44. The reports of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, for instance, frequently described the alleged exploiters of children in vicious and often confused ethnic stereotypes. Italian 'padrones' who traffic variously in child labor, entertainment, and flesh are ubiquitous. A 'rabbi' who runs a beer-bottle and cigarette-strewn gambling den behind a bogus 'bird store' is characterized, incongruously, by his 'little Chinese ways of enticement.' Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Sixteenth Annual Report (New York, 1891), 23.

45. See, e.g., Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight; Ellen Carol DuBois and Linda Gordon, 'Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield,' in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole Vance (London: Pandora Press, 1989); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789- 1860 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987); and Ruth C. Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), for a fuller picture of turn-of-the-century urban prostitution.

46. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 81-120.

47. Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980): 17.

48. DuBois and Gordon, 'Seeking Ecstasy on the Battlefield,' 33.

49. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 82.

50. John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 153.

51. Estelle Freedman, ''Uncontrolled Desires': The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920-1960,' Journal of American History 71, no. 1 (1987): 83-106.

52. D'Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 260-61.

53. Allan Berube, Coming Out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: Macmillan, 1990).

54. As quoted by George Chauncey Jr., 'The Postwar Sex Crime Panic,' in True Stories from the American Past, ed. William Graebner (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993), 162.

55. Freedman, ''Uncontrolled Desires.''

56. Chauncey, 'Postwar Sex Crimes,' 160-78.

57. Freedman, ''Uncontrolled Desires,'' 92.

58. Freedman, ''Uncontrolled Desires,'' 84.

59. Chauncey, 'Postwar Sex Crimes,' 160-74.

60. Heidi Handman and Peter Brennan, Sex Handbook: Information and Help for Minors (New York: Putnam, 1974).

61. Lawrence Stanley, 'The Child Porn Myth,' Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 7 (1989): 295-358.

62. U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary, Sexual Exploitation of Children: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Crime, 95th Congress, first session, 1977, 42-48. See also, Judianne Densen-Gerber and Stephen F. Hutchinson, 'Sexual and Commercial Exploitation of Children: Legislative Responses and Treatment Challenges,' Child Abuse and Neglect 3 (1979): 61-66.

63. ''Child Sex' Cop Transferred,' Bay Area Reporter, March 18, 1982, 8.

64. U.S. House Judiciary Committee, Sexual Exploitation of Children, 48.

65. Stanley, 'The Child Porn Myth,' 313.

66. Joel Best, 'Dark Figures and Child Victims: Statistical Claims about Missing Children,' in Images of Issues: Typifying Contemporary Social Problems, ed. Joel Best (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1989), 21-37.

67. Stanley, 'The Child Porn Myth,' 313.

68. Lucy Komisar, 'The Mysterious Mistress of Odyssey House,' New York Magazine, November 1979, 43-50. The charges were not indictably substantiated, but they were enough to exile Densen-Gerber from Odyssey House and, for a time, social service altogether. In 1998, she was running Applied Resources Corporation in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

69. ''Child Sex' Cop Transferred.'

70. See Nathan and Snedeker, Satan's Silence. Nathan was for a long time the only journalist in America who published skeptical investigations of 'satanic ritual abuse.' Later, she was joined by the documentarist Ofra Bikel and others, and by the early 1990s, their painstaking reporting began to turn some opinion around.

71. Daniel Goleman, 'Proof Lacking in Ritual Abuse by Satanists,' New York Times, October 31, 1994.

72. The charges were brought by the adopted daughter of a zealous police chief, and, as in Salem, the people who objected to what looked to them like a widening witch-hunt, found themselves accused. The defendants were disproportionately poor, uneducated, and in several cases mentally disabled, and no defendant without a private attorney was acquitted. Kathryn Lyons, Witch Hunt: A True Story of Social Hysteria and Abused Justice (New York: Avon, 1998).

73. Documented by the Justice Committee, San Diego, Calif.; Boston Coalition for Freedom of Expression, Boston, Mass.; Nathan and Snedeker (Satan's Silence); and others.

74. Selcraig, 'Chasing Computer Perverts,' 72.

75. Seminar conducted at the University of Southern California by R. P. Tyler (reported by James R. Kincaid, author interview).

76. Lawrence A. Stanley, 'The Child-Porn Myth,' Playboy, September 1988, 41.

77. The notion of predisposition informs all sting operations: police are not allowed to entice somebody into breaking the law (that would be entrapment) unless they have evidence indicating he is likely to do so on his own. Narcotics agents commonly buy from a known dealer; occasionally an undercover cop will put herself into a position to be assaulted by a rapist whose m.o. is known. However, the establishment of predisposition in child pornography enforcement is not so straightforward, because the enforcers' motives aren't. If the goal is to eradicate deviance and not necessarily to prevent actual crimes, as the ACLU's Marjorie Heins suggests, suspicion of deviance goes a long way toward legally establishing predisposition to criminality. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's manual for law enforcers suggests including in requests for search warrants a profile of what they call a 'preferential child molester,' accent on preferential, since he might want to do something he's never done. Since the person needs to have demonstrated no greater erotic interest in children than logging onto a site where they congregate (I, in researching this chapter, could be accused of such acts), the tactic resembles setting somebody up for a drug bust not because he's actually sold or bought drugs but because he has watched the doings of the dealer next door or because he has an 'addictive personality.' Once a 'preference' for 'child molestation' has been thus established, a search warrant stating this preference in the suspect alerts cops to the probability that a collection of illegal child pornography awaits their search. And the search fulfills their expectations: they find pictures and, whether they're pornographic or not, take them to be clues to molestation. 'The photograph of a fully dressed child may not be evidence of an obscenity violation, but it could be evidence of an offender's sexual involvement with children,' says the National Center's manual. In 1995 I asked Raymond Smith, who heads the Postal Inspection Service's child pornography investigations, about his estimation that PI agents find 'evidence of child molestation' in 30 percent of their searches of the homes of suspected pedophiles: 'We'll find pictures of kids—no sexual act; we don't know where these kids come from. But you get a gut feeling . . . you learn to identify it. . . . We're not finding a videotape of this guy having sex with the ten-year-old girl next door. We're not finding a picture. Just from what we see in the house and how they talk. 'When we get into these cases, many of these individuals literally confess to committing horrible acts, before they're arrested. Sometimes that is fantasy, which is not against the law. But when you have the child pornography present, combined with the fantasy, in my opinion not only are they violating the law, they also pose a serious threat to children in the community where they live. If somebody told me this man never molested before, but, man, he loves kids and I knew he was a member of NAMBLA [the North American Man/Boy Love Association, a support group-propaganda organization], I would think