Book Excerpt: 'Harmful to Minors'

April 15 -- In Judith Levine's controversial book, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, she looks at children and sexuality. In the excerpt below, she argues that the public has an irrational fear of pedophilia, and that censoring children from sexual content does not protect them.

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. 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" — 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. Pedophiles are insatiable and incurable. "Statistics show that 95 percent 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. "The only molesters who can be considered permanently cured are those who have been surgically castrated," Ann Landers once wrote.

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. "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." 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.

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. 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.

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. 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. Extrapolating from other FBI statistics, those odds come out between 1 in 364,000 and fewer than 1 in 1 million. 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. As for Adam Walsh, invoked by the Boston Herald as the Ur-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.

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