41. Contract between offenders and parents and Sexual Treatment and Education Program and Services (STEPS), 2555 Camino Del Rio South, Ste. 101, San Diego, Calif. (last revised September 19, 1994).

42. Practices at STEPS may have changed, but, considering the literature on children who molest that has come out since, I have no reason to believe it has.

43. U.S. District Court (Vermont), Civil Action No. 2: 93-CV-383: Robert Goldstein et al. v. Howard Dean et al.

44. Testimony of Dr. Fred Berlin in Goldstein et al. v. Dean et al.

45. NCCAN Discretionary Grants, FY 1991, award no. 90CA1470.

46. Other research also strongly interrogates, and condemns, sex-specific treatment for young violent sex offenders as well. One study compared boys who had committed exceedingly brutal sex crimes with other young violent offenders and found that both groups had survived childhoods afflicted by severe violence but not by sexual abuse and that the two groups exhibited identical psychiatric and neurological disorders, including depression, auditory hallucinations, paranoia, and often "grossly abnormal EEGs" or epilepsy. "The assumption that sexually assaultive offenders differ neuropsychiatrically from other kinds of violent offenders, which has led to the establishment of specific programs for sex offenders," the researchers concluded, "must ... be questioned in the light of our data." Dorothy Otnow Lewis, Shelley S. Shankok, and Jonathan H. Pincus, "Juvenile Male Sexual Assaulters," American journal of Psychiatry 136, no. 9 (September 1979): 1194-96.

47. Gisela Bleibtreu-Ehrenberg, "Pederasty among Primitives: Institutionalized Initiation and Cultic Prostitution," in Male Intergenerational Intimacy, ed. Theo Sandfort, Edward Brongersma, and Alex van Naerssen (New York: Hawthorn Press, 1991), 13-30; William H. Davenport, "Adult-Child Sexual Relations in Cross-Cultural Perspective," in The Sexual Abuse of Children: Theory and Research, vol. 1, ed. William O'Donohue and James H. Geer (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Ehrlbaum Associates, 1992), 73-80.

48. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975). In 2001, the conviction by a United Nations war-crimes tribunal of three Bosnian Serbs for the rapes of captive Muslim women and girls marked the first time in history that "sexual slavery" has been designated a crime against humanity, deemed one of the most heinous crimes. Marlise Simons, "3 Serbs Convicted in Wartime Rapes," New York Times, February 23, 2001.

4. Crimes of Passion

1. Although these events received considerable press attention at the time they occurred, the people involved have returned to private life. Therefore, the names of the members of the two families and their personal acquaintances have been changed, along with their cities and state of residence. The following names are fictitious: Dylan Healy; Heather, Robert, Pauline, and Jason Kowalski; Laura and Tom Barton; June Smith; Jennifer Bordeaux; and Patrick. Of public figures, only the names of "Dylan Healy's" lawyer and the sentencing judge have been deleted. Press and court sources are in the author's possession, but notes corresponding to these sources have been omitted to prevent identification of the subjects.

2. Bob Trebilcock, "Child Molesters on the Internet: Are They in Your Home?" Redbook, April 1997.

3. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1984), 96.

4. Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 29.

5. Historically U.S. law has denied the right of certain people, such as slaves and married women, to say no, and others, such as the mentally disabled, to say yes to sex, marriage, or procreation. But our ideas of what sorts of people can't say yes or no to sex often compound each other. So a teenager who got pregnant in the 1920s, for instance, was often also dubbed feeble-minded, and a disproportionate number of the adolescents forcibly sterilized under eugenic policies were also black. Kristie Lindenmeyer, "Making Adolescence," paper presented at the International Conference on the History of Childhood, Ottawa, 1997.

6. Michael M. v. Superior Court of Sonoma County, 450 U.S. 464 (1981).

7. The volume of publicity and punishment given Mary Kay Letourneau, thirty-five, for her relationship with a thirteen-year-old student, whose baby she bore, is an indication of the rarity of such relationships and of statutory rape prosecutions in which the adult is female and the minor male. Letourneau lost her job and her children and went to jail. But the boy insisted he still loved her and was adamant that he was not a victim. "It hurts me, it makes me more angry when people give me their pity, because I don't need it," he told the local television station. "I'm fine." The two saw each other illicitly while she was on a leave from prison, and she became pregnant again. "Boy Says He and Teacher Planned Her Pregnancy," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, August 22, 1997, C1; "Schoolteacher Jailed for Rape Gives Birth to Another Child," New York Times, October 18, 1998.

8. While there are no hard facts about the sexual orientation of perpetrator or victim, anecdotal evidence suggests that these laws are being used more aggressively to prosecute consensual sex between men and teenage boys, taking over the role of antisodomy statutes, which by 1998 had been repealed in thirty states. Legislation prohibiting sex with minors, moreover, is often written more harshly against gay sex than straight. For instance, a 1996 California law compelling chemical or surgical castration for the second offense of engaging in sex with anyone under thirteen most severely penalizes the two acts commonly associated with homosexuality—anal intercourse and oral sex—but fails to mention heterosexual vaginal intercourse with girls. The prohibition against homosexual marriage affects gay teenage boys and girls as well, since youngsters can marry in most states at an earlier age than they are legally allowed to have unmarried sex. Bill Andriette, "Life Sentences," NAMBLA Bulletin, June 1994, 94-95; Carey Goldberg, "Rhode Island Moves to End Sodomy Ban," New York Times, May 10, 1998, 12; "RE: Sexual Relations with Minor," memo from Silverstein Langer Newburgh and Brady to Lambda Legal Defense Fund, February 4, 1998; Bill Andriette, "Barbarism California Style," Guide, October 1996, 9-10.

9. Kristin Anderson Moore, Anne K. Driscoll, and Laura Duberstein Lindberg, A Statistical Portrait of Adolescent Sex, Contraception, and Childbearing, pamphlet (Washington, D.C.: National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, 1998), 11, 13.

10. The characterizations of Dylan's condition come from his lawyer, Laura Barton, and Dylan himself.

11. Sharon G. Elstein and Noy Davis, "Sexual Relations between Adult Males and Young Teen Girls: Exploring the Legal and Social Responses," American Bar Association report, Washington, D.C., 1997, 26.

12. Elstein and Davis, "Sexual Relations between Adult Males and Young Teen Girls," 5.

13. Elstein and Davis, "Sexual Relations between Adult Males and Young Teen Girls," 26.

14. Lynn M. Phillips, "Recasting Consent: Agency and Victimization in Adult-Teen Relationships," in New Versions of Victims: Feminists Struggle with the Concept, ed. Sharon Lamb (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 93. A local Planned Parenthood chapter funded the study.

15. Mike A. Males, Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents (Monroe, Me.: Common Courage Press, 1996), 45-76.