Child Sexuality: Challenging the Taboos

Weeks before it hits store shelves, a book on America's anxieties about children and sex is already tapping into those very feelings. The book, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, has been the target of vitriol on talk radio and conservative websites, and was denounced by the majority leader of the Minnesota house of representatives as promoting the "disgusting victimization of children." Due later this month from the University of Minnesota Press, the book details what author Judith Levine calls "the sexual politics of fear." Drawing on interviews with families and researchers, Levine, a journalist, argues that adults harm children by associating sex with danger--warning kids about pedophiles, for instance, but not acknowledging that children and teens are capable of a measure of sexual pleasure. Getting abducted by a stranger is a less likely danger for most children than the chance that a teenager will catch a sexually transmitted disease, she says. "My aim is to sort out the real perils from the exaggerated ones."

The book contends that the concept of children as nonsexual beings is a relatively modern one and says forms of "sex play" considered harmless 25 years ago--such as masturbation before puberty--are now regarded by some psychologists as signs of abuse. Levine interviews family members who have been separated from one another when social workers made dubious claims of sexual abuse. She talks to a 21-year-old man sent to jail for up to 24 years for having sex with his 13-year-old girlfriend and wonders whether justice was truly served. The very fact that an author might ask such questions led many publishers to pass on the book. Levine says one publishing house called her manuscript "radioactive"; another told her it lacked the "comforting messages" of a parenting tome. The book's timing, coming as the sex-abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church unfolds, has not helped its cause. Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women for America's Culture and Family Institute, calls it an "academic cover for child molesters." Though the University of Minnesota said in a statement that it stands by the book as an "honest discussion about adolescent and children's sexuality," it responded to the outcry by creating a new external review policy for its books.

--By Rebecca Winters