Research on pedophilia in academia, and writings on pedophilia in heavyweight journals -- an internet research-guide for students and scholars.

This is not a comprehensive attempt to list everything on the web to do with the subject. Rather it's my "working bibliography" of links to intelligent online papers, books, articles and interviews, which I hope are likely to be of interest to other humanities-based researchers and writers.

It assumes you've done your basic basic homework and read primers like Weeks' Sexuality and The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. It also assumes that the history of children's sexuality, and its repression, is indivisible from the history and current constructions of "the paedophile". It has been compiled by a pro-sex feminism-informed skeptic :) I hope eventually to include papers and articles for direct download from this page.

Last updated, May 14th 1999

Contents:
1. Histories of child sexualities
2. Censorship of art and photography
3. Influence of erotic images
4. Media coverage
5. Critical theory
6. Statistical and evidential issues
7. Literary studies
8. Art studies
9. Cultural Studies
10. Interviews / panel discussions
11. Personal accounts
12. "Satanic abuse" panics
13. Misc resources

1. Histories of child sexualities:

Good primer on the social construction of childhood.

A comprehensive bibliography on pedophilia research, especially good on historical research. [Link does not work anymore]

Full text of an academic paper, Canes, Berets and Gangsta Rap: Disciplining Sexuality In School, 1920-1995. [Link does not work]

"From the point of view of the 'discipline of the body' it would seem that Progressivism - which rests on assumptions of freedom of choice, intrinsic motivation, and self-discipline - is in direct opposition to some traditional school regulatory practices with respect, for example, to students' dress [...] However, as Valerie Walkerdine has argued, what happens is that the processes of discipline, regulation and normalisation become more covert: "the child supposedly freed by this process to develop according to its nature was the most classified, catalogued, watched and monitored in history. Freed from coercion, the child was much more subtly regulated into normality" (Walkerdine, 1992, p 18). Within a Progressivist school environment, she argues, "Discipline became not overt disciplining, but covert watching...[as] the classroom became the facilitating space for each individual under the watchful and total gaze of the teacher"."

Salon extract from a new book The Body Project - an intimate history of American girls.

"In 1952, in an article in Parents' Magazine, physician Frank H. Crowell endorsed bras for young girls and spelled out a theory and program of teenage breast management ... In the interest of both beauty and health, mothers in the 1950s were encouraged to check their daughters' breasts regularly to see if they were developing properly. This was not just a matter of a quick look and a word of reassurance. Instead, Crowell and others suggested systematic scrutiny as often as every three months to see if the breasts were positioned correctly. One way to chart the geography of the adolescent bustline was to have the girl stand sideways in a darkened room against a wall covered with white paper. By shining a bright light on her and having her throw out her chest at a provocative angle, a mother could trace a silhouette that indicated the actual shape of her daughter's bosom. By placing a pencil under her armpit and folding the arm that held it across the waist, mothers could also determine if their daughter's nipples were in the right place. On a healthy breast, the nipple was supposed to be at least halfway above the midway point between the location of the pencil and the hollow of the elbow."

Short undergraduate paper from the University of California, Santa Barbera, "Sissy" boys and "unhappy" girls: childrearing during the Cold War... [Link does not work]

"Contrary to the old Watsonian philosophies, which advocated that parents tape their children's genitals at bedtime or tie their hands to the sides of the bed, the postwar experts maintained that masturbation was a natural part of human growth..."

Virtual Worlds of Girls is an online e-text of a 1997 dissertation by Juliet Gosling, subtitled an "e-book about girls power, girls' school stories, and the future of reading". With such chapters such as 'The History of Girls' School Stories'. You even get two more e-books, on on girl's reading, and another which is the author's earlier MA thesis (A World of Girls - Genre, Femininity & the Chalet School)! (Around 100 pages - you might want to grab the whole site with software such as Teleport Pro.) [Link does not work]

Book from the University of Toronto Press, Stories of Childhood : Shifting Agendas of Child Concern by Dr Stainton Rogers ...

From a review: "British academics in psychology and social welfare ... argue that the child-concern disciplines covertly provide a mandate that allows the adult world to treat the young as alien subjects, and to continue to keep them disenfranchised, and dehumanized."

"Uncontrolled Desires": The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960 by Estelle B. Freedman.
[Link does not work]

"A close look at the sex crime panics that began in the mid-1930s, declined during World War II, and revived in the postwar decade reveals that those episodes were not necessarily related to any increase in the actual incidence of violent, sexually related crimes. Although arrest rates for sexual offenses in general rose throughout the period, the vast majority of arrests were for minor offenses, rather than for the violent acts portrayed in the media."

Book note: Teaching Fear - The Religious Right's Campaign Against Sexuality Education [Link broken]

Course note: The USA's Cornell University offers a course on The Sexual Child... [Link broken]

"With respect to children, Americans today have what we might call a pedophilic imagination. The sexual child, as an emblem of trauma, has become the focus of moral panics from every point on the political spectrum - panics about cultural phenomena as various as child pornography, single motherhood, the Roman Catholic priesthood, access to the Internet, and gay studies curricula. But what is a child? What does it mean to love or desire a child? How might we construe child sexuality beyond the dominant, largely Freudian paradigm of Trauma? Who promotes the idea of child sexuality and why? How has it been constructed through narrative and visual imagery? This course offers a political, historical, and rhetorical analysis of the language of trauma that has developed around the sexual child in the past century. Readings for the course will include theoretical texts on child sexuality, trauma, and the debate over "false memory" (Sigmund Freud, James Kincaid, Judith Lewis Herman, Frederick Crewel; we will also do close readings of literary and visual texts, from Lewis Carroll's Alice books to Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining and Sally Mann's erotic photographs of children."

2. Censorship of art and photography:

Anne Higgonet's essay in The Yale Journal of Criticism, 'Conclusions Based on Observation'. Her new book is Pictures of Innocence : The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood.

"The law reads like a laundry list of vague terms. What does "sexually suggestive" mean, applied to places, poses, or attire? Has Congress invented a kind of Geiger counter for "sexual coyness"? "Sexual response" is remarkably singular. Our legislators feel confident they can see right through images to someone's unambiguous thoughts, but who is that someone, and how many someones need be involved -- will one suffice, and which one? Most disturbingly, the frame of legal interpretation slips and slides in every direction; "design," "intent," and "use" are treated interchangeably, but somehow "observation" remains reliable, precise, and consistent."

Index on Censorship article, the introduction by Edward Lucie-Smith to the recent 'Looking At Kids' special issue - "Eros and Innocence"...

"Though we know children do have sexual impulses, we prefer not to be brutally confronted with evidence of these. Still less do we like to be confronted with images which may, at some deep level, arouse unacceptable feelings in ourselves. We cannot, despite our familiarity with Freudian concepts, deal with the idea that parental love or its surrogates may contain a barely controlled sexual element. Our extreme self- consciousness about images of this kind has had a curious result. During a decade when the boundaries of tolerance, certainly in the English-speaking world, have gradually loosened to the point where almost any sexual image can be published or exhibited, they have become noticeably tighter where photographic representations of children are involved. It is not Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of male S&M activities that now cause concern, but his picture of a little girl throwing up her skirt to reveal her pudenda: the record of a spontaneous moment of exhibitionism of a sort very common in small children. Even Edward Weston's beautiful frontal torso of his young son has become the kind of image that publishers are reluctant to deal with. In these cases, the standard excuse is made: 'It is not, you understand, that I am disturbed by this particular image myself. It's just that other people might take it the wrong way.' "

'Defacing Mann and Others'*, is a short graduate essay on the USA controversy over the girl photography of Sturges, Hamilton, Mann and others.
* Link does not work.

"I'd like to suggest an alternative view of the good and the bad -- one that takes into account the productive role of power arrangements in the formation of legitimized knowledges or moralities, especially those of human and child sexuality. On this model, the idea that sexuality is something that can be or needs to be repressed is abandoned. It does not seek to establish an "original" condition of sexual purity, but recognizes the constructive role our practice and discourse plays in establishing ideas of normalcy."

Wired article, 'Canada's Thought Police'... [Link broken]

"Confusion between fantasy and reality goes to the heart of Canada's current madness. There is a metaphysical child or metaphysical woman out there whom people like politician Wappel and enforcer Sweeney seek to protect. The victim of these crimes is not a person but a sense of "human dignity" and "community" which Canada "defends" with armed police. That distinguishes the country from the US and from most of Europe, which, in their information laws, emphasize the rights of concrete individuals. Indeed, it is very hard to stop the flow of information in the US without a complainant, normally a libel plaintiff, who is materially hurt by false information."

Feature-article on Canadian laws, Child-less Child Pornography [Link does not work]

Bob Chantalle's Artists Must Oppose Witch Hunts...

"As Laura Marks attested, America is now an insane and scary place. And the scariest child abusers of all are those well-meaning vigilantes who spread ignorance and fear, thus robbing the coming generation of its precious birthright of freedom."

A pro free-speech opinion piece from ArtsWire, Why Defend "Child Pornography"? [Link does not work]

"...there is a need to recognize that not every sexual image involving a minor is problematic, and some serve important artistic, historical, scientific, and educational goals. [...] After resolving the easy cases and reason is restored to the debate about child pornography, perhaps it will be possible to discuss the harm to the mind and spirit when taboos are institutionalized and dissent demonized."

Intellectual Capital's 'Bang The Tin Drum No More' * is a feature-article on US censorship of movies featuring children's sexuality
* Link does not work.

"Not only does this thought-crime approach endanger all manner of expressive material that might inspire some illegal act -- after all, there are well-documented cases in which particular individuals have felt driven to commit heinous crimes by everything from The Bible to Crime and Punishment to Beavis and Butthead. Even worse, the federal law's fixation on fantasy undermines the vitally important goal of protecting actual children from actual abuse."

Sex & Censorship - dangers to minors and others? [Link broken] is a critical June 98 background paper on the recent sex-panics in the USA, from Censorship News Quarterly.

Article in the Bad Subjects journal, 'Retouching the Schoolkids', on child photography and sexuality. (USA) [Links did not work]

New York Times editorial, 'A Dixie Book-Burning', on the 1998 Sturges/Mann/Hamilton Alabama indictements.

Article from South Africa's Mail & Guardian, Knotted nappies, which is an intelligent survey of how contemporary artists are representing children's active sexuality. [Link did not work anymore]

Lawrence Stanley's essay 'The Coming Criminalization of Art'.

University of Toronto academic paper 'Reflections on the Duehring and Brand Cases: Political Correctness and the Current Abandonment of Academic Autonomy to the Culture of Comfort', which is a paper which looks critically at the sacking of academics for expressing views on pedophilia.

Sabine magazine article, "Endandered Expressions", on nude children and photography...

"Freedom and consent are the key issues when considering the legitimacy of artists such as Jock Sturges, Sally Mann, and David Hamilton. Each attains the permission not only from the subject, but also that of the parents of the subject. An individual has a right to be photographed and the photographers have a right to photograph the individual. This right is guaranteed by the First Amendment and the First Amendment does not discriminate against age, creed, color, or sex. Any form of suppression, whether it be of images or information is unconstitutional."

3. Influence of erotic images:

Intellectual Capital article by Nadine Strossen, 'Schoolgirls, Sex and Speech', [link did not work] which strongly questions the assumption that teens are harmed by reading or viewing sexual material.

Familial and societal attitudes toward nudity, an academic paper from California State University, which surveys previous research and concludes... [Link did not work]

"The results of the research presented would seem to speak clearly and with force: children's exposure to nudity is not only not harmful, it appears to be beneficial."

Some other summaries of papers on a similar topic to the above link are: The relationship between adult sexual adjustment and childhood experiences regarding exposure to nudity, sleeping in the parental bed, and parental attitudes toward sexuality and Children's perceptions of clothes and nakedness: a cross-national study. [Links did not work]

Screening Out Sex: Kids, Computers, and the New Censors by Marjorie Heins, is an intelligent overview of the issues around 'Net Nanny' type software and children's online liberties.

'Morality and imagination - technology challenges both', feature-article by Bill Frezza...

"It's certainly not illegal to sell pictures of murders being committed, newspapers do it all the time. Judging by the insatiable appetite the viewing public has for graphic violence, both real and simulated, it's also clear that most law abiding citizens find it curiously entertaining to watch depictions of gross criminal acts. They seem to be able to watch hours of this on TV without going out and murdering their neighbors.

What makes child pornography different?"

Salon article by Camille Paglia, 'Why We Leer at JonBenet'.

"The hysteria over day-care child abuse that peaked in America in the early 1990s transmogrified first into fascist surveillance of professional photographers for suspected pedophilia and then into a shrill political crusade to crack down on Internet "indecency"..."

4. Media coverage:

A review of Valerie Walkerdine's new book Daddy's Girls: Young Girls and Popular Culture.

"Walkerdine's main thesis is that working-class girls experience an Electra complex of enormous proportions, scorning their downtrodden mothers and visualizing themselves in romantic alliances with their fathers. In this, she says, they are aided by pop-culture stories such as Annie and My Fair Lady, by advertisements (she cites ads by Volkswagen, Yoplait, and Kodak), and by girls' comics and magazines. Girls are taught that if they combine innocence with eroticism to charm a father figure, they might make it to a higher social level."

The Nation essay, 'The New Puritanism - Who's afraid of Lolita (we are)'

"We are so insecure and negligent in our parenthood and citizenship, caught between a public sphere (officialdom) that feels hollow and a private sphere (family) that feels besieged, that we seem to project onto the body of an imaginary child -- "innocent," "missing," "inner," coveted, abused, eroticized, abandoned, homeless, emblematic and commodified -- all our fear and rage. Caretakers become scapegoats, as do novels, movies, television and Calvin Klein.   About Lolita, Humbert told us that she was "the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster," to whom all advertising was ultimately directed--and she would, of course, consume herself. In one of those peculiar reversals of the very terms of hyperreality in which Nabokov specialized, as if caught "in the lining of time," all our children are nymphets, our adults are Humberts and Quiltys and Kinbotes, the culture we dream in our sailor suits is an insect Zembla, and the face on the milk carton at the supermarket is our own mug."

Complete online dissertation: The Press and Paedophilia [Link does not work] by Tonje Bergmo. Her English isn't wonderful, and the whole thing feels cobbled together - but it's an interesting attempt by a Norwegian journalist to take a relatively balanced view of English media coverage. She concludes...

"...it could seem like paedophiles have turned into scapegoats for the bad consciousness in today's money-making society, which just does not know where to put our children. They also have to take the blame for the bad consciousness all of us have because we know that some - ostensibly - ordinary family husbands (and wives) are capable and do sexually abuse their children, even if we don't want to know. It can seem like the moral panics about paedophiles are not [really] about paedophiles - but about our children and the bad consciousness we have for them."

Recent Matthew Parris article, 'Call off the lynch-mob', from The Times of London.

"I don't talk to children in the street any more. Only today I stopped myself picking up and comforting a toddler who had fallen over on an escalator. In the damage done to millions of children made afraid of every stranger and millions of adults frightened of physical contact and friendship towards children, I believe that the wave of public anxiety about paedophilia now sweeping over us is doing incalculably more harm than the paedophilia itself.

Sooner or later, someone is going to be lynched, beaten to pulp or torched. Those politicians who have added to these flames should examine their consciences, for politicians can lead as well as follow."

Collection of press reports on the recent Canadian judge's ruling that the Canadian law against possession of child porn is unconstitutional.

Pedophilia and the Internet - old obsessions, new crusades, a conference in Rome, 27 October 1998... [Link does not work]

"The aim of the conference is to analyse and denounce the dangerous consequences for personal freedoms, for the right to privacy and for the development of new data-communication technologies, of legislative and judicial initiatives conducted under the impetus of the recent open campaign - with patent falsifications of truth - in regard to paedophilia in general, and the elision "Internet - Paedophilia" in particular."

 

Essay from Mother Jones magazine, 'A Question of Abuse'...

"An influential group of therapists is promoting a new scare: children who molest other children. Those who question the murky evidence are said to be 'in denial'. But it is the kids, taken from home and given intense therapy, who might be sufferering the most."

Child Pornography on AOL - a history of the AOL child-porn stings.

HotWired: JournaPorn * is a comprehensive dissection of the 1995 "journo-scare" about net child porn, centered around the fraudulent Rimm Report.
 * Link does not work.

5. Critical theory:

Primer on the social construction of childhood.

Hakim Bey's text, 'The Music of What Happens'. (Switzerland)

"The seductive child-imagery is not aimed at "pedophiles," who do not represent a significant market sector, nor is it created by "pedophiles." (The Klein ads, for example, were not based on "kiddie porn" but on the image of kiddie porn as filtered through "shock & revulsion" into an erotic evocation of "abuse.") These ads take their major source of power from what Deleuze & Guattari called the "Oedipal misery" of Capitalist society. Ultimately the seduction of imagery in the media is a family drama. The nuclear family monopolizes sexuality & yet denies it utterly (incest, "abuse") -- as Gide said, families are the "misers of love" ("How I hate them!"). The family is also the basic unit of consumption. By playing on frustrated desire within the family, the imagery of Capital builds up a huge repressed energy that can be directed into commodity fetishism. The utopia of love is embedded as a trace within the imagery of control. Desire is channeled away from free libidinal expression and into the energy forms of work & "leisure." The shock-&-revulsion imagery of the News thus complements the seductive imagery of the ads, sit-coms, records, etc. It's a sort of Good Cop/Bad Cop routine -- "Thou shalt not," warns the imagery of panic & abuse -- but you can get a taste of the forbidden fruit if you buy this product."

Feminist art-zine n.paradoxa has a densely theoretical review of Sally Mann's Immediate Family [Link does not work]

"Mann combines photography and motherhood to produce an alternative discourse of childhood and maternity. To mother and to photograph cease to be two distinct occupations; they sustain one another. In doing so, they upset our cherished ideas about what motherhood and childhood should entail. Immediate Family is important because it subverts patriarchal ideals and revels in its contradictions."

Full online thesis, BODY BODY BODY : High Art, Photography and Media in the Age of Digital Corporeality This is from Chapter 5... [Link did not work]

"Why are images of nude children so disturbing, to many of our fellow citizens? The most famous bare son is Edward Weston's famous portrait of his Neil. The specific pledge often demanded in the NEA "loyalty oath" by some politicians that the recipient of federal funds must promise he or she will not depict children frankly, in art. If Edward Weston had signed such an oath in 1931, he could not have openly displayed this classic picture, while using public money. Yet to many of our taxpayers Weston's images are not only breathtakingly innocent but completely without voyeuristic content. They are far less provocative, less likely to arouse that passion so feared by conservative institutions than commercial ads in any daily newspaper or on any television station anywhere, even in Utah."

Essay: 'The Democratic Erection...  [Link did not work]

"The Freudian explanations have reached a level of communal acceptance in society and that is how far it goes, on a theoretical level we tend to understand the problematic issues but in practise we are still acting numb. The recent discussion on paedophilia explains the situation fully; on one hand society (i.e. the state) does not understand the paedophile's need, it remains unable to even discuss the issues -- and on the other hand, the industry of pornography shows a quite fully developed understanding of the tools to provoke the feelings of paedophilia. Society must realise the link between pornography and the sexual frustration that causes our sexual behaviour which also affects our social behaviour, and so forth - it is impossible to seperate the emotions which define our human behaviours. There is a strong educational side to pornography which society still needs to realise and explore."

6. Statistical and evidential issues:

Children's Sexual Encounters With Adults : A Scientific Study

Paedophiles and Sexual Offences Against Children (Wiley Series in the Psychology of Crime, Policing and Law)

The paper 'Myths and Realities of Sexual Abuse Evaluation and Diagnosis: A Call for Judicial Guidelines' [Link did not work]  questions the top ten claims made by those in the child sexual abuse industry. See also the other papers in the archive. [link did not work]

Pedophilia, Science, and Self-deception - A Criticism of Sex Abuse Research, by Arne Frederiksen. [Link does not work]

Online copy of a chapter from the book Children and Sex, "The Effects of Early Sexual Experiences: a review and synthesis of research" *. (140kb zip file containing MS Word file and Adobe Acrobat PDF file)
* Link does not work, but see in this Ipce Library

Amazon.com have an review page for The Sexual Life of Children. (You can also order it direct from the publishers). [Link does not work]

'Child Sexual Abuse' or 'Consensual Teenage Sexual Activity'?, by Lex Watson, Senior Lecturer in Government, University of Sydney (Adobe Acrobat PDF file)

The complete text of Tom O'Carroll's book Paedophilia - the radical case

An abstract (summary) of a paper in an academic/medical journal: 'Sexual Arousal and Arousibility to Pedophilic Stimuli in a Community Sample of "Normal" Men'.

An Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Based on Nonclinical Samples

A Real Mensh magazine article, detailing allegations that U.S. child protection investigators routinely trample on constitutional rights. [Link does not work]

An English defence lawyer's account of the technicalities and defences involved in an "indecent images" case in Computers and Law magazine. [Link did not work]

7. Literary studies:

Details of a 1997 book, Nevermore: The Hymen and the Loss of Virginity, which has three chapters surveying defloration in literature and fairy tales.

"Poerotic mode: Lolita and Ada" [Link broken]- a whole chapter (in English) from the new book 'Roman et censure, ou la mauvaise foi d'Eros' [Novel and Censorship, or Eros' Bad Faith] (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1996). The chapter looks at Nabokov's most pedophilia-focussed books, 'Lolita' and 'Ada'.

Nabokov: Genius Ignored looks at why the novel 'Lolita' has been neglected as a work of literature.

A flyer for Hide and Seek: The Child between Psychoanalysis and Fiction by Virginia Blum.

"Hide and Seek raises provocative questions about the ways in which our culture fetishizes the idea of the child at the same time that we treat with comparative indifference the conditions under which many real children actually live."

Salon magazine, Lusting after "Lolita" celebrates the novel and explores one girl's response to it...

'Carol gave me a copy of "Lolita" [...]. And that is how I came to read it, in two rainy summer afternoons, when I was 12. And when I emerged tearfully from the bedroom, she just nodded and opened her arms, for I was a sensitive kid. "Poor, poor Humbert!" I cried. "Lolita was so mean!"  Carol's thinly plucked eyebrows shot up in surprise. This was not what she had had in mind.'

Salon essay, 'Alice in Mirrorland', on modern interpretations of the Alice figure.

A London Evening Standard review of A.N. Wilson's new novel, Dream Children

The Spitting Image issue on children's sexuality (the paper issue is sold out, but there [no more] are three pieces online).

8. Art studies:

Review of last year's Henry Darger retrospective exhibition Henry Darger: The Unreality of Being, at the Museum of American Folk Art in New York.

Amazon.com entry for Children in Photography : 150 Years.

Adolescence in Art: The Photography of Sally Mann in At Twelve, an illustrated essay/review from Cedarcrest University.  [Link does not work]

Balthus: Arts Erotica*, Master Gallery - Balthus, Balthus the painter, Bathlus - the reincarnation of the picture.
*[Link does not work]

Short ArtNet feature-article on sensual/erotic art featuring teenagers, 'Teenage Superstar'. [Link does not work]

9. Cultural Studies:

"Baby Bitches from Hell: Monstrous-Little Women in Film" by Barbara Creed, UCLA. This is a [once...] online dissertation about the portrayals of 'evil nymphets' in the US post-war cinema. Complete with small film-stills and some quicktime (.mov) movie clips...

"Monstrous little women, mad moppets, deadly dollies, deranged daughters, sinister sisters -- call them what you will, there is no doubt that multifarious images of the evil girl-child haunt the celluloid corridors of popular cinema..."

"Photographic Evidence, Naked Children, and Dead Celebrities -- Digital Forgery and the Law" is an [No more] online thesis by Jol Silversmith, Harvard Law School, 1998.

"Child pornography is sometimes simply equated with child molestation. But if no actual child is involved in its production, that simply cannot be the case -- unless one adopts the convoluted logic of commentators such as Catherine MacKinnon who argue -- and in almost any other context but this would be and usually are derided for so doing -- that imagination is in fact reality. But in the child pornography context, the distinction between imagination and reality is commonly jettisoned."

Three cultural studies essays about Japan, where the age of consent is 13 and where religion and literary and art censorship have not developed as they have in the West: 

  These articles are by Matt Thorn, an anthropologist and admirer of shōjo (girls) manga. The first two are at his site. Thorn eloquently describes the powerful effect of a 1974 shōjo manga, Tōma no Shinzō ("The Heart of Thomas"). Thorn says that the story,

 begins with the suicide of fourteen year-old Thomas, whose love for an older boy, Yuri, has gone unrequited. 

In his final love letter to Yuri, Thomas writes: 

To Yuri, one last time, This is my love. This is the sound of my heart. Surely you must understand.

In the end we discover that Yuri had in fact been in love with Thomas, but felt that he was unworthy of Thomas' love...  

Tōma no Shinzō was a major contributor to the rise of shōnen-ai (boyslove) manga, and eventually, in the 1980s, to yaoi, which depicts the teenage heroes of commercial anime and manga in homoerotic/homosexual situations. A leading U.S. yaoi storywriter has created a character whose name is also Thomas. Her Thomas is the epitome of a youth who  enjoys sex and romance with younger boys and older men. Her stories describe the sex explicitly and joyously, as something beautiful and necessary. 

 In her country, a child such as this would be condemned as sexually acting out and in need of therapy, or locked up as a sexually violent predator (as indeed some children are); his older partners would most certainly be imprisoned. In Japan, schoolgirls read such stories in comic book form on the train (the drawings leave little to the imagination). There, such love is considered in many ways an ideal.  

Both Thomases give the lie to the West's ideology that children's sexuality must be repressed. Yaoi has become a major popular culture form in the West among young women. Perhaps it has a potential for subverting some of the Western conceptions of children and sex.

10. Interviews / panel discussions:

High-level 1998 site from NerveMag: "Politicising Puberty - the zoning of child sexuality in art, advertising and the American household", a round-table of American luminaries and academics, including James Kincaid and even Sally Mann herself. [Link does not work]

Arts & Leisure magazine Jock Sturges interview *. See also the Jock Sturges Yahoo page. [Link does not work]

Cyanosis magazine's Interview with Nina Glaser...
[Links do not work]

CY: "You've done some work that contains nudes of children, and this has been a really serious issue recently in the United States. Has that presented you with any serious complications in dealing with the public? Have you had to deal with any legal repercussions or threats?"

NG: "There's been more concern, or fear introduced into the sessions -- because it looks bad...you know, I'm out in some public place with naked adults and children and a camera, and the parents aren't there... and to the naked eye of a law enforcement officer (laughing) it would look very dangerous. And so the element of fear enters into the session in a way that it normally wouldn't -- I mean we know that we're there to create art, and that we're respecting these children, and that we have their full understanding of what their doing, and the permission and understanding of their parents. But I've become a little more paranoid. There was this woman who called the police -- she called Vox magazine after they published some of my work, and she said that she was a survivor of incest, and that my work was child abuse -- that she was going to call the police. So I hid my negatives and got a lawyer who gave me very good advice, and I was told what my rights were."

Salon magazine's short Gore Vidal interview...

"No child was ever raped by a book or a picture. Actually, pedophiles are turned off by explicit sex - and adolescents can't think about anything else anyway."

Sexual Revolution and the Liberation of Children - an interview with feminist Kate Millet... [Link broken]

"Part of the patriarchal family structure involves the control of the sexual life of children; indeed, the control of children totally. Children have virtually no rights guaranteed by law in our society and besides, they have no money - which, in a money-economy, is one of the most important sources of their oppression. Certainly, one of children's essential rights is to express themselves sexually, probably primarily with each other but with adults as well."

11. Personal accounts:

Lesbian-feminist novelist Jane Rule's essay "Teaching Sexuality" [Link broken]

Salon magazine's famous Molested in which...

"A mother discovers that the legal system's nightmarish 'cure' for child sexual abuse can be worse than the disease."

'Growing up without Shame' [link did not work] is a book in which nudist children write about their experiences.

12. "Satanic abuse" panics:

Speak of the Devil : Allegations of Satanic Abuse in Britain is the government-commisioned report from a leading woman academic.

Students at the HyperMedia Research Centre of the University of Westminster, London, have put up an English-language copy of Luther Blissett's Italian book The Children of Satan - deconstruction of a scam. [Link does not work]

The Seattle Post's comprehensive critical overview and chronology of the notorious Wenatchee witch-hunt. (USA) [Link did not work anymore]

Monsters and Witches: distorted allegations and their dangers, a conference paper by Richard Guilliatt, Senior Writer, Sydney Morning Herald. (In PDF format: right-click, select "save as...")

Book review-site Spectral Evidence, promoting a critical book about the USA's "satanic child abuse" hysteria. [Link did not work]

The crisis that wasn't - pedophiles and the priesthood, a review of the book Pedophiles and Priests: The Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis.

Letter of Complaint to The Boston Globe, from participants in the Salem anti-witchhunt conference, about shoddy journalism.

Feature-article from The Guide gay men's magazine: 'Salem's Shadow'. [Link did not work]

Magick/musick zine Databass has a good account [Link did not work] of how the satanic-abuse panic forced one of the UK's most challenging artists (and his children) into exile for six years. The page also summarises the exile of the acclaimed UK photographer of children, Ron Oliver.

The abstract of a 1997 paper in an academic/medical journal: Case Study: False Allegations of Abuse Created in a Single Interview [Link does not work]

The American Civil Liberties Union have put a comprehensive report online, about the Wenatchee witch-hunts, 'When Child Protection Investigations Harm Children: The Wenatchee Sexual Abuse Cases', * and have sent a Letter to Janet Reno re Child Sex Abuse Investigations. For more info on the Waco and Ruby Ridge cases see: "The Wenatchee 'Sex Rings' Hoax - An Overview"
* Link does not work.

Issues in Child Abuse Accusations is an academic peer-reviewed journal which takes a critical stance on the topic.

Two locations for the banned official JET Report, now that the UK's High Court injunction against its leakers has finally been lifted -- here and here. [Link broken]

There are a huge number of sites with more information about this area. For more information, try: Witch Hunt Information Center [Link does not work]

13. Misc resources:

Princeton's Lewis Carroll photography gallery.

Interesting bibliography * which forms the Paedophilia section of the latest 1999 edition of The Men's Bibliography. [* Link does not work]

Full version of the recent Pediatrics paper on children's sexuality.

The Crazy Quilt Of Our Age of Consent Laws is an in-depth feature article, with comprehensive state-by-state tables for the USA. [Link does not work]

An excellent quality (suitable for use as a teaching resource) large scan of Sally Mann's "Candy Cigarette".

Information about a recent book The Child in Question * by Diana Gittins. It includes a chapter titled: 'Children's Sexuality: Why Do Adults Panic?'.
 * Link does not work.

Review of the book [Not working link>] First Do No Harm: The Sexual Abuse Industry

"Teen Sex is Not a Catastrophe", is an archived feature article. [Link does not work]

Feature-article from The Guide gay men's magazine, "America's Sex Gulags" [Link did not work]

Essay: 'Antisexuality and Child Sexual Abuse'

Feedmag essay, 'The Molester Within' by Mary Granfield, "on the panic over children's sexuality". [Link did not work]

Articles from the UK's influential LM magazine (in rough date order, most recent first):