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 of Criticism 8 (1995): 51. Wilson's conclusion, drawn from examinations of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of 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 of 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.