Celebrity, Pedophilia, and Ideology in American Culture By Jason ...

histories in at least 7 percent of females and 3 percent of males, at the higher end of the spectrum ranging to 36 percent of females in Australia and 29 percent of males in South Africa.²⁵ Variations were possibly due to the following: the lack of a standard definition of abuse or upper age limit (from ages fifteen to eighteen); absence of agreement over the age difference between abuser and abused; different sample selections; and different forms of data collection, face-to-face interviews eliciting a higher incidence rate.²⁶ According to one report in South Africa, sixty children a day are raped, some less than a year old.²⁷

Globally, child sex tourism has only recently been taken seriously. In the United Kingdom, only five foreign travel orders, forcing registered sex offenders to tell the police if they are travelling abroad, were issued between 2004 and 2007, but at least fifteen British nationals were charged in Thailand alone for child sex offences during this period.²⁸ Increased sexual activity of children has made it harder to distinguish what exactly abuse is, or what a child is. In a survey of two thousand British teenagers in 2008, two-thirds had had sex under the age of consent.²⁹ Despite methodological and definitional problems, many of the most respected researchers in the field claim child sexual abuse is not merely something on the fringes of society that can be put down to hysteria and media hype. For sociologist Brian Corby, children are “subjected to far more sexual abuse than was previously imagined possible.”³⁰ The word imagined needs to be noted, as frequently, when it comes to thinking about this issue, the imagination runs riot.

The prototype of child sexual abuse in the 1970s was incest, and this enlarged in the 1980s to include the varying degrees of childhood sexual contacts with older persons, date rape, and sexual harassment in adolescence and adulthood, with meanings and differences ignored in the unifying term known as survivorship. In America, Wendy Maltz claimed the figure of 30 to 40 percent for female victims of child sexual abuse to be conservative and, as it became emblematic of the oppression of women generally, estimates should be just under 100 percent.³¹ There are deep problems in ignoring differences in types and levels of abuse and with bracketing everything under the label of “survivorship.”