ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Canadian media coverage of law enforcement activities related to child pornography and the sexual exploitation of children. A difficulty of writing about this topic is that we live in a culture that would prefer not to discuss complex issues pertaining to the sexuality of children and teenagers. When circumstances dictate that we must discuss them publicly, we would prefer not to discuss them with too much complexity. The sexuality of young people stirs strong emotions, especially in those adults who care for them and want to protect them from harm. Sometimes, these emotions about young people’s sexuality become political weapons in the war against sexual deviants of all kinds, the raw materials from which powerful alliances between cultural conservatives and well-meaning liberals can be forged. As Gayle S. Rubin has written, “For over a century, no tactic for stirring up erotic hysteria has been as reliable as the appeal to protect children. The current wave of erotic terror has reached deepest into those areas bordered in some way, if only symbolically, by the sexuality of the young” (Rubin 1993, 6).
