ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the ways in which child sexual abuse is represented in popular culture. The mass media, like psychology and psychiatry, shapes how childhood, sex and abuse are understood and experienced. Indeed, as signalled in the previous chapter, the mass media relies on mainstream mental-health understandings about child sexual abuse to inform its own ways of making sense of this issue. In this chapter I argue that mainstream depictions of victims and abusers circulate as `master narratives'. These narratives function as benchmarks against which we measure ourselves and through which others interpret our behaviour (Harris et al. 2001). In this sense sexual acts and desires are never simply an individual matter of private concern, but are mediated by how sex and sexuality are deployed in culture. As Foucault (1978: 11) argued:
The central issue . . . is not to determine whether one says yes or no to sex . . . but to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things which are said.
