This ground-breaking work provides the first history of ideas about the sexual child in modernity. Beginning with twenty-first century panics about sexualization, the authors address why the sexual child excites such powerful emotions in the Anglophone west.

R. DANIELLE EGAN is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, USA.
 
GAIL HAWKES teaches sociology at the University of New England, Australia.