Harmful to minors

Sex is a wonderful, crucial part of growing up, and children and teens can enjoy the pleasures of the body and be safe, too. In this important and controversial book, Judith Levine makes this argument and goes further, asserting that America's attempts to protect children from sex are worse than ineffectual. It is the assumption of danger and the exclusive focus on protection - what Levine terms "the sexual politics of fear" - that are themselves harmful to minors. [...]

She examens and challenges widespread anxieties (pedophilia, stranger kidnapping, Internet pornography) and sacred cows (abstinance-based sex education, statury rape laws). Levine investigates the policies and practices that affect kids' sex lives - censorship, psychology, sex and AIDS aducation, family, criminal, and reproductive law, and the journalism that begs for "solutions" while inciting more fear.

Levine provides optimistic, though realistic, prescriptions for how we might do better in guiding children toward loving well - that is, safely pleasurably, and with respect for others and themselves.

source: Text on the book 'Harmful to minors' by Judith Levine; University of Minnesota Press; 2002