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Our culture has enthusiastically sexualised the child while denying just as enthusiastically that it was doing any such thing. We have become so engaged with tales of childhood eroticism (molestation, abduction, pornography) that we have come to take for granted the irrepressible allure of children. We allow so much power to the child’s sexual appeal that we no longer question whether adults are drawn to children…. I do not deny that we are also talking sincerely about the poor, hurt children. But we worry also about maintaining the particular erotic vision of children that is putting them at risk in the first place… while we maintain the monstrous and perverse criminality of child sexual abuse, we also move to make it universal and inevitable.
Kincaid, Erotic Innocence, p. 13-4
