However most parents of child sex offenders feel too intimidated to question the criminal label assigned to their children

However, most parents of “child sex offenders” feel too intimidated to question the criminal label assigned to their children.Like many of our contemporary obsessions, this one first emerged in the US. In the late Eighties, many experts began to inflate the definition of sexual abuse and turned their attention to child sex crime. Widespread anxiety about children’s behaviour helped create a climate where virtually any childhood sexual activity could be potentially defined as abuse. In 1997, David Finklehor, a leading American authority on child abuse, declared that sibling abuse was the most common kind of victimisation facing children.

According to Finklehor, such assaults affect 80 per cent of children. He used the evocative term “pandemic victimisation” to underline the sheer frequency of this form of abuse.It was not only the experts who turned their attention towards childhood sexuality. The criminal justice system also jumped on this new bandwagon. The suspension from school of a six-year-old North Carolina boy for kissing a female classmate is symbolic of an era of moral incertitude. Last year a nine-year-old boy was charged with sexual harassment for allegedly rubbing himself against a girl of the same age in a lunch queue Thankfully, he was acquitted But others are not so lucky. In Jefferson County alone, prosecutors have filed 292 child-on-child crime cases since 1997.The pathologising of normal childhood sexual behaviour has acquired epidemic proportions.

In one California junior high school, all displays of affection – hugging, kissing, back-patting, even “high-fives” – have been banned. Not to be outdone, a school in Britain has recently banned five-year-old children from playing “kiss-chase”. Maureen Fitzgerald, head of Cheynes Infant School in Luton, wrote to parents indicating that such acts constitute “inappropriate behaviour”. A leading Luton educationalist told the press that “children have responded favourably to the banning of games that involve unwanted physical attention”. Child sex criminals are in; playing doctors and nurses is out. When anything so innocent as kiss-chase can become stigmatised, even the most ordinary forms of childhood exploration can serve as fodder for the next series of sex crime statistics.Predictably, British experts have signed up to the moral crusade against child sex monsters.