Volume 3, Issue 3: May - June, 2002

Contents Cover Story     Child Labor Laws Articles     Just In My Opinion     Perspective     Sue’s Review Features     Buzz     Letters     News Links     Redirect

Sue’s Review by Susan Wishnetsky, Treasurer, ASFAR Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex Judith Levine, Joycelyn M. Elders, 2002 in hardcover Levine, Judith.  Harmful to minors : the perils of protecting children from sex.  Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2002. America is a land of free speech, of open debate.  Almost every proposal has its opponents.  And while the stronger voice usually gets its way without much compromise, that doesn’t mean that the opposition must remain silent thereafter.  Look at the months since September 11: critics of George W. Bush and his war on terrorism may have been publicly derided or condemned, but they have been speaking, in newspapers, on TV, and in public protests.  In America, unpopular points of view are not suppressed ... unless it’s about something as unpeakable as kids being allowed to have sexual lives. There is plenty of talk about kids and sex in the mass media—as long as that combination is portrayed as uniformly dangerous and evil.  People who count the number of times they hear the word “sex” in relation to children on news programs these days will be convinced that talking about the subject is far from forbidden, what with all the talk about the Catholic priest scandal.  But the arguments are all on one side. Judith Levine’s Harmful to Minors was unpublished for years.  It was suppressed not by the government, but by a string of publishers who rejected her work (or called for vast revisions only to end up chickening out and dropping the book anyway).  Editorial boards found the book “commercially unenviable”, calling it “hard to swallow” and “radioactive”.  It remained unpublished because of fear, the fear that “is precisely what Harmful to Minors is about”.  These publishers knew all too well what might happen to them if they released the book. It had happened before, when the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously voted to condemn a 1998 research article in the Psychological Bulletin which concluded that consensual sex between a minor and an adult is not generally traumatic and should not be classified as abuse.  And just this year, Missouri legislators punished the University of Missouri with a $100,000 budget cut for allowing a similar article to be seen by the public (New York Times, April 13, 2002, p.B1). Violating this particular taboo can get you in big trouble with the government, even if they can’t arrest you for expressing your views or truthfully reporting the results of your research (yet).  And let’s not forget about hate mail, bomb threats, or actual attacks by angry fanatics. Many of the anticipated consequences did happen to the University of Minnesota Press when the book’s publication was announced.  Even before its scheduled May 2002 release, the Minnesota House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning the book.  Under pressure from Minnesota House majority leader Tim Pawlenty to cancel the publication, the publisher agreed to allow their selection process to be reviewed by people from other academic presses.  They got the hate mail and angry phone calls, too.  One can only imagine the personal consequences for those involved with this book, branded “perverts” by their relatives, neighbors or church groups ... But the publicity paid off for the publisher—the first printing sold out even before it hit the bookstore shelves.  Sometimes it pays to take a risk. Now I wouldn’t urge you to buy this book just to support a courageous writer or publishing house, although I have to admit that’s one of the reasons I rushed to get my copy.  I urge you to buy it because it’s good, superbly researched and written.  It’s enjoyable reading, too, full of stories that illustrate the facts and figures. Levine explores the historical changes in attitudes about children and sexuality, showing how these attitudes differed from and contributed to our current paranoia and prudery .  She exposes the statistical distortions, which often grow with each retelling, used to fan the flames of hysteria.  She reveals the political trade-offs which allowed “abstinence” to become the only acceptable topic in most sex education classes (with contraception mentioned only to stress its unreliability), even though the graduates of abstinence classes are afterward just as sexually active “as kids who had received lessons stressing condom use, with the dangerous difference that the first group hadn’t been taught anything about safe sex.”  And she recounts the true stories of ordinary kids, parents, and teachers who have been harmed by the pervasive fear and suspicion that surrounds any place children and adults come together. In one story, a nine-year-old boy was taken from his mother’s home and placed in a harrowing “treatment program” for young sex offenders because he’d poked his little sister’s behind.  (He’d also been known to utter swear words and look under girls’ skirts.)  The sister, labeled a “victim”, was also removed and subjected to plenty of “treatment”; the mother was naturally suspected of abuse.  After two years and $30,000 in legal expenses, the family was reunited and allowed to recover from all this “treatment”. Parents, already frantic about the dangers of “predatory” pedophiles, must also worry about their own innocent play with their children, their “in the bathtub” photographs, their shows of affection.  Teachers have also been affected; one, who felt compelled to give up his career soon after it began, is quoted: “What a stifling effect this moral panic held for a young male teacher who until this time worried mostly about establishing warm, trusting relationships with all the children .... I started to worry and second-guess myself when I went about my once taken-for-granted routines of changing diapers, wiping runny noses, unbuttoning and buttoning a two-year-old’s ‘Button Down 501’ jeans .... suddenly, the sense of touch, which has always been such an integral part of my relationship with children ... was being called into question.” And the dilemma of an older teacher is described: ... She had been reprimanded by an administrator for not intervening when a group of four- and five-year-olds enacted childbirth with a doll .... She thought it was an excellent game, in fact, and because one child had seen her baby sister being born, impressively accurate.  But her student teacher ... complained to the school’s headmistress, who in turn instructed the teacher to stop such games in the future.  The headmistress averred that the play was harmless and might even be educative, but she feared that parents, if they found out, might react as the student teacher had.  The senior teacher protested that such a situation offered a good opportunity to educate such parents, but she was overruled.  She told me she wasn’t sure what whe would do the next, inevitable, time such a game occurred.  Fifteen or twenty years ago, she added, such play would have been regarded as healthy and unremarkable. The book covers nearly every topic that could be raised.  Only one aspect of the book concerned me: Ms. Levine’s assumption that all children crave and need physical affection (which I agree is basically true) did not include the qualification that not all children are the same—some children need more than others—and that the affection should be wanted and enjoyable to the child.  The possible effect of the unwanted (non-sexual) physical contact to which children are so often subjected, such as having to accept unwelcome kisses from relatives, being tickled, pinched, tossed or spun around against their will, was not discussed. Psychologist Richard Farson suggested in his 1974 book Birthrights that being forced to submit to such invasions of personal space might teach a child that what happens to their bodies is not under their control.  I have seen no other mention of this theory elsewhere, but it rang true to me. Perhaps this is a topic for further research, and another book! Two long passages can be viewed for free at <http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/L/levine_harmful.html>.  But don’t stop there; do buy this book, or check it out from your local library.  If your library doesn’t own it, encourage them to buy it.  Since the arguments in this book are so seldom seen, no library’s collection could be truly balanced without it.