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

felt emotions.²⁴ What is ascertained throughout is that both the abused and the abuser are depicted as beings that gain supernatural power from abuse. The supernatural is that which is beyond scientific explanation, with child sexual abuse confronting the very notion of logic. Pedophilia and child sexual abuse encapsulate a fear that extends beyond the real threat to children. This fear is concerned with a number of horrors: the fear of the beast who has destroyed all our innocence and hope; the fear of miscegenation, as in the Dracula legend, with the pedophile the Creature, our creation, that knows no bounds, be they racial, ethical, moral, or otherwise; and the fear of the machine and technology, and the inhumanly created, coming to destroy the creator, as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Or even the return of the repressed—did we secretly want to be abused all along, as Freud maintained? Can we ever put our trembling finger on this fear, or is this the whole point? In our mythology, the real beast, the real pedophile, is never fingered, for he is always the beyond while being in our very midst. Fundamentally, what we are concerned with here is the uncanny, a word that became popular after Freud’s 1919 essay on the subject, and just as the pedophile exists in the zone of the uncanny, the uncanny dominates the modern and postmodern age, so the pedophile in this sense is an archetypal being.

1.2. Facts and Theories

Research conducted with adults, based on nineteen studies in the United States and Canada since 1980 that were published in 1994, found rates of child sexual abuse histories ranging from 6 to 62 percent of all females and 3 to 16 percent for males. This research is still significant, as it was conducted and published during a period before skepticism by parts of the public, the media, the police, and the judiciary over child sexual abuse claims. It concluded that a child sexual abuse prevalence rate of 20 percent for females and between 5 and 10 percent for males was statistically reasonable. A number of charities today would put this far higher, one in the United Kingdom being called One in Four. Large-scale research in twenty-one countries found child sexual abuse