Thirty years ago parents let their children run free, perhaps with the admonishment not to talk to strangers, and people with authority over children were trusted; today we 'do not let them out of our sight', and we fully trust only those we know intimately. Our fear is that they will be abused, a word that scarcely existed in its modern usage thirty years ago; we fear that they will be murdered for the sake of their death, the ultimate act of abuse: and at the heart of both is sex. For, even if there is no apparent arousal, we still feel that a person who causes pain for the sake of causing pain, or murders for the sake of murdering, is in some sense committing a sexual act. It is, after all, a lust for the body, for doing something to a body, which drives such behaviour. Even if there is no salivary response, a sexual hunger is being satisfied, and the fear which has imprisoned our lives is a fear with sex at its heart.

In 1968 the permissive revolution was well under way, but its effects were still limited to the arena of the obviously sexual. Women wore shorter skirts, people had more sex younger; but things were still not very sexy. Consider children's television: the best on offer was perhaps Blue Peter, it was Val in sensible (oh so sensible) blouse and skirt, and Peter in the sort of slacks and woolly even your mother might have found a little too cosy. The content was about as sexy as the school dinners most of its audience would have eaten that day - vegetables boiled for hours and a congealing puddle of tepid brown liquid containing bits of fat, gristle, and unidentifiable protein, perhaps labelled 'beef stew' - definitely not sexy food (tho' there was something a little kinky about that pink blancmange for pudding). Today, on Saturday morning, the sexy female presenter wears an off one shoulder rubber tee-shirt and introduces pop videos many of which have an intense and obviously sexual subtext, if not text, as i write I'm Horny (the lyric content of which is mainly the repetition of 'I'm horny - horny, horny, horny' and 'I'm horny all night long') is still in the top ten after seven weeks - the video shown on Saturday morning leaves no doubt as to what the two sultry women singing the song mean, and 'everyone' knows that there is an X-rated version. On Blue Peter a presenter wears a black bra displayed under a tight translucent top; another Blue Peter presenter (young and handsome in tight shiny trousers) as a guest on an early evening show making ethical judgements on fictional scenarios involving adolescents, says 'if someone fancies you, whatever sex they are, it's a compliment; end of story'.

Thirty years ago early on a Saturday evening the family might have gathered round the television to watch Flipper, a programme of sun and sea, boats and adventure, goodies triumphing over baddies; and, of course, a dolphin. Today it is Baywatch (the most watched television programme in the world) which, minus the dolphin, is much the same sort of thing; apart from its sexiness. In Baywatch the women display themselves in ways that would have flabbergasted audiences thirty years ago (the waxed bikini line and silicone breast phenomena can still seem a little strange today), and careful editing of a few episodes could produce a tape of effective masturbatory material that would have been unthinkable on even the latest of late night television thirty years ago. Children instinctively respond to the values of the culture they are in: little girls used to play at being nurses; today aged five, six, and seven they dress up as the Spice Girls and mime to the music following the Girls' dance steps - they are playing at being sexy. We have turned the mid-nineteenth century world (well, if apocryphally, characterised by the stories of covered piano legs) inside out. Now sex and sexuality are blatantly everywhere.

This public permissiveness has been steadily rising since its nadir under Victoria. What happened in the sixties was the explosion of a long fomenting brew. Its icons were the flower children and their stars - and the message was of purity and freedom and love. It was remarkably unsexy by today's standards - it took intense allure to get past that long, lank, loose and shapeless hippy garb. For, when it came to sex, things were to be naked and pure; that was the plan. Instead, when so much of the remaining lid was blown off, it was not the naked and pure love that the flower children's dreamers had dreamed of that came out; instead, there was a seething and confused animal of darkness that had grown in the shadows where people usually looked only in private, and then only in furtive, fascinated and fearful glances. The creature that had grown in the shadows and is still blinking nervously in the unaccustomed light is perversion.

'Perversion', from the Latin perversus 'turned the wrong way'. The first recorded use, to mean wicked, is by Chaucer in 1369; semantically not much changed until the first recorded use concerning sex in 1892, when it was defined as any sexual activity in which pleasure is sought by means other than normal sexual intercourse. The value judgement built into the classification of something as sexually perverse shouts itself in the word's etymology; and it is this value judgement that has since determined the designation of sex acts as perverse, not the original definition. Thus it is that the perverse has steadily shrunk: the realm of the acceptable to the modern ethos now includes homosexuality, cross-dressing, masturbation, being aroused by different materials (leather and rubber are now comfortably seen as sexy, along with satin, silk, and lace), and other fetishes. What consenting adults get up to in private, especially if within a loving relationship, attracts little public opprobrium; it may incite laughter and incredulity, but the modern attitude is to live and let live. If someone's sexuality requires solitude it may incite pity but also distrust, for without strong bonds of love to anyone, the bonds which spread out among people and help hold us together, a person is less a part of us and therefore more dangerous. But if they are comfortably socially integrated and not hurting anyone, we are tolerant of more or less whatever people get up to in private. In part, this stems from the manifest absurdity of sexual desire. From an objective perspective, being aroused by a breast -the sort of obsessive attention such arousal brings- is as absurd as being aroused by a stiletto shoe or a safety pin. To a purely rational observer, (good) sex would seem like a sort of madness. There are, tho', two exceptions, two types of desire for which the word 'perverted' may still be applied with some or all of its old meaning: desire which focuses on the abuse of power and desire which focuses on children. (The two types of desire are liable to be conflated, partly because those attracted by the abuse of power may thereby be attracted to children because of their vulnerability and innocence; i want to distinguish such desire from that which is primarily focused on immature bodies.)
In reality, all abuse is the abuse of power; in phantasy, the idea of such abuse arouses many. It is this type of perversion which is in the process of stepping out into the light. In a way, this freeing of perversion has been a child of the gay liberation movement. Homosexuals aroused by some aspect of the abuse of power, and having already come out of the closet about the homosexual part of their desire, found it easy to come out about the rest - remember Village People on Top of the Pops back in 1978, all dressed in a variety of gay fetish costumes, including a distinctly S&M policeman. After a while, those heterosexuals aroused by the abuse of power felt safe enough to demand some of the action too. People in the vanguard of this movement are calling themselves perverts with the same defiant pride as those homosexuals who call themselves queer. (It is noteworthy that 'wicked' and 'bad' have gone throu' a reversal of meaning that reflects the new value judgement being attached to 'pervert'; no coincidence, some traditionalists will say.)

We have often heard about the 'dark side' of people, but seldom much detail. Jung told us we had to love it, but not what that means in practice. People may allude (darkly) to the fact that they have one, but seldom as to how it manifests itself. It was talked of, but it was not talked about - or, at least, not until recently. Torture and rape are amongst the worst that people can do; yet nowadays the drives behind them are things we are constantly being told to indulge in, if that is our fancy. The 'right to be queer' was born in the seventies; the 'right to be a pervert', in the eighties. In that decade (give or take a few months) we had a single at number two in the charts about the joys of spanking by the icon of that time, Madonna (Hanky Panky: 'Some girls they like candy, others they like crime, I'll settle for the back of your hand somewhere on my behind. Treat me like a bad girl, even when I'm being good to you; I don't want you to thump me, you can just spank me...' and so on) and no woman's magazine was complete without somewhere some advice to indulge one's rape, bondage, and S&M phantasies within a loving relationship or throu' masturbation. Two years after releasing Hanky Panky and two months before she published her own work of pornography, Madonna, that icon beloved by little girls, appeared in Vanity Fair dressed as a very little girl posing erotically. This Summer The Sunday Mirror (a family newspaper, appearing on millions of family tables every week) had a double page spread reporting a survey, purporting to reveal men's 'secret fantasies', that had asked seven questions, each repeated in bold type next to a photo of the most popular answer: they included, 'Who would you most like to see wearing a school uniform?' (winner, Baby Spice - 32%), 'Who of these women would you most like to tie up?', and 'Which of the following women would you most like to tie you up?'. The people enjoying the Sunday Mirror article that morning no doubt sent their daughters off to school next day dressed in school uniform, with somewhere at the back of their minds the fear that some monster would kidnap her, tie her up, and do unspeakable things to her. I don't suppose many of them made the connection. It is this sort of perversity that is the dark side that we have heard so much of before: even tho' there may be no obvious sexual arousal involved, the dark side is the secret monster of sexual deviancy, deviancy that centres on the abuse of power. The dark side is the perversity that is now being illuminated by our fascinated gaze.

Our society will never tolerate such genuine abuse of power again. It has been like a huge boil of pus beneath the surface, covered by the skin of our fear of our sexuality. That skin has been burnt away by modern understanding (from the street as well as the text book), and the boil has finally burst. The pus of the suffering of previous generations of children, and to a lesser extent that of our own, has been spewed out under the horrified gaze of the rest of us. It is because we have seen this suffering, because we can look at it for what it is, that we will not allow it to happen again. It has been a great step forward, the righting of a great wrong. Much of the credit for this must go to those perverts who were brave enough to look honestly at themselves, love what they found, and be determined to make out of it something good.

Desire which focuses on children is of quite a different order. While the modern might disagree with the traditionalist as to the reason, both agree that children should be sexually off-limits to adults. The traditionalist will perhaps say it is because sexuality is sacred, to be shared only between committed loving adults blessed in union by God or committed to lifelong loyalty. The modern has a harder task: for them, sexuality is an enjoyable tool, a means to pleasure, which can be used for higher spiritual, emotional, and aesthetic ends. So, there is no necessary bar to sexual relations between adults and children unless such interaction will, in all possible worlds, damage the children. This hardly seems likely: there are no end of possible worlds, and with sufficient cultural alterations, and perhaps also genetic alterations to change the way our sexuality develops, one can imagine a world in which adults and children sexually interact in a way beneficial to all; but we are in no such world. Here one thing is certain and can be agreed on by all of us: sexual contact between adults and children is very likely to be, at the least, damaging to the child - more likely, extremely damaging. The future, for the modern, must always be an open book - and it can take care of itself. For the moment the modern and the traditionalist agree: it is wrong and it must be stopped; the question is, how?

One cannot determine one's desires, but one can determine one's actions, and it is only on the latter that one should be judged - for the rest, one is simply more or less fortunate. The distortion of this truth has been one of the many factors that led to that epidemic of abuse that we are now seeing uncovered. Perhaps pornography could be provided for paedophiles (drawn, of course, albeit realistically) which while exciting them seeks to show at the same time that the objects of their lust are pure phantasy; that the fictional children of their dreams are in reality adults pretending - that if real, such dreams would be horrible. Whatever we do, tho', by treating their desires as abhorrent instead of pathetic, we will not be able to convince them that their actions are abhorrent (for having actually become bad they will nearly always have to lie to themselves, saying that what they are doing harms no-one), and the abuse and misery will go on longer than it needs to.

In the classical Greek world a few people disapproved of sex and wanted it curbed; but mostly it was celebrated, partly within the ritualised safety of the mystery religions. The disapproval steadily rose with the rise of Christianity until, from Augustine onward, it reigned supreme in Europe, as what had formerly been a distaste at the animal nature of sexuality became welded to an enormous burden of guilt. For centuries the guilt did its work helping to keep people chaste and the church in power, but it had another effect. You cannot keep telling a people that something is wrong without it in the end assuming the form of wrongness for them; and thus it is that modern sexuality is haunted by so many demons - creatures we created throu' the distorting lens of shame, in a world forbidden to the light of our everyday perception. But that form is wrong and at heart they are not demons. Lust is a good thing, even tho' it can lead in the wrong direction; at the very least it is a means to the crudest form of love, pleasure, but it is also a tool throu' which finer forms of love can be reached: it is a means to spiritual, emotional, and aesthetic heights.