Underage and Under Siege

The New York Times explained the witch-hunting of Levine by her book's release in the midst of the Catholic Church's explosive sexual abuse scandal. From a publicist's perspective, at least, the timing was a boon; Levine's footnoted, scholarly work made it up to No. 25 on the Amazon.com bestseller list and has gone into a 20,000-copy second printing. But what's so frustrating about the hysteria (aside from giving groups like the conservative Family Institute an excuse to host press conferences with lurid titles like "Pedophilia Book") is that it obscures Levine's astute analysis of what's gone wrong between adults and children in the U.S.

Drawing on social science and history, Levine makes a strong case that the denial of sexuality is the true cause of harm to minors. The book uses most of its 300 pages to detail the mounting anxiety over sex play between children, the restriction of youth access to the Internet, and a blackout on critical sexual information in the name of government-funded abstinence education. But Levine might just as well have focused on abusive priests. "If I wanted to design a historically accurate, long-term study to prove the point of my book, [the subject] would be the Catholic Church," the author sighed wearily.

Harmful to Minors' most important contribution is tying that protective impulse to adults' deep-rooted discomfort with their own sexuality. In the section that secured her a central spot on the right's radar, Levine teases apart the disproportionately large spot the pedophile occupies in the American psyche. She doesn't deny that strangers sometimes rape children ("I can't believe I've had to clarify that," said the exasperated author), but points out that such crimes are far more often committed by family members. Levine describes the obsession with pedophiles as stemming both from a reluctance to confront incest and the rampant sexualization of children throughout the culture. Rather than focus on ourselves, she says, adults "project that eroticized desire outward, creating a monster to hate, hunt down, and punish."

The spot the paedophile occupies in our the British psyche is also disproportionately large, and statistics illustrate that such fears are unfounded.

http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,772586,00.html

Of the 490 children abducted every year, most are taken by a family member. The small number of homicide victims in the five-16 age group rose from 22 to 29, but strangers remain a far lesser threat to children than their parents. In almost all categories of accident, from car crashes to playground falls, children run a decreasing risk of grave harm. Child deaths from mishaps fell from 10 in 100,000 in 1979 to three in 100,000 by 1998. No country bar Sweden is a safer place to grow up, according to Unicef.

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13843

Related stories concern child abduction, rape and murder have been ongoing in the US.

The coverage of stolen children there has turned the airwaves into a vast ministry of fear (to use Graham Greene's famous phrase). "The parents I know live in eternal dread that their briefest lapse of attention could have fatal consequences -- "I'm already overprotective," says a friend about her 7-year-old -- and cable news does them no favors by making stories of kidnap and murder the wallpaper of daily life. We're being force-fed paranoia each time a rabble-rouser like Bill O'Reilly claims that 100,000 kids are grabbed every year by strangers when the correct number is closer to 600 (welcome to the No Facts Zone!)."

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Last update: Saturday, August 17, 2002 at 2:18:06 PM.