‘Strangers'

It is clear that children were vulnerable at home, and perhaps most vulner­able in institutions, the very places supposed to guarantee their protection. However, instead of focusing on these dual sites of danger for child sexual abuse, by the mid twentieth century in North America attention had diverted to the stranger, and particularly to the so-called ‘sexual psychopath'.

The new North American interest in the perpetrators of child sexual assault has been seen as a side effect of the Cold War, with its corresponding emphasis on normativity, family, heterosexuality and the wider linking of domestic and national stability.^[280] Scientific and medical knowledge was prioritised, with the increased presence of psychiatry in the courtrooms and prisons ofNorth America. As Chenier suggests, however, the legislation was more concerned with managing a problem population - and managing the social fears around sexual offenders - than about treating men who had sex with children, or other troubling types of offenders.^[281] Further, by linking them together as ‘deviant', the legislation only consolidated the perceived links between homosexuality and paedophilia, a slippage that operated in both law and the popular imagination.

Though not all Western nations legislated specifically against the ‘sexual psychopath', the focus on ‘sexual deviants' as certain kinds of men - eugenically unsound, socially deviant - only served to hide the fact that most children were (and are) sexually abused by those close to them: fathers, step-fathers, teachers, neighbours, family friends. Through much of the twentieth century, the twin myths of ‘stranger danger' and the ‘sexual psychopaths' erased the fact that a site of real danger was in fact the domestic spaces of the family home.^[282] The 1970s and 1980s, however, saw a raft of substantial and enduring changes to the ways we imagined sexual assault, in the West but also increasingly in the developing world.