Abstract
In the late twentieth century, a new view of children as potential sexual abusers emerged. Today, more research addresses children’s “problematic sexual behavior” than their natural sexuality, and even young children are stigmatized and criminalized because of species-typical sexual behavior. Despite the importance of this new field of research and view of childhood sexuality, studies of this development, its origins, and consequences are extremely rare. This study analyzed the discourse and images related to childhood sexuality in a Danish education and care journal for childcare professionals, from 1970 to 2019, to examine the emergence of “the child perpetrator of sexual abuse” in Denmark in the late 1990s, and traced the travelling of these ideas back to the United States, where this figure originated in the mid-1980s. The study revealed a radical change in views of childhood sexuality in Denmark from 1970 to 2019: from an extreme liberalism in the early decades—illustrated by a rare collection of photos of children’s nudity and sexuality, of which a selection is reprinted in this article—to a view that strongly associates children’s sexuality with sexual abuse. The study showed that the significant attention to and fear of child sexual abuse influenced the new view of childhood sexuality, and that this progressively took root in Danish childcare institutions, creating a panic. This article examines the knowledge, narratives, and the question of proportion regarding the cross-cultural view of children as potential sexual abusers, and discusses its consequences, combining a historical study and a dissection of an important, current phenomenon.