s putting them there? Attorney Lawrence Stanley, who published in the Benjamin A. Cardozo Law Review what is widely considered the most thorough research of child pornography in the 1980s, concluded that the pornographers were almost exclusively cops. In 1990 at a southern California police seminar, the LAPD’s R. P. "Toby" Tyler proudly announced as much. The government had shellacked the competition, he said; now law enforcement agencies were the sole reproducers and distributors of child pornography.⁷⁵ Virtually all advertising, distribution, and sales to people considered potential lawbreakers were done by the federal government, in sting operations against people who have demonstrated (through, for instance, membership in NAMBLA) what agents regard as a predisposition to commit a crime. These solicitations were usually numerous and did not cease until the recipient took the bait. "In other words, there was no crime until the government seduced people into committing one," Stanley wrote.⁷⁶

If, as police claim, looking at child porn inspires molesters to go out and seduce living children, why were the feds doing the equivalent of distributing matches to arsonists? Their answer is: to stop the molesters before they strike again. Newspaper reports of arrests uniformly follow the same pattern: a federal agent poses as a minor online, hints at a desired meeting or agrees to one should the mark suggest it, and then arrests the would-be molester when he shows up.⁷⁷ But another logical answer to the almost exclusive use of stings to arrest would-be criminals is that the government, frustrated with the paucity of the crime they claim is epidemic and around which huge networks of enforcement operations have been built, have to stir the action to justify their jobs.

The same logic can explain why the volume of anti-child-porn legislation has increased annually. From a relatively simple criminalization of production and distribution, the law eventually went after possession and then even viewing of child-erotic images at somebody else’s house. It raised the age of a "child" from sixteen to eighteen and defined as pornography pictures in which the subject is neither naked, nor doing anything sexual, nor, under the 1996 Child Pornography Prevention Act, is even an actual child. Legislation that was first justified as a protection of real children has evolved to statutes criminalizing the depiction of any person engaged in sexual activity who is intended to look like a minor. That may be a young-looking Asian adult woman lasciviously sucking a lollipop. Or she may also be a computer-generated image created by manipulating pixels until an adult morphs into a child or a child appears to be performing a sex act.⁷⁸

Such bills have almost invariably been sponsored by conservative Republicans with support from right-wing and fundamentalist Christian organizations and antipornography feminists. And even while some legislators privately express doubts that they protect children, these proposals are unstoppable. "When the Senate votes on child issues, they’re all on one side," Patrick Trueman, a lobbyist for the American Family Association and former head of justice Department’s National Obscenity Enforcement Unit, told me in 1989. "We got the toughest law in 1988"—the Child Protection and Enforcement Act—"because it had the words child exploitation in it, though most of it was directed to adult pornography." So, have the government’s efforts worked to round up dangerous pedophiles?

In 1995, the FBI launched its child-pornography task force Innocent Images, which trains special agents under a congressional grant of ten million dollars to rout out pedophiles on the Net. From 1996 to 2000, the unit initiated 2,609 cases. But barely 20 percent of those generated indictments, with just 17 percent resulting in convictions.⁷⁹ The FBI’s Peter Gullotta told James Kincaid that Innocent Images had achieved 439 convictions since 1995. How were these criminals found? "It’s like fishing in a pond full of hungry fish," Gullotta told Kincaid. "Every time you put a line with live bait in there, you’re going to get one."⁸⁰ This might sound like inducement (especially to journalists like myself, who have talked to the fish)—the same tactics that Stanley described in the 1980s, only updated from snail mail to e-mail.⁸¹

The federal government’s biggest success to date concluded in August 2001, with the arrest of the two owners of Landslide Productions, Inc., and one hundred of their customers in Fort Worth, Texas. Landslide maintained a profitable pornography Web site that offered, in addition to adult porn, links to foreign sites that contain images considered child pornography under U.S. law. The two owners were arrested for possession and distribution, not production, of child pornography, and the subscribers were arrested for possession. While one of these customers was identified as a "registered child sex offender" and another as having been convicted of four "sex crimes" in the past, none arrested in this operation was indicted for abuse of an actual child. To draw out the child porn aficionados from among the site’s 250,000 mostly law-abiding subscribers, the government advertised sales of child-pornographic tapes and CD-ROMs under the name of the company, which it had seized in 1999. When a person placed an order, a package was sent and the buyer arrested on its delivery.

Although the shutdown of one site and the arrest of one hundred customers took four years and engaged unnumbered justice Department agents, as well as thirty federally financed local task forces nationwide, U.S. Postal Service Inspector General Kenneth Weaver claimed that Landslide was "the tip of the iceberg" in what the New York Times paraphrased as "a growing market for child pornography via the Internet."⁸² The story was front-page news in every market I checked, and the Times ran it in the spot reserved for the day’s most important story, the top right-hand column.

Were these customers predisposed to crime, besides the illegal act of looking at images of minors who might or might not be engaging in sex? According to the FBI’s Gullotta when he spoke to Kincaid, the typical catch has no previous criminal record. Almost no such case goes to trial; the defendants plead guilty. The government calls this more evidence of guilt.⁸³ But, again, closer examination of such cases (in fact, of most child abuse charges) reveals that pleas are often taken under advice of counsel to eliminate the chance of a long prison sentence and also to limit the personal destruction that publicity wreaks even if the accused is exonerated.⁸⁴

Unfortunately, plea bargains, because they lack the details of depositions, interrogations at trial, and the defense’s version of events, make it almost impossible to tell what the person is accused of doing, much less whether he did it. Federal statistics aren’t much help. According to Kincaid, neither the FBI nor the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children now keeps track of how many children are actually lured to danger after online assignations, the feared eventuality that motivates these operations. Journalists are frustrated by more than insufficient data, though. In 1995, while I covered the story of the first man convicted for possession of "lascivious" videotapes of minors who were neither naked nor doing anything sexual, I arrived at the justice Department in Washington, D.C., only to learn that my scheduled viewing of the evidence had been canceled because, well, the tapes were illegal. Exposing the models to my eyes, an agent told me, would criminally harm them (I later learned that portions of the tapes had aired on Court TV). I drove six hours to western Pennsylvania, where the court clerk set me up with a VCR, and I yawned through hours of badly filmed images no racier than a Bahamas tourism commercial. Similar restrictions were placed on reportage of the Landslide investigation. According to the Times, "the authorities did not release the addresses of the actual [foreign] sites" allegedly offering child-pornographic images, and the only models described were two British siblings, a girl and a boy, ages eight and six.⁸⁵ But agents did not reveal whether these children were photographed engaging in sexual activity, and journalists were obviously unable to inspect the images themselves. In 1999, thirty-two-year veteran radio journalist Larry Matthews was sentenced to eighteen months in federal prison for receiving and transmitting a child-pornographic image in the process of reporting a story on child-porn chat rooms. In fact, prosecutors were alerted to his activities when he reported what he called "terrible things"—the posting by a mother apparently offering up her children for sex with adults.⁸⁶

Statistics that I got from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 1996 indicated that the feared eventuality that motivates all this activity had rarely come to pass. Only twenty-three minors were enticed to malls and hotel rooms by their adult suitors between 1994 and 1996, none of these "children" was under thirteen, and most were at least a couple of years older than that. A 2001 survey conducted by the University of New Hampshire found that almost a fifth of ten- to seventeen-year-olds who went online received sexual solicitations from "strangers," an unspecified number of whom may have been adults. However, it would be hard to impute widespread harm to these experiences. Three-quarters of the youth said they were not distressed by the posts. And, wrote the researchers, "no youth in the sample was actually sexually assaulted as a result of contacts made over the Internet."⁸⁷ As for pedophiles caught in the act, as far as I can gather only one such case has occurred: the infamous Orchid Club, whose members took turns having sex with a child in front of videocams that broadcast their doings to their compatriots in real time.⁸⁸ This act of sexual violence was already a crime before child porn law and remains so, as it should.

Meanwhile, local authorities have dived enthusiastically into the broadening legal definitions of smut, with the result that more and more citizens are finding themselves entangled with the law for making and keeping truly innocent images. In the early 1990s, the Nebraska attorney general ordered a local policeman to burn nine thousand slides, each of an individual naked child, assembled by psychologist William Farrall to be used with the penile plethysmograph, an instrument that measures sexual arousal. Psychologists employed the pictures along with the device to assess the progress of thousands of sex offenders in treatment nationwide.⁸⁹ After the passage of The Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, Oklahoma police seized a copy of the film of Günter Grass’s Nobel Prize-winning The Tin Drum from a video rental store because of an inexplicit scene in the movie in which a man who refuses to grow out of his child’s body (to avoid participating in fascism) performs what some construed as oral sex on an adult woman. And in the 1990s, cases proliferated in which clerks in photo-developing shops, instructed to alert the police of any "suspicious" pictures, flagged such classic "bear rug" shots as moms in the tub with their babies, which led to the arrests of the photographers, and worse.⁹⁰ In New York, Fotomat employees reported nude shots of a six-year-old son taken by a photography student. The father was handcuffed and taken from his home, while his children were rushed out in their pajamas to be examined for sexual abuse. No evidence of abuse was found, and the man was not brought to trial. But he was barred from his home for two months and forbidden to see his youngest daughter. Cynthia Stewart, an Oberlin, Ohio, mother, was nabbed when a photograph of her eight-year-old daughter in the bath was fingered as "pornographic" by a photo-shop clerk. Stewart escaped prosecution (and potential imprisonment) only after agreeing to state publicly that two of her pictures could be interpreted as "sexually oriented" and allowing prosecutors to destroy them; she also consented to participate in six months of anti-abuse counseling. Although she found the smarmy implications of these measures abhorrent, she complied in order to save her daughter the trauma of a trial.⁹¹

False Security

Civil libertarians have called these laws unconstitutionally vague: a reasonable person can’t know in advance if he is breaking them. They’ve diverted millions of taxpayer dollars from real child welfare and created an atmosphere of puritanical surveillance over all U.S. citizens in the dubious name of catching a small number of people who, if left alone, might do nothing more harmful to minors than sit around and masturbate to pictures of ten-year-olds in bathing suits.

But the legislative legacy of the child-abuse panic has done more than abridge the First Amendment. For Americans convicted of any sex crime, legislation passed in the 1990s arguably constitutes cruel and unusual, and perpetual, punishment. By 1999, according to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, all fifty states had enacted "Megan’s laws," requiring paroled sex offender registration and community notification; more stringent laws win states more federal crime-fighting funds.⁹² In many states, parolees are required to register regardless of the nature of their crime. In 2001, a judge in Corpus Christi, Texas, ordered twenty-one registered offenders to post "DANGER: Registered Sex Offender" notices on their homes and cars.⁹³

Sweeping over individual differences, politicians routinely refer to the former convicts as sexual predators, a phrase connoting insatiable appetite and sharp teeth. But as the rhetoric mounted during the 1990s, even predator wasn’t scary enough. Following Kansas’s lead in 1994, "sexually violent predator" laws spread across the states, which allowed the indefinite incarceration in psychiatric facilities of sex criminals who had completed prison sentences but were deemed likely to commit another crime.⁹⁴ To qualify as a sexually violent predator, the convict had to manifest a "mental abnormality" or "personality disorder," diagnoses about as exact as "a real fruitcake" and as common as compulsive eating. They were also remarkably reminiscent of the "uncontrollable desires" of the 1950s.⁹⁵

Those who work with sex offenders have warned that such policies might do no good and even could do harm. For one thing, former sex offenders are at far lower risk of committing new crimes than those released from prison after serving time for other crimes.⁹⁶ Nevertheless, rage against sex criminals is often far greater, and community notification laws serve to focus that rage. Since their inception, such programs have fueled harassment and vigilantism,⁹⁷ which further isolate and unnerve the parolee, leading to the exact opposite of the law’s intended effect. "You ban somebody from the community, he has no friends, he feels bad about himself, and you reinforce the very problems that contribute to the sex abuse behavior in the first place," Robert Freeman-Longo, former director of the Safer Society Program and president of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, told me. "You make him a better sex offender."

Some criminal-justice practices, moreover, seem to have no other intent but to keep the public on the edge of its seats. During the summer of 1997, California’s Justice Department set up a sort of side-show booth at state fairs featuring an LED screen that endlessly scrolled the names of the state’s registered sex offenders, along with their addresses-sixty-four thousand in all. What the shocked viewers did not know was that because registration in that state covered crimes committed as far back as the 1940s, many of the "predators" on the list had been arrested for victimless misdemeanors like soliciting a prostitute or cruising a man in a gay bar.⁹⁸ Tom Masters, program director of correctional treatment services at Oregon State Hospital, described such policymaking succinctly: "A lot of crime legislation is a function of politics, and not of rehabilitation or community safety."

Nor, I would add, is it a function of community sanity. In 1984, at the beginning of the sex-lawmaking frenzy, the authors of the final report on U.S. Senator William V. Roth’s Child Pornography and Pedophilia hearings noted what they called a paradox. "Good laws often lead to more arrests," they wrote, "thus making it appear that more new laws are needed to curb what the public perceives as an increase in crime."⁹⁹ Nevertheless, the commissioners recommended more laws, which led to more bureaucracy, more agents, more investigations, and more arrests. And that, said Eric Lotke of the National Center for Institutions and Alternatives, created another paradox: the public felt falsely safer and also more fearful.

Lynn Johnston, in the comic strip "For Better or For Worse," described the sadness and bafflement that can accompany these contradictory feelings. In a strip at the end of the 1990s, John, the father, amiably chats with a five-year-old at the supermarket. Her panicked mother swoops down the aisle. "VANESSA!!!" she cries. "Don’t talk to that man ... we don’t know who he is!!!" Back at home, John’s wife comforts him as he holds his own toddler in his lap. "She was just protecting her child, honey," says Elly. "I know," John answers. "It’s just that now and then I hate the world we’re living in." The reader was left to infer what about the world this archetypal baby boomer hated, the pedophiles or the paranoia.

Vanessa’s mother was doing the "right thing," according to the local police who would have spoken at her daughter’s school. But for the child’s sake, it was the wrong thing. Panic about adult-child sex, like panic about anything, prompts fewer right decisions than wrong ones, and the wrong ones can be breathtakingly wrong. Attorney General Janet Reno’s decision to lay siege to the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, was based in part on rumors of child abuse going on inside.¹⁰⁰ In the ensuing conflagration, eighty people died, including twenty-four children.¹⁰¹

Trying to fortify the nuclear family by fomenting suspicion of strangers fractures the community of adults and children; it can leave children defenseless in abusive homes. Projecting sexual menace onto a cardboard monster and pouring money and energy into vanquishing him distract adults from teaching children the subtle skills of loving with both trust and discrimination. Ultimately, children are rendered more vulnerable both at home and in the world.

Endnotes:

1. This account was constructed from articles in the Boston Herald, Boston Globe, and Cambridge Chronicle between October 1997 and December 1998; also Yvonne Abraham, “Life after Death,” Boston Phoenix, September 25, 1998, 23-30; and interviews with Boston and Cambridge residents.

2. In spite of the proliferating coverage of pedophilia and child abuse, the media frequently claim that we are inexcusably silent on the subject. “[The pedophile] is protected not only by our ignorance of his presence, but also by our unwillingness to confront the truth,” Andrew Vachss, one of the more sensationalist writers on the subject, opined in 1989, for instance.

3. Paul Okami and Amy Goldberg, “Personality Correlates of Pedophilia: Are They Reliable Indicators?” Journal of Sex Research 29, no. 3 (August 1992): 297-328; author’s review of state laws.

4. See, e.g., Andrew Vachss, “How We Can Fight Child Abuse,” Parade Magazine, August 20, 1989, 14.

5. A pedophile is defined as a person who has “recurrent intense sexual urges and arousing sexual fantasies involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children.” Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III-R (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1987).

6. Mike Smith, “Sex Offender Registry OK’d,” Journal Gazette (Fort Wayne, Indiana), February 20, 1996.

7. Ann Landers, “There’s One Cure for Child Molesters,” syndicated column, August 2, 1995.

8. Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making o f a Modern American Witch Hunt (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 91.

9. Tim LaHave and Beverly LaHave, Against the Tide: How to Raise Sexually Pure Kids in an “Anything-Goes” World (Colorado Springs: Multnomah Books, 1993), 189.

10. “Improving Investigations and Protecting Victims,” Boston Herald, May 4, 1994.

11. Richard Laliberte, “Missing Children: The Truth, the Hype, and What You Must Know,” Redbook, February 1998, 77.

12. The death-penalty bill was defeated by one vote at the end of the1997-98 legislative session, though the incoming Republican governor, Paul Cellucci, promised to pass it in the next term. Bob Curley, feeling used by his political handlers and used up by a life of rage, has retreated to crusade against child pornography and raise funds for child-abuse prevention programs. Abraham, “Life after Death,” 30. In 2000, the Curleys brought a civil suit against the North American Man/Boy Love Association and several individuals allegedly associated with it, claiming that Jaynes was a heterosexual before reading the organization’s propaganda and that his crimes were “a direct and proximate result of [its] urging, advocacy, and promoting of pedophile activity.” Barbara Curley and Robert Curley v. North American Man Boy Love Association, Best Interest Communications Inc., Verio Inc. [and various individual defendants], U.S. District of Massachusetts (announced April 15, 2000). In April 2001, the family’s lawyers filed additional charges against NAMBLA, seeking damages under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), usually used to prosecute gangsters. The Massachusetts Chapter of the ACLU is representing NAMBLA on free-speech grounds; the Civil Liberties Union has asked the judge to dismiss the case. David Weber, “Family of Slain Cambridge Boy Wants NAMBLA Held Responsible,” BostonHerald.com, April 11, 2001.

13. Laliberte, “Missing Children,” 77.

14. J. M. Lawrence, “Molesters Hide Evil behind Image of the Normal Guy,” Boston Herald, October 12, 1997, 30.

15. According to the FBI, “classic” abductions, in which a child is taken by a nonfamily member more than fifty miles from home, held overnight, and ransomed or murdered, number two hundred to three hundred annually, or 1 child in every 230,000 (as of 1997).

16. FBI statistics, phone interview, summer 1993.

17. Lieutenant Bill D’Heron points out that the case is still open. Phone interview with the lieutenant, of the Hollywood (Florida) Police Department detectives unit, December 15, 1998.

18. Laliberte, “Missing Children,” 78.

19. Anna C. Salter, “Epidemiology of Child Sexual Abuse,” in The Sexual Abuse o f Children: Theory and Research, vol. 1, ed. William O’Donoghue and James H. Geer (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992), 129-130.

20. See Paul Okami, “‘Slippage’ in Research on Child Sexual Abuse: Science as Social Advocacy,” in The Handbook of Forensic Sexology: Biomedical and Criminological Perspectives, ed. James J. Krivacska and John Money (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1994), 559-75.

Endnotes continued here