ABSTRACT
In her 1987 essay, “‘Uncontrolled Desires’: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960,” historian Estelle B. Freedman confirms Rubin’s assertion that “no tactic for stirring up erotic hysteria has been as reliable as the appeal to protect children.” Describing a series of “sex crime panics that began in the mid-1930s, declined during World War II, and revived in the postwar decade” in the United States (1987, 84), Freedman observes that for a number of (mostly unconscious) reasons, crimes against children were of particular concern:
Social and cultural changes that occurred before, during, and after World War II led to increased public anxiety over child molestation; heightened concern over children can be linked to such developments as growing acceptance of female sexuality, dissemination of psychoanalytic theories of childhood sexuality, and women’s continued entry into the paid workforce (also perhaps a factor in moral panics over juvenile delinquency of the time). Freedman frames her discussion of the central role that adult concerns about children played in the sex crime panics of the 1930s-50s within a detailed analysis of the episodes’ wide-ranging effects on the lives of both children and adults. She asserts,
According to Freedman, the sex crime panics helped usher in at least three significant (and somewhat contradictory) changes in popular notions about sexuality: women and children who were victims of rape were increasingly seen as contributing to their own victimization, homosexuality came to be viewed as both utterly unlike heterosexuality and closely associated with violent child molestation, and the creation of the sexual psychopath – who supposedly embodied extreme sexual deviance – served to make some of those who took part in nonprocreative sex acts seem normal in comparison.
