SEXUAL OFFENSES INDEX

This culture has a long history of unnatural sexual anxiety and superstition. The twofold effect of this influence has been to make it harder for victims of sexual assault and extortion to get the help they need, and to make the psychological effects of such offenses on the victims more serious than they would otherwise have been. The good news is that concerted efforts over recent years have enabled victims of sexual aggression to come out of the closet. The bad news is that those efforts have largely retained, and amplified, the sexual anxiety and superstition which caused much of the original problem. The result has been to treat harmless and nearly harmless sexual actions as serious offenses—hence to result in perceived harm to the "victims" of such behavior far beyond what it would naturally have been; and to encourage vast numbers of frivolous and maliciously false accusations of sexual misbehavior.

Part and parcel of this vast injustice have been anti-male stereotypes and anti-male value judgements; in this set of issues as in others, the gender bias which is characteristic of the current milieu has operated to turn efforts to solve old problems into serious new problems. The specific injustices of false accusations of child sex abuse in divorce, and of ideologically induced false memories of child sex abuse, have in very recent years been much reduced through exposure of their evils; but serious injustices resulting from the anti-male and antisexual prejudices remain. The general discussions (labels beginning with A) and individual case studies (labels beginning with B) below are meant to reveal this problem graphically in hopes of spurring all the needed reforms.