Pervasive Perversions

During the 1980s in the UK and USA discourse concerning child sexual abuse became central to the media. In the 1990s popular culture frequently took child sexual abuse as a subject for representation. Between 1984 and 1994 numerous claims of child sexual abuse were made. While cases of child sexual abuse in reality did occur child sexual abuse also became a metaphor for a cultural phenomenon that was far wider and reflected other concerns. Everyday news throughout the 1990s highlighted concerns concerning abduction by paedophiles and children being at risk from predatory paedophiles using the Internet. While the media continually made child sexual abuse a central concern of pubic debate, popular culture, particularly films, explored this issue in fiction and docudrama. Many of these films reproduced some of the central myths concerning child sexual abuse and paedophilia. Men abusing children, women abusing children, children abusing other children, became staple fodder in mainstream feature films. In 2005 'the most famous person in the world' was again on trial for what is popularly considered to be the most heinous of crimes. Taking an approach that utilises cultural history and cultural and media studies, 'Pervasive Perversions' analyses a range of media and popular culture texts concerned with child sexual abuse. With sections on new media, fiction film, and celebrity culture, key questions are examined. Why did mass hysteria break out in the 1980s over sexual abuse and continue throughout the final decades of the twentieth century? What was the significance of this phenomenon? How have the constructions and representation of child sexual abuse in the media and popular culture altered? What do these images and narratives convey concerning the understanding of child sexual abuse in the public consciousness? How does this relate to the reality? What is the relationship between celebrity culture and child sexual abuse? 'Pervasive Perversions' examines these questions and others through an extensive evaluation of all forms of media and popular culture. By doing so Pervasive Perversions is the first book to comprehensively unearth and demystify the key myths of child sexual abuse in contemporary media and popular culture.