Introduction

Abstract

Contraband: aesthetes, pornographers and paedophiles These days a book entitled Children and Sexuality rings alarm bells. Is it another call to whip up the flames demanding an end to sexual abuse and other forms of behaviour that contribute to the current malaise — some will say outright hysteria and panic? Or is it something else? No doubt exists that in the early twenty-first century many Westerners, and perhaps Easterners too, find themselves in the midst of a moral crisis about children: their mental and physical well-being, especially their safety and new levels of obesity; their legal rights in systems of law currently in rapid transition; the state’s sense that childrens’ rights must be protected and policed; as well as concerns about their education, access to the Internet and other forms of vulnerability. On grey days, when the media lurch out about the decay of our children, it seems as if we dwell in the land of The Color Purple.