Elizabeth J. Letourneau & Luke Malone. One in Five: Why Child Sexual Abuse Is Our Biggest Public Health Crisis – And What We Can Do to Stop It. New York: Basic Books, 2026.
This book, co-authored by a senior public health researcher at Johns Hopkins and a veteran journalist, makes the reasonable case that our draconian punitive approach to dealing with child sexual abuse (CSA) in the U.S. is far more expensive (an estimated $5.4 billion a year) and less efficient than efforts to prevent it from occurring in the first place. To what extent their proposals how to prevent it are realistic we shall analyze later in this review. But we must first take issue with the hyperbolic rhetoric of the book’s title and subtitle, which does a profound disservice to rational discussion of this difficult issue. Accurate knowledge of the prevalence and consequences of CSA compared to other forms of child maltreatment is important to consideration of just where this problem ranks relative to the many other serious domestic issues that impact American society today, including but not limited to socio-economic and environmental challenges, mass incarceration, perceived racism, fraying trust in institutions, political polarization, immigrant assimilation, substance abuse, loneliness and poor mental health not connected to abuse, gun violence, and declining literacy skills among both students and adults. All of these can be and have been treated as public health crises. Declaring that CSA is more impactful than all of these and is the nation’s “biggest public health crisis” may help sell books and whip up public alarm, but cannot be supported based on the totality of available evidence, especially since documented cases of CSA are down 67% since 1992.
The “One in Five” Claim
The “one in five” figure that gives the book its title is derived from a single study (Finkelhor, Turner, & Colburn, 2024), which arrives at its estimate of a 21.7% rate by including online interactions with no physical contact. Most of these online interactions are with other minors. As Finkelhor et al. acknowledge, the most frequent online behaviors they count as “abuse” were offenses involving non-consensual image sharing (“Has someone ever shared with other people a sexual picture or video of you without your permission?”) and voluntary online sexual interactions with an “impermissibly older” adult partner (“Before the age of 18, did you have intimate sexual conversations or share sexual pictures or videos (online or through a cell phone), even if you wanted to, with a person who was five or more years older than you?”). Many teens “sext” images of themselves to romantic partners or even potential partners as a form of flirtation. If that partner later shares it with other friends, as often happens, it is certainly embarrassing, but it began as voluntary exhibitionism on the part of the person who first sent it, knowing the risk involved. It is not significantly different from the cases of boys who boast to their friends about getting to second or third base with their girlfriends, which has been going on since time immemorial. Similarly, it is questionable whether we should really count as “abuse” the voluntary conversations a teen may have online with someone who turns out to be five years older; teens in a hurry to become grown-ups sometimes find it flattering to think they appear sexy to a more mature man or woman, even if they have no intention of ever meeting the person.
The “one in five” figure that gives the book its title is derived from a single 2024 study, which arrives at its estimate of a 21.7% rate by including online interactions with no physical contact. Most of these online interactions are with other minors.
Even the two questions Finkelhor et al. used to identify “conventional sexual abuse” encompass a lot of phenomena which were probably not all that traumatic. “At any time in your life before age 18, did a grown-up you knew touch your private parts when they shouldn’t have or make you touch their private parts? Or did a grown-up you knew force you to have sex?” The second part of this question pertains to undeniable CSA, but there is a lot of difference between mere touching (inappropriate, but not life-shattering) and forced penetration. As Finkelhor and another colleague admit in a previous study (Gewirtz-Meydan & Finkelhor, 2020), only about 15% of the cases involve penetration of any sort, and these are usually with teenagers 14 and above. The other question (“At any time in your life before age 18, did another child or teen make you do sexual things?”) is vaguely phrased so as to increase the likelihood of a positive response: “making you” do something can mean inducing you to do it or pressuring you to do it. This locution can be used as a retrospective excuse to absolve oneself of guilt or complicity in what happened: “the Devil made me do it.” And what does it mean to “do sexual things?” Does this include talking dirty? Going skinny-dipping? Looking at pornography? Spying on a girl through an open window? It is easy to say my friend “made me” do it. As experienced poll-takers know, the exact wording of the question can make a world of difference: the positive responses would have been far lower had the question been more precise and focused on what everyone would agree is abusive: “did another child or teen force you against your will to participate in an act of oral, anal, or vaginal penetration?”
The 21.7% figure thus includes a lot that does not conform with the public’s typical image when they hear the phrase “child sexual abuse,” which evokes thoughts of nine-year-old girls being repeatedly raped by a drunk step-father or the dirty old man next door. As Finkelhor et al. note at the end of their article, “Enlarging the estimated prevalence of child sexual abuse in this way does need to be accompanied with a caution. As with generic sexual abuse epidemiology, these large prevalence rates include a range of diverse episodes that do not all fit the stereotype of an adult offender having physical sexual contact with a child. Large proportions of the episodes, both online and conventional, involve other youth as perpetrators, some involve relatively brief inappropriate verbal interactions, and in the case of online offenses most do not involve physical contact. This diversity needs to be explained to audiences unfamiliar with the diversity of what can be counted as sexual abuse.” This prudent caution is completely omitted from Letourneau & Malone’s citation of the “one in five” statistic.
Finkelhor et al. also admit that their study is based on recollections by people who are now adults, sometimes 10-20 years later, and that more accurate data is obtained when one surveys young people still in their teens or early 20s, who have a fresher memory of what happened and the extent to which their involvement was consensual. See Baldwin, Coleman, Francis, & Danese (2024) for a meta-analysis of the bias inherent in such retrospective surveys. As Clancy (2009) observed, minors usually come to regard their sexual experiences as “traumatic abuse” only years later, once they have absorbed dominant clinical and cultural discourses about the necessary harmfulness of what they may have shrugged off as “no big deal” at the time. The earlier study by Gewirtz-Meydan & Finkelhor, 2020, did survey young people aged 10 to 17, and found that over 70% of their “abuse” experiences involved interactions with other juveniles, mostly acquaintances, two-thirds did not regard the incident as serious enough to report to any adult, and only a little over one third said the incident made them “very afraid” (and even if they were very afraid, were they afraid of their partner or of being found out by their parents? Or of becoming pregnant or getting HIV?). Contemporaneous insight from teenagers was also obtained by another publication of Finkelhor, Turner, et al. (2015), based on the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence: only 2.7% of 14-17 year olds reported that they had ever in their life been sexually assaulted (defined as touching or forced sex) by an adult they knew, 0.7% by an adult stranger, but 7.9% by a peer (see Table 2), confirming that most abuse these days comes from other minors, not adults.
In fact, there does exist a much larger nationally representative sample of sixth- and ninth-grade students from Finland; the vast majority of the 2,095 students who had sexual interactions with adults did not find it to be a negative experience (65% of girls and 89% of boys), and a majority of boys (68%) even found it to be a positive experience (Felson, Savorlainen, Fry, Whichard, & Ellonen, 2019; Rind, 2022). Contrary to common assumptions, they were most likely to regard it as a positive experience when it did involve intercourse and was repeated, as long as they considered it consensual. Without condoning adult sexual contact with minors, we should hesitate to frame as “abuse” all the experiences Finkelhor et al. (2024) and Letourneau & Malone label CSA, perhaps even a majority of them.
The figures of Finkelhor et al. are potentially inflated in another way, namely self-selection bias in the pool surveyed. Their study had a very low response rate (only about 20%) from among the general population panel who were invited to participate; as in surveys concerning adult victims of sexual assault, those who have experienced a problem related to the subject of the survey are more likely to respond than those who have not, so prevalence estimates using this kind of convenience sample are highly unreliable, especially when the response rate is this low. See Anderson et al. (2021) for the problem of self-selection bias in such surveys.
Prevalence rates for sexual abuse are notoriously difficult to assess with precision, but a more reliable estimate may be derived from the 2012 Canadian Community Health Survey-Mental Health, which had a much more robust response rate of 68.9% and defined CSA more rigorously as incidents in which an adult forced or attempted to force sexual activity through threats or physical coercion, or a child experienced touching or kissing against their will. Under this criterion, 10.1% of the 23,395 subjects experienced it; see Afifi et al. (2014). The majority of the CSA victims also experienced physical abuse in their families. This sample also has its limitations, as it is Canadian and somewhat dated at this point, and does not disaggregate the results for “sexual activity” from those for “touching/kissing.” Although its sample is almost ten times as large as that of Finkelhor et al., it includes adults of all ages, so many of the respondents would have been children decades ago, and it thus does not yield abuse rates that are closer to the present time. It also does not include abuse by other minors. But it does use a definition for sexual abuse that more closely conforms to what most people understand from the term. Had Letourneau & Malone used this study instead of the flawed work of Finkelhor et al., their book’s title would have had to be more modest: One in Ten.
The “Biggest Public Health Crisis” Claim
The towering “One in Five” claim is thus erected on a crumbling foundation of evidence. The subtitle’s equally catastrophizing claim that CSA is America’s “biggest public health crisis” is also based on carefully cherry-picked studies and ignores the mounting evidence that other forms of child maltreatment are both more common and more damaging. CSA occurs most frequently in dysfunctional family environments where children are under stress from a range of factors: divorce, parental substance abuse or mental illness, emotional instability, family violence, lack of supervision, frequent moves, etc. Disaggregating these factors to determine how much of an individual’s later problems in life are due to each one is notoriously difficult and perhaps even impossible. Scholarship on the consequences of CSA tends to assume that it is the dominant factor predicting later problems of psychological adjustment and ignores what else may have been going on in a child’s surrounding environment, as well as failing to distinguish between inarguable CSA and the many other less serious events to which the label is inappropriately applied.
The recent meta-analytic review of Rind & Rieger (2026) debunks the claim that CSA is the greatest contributor to poor mental health in adulthood. Based on 12 previous meta-analyses covering 217 studies of depression risk and 157 studies of depression severity, this article aggregated data from studies that used the same population samples to assess multiple forms of child maltreatment or neglect, including not only CSA, but physical abuse, emotional abuse (repeated acts of verbal hostility, rejection, humiliation, or threats aimed at a child), emotional neglect (persistent failure to meet a child’s basic needs for affection, support, and belonging), and physical neglect (chronic failure to provide for a child’s basic physical needs for food, clothing, hygiene, medical care, and protection). This methodology yields more rigorous comparative findings than can be gleaned from studies that single out only one form of abuse in isolation, all of which are based on differing population samples. What Rind & Rieger found was that among these five forms of abuse or neglect, CSA was least associated with risk of later depression (the most common and clearly defined mental health problem, established by a long-standardized measure). By far the most predictive of future depression was emotional abuse (Odds Ratio = 3.64), followed by physical abuse (OR = 2.74), physical neglect (OR = 2.67), emotional neglect (OR = 2.40), and CSA (OR = 2.06). Similarly, emotional abuse was most highly correlated with the severity of depression (r = 0.35), followed by emotional neglect (r = 0.31), physical neglect (r = 0.23), physical abuse (r = 0.22), and CSA in last place (r = 0.18).
The towering “One in Five” claim is thus erected on a crumbling foundation of evidence. The subtitle’s equally catastrophizing claim that CSA is America’s “biggest public health crisis” is also based on carefully cherry-picked studies and ignores the mounting evidence that other forms of child maltreatment are both more common and more damaging.
Emotional abuse of children, mainly by their parents and caregivers, is not only the largest contributor to poor mental health, but is far more common than CSA, as confirmed by both the World Health Organization and the U.S. Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System: weighted data from the latter (Table 3) showed that among the 13,483 subjects aged 18-24 at the time of the survey (those with the best recall and most indicative of recent prevalence), only 11.5% reported sexual abuse, but 43.1% reported emotional abuse (3.75X the rate), and 23.0% physical abuse (2X the rate). Among this group, all other adverse childhood experiences surveyed (domestic violence in the family, mental illness, substance use, divorce, and incarceration) were more common than CSA. Despite being the most common and toxic of these childhood stressors, emotional abuse is seldom discussed by the well-funded child abuse industry in the U.S., represented most conspicuously by the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers (ATSA), the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), Letourneau’s MOORE Center for the Prevention of CSA, and Finkelhor’s Crimes Against Children Research Center. It is not criminalized, never generates sensational media stories (as CSA and particularly severe cases of physical abuse do), and is common even among intact and socially respectable families with affluent, well-educated parents who belittle their underachieving children. Emotional abuse and neglect of children are today’s real silent killers, not over-hyped CSA.
There are plenty of other studies showing that the purported psychological impact of CSA is, when put in perspective, not nearly as severe and universal as the alarmists assume. This is not to doubt that it can be devastating in some individual cases, especially when perpetrated by a close family member whose repeated coercion could not be escaped by a child and might be denied by other family members. The study of Fuller-Thomson et al. (2019) assessed the overall mental health of 651 victims who experienced coercive in-person (not online) CSA at the hands of an adult (not another child): after controlling for variables such as sex, race, marital status, education, and household income, they found that 65% of the victims had “complete mental health,” compared to 77% as established in general population studies. “Complete mental health” was evaluated based on 13 questions covering emotional, psychological, and social well-being, and not having experienced any mental health conditions, suicidal ideation, or substance dependency in the last 12 months. This study has the advantage of reducing confounds by eliminating from the pool any subjects who had experienced physical abuse or witnessed violence in the family, although the survey on which it was based did not screen for emotional abuse, neglect, or other adverse childhood experiences that are frequent co-morbidities of CSA and also affect later psychological adjustment. What it does show is that the overwhelming majority of those victimized even by the worst forms of CSA are resilient.
In the first chapter of the book, the authors cite what appears to be an impressive array of articles suggesting that the trauma of CSA causes not only poor mental health, but obesity, high cholesterol, smoking, drug and alcohol use, cervical cancer, sexual promiscuity, future sex offending by victims, and lost earning potential. These citations confuse correlation with causation and, as we have noted, fail to account for the impact of the many other adverse childhood experiences that are usually present in families where CSA occurs. That CSA victims may be sexually active at earlier ages and with more partners could merely reflect that kids who develop strong sex drive at an earlier age are more likely to go online looking for sex, view pornography, and be open to sexual experimentation with adults. And while it might seem plausible that boys who experience sex with an adult at an early age, particularly if they enjoy it, will consider sex with children normalized and go on to approach similarly aged kids later in life, the largest study of this “abused-to-abuser” hypothesis, based on a birth cohort of over 38,000, showed that only 3% of sexually abused boys went on to engage in any form of criminal sexual behavior, and only 4% of those convicted of a sexual offense had a documented history of sexual abuse as children (Leach, Stewart, & Smallbone, 2016).
Can It Be Prevented “at Scale”?
The book’s mantra that “CSA is preventable” with the later addition “at scale” is also misleading in that it may give some readers the impression that all or most of it can be prevented. It would be more accurate to say that with aggressive interventions the incidence of CSA can be reduced among some individuals who might otherwise be at risk. And it needs to be noted that many of those interventions come with a cost that makes them unpalatable to most Americans.
One that is relatively cost-free and originates from within the community of those who recognize their attraction to legally impermissible minors is the growth of support groups like B4U-ACT, Stop It Now!, and Virtuous Pedophiles. These organizations educate their audience about the dangers of translating minor attraction into illegal behavior and help connect those who need psychological counseling with qualified professionals who can provide it in a constructive, but non-stigmatizing way. As Letourneau & Malone rightly observe, at least half of CSA is not perpetrated by individuals with a dominant minor attraction, and as much as a half of individuals with such attraction never commit offenses. However, they fail to observe that 72-81% of adults with dominant minor attractions also share some attraction to adults (Lievesley et al., 2023; Lievesley et al., 2025; Martijn et al., 2020); sex-positive therapy should seek to strengthen their capacity for success and satisfaction in adult relationships, but this is seldom the goal of standard treatment practices.
Letourneau & Malone approve of efforts by companies like Google to divert those looking for CSAM by responding to suspect searches with warning notices and links to helpful therapeutic resources. While this initiative is praiseworthy enough, few serious collectors of CSAM are so naïve as to Google “child pornography.” They use the Dark Web to trade such material, where no helpful diversion ads are going to appear.
Letourneau & Malone express some reluctance to trust proper sex education as an answer, because in their view it puts too much onus of responsibility on the victims to recognize and report inappropriate behavior by an adult. But learning responsibility is part of growing up, and since 70% of CSA is perpetrated by minors themselves, as Letourneau & Malone acknowledge, it is imperative that young people at the earliest possible age learn about the often confusing laws in their state and the serious sanctions that come from violating them. Letourneau & Malone take scant notice of the easy access to online pornography by children at early ages, which may be a dominant factor in creating “problem sexual behavior.” Proper sex education must therefore include porn literacy, teaching that the scenarios young people may find in this material (including extreme behaviors like choking, bondage, and rough sex) are not realistic depictions of most human sexuality; porn literacy should also teach that any intimate depiction of themselves or their peers may wind up circulating beyond its original recipient and could land them in serious legal trouble for production and distribution of CSAM. Teaching about consent must also be fundamental to proper sex education, but introducing young people to this concept implies to them that they have the capacity to assert consent as well as non-consent, which undercuts the whole premise of our confusing array of age-of-consent laws (e.g. in many states a 14-year-old is assumed to have the intellectual and emotional capacity to consent to a 16-year old, but not an 18-year-old). However, sex education is always a highly contested political arena in the U.S., in which any discussion of these topics, however protective and prophylactic in intent, is thought to contaminate “childhood innocence.” Decisions about these curricula are generally made at the local level with few statewide (much less nationwide) mandates, and most sex education in the US remains hopelessly mired in a lowest common denominator abstinence-only mode where teaching consent and porn literacy are alien concepts. The best we can hope is that some progressive localities will adopt good curricula that cover these issues, but the victories will be sporadic at best. It is not a solution likely to succeed “at scale.”
Letourneau & Malone advocate more home visitation by social workers in families deemed to be at high risk for CSA. But even if the money should suddenly appear to hire twice as many CPS employees, would the public really tolerate close monitoring of families where there is no prior evidence of abuse? The presence of a step-father or mom’s live-in boyfriend may be a risk factor, but CSA still occurs in only a minority of families with this profile. Too often suspicion falls on low-income or immigrant families, and even when abuse is discovered, often the solution CPS has to offer is placement of the children in foster care or group homes, which are even more rife with the potential for CSA.
Letourneau & Malone are fans of the “panopticon” design (originally intended for prisons) for any building where children are present, whether it be youth centers or schools. At enormous expense, walls need to be knocked down in favor of windows even in the interior of buildings. Do they think that such loss of privacy comes without psychological cost to both the children and adults who occupy these de-humanizing Orwellian structures? One need merely note the current public resistance to “Flock cameras,” despite their usefulness in apprehending criminals, to see just how important privacy is to most Americans who do nothing wrong, but are nevertheless deeply uncomfortable with always being watched.
Another policy they praise is the development of institutional guidelines for organizations in which adults mentor minor children. They point as a model to policies instituted by Scouting USA and Big Brothers / Big Sisters, relying on a rather weak study in which Letourneau participated (Assini-Meytin et al., 2025). Their hypothesis is that growing institutional rule-making and surveillance results in less CSA, but their study actually showed more CSA in the younger cohort born in 2000-2004 than in the older cohort born 1986-1990 (3.8% vs. 3.7%), despite the overall downward trend in CSA cases nationwide. There were also more boundary violating behaviors of a sexual nature (7.89% vs. 6.14%), such as showing pornography, sexual talk, or walking in on the child in the bathroom or changing room. They also found more rule violations (15.09% vs. 9.88%), inappropriate ingratiating behavior (41.61% vs. 26.12%), and cultivation of close relationships with the child’s parents (13.18% vs. 8.78%). The only respect in which the situation was better for the younger cohort was that less of the CSA occurred within the “Big 6” service organizations (Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, YMCA, Big Brothers / Big Sisters, 4-H, Boys & Girls’ Clubs), while more of it was happening in school-connected settings. Schools also have a panoply of similar official policies, which seem to have had little positive effect. They present no evidence for a substantial shift in organizational culture between the two cohorts: Big Brothers / Big Sisters had a formal prevention program going back to 1989, Boy Scouts in 1988, and YMCA in 1995.
If a lower percentage of the CSA was occurring in these organizations than in school-based programs, it may be because these organizations have all experienced precipitous membership decline: Cub Scouts / Boy Scouts enrolled around 4.2 million boys in 1990 (6.5 million in 1972), but only a little over one million today. Similarly, Big Brothers / Sisters served only two-thirds the number of youth in 2023 that it served as recently as 2019; nationwide statistics are not available for earlier years. Contributing to the decline of all these organizations is the reluctance of male volunteers to come forward, which must in part be attributed to men’s quite reasonable fear of being falsely accused of impropriety with children in institutional contexts where children and other adults are trained to suspect their behavior. Although national figures do not exist, the Greater Cleveland chapter of Big Brothers / Big Sisters had 80% male volunteers in 1980; in the most recent national report, less than 40% of the volunteers were male, and boys in need of a mentor are having to be matched with women, even though the organization acknowledges that same-sex pairings are more effective. Increasing institutional surveillance in response to a few extraordinary cases of abuse comes at a steep social cost in depriving boys and young men of the kind of role-models they desperately need. Just ask Jerry Sandusky (see below) what happens when you donate your time to help mentor troubled teens from poor families.
Letourneau & Malone’s final recommendation for preventing CSA is the creation of a new federal agency with the sole mission of funding researchers like them to come up with new ideas how to prevent it. We find very few such new ideas in this book, although it does survey some old ones. Their inability to come up with anything new that will work “at scale” is presumably because the massive funding that Letourneau’s and Finkelhor’s institutes already receive from private do-gooder philanthropy just isn’t enough. Unfortunately, the bias of any federal bureaucracy is always going to be in favor of funding one-sided research that attempts to maximize perceptions of the “crisis” the agency was designed to address, so that the agency can perpetuate its raison d’être for as long as possible and with the most generous legislative appropriations from politicians who want to virtue-signal their concern for protecting children. This entire self-serving book is one extended example of what we should expect if such an agency were ever created. We would do far better to have an agency funding work on the emotional abuse and neglect of children, since these have been shown to be far more prevalent and more toxic to healthy development, but don’t receive a fraction of the public attention that CSA does. Even Finkelhor admits CSA is 67% less common today than it was in 1992 (Finkelhor, Saito, & Jones, 2025). The pretense that it is today’s “biggest public health crisis” is a self-interested fiction.
Does This Book Deserve Any Credibility?
The scholarship behind this book’s maximalist claims about the prevalence and long-term harm of CSA is deficient. Letourneau, a respected scholar who has been working in this field for decades, should have been able to see the obvious shortcomings of Finkelhor et al. (2024) and should have known about the various works we have cited that paint a very different picture, such as Fuller-Thomson et al. (2019), Felson et al. (2019), and above all the many articles of Rind and his collaborators. She cites none of them. Either she was ignorant of this work, which raises troubling questions about the extent of her knowledge, or she knew about it and deliberately suppressed it because it does not fit her pre-conceived agenda; this possibility is even worse for the book’s credibility.
Malone, as an investigative journalist, is also to be faulted for not knowing news that he should have known. The first chapter heralds as “field-building pioneers” (p. 24) Finkelhor (whose misleading work we have discussed) and the feminist social worker Kee MacFarlane. MacFarlane’s principal claim to fame is as the lead investigator in the now much-derided McMartin Pre-School case from the 1980s, despite her lack of any license. Utilizing suggestive “anatomically correct” dolls and sock-puppets, manipulatively prodding the pre-schoolers to confirm lurid sexual narratives that had supposedly been admitted by other children, and harassing over 400 children with repetitive interrogations until they admitted abuse, MacFarlane was instrumental in convincing prosecutors to squander time, money, and credibility in what was to prove the most expensive trial and investigation in U.S. history, one which has become synonymous with the over-zealous CSA hysteria of the 1980s (see Garven et al., 1998; Schreiber et al., 2006). MacFarlane later testified to Congress that she believed in the existence of a well-organized nationwide conspiracy of “orthodox Satanic groups” to engage in ritual sexual abuse of children, a widely hypothesized myth of which law enforcement has never been able to document a single case, despite much effort (Frankfurter, 2006). After years of suffering, the McMartin defendants were eventually all acquitted; the only real child abusers were MacFarlane and her team, who violated the innocence of little children by implanting into their credulous minds nightmarish scenarios and the filthiest possible understanding of sex. Has there ever been a study of the later-life psychological trauma of MacFarlane’s hundreds of victims? Since “intimate sexual conversations” with someone more than five years older is one of the criteria for CSA in the Finkelhor et al. study on which Letourneau & Malone rely, Kee MacFarlane is arguably one of the most prolific child sexual abusers in American history.
With heroines like this, one can understand why the book features a glowing jacket blurb from the late Gloria Steinem, a passionate believer in McMartin (and Satanic abuse), who even donated generously out of her publishing fortune to fund the excavation of the McMartin playground in a vain quest to find the supposed underground torture chambers in which children were frightened with a menagerie of exotic wild animals to induce their compliance with sexual abuse (Tracey, 2026). Some feminist ideologues are so convinced of ubiquitous male sexual evil that they genuinely believe the most absurd and fantastic scenarios of abuse must be true.
If Kee MacFarlane is one of the book’s “field-building pioneers,” Jerry Sandusky is uncritically presented as its paradigmatic demon. The book’s authors seem unaware that the case against Sandusky was constructed almost entirely around “recovered memory” testimony, which has long been discredited by serious memory scientists (Pendergrast, 2017). The recent recantation by one of the key witnesses against Sandusky confirmed that the boys he was accused of molesting were subjected to the same kind of investigative browbeating and manipulation that proved fatal to the McMartin prosecution and many other cases that were later overturned, such as the convictions of Kelly Michaels (Schreiber et al., 2006) and Bernard Baran (https://exonerationregistry.org/cases/10247).
It is unfortunate that this book does so much to undercut its own credibility, because it does contain some good arguments about the futility of the draconian punishments heaped upon persons convicted of sexual offenses against minors: long prison terms, followed by listing on a public sex offender registry, residency restrictions, and in some cases civil commitment. As the authors point out, the recidivism rate for these people is extremely low, despite the handful of well-publicized cases that triggered a succession of ill-conceived laws named after children who were abducted and murdered by prior offenders. They are right that most sexual abuse comes at the hands of other children or trusted family friends who have never offended before, not from strangers with prior convictions. Their critique of U.S. policy could have been strengthened by reference to the less punitive approach of European jurisprudence, which emphasizes therapy after comparatively short incarceration; this leniency does not result in higher rates of CSA. European success in this area is also promoted by more comprehensive sex education and lower ages of consent that allow police to focus resources on the worst cases.
Most people are never going to read this book and see whatever good arguments are buried within it, but will merely see its sensational title and take away from it the false information that “one in five” children are molested and that CSA is our “biggest public health crisis.” Stoking public fear on this issue is exactly what led to cases like McMartin and the Satanic abuse panic in the 1980s, the “recovered memory” fraud that destroyed so many families in the 1990s, personal injury attorneys enriching themselves out of deep pockets by encouraging clients in the 2000s to make false claims of abuse at the hands of now deceased priests or Scoutmasters unable to defend themselves, Q-Anon and Pizza-Gate in the 2010s, and the never-ending political circus of Epsteinmania in our present decade. Despite its authors’ benevolent intentions, this misleading book will do more harm than good.