The core thesis of Steven Angelides's The Fear of Child Sexuality: Young People, Sex, and Agency is compelling enough: at the heart of many a late modern child sex panic across the Anglosphere is, as titularly intimated, collective fear at acknowledging the “agentive sexual child” (xxi). The thesis is an important corrective to what Angelides calls the “scapegoat model” (95) of leftist scholarly approaches to sex panic, in which episodic brouhahas under the banner of protecting children are often interpreted as pretexts for advancing regressive political agendas and for targeting “folk devils” like homosexuals and pedophiles (Cohen 2002). Angelides cautions that the scapegoat model doubles the erasure of young people's sexuality induced by the panics themselves, panics that substitute the “sexualized child” for the “sexual child” (xxii).
Angelides's argument is at its most illuminative in the first and final chapters of the book. The first chapter examines a scandal...
