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Pedophilia (or paedophilia), a term coined in 1896 by Richard Krafft-Ebing, refers to a pubescent individual who is sexually attracted to prepubescent individuals. U.S. concern about child molestation dates back to 1894, when a wave of legislation geared toward increasing the age of sexual consent was enacted. This interest was revitalized in 1932 with the media frenzy surrounding the Charles Lindbergh baby abduction and homicide. The panic led to the first wave of sexual psychopath legislation. In 1938, Illinois enacted the first sexual psychopath law, allowing judges to commit offenders convicted of sex offenses to mental health facilities in lieu of prison. Similar statutes followed elsewhere, but most had fallen out of favor by the late 1970s and early 1980s.

After several years elapsed, child protection issues again gained public attention with the 1987 case of Earl Shriner raping and mutilating a 6-year-old boy, the 1990 disappearance of Jacob Wetterling in Minnesota, the 1993 abduction and murder of Polly Klaas in California, and the sexual molestation and murder of 7-year-old Megan Kanka in New Jersey in 1994. Societal responses included the creation of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to increase public awareness concerning the safety of children, and passage of the National Child Search Assistance Act of 1990, mandating the immediate reporting of missing children. In addition, sexual psychopath state legislation regained popularity with passage of sexual predator laws and/or civil commitment statutes. Seemingly unaffected by constitutional challenges, the statutes gathered increased popularity and adoption in numerous states and the District of Columbia. Restricted movement of pedophiles through global positioning satellites (GPSs) and pedophile-free zones are even more extensive.

Even more far-reaching is the implementation of Megan's Law statutes. The 1994 Megan Kanka case produced an enormous amount of public outrage, resulting in the enactment, only 2 months later, of a New Jersey state statute commonly known as Megan's Law, that eventually led to federal legislation that included offender registration, community notification, civil commitment, discretionary use of the death penalty, discretionary life imprisonment, the development of a national sexual offender registry, lifetime supervision, DNA testing, fingerprinting, and the right to refuse good time credits. President William Clinton signed this legislation into federal law in 1996, and today all 50 states have some form of Megan's Law.

More recently, crimes perpetrated against Dru Sjodin and Jessica Lunsford by previously convicted sexual offenders resulted in other legislation: the Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Database Act (part of the 2006 Adam Walsh Protection and Safety Act) at the national level and the Jessica Lunsford Act in Florida in 2005. "Dru's Law" established a national sex offender database that links state information. The Jessica Lunsford Act mandates minimum 25-year sentences and lifetime electronic monitoring, and other states are considering similar legislation.

Given the private nature of sexual crimes and the limited forum children have to speak out about sex crimes, experts believe incidents of child sexual victimization are undercounted. While determining the full extent of child molestation is difficult, official reports and offender and victim surveys provide some insight into the frequency.

Despite increased publicity, sexual molestations and abuses decreased in recent years. The Children's Bureau reports that the rate of sexual victimization per 1,000 children in the population dropped from 1.9 in 1995 to 1.2 in 2004. The overall number of arrests for forcible and nonforcible sexual crimes also dropped from 75,229 in 1996 to 67,539 in 2005. Finally, selfreport rape victimization in individuals ages 12 and older has continuously gone down since the 1970s, from a 1979 peak of 2.8 per 1,000 to 0.5 per 1,000 in 2005. Victimization estimates in meta-analyses display much less consistency, positing the prevalence of child sexual abuse anywhere from 7 to 40 percent in girls and 3 to 13 percent in boys.

Despite the numerous publications citing a decrease in sexual abuse of both children and adults, U.S. media broadcasts persistently report an "epidemic" of child abductions, molestations, and homicides. The dramatic shift in the terminology used to describe offenders offers an additional indicator of the heightened concern over child predation. Child sexual offenders have most often been described as "predators" or "fiends," with the specific intention of metaphorically describing offenders as predatory animals aggressively seeking out innocent prey. While the term predator has no legal or psychological basis, American legislation bearing this terminology has recently been enacted, and its usage has increased dramatically.

The temporal coincidence between a decrease in child sexual abuse cases substantiated by child welfare services in the United States and an increase in pedophilia coverage in the New York Times, as well as the constant intensification of child sexual abuse repression laws, tends to indicate the existence of a moral panic centered on pedophilia in this country. The primary catalyst of this pedophilia panic has not been the increased frequency of child molestation; rather, sensationalized media reports and political crusading are responsible. This perceived threat of child molestation plays an important role in the generation of legislation. The resulting panic legislation is most often a knee-jerk reaction developed by the legislature to resolve the publicly perceived "emergency situation." More often than not, these types of laws are crafted amid a state of panic and lack the calm deliberation that effective legislation exhibits. While in theory the various types of legislation are attempts to keep children safe, the practical obstacles to each may outweigh their efficacy. Plagued by issues of misdirection of attention and vigilantism, the enactment of legislation begs the question of whether its initial implementation was necessary.

Bibliography:

1) Aylwin, A. Scott, Lea H. Studer, and John R. Reddon. 2003. "Abuse Prevalence and Victim Gender among Adult and Adolescent Child Molesters." International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 26(2):179-90.

2) Jenkins, Philip. 2004. Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

3) Jones, Lisa M. and David Finkelhor. 2001. The Decline in Child Sexual Abuse Cases. Juvenile Justice Bulletin, NCJ 184741. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

4) Sample, Lisa L. and Timothy M. Bray. 2003. "Are Sex Offenders Dangerous?" Criminology & Public Policy 3(1):59-104.

5) Seto, Michael C. 2004. "Pedophilia and Sex Offenses against Children." Annals of Sex Research 15:321-61.

6) Simon, Leonore M. and Kristen M. Zgoba. 2006. "Sex Crimes against Children: Legislation, Prevention, and Investigation." Pp. 65-100 in Situational Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse. Crime Prevention Studies, Vol. 19. Edited by R. Wortley and S. Smallbone. Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press.

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