21. Quoted in Bruce Selcraig, “Chasing Computer Perverts,” Penthouse, February 1996, 51.

22. More than eight times more people were incarcerated for low-level sex offenses in 1992 than in 1980. Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Correctional Populations in the United States,” report, Washington, D.C., 1992, 53.

23. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the U.S.,” report, Washington, D.C., 1993, 217.

24. Okami and Goldberg, “Personality Correlates,” 317-20. The article is an excellent review of the literature.

25. In one study, fewer than a fifth of pedophiles interviewed said they desired genital sex, whereas another fifth wanted “non-sexual, platonic friendships.” Glenn D. Wilson and David N. Cox, The Child-Lovers: A Study of Paedophiles in Society (London: Peter Owen), 35.

26. Okami and Goldberg, “Personality Correlates,” 297-328. A study of the members of a British pedophile organization found that “the majority [of subjects] showed no sign of clinically significant psychopathy or thought disorder.” Wilson and Cox, The Child Lovers, 122-23. Even the commonly held belief that a molested child will grow up to be a molester is exaggerated: studies find that about a third do, which means that as many as two-thirds do not. Joan Kaufman and Edward Zigler, “Do Abused Children Become Abusive Parents?” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 57, no. 2 (1987): 186-92. The degree of social anxiety that pedophiles exhibit may be a result, not a cause, of the intense hatred and ostracism they experience, say a number of observers, including psychologists Theo Sandfort and Larry Constantine.

27. Wilson and Cox (The Child-Lovers) add a caveat to Money’s comment about erotophobia in the families of paraphilics. They note that just about everyone describes his or her parents as repressive about sex.

28. There was no proof of a sexual relationship between the two men. Nor was there any of a general propensity toward child molesting in the Sicari family, although police inferred one from the conviction of Salvi’s sixteen-year-old brother in a sexual encounter with a ten-year-old boy. The gay historian Allan Bérubé suggested that the crime fit another stereotype and piqued another fear: that the child molester’s prey is not only a boybut a white boy (author conversation with Bérubé).

29. Margaret A. Alexander, “Quasi-Meta-Analysis II, Oshkosh Correctional Institution,” State of Wisconsin Department of Corrections/ Oshkosh Correctional Institution report, Oshkosh, 1994; Lita Furby et al., “Sex Offender Recidivism: A Review,” Psychological Bulletin 3 (1989); R. Karl Hanson and Monique T. BussiPre, “Predictors of Sexual Offender Recidivism: A Meta-Analysis,” Department of Solicitor General of Canada, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 66, no. 2 (1996).

30. These numbers are inflated by reoffenses by adult rapists. In her metanalysis of seventy-nine studies encompassing almost eleven thousand subjects, Oshkosh (Wisconsin) Correctional Institution clinical director Margaret Alexander reconfirmed the fact that men who rape adult women are the most intransigent, with about a fifth striking again whether they undergo a treatment program in prison or not. But men arrested for having sex with children are usually overcome with shame and remorse; they want to stop. For them, good treatment has made a great difference: Since 1943, an average of 11 percent of “child molesters” who were treated in jails, hospitals, and outpatient clinics found their way back to prison, compared with 32 percent of those who took part in no treatment. Margaret A. Alexander, “Sexual Offender Treatment Efficacy Revisited,” State of Wisconsin Department of Corrections/Oshkosh Correctional Institution report, Oshkosh, May 1998. There’s also evidence that better treatment is increasingly successful. Before 1980, recidivism among treated sex offenders was almost 30 percent; after 1980, it dropped to 8.4 percent. Eric Lotke, “Sex Offenders: Does Treatment Work?” National Center for Institutions and Alternatives report, Washington, D.C., 1996, 5.

31. James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992); and James R. Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child-Molesting (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998). <p. 32. Judith Lewis Herman, Father-Daughter Incest (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981).

33. National Incidence Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Health and Human Services, 1993).

34. Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (New York: Harper Perennial, 1988): 22.

35. Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters, Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), 65-67. In fact, any catalogue of symptoms is suspect. “Psychological evidence suggests that it is impossible to tease out a set of symptoms that are related to sexual abuse but are never seen in victims of other types of abuse.” Elizabeth Wilson, “Not in This House: Incest, Denial, and Doubt in the Middle-Class Family,” Yale Journal o f Criticism 8 (1995): 51. Wilson’s conclusion, drawn from examinations of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual o f Mental Disorders, is supported by a thorough review of the abuse literature by Bruce Rind at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as Paul Okami and others. Such careful work is in the minority. The complete confounding of data has led to huge inflations of the statistics, which are commonly repeated by journalists. In the 1980s, estimates of women abused as children ranged as high as 62 percent. S. D. Peters, G. E. Wyatt, and D. Finkelhor, “Prevalence,” in A Source Book on Sexual Abuse, ed. David Finkelhor (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publishers, 1986), 75-93.

36. This estimation is drawn from the hundreds of articles I’ve read in writing about child abuse.

37. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Third National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (Washington, D.C., 1993); 3-3.

38. Judith Lewis Herman, D. Russell, and K. Trocki, “Long-Term Effects of Incestuous Abuse in Childhood,” American Journal o f Psychiatry 143, no. 10 (1986): 1293-96.

39. “By far the largest group of defendants [in child pornography cases] seems to be white males between 30 and 50 who are interested in teenage boys, usually between 14 and 17,” concluded Bruce Selcraig, a government investigator of child pornography during the 1980s who went online in 1996 as a journalist to review the situation. Selcraig, “Chasing Computer Perverts,” 53. The same is true of the majority of men in jail for consensual sex with girls or boys: their partners are teenagers. I conclude this from my own surveys over the past ten years of journalism, police sources, and defense attorneys.

40. Jennifer Allen, “The Danger Years,” Life, July 1995, 48. 41. Lawrence, “Molesters Hide Evil,” 31.

42. As quoted by Harry Hendrick, “Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood: An Interpretive Survey, 1800 to the Present,” in Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood, ed. Allison James and Alan Prout (London: Falmer Press, 1990), 42.

43. Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

44. The reports of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, for instance, frequently described the alleged exploiters of children in vicious and often confused ethnic stereotypes. Italian “padrones” who traffic variously in child labor, entertainment, and flesh are ubiquitous. A “rabbi” who runs a beer-bottle and cigarette-strewn gambling den behind a bogus “bird store” is characterized, incongruously, by his “little Chinese ways of enticement.” Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Sixteenth Annual Report (New York, 1891), 23.

45. See, e.g., Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight; Ellen Carol DuBois and Linda Gordon, “Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole Vance (London: Pandora Press, 1989); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987); and Ruth C. Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), for a fuller picture of turn-of-the-century urban prostitution.

46. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 81-120.

47. Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980): 17.

48. DuBois and Gordon, “Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield,” 33.

49. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 82.

50. John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History o f Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 153.

51. Estelle Freedman, “‘Uncontrolled Desires’: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960,” Journal of American History 71, no. 1 (1987): 83-106.

52. D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 260-61.

53. Allan Bérubé, Coming Out under Fire: The History o f Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: Macmillan, 1990).

54. As quoted by George Chauncey Jr., “The Postwar Sex Crime Panic,” in True Stories from the American Past, ed. William Graebner (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993), 162.

55. Freedman, “`Uncontrolled Desires.”’

56. Chauncey, “Postwar Sex Crimes,” 160-78.

57. Freedman, “`Uncontrolled Desires,”’ 92.

58. Freedman, “`Uncontrolled Desires,”’ 84.

59. Chauncey, “Postwar Sex Crimes,” 160-74.

60. Heidi Handman and Peter Brennan, Sex Handbook: Information and Help for Minors (New York: Putnam, 1974).

61. Lawrence Stanley, “The Child Porn Myth,” Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 7 (1989): 295-358.

62. U.S. House Committee on the judiciary, Sexual Exploitation of Children: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Crime, 95th Congress, first session, 1977, 42-48. See also, Judianne Densen-Gerber and Stephen F. Hutchinson, “Sexual and Commercial Exploitation of Children: Legislative Responses and Treatment Challenges,” Child Abuse and Neglect 3 (1979): 61-66.

63. “‘Child Sex’ Cop Transferred,” Bay Area Reporter, March 18, 1982, 8.

64. U.S. House Judiciary Committee, Sexual Exploitation of Children, 48.

65. Stanley, “The Child Porn Myth,” 313.

66. Joel Best, “Dark Figures and Child Victims: Statistical Claims about Missing Children,” in Images of Issues: Typifying Contemporary Social Problems, ed. Joel Best (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1989), 21-37.

67. Stanley, “The Child Porn Myth,” 313.

68. Lucy Komisar, “The Mysterious Mistress of Odyssey House,” New York Magazine, November 1979, 43-50. The charges were not indictably substantiated, but they were enough to exile Densen-Gerber from Odyssey House and, for a time, social service altogether. In 1998, she was running Applied Resources Corporation in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

69. “`Child Sex’ Cop Transferred.”

70. See Nathan and Snedeker, Satan’s Silence. Nathan was for a long time the only journalist in America who published skeptical investigations of “satanic ritual abuse.” Later, she was joined by the documentarist Ofra Bikel and others, and by the early 1990s, their painstaking reporting began to turn some opinion around.

71. Daniel Goleman, “Proof Lacking in Ritual Abuse by Satanists,” New York Times, October 31, 1994.

72. The charges were brought by the adopted daughter of a zealous police chief, and, as in Salem, the people who objected to what looked to them like a widening witch-hunt, found themselves accused. The defendants were disproportionately poor, uneducated, and in several cases mentally disabled, and no defendant without a private attorney was acquitted. Kathryn Lyons, Witch Hunt: A True Story of Social Hysteria and Abused Justice (New York: Avon, 1998).

73. Documented by the Justice Committee, San Diego, Calif.; Boston Coalition for Freedom of Expression, Boston, Mass.; Nathan and Snedeker (Satan’s Silence); and others.

74. Selcraig, “Chasing Computer Perverts,” 72.

75. Seminar conducted at the University of Southern California by R. P. Tyler (reported by James R. Kincaid, author interview).

76. Lawrence A. Stanley, “The Child-Porn Myth,” Playboy, September 1988, 41.

77. The notion of predisposition informs all sting operations: police are not allowed to entice somebody into breaking the law (that would be entrapment) unless they have evidence indicating he is likely to do so on his own. Narcotics agents commonly buy from a known dealer; occasionally an undercover cop will put herself into a position to be assaulted by a rapist whose m.o. is known.

However, the establishment of predisposition in child pornography enforcement is not so straightforward, because the enforcers’ motives aren’t. If the goal is to eradicate deviance and not necessarily to prevent actual crimes, as the ACLU’s Marjorie Heins suggests, suspicion of deviance goes a long way toward legally establishing predisposition to criminality. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s manual for law enforcers suggests including in requests for search warrants a profile of what they call a “preferential child molester,” accent on preferential, since he might want to do something he’s never done.

Since the person needs to have demonstrated no greater erotic interest in children than logging onto a site where they congregate (I, in researching this chapter, could be accused of such acts), the tactic resembles setting somebody up for a drug bust not because he’s actually sold or bought drugs but because he has watched the doings of the dealer next door or because he has an “addictive personality.”

Once a “preference” for “child molestation” has been thus established, a search warrant stating this preference in the suspect alerts cops to the probability that a collection of illegal child pornography awaits their search. And the search fulfills their expectations: they find pictures and, whether they’re pornographic or not, take them to be clues to molestation. “The photograph of a fully dressed child may not be evidence of an obscenity violation, but it could be evidence of an offender’s sexual involvement with children,” says the National Center’s manual.

In 1995 I asked Raymond Smith, who heads the Postal Inspection Service’s child pornography investigations, about his estimation that PI agents find “evidence of child molestation” in 30 percent of their searches of the homes of suspected pedophiles:

”We’ll find pictures of kids-no sexual act; we don’t know where these kids come from. But you get a gut feeling ... you learn to identify it.... We’re not finding a videotape of this guy having sex with the ten-year-old girl next door. We’re not finding a picture. Just from what we see in the house and how they talk.

”When we get into these cases, many of these individuals literally confess to committing horrible acts, before they’re arrested. Sometimes that is fantasy, which is not against the law. But when you have the child pornography present, combined with the fantasy, in my opinion not only are they violating the law, they also pose a serious threat to children in the community where they live. If somebody told me this man never molested before, but, man, he loves kids and I knew he was a member of NAMBLA [the North American Man/Boy Love Association, a support group-propaganda organization], I would think that person was a threat to my child. But I have no, quote, evidence that he molested.”

78. At this writing, in 2001, a constitutional challenge to the 1996 law is on the Supreme Court’s docket.

79. “Cynthia Stewart’s Ordeal,” editorials, Nation (May 1, 2000).

80. James R. Kincaid, “Hunting Pedophiles on the Net,” salon.com, August 24, 2000.

81. A particularly harrowing account of a year-long entrapment campaign resulting in the conviction of a man who seemed to have no preexisting sexual interest in children can be found in Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (New York: Grove Press, 1996).

82. Christopher Marquis, “U.S. Says It Broke Pornography Ring Featuring Youths,” New York Times, August 9, 2001.

83. Kincaid, “Hunting Pedophiles on the Net.”

84. During the U.S. Postal Inspection Service’s late-1980s Project Looking Glass investigations, 5 of the 160 people indicted saved the government the effort of seeking a plea bargain by promptly committing suicide.

85. Marquis, “U.S. Says It Broke Pornography Ring Featuring Youths.”

86. Susan Lehman, “Larry Matthews’ 18-Month Sentence for Receiving and Transmitting Kiddie Porn Raises Difficult First Amendment Issues,” salon.com, March 11, 1999. The brazenness of the putative mother’s post gives it the scent of a sting operation, in my view. Frequenters of such chat rooms, and surely criminals involved in child prostitution, are meticulously secretive, understanding that they are under constant surveillance. In the mid-1990s, lawyer Lawrence Stanley was also indicted (though not convicted) for receiving alleged child-pornographic images through the mail. He had received the pictures from a client for whom he was acting as defense counsel; they were the indictable items in the client’s case, and Stanley was challenging the prosecutor’s claims that the images were indeed legally pornographic.

87. Kimberly J. Mitchell, David Finkelhor, and Janis Wolak, “Risk Factors for and Impact of Online Sexual Solicitation of Youth,” Journal of the American Medical Association 285 (June 20, 2001): 3011-14 (unpaginated online). Commenting on the study, Harrison M. Rainie, the director of a more comprehensive study called “Teenage Life Online,” by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, said, “Virtually every kid we talked to knows there are some really bad things and bad people in the online world, and know that there are some good things and good people. When they get down to weighing the pluses and minuses, most kids will say the pluses pile up and the minuses are manageable.” John Schwartz, “Studies Detail Solicitation of Children for Sex Online,” New York Times, June 20, 2001.

88. Ron Martz, “Internet Spreading Child Porn, Investigators Say,” Sunday Rutland Herald, June 28, 1998, A8.

89. “Bonfire of the Knuckleheads,” Contemporary Sexuality 28 (April 1994): 1.

90. James Kincaid documented a dozen or so with newspaper articles, but my researches would suggest there are many more that don’t make the papers. James Kincaid, “Is This Child Pornography?” salon.com, January 31, 2000.

91. Katha Pollitt, “Subject to Debate,” Nation (December 13, 1999); “Cynthia Stewart’s Ordeal”; and Cynthia Stewart and David Perrotta, “Thank You, Nation Family,” letters, Nation (May 1, 2000).

92. Matt Golec, “Bill Would Expand Sex Offender Notification Law,” Burlington Free Press, January 30, 2000, Al.

93. Ross E. Milloy, “Texas Judge Orders Notices Warning of Sex Offenders,” New York Times, May 29, 2001.

94. In 1997, the first subject of the Kansas law, who had no record of violence, but rather a rap sheet of exhibitionism and mild fondling, brought his case to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost. The law was upheld. By that year, Washington, Arizona, California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin had passed similar laws.

95. Bill Andriette, “America’s Sex Gulags,” Guide (August 1997) (reprint): 1-3.

96. A 1996 review of the data by the National Center for Institutions and Alternatives concluded that only 13 percent of former sex offenders are arrested for subsequent sex crimes. This compares with a recidivism rate of 74 percent for all criminal offenders. The NCIA estimated at this time that of 250,000 potential compliers with community registration statutes, 217,000 were “ex-offenders” or people who were not destined to commit additional crimes. National Center for Institutions and Alternatives, “Community Notification and Setting the Record Straight on Recidivism,” Community Notification/NCIA/info@ncianet.org, November 8, 1996.

97. In Corpus Christi, several of the men who posted warning signs immediately had their property vandalized, two were evicted from their homes, and one attempted suicide. An intruder threatened the life of the father of one of the men, who had been arrested for indecency with a child in 1999 “after a night of drinking ended with an encounter with a fifteen-year-old girl.” Milloy, “Texas Judge Orders Notices.”

98. Todd Purdum, “Registry Laws Tar Sex-Crimes Convicts with Broad Brush,” New York Times, July 1, 1997. Later that year, California excised the names of men convicted of consensual homosexuality from the list. “Gay Exception Made to Registration Law,” New York Times, November 11, 1997.

99. U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, “Child Pornography and Pedophilia,” Report 99-537, October 6, 1986, 3.

100. Evidence suggests that statutory rape, or sex with minors, did occur at Waco. David Koresh did so with the parents’ consent, because his followers believed it “was his religious duty to father 24 children by virgin mothers.” Because the parents cooperated, the state did not bring charges. Dick J. Reavis, The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1998).

101. The number of fatalities, including the number of children among them, is hard to pin down. On James Tabor and Eugene Gallagher’s “Why Waco?” Web site, a list of Branch Davidians counts seventy-two dead, including twenty-three children. The New York Times, reporting on the FBI’s belated admission that it had fired pyrotechnic gas canisters at the compound, noted on August 26, 1999, that “about 80 people, including 24 children, were found dead after the fire.” The following day, a subsequent story said “about 80 people, including 25 children.” David Stout, “FBI Backs Away from Flat Denial in Waco Cult Fire,” New York Times, August 26, 1999, Al; Stephen Labaton “Reno Admits Credibility Hurt in Waco Case,” New York Times, August 27, 1999, Al. The Justice Department’s report directly following the events said “the medical examiner found the remains of 75 individuals” but did not specify how many were children. Edward S. G. Dennis Jr., “Evaluation of the Handling of the Branch Davidian Stand-Off in Waco, Texas, February 28 to April 19, 1993,” U.S. Department of justice report, Washington, D.C., October 8, 1993.