Magazine Article	Articles Archive

Since the 1970s, a positive feedback loop of public indignation and media heat has fostered the illusion of a pandemic of child abduction, rape, and murder. It began, perhaps, with an uptick in reports of sexual misconduct following the 1974 passage of Democrat Walter Mondale's Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA), a law requiring schools, clinics, social service agencies, and their employees to report suspected abuse or forfeit federal money.

CAPTA set the stage for scare campaigns by Lloyd Martin of the LAPD Sexually Exploited Child Unit, and by Judianne Densen-Gerber-- a future member of Ronald Reagan's anti-smut Meese Commission-- who alleged that 1.2 million children had been ensnared by the porn industry, and that children were routinely kidnapped for use in pornographic modeling and prostitution. The absence of hard evidence to support such claims made little difference to a gullible press.

View our poll archive

The homophobia lurking beneath child-sex folklore leapt to the surface in 1977, when born-again recording artist and Florida citrus spokesperson Anita Bryant launched her Save Our Children campaign in response to "widespread militant homosexuals' efforts to influence children to their abnormal way of life." Ironically, it was in response to hysteria fomented by Bryant-- specifically a Boston-area witch hunt focused on teenaged male hustlers and their johns-- that a new assortment of gay rights organizations came into being, including the minuscule, endlessly demonized North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).

The 1979 New York disappearance of six-year-old Etan Patz was widely attributed to traffickers in child prostitution or kiddie porn. Although the boy's actual fate was and is unknown, the case became a propaganda tool for tougher sex-offender legislation. In 1981, Adam Walsh, also six, was abducted at a Miami department store; his severed head was later found in a Florida canal. Outrage over his murder contributed to the founding of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

By the mid-1980s, when future sex-abuse avenger Stephen Marshall was born, parents had begun spotting sex fiends behind every tree. The trend was encouraged by such professionals as psychiatric nurse Ann Burgess, who seems to have invented the term "sex ring." Rumors of molestation conspiracies, often arising from coercive child interviews, swept the US. The hysteria reached from Malden, Massachusetts, where the Amirault family faced trumped-up charges of sexually assaulting toddlers in daycare, to Manhattan Beach, California, where allegations against the proprietors and staff of the McMartin Preschool were hatching the most exhaustive-- and fruitless-- trial process in US history.

Daycare panic overlapped with widespread fear of Satanic Ritual Abuse, a myth jointly sustained by reactionary Christians and leftists. Ms. magazine's Gloria Steinem was so certain of ritual abuse at the McMartin Preschool that she financed an archaeological dig intended to expose "abuse tunnels" under the school. (No tunnels were found.)

The 1980s witnessed the rise of the indomitably popular predator trope, and the transmogrification of the clinical term for an adult who is sexually drawn to children, pedophile, into a loaded buzzword, rife with sinister connotations. "The 'pedophile,'" notes James Kincaid in Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (1998), "is the place where a host of current revulsions are relieved; it is perhaps our most frequented cultural and linguistic toilet."

Activists such as the late, troubled Mike Echols, who died in prison in 2003, attorney/crime novelist Andrew Vachss, and freelance crackpot Judith Reisman have maintained that cultural commode in working order, and have channeled some of its effluvia into sex offender legislation-- and into the minds of those eager to take arms against monsters.