Abstract
AbstractThe history of sexual relations between children or youth and adults in the United States has received limited attention in part because of the strong taboos against discussion of the topic. The growing moral panic about pedophilia in the 1980s, which coincided with the first wave of American historiography of sexuality, had a silencing effect. Historians of the family first broke the silence by researching the history of incest within the family, focusing on father–daughter relations. Later, in the 1990s, historians of childhood argued that age should be considered as a category of analysis within the history of sexuality. Many scholars have explored the role that age played in structuring same‐sex male encounters, especially at the turn of the twentieth century. Others working in a range of disciplines have historicized the rhetoric of the “sexual psychopath” or the “pedophile,” and its effects. Much work remains to be done on multiple aspects of this topic.
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