Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex
by Judith Levine
University of Minnesota Press, 2002

(From the publisher) Sex is a wonderful, crucial part of growing up, and children and teens can enjoy the pleasures of the body and be safe, too. In this important and controversial book, Judith Levine makes this argument and goes further, asserting that America's attempts to protect children from sex are worse than ineffectual. It is the assumption of danger and the exclusive focus on protection-what Levine terms "the sexual politics of fear"-that are themselves harmful to minors.

Through interviews with young people and their parents, stories drawn from today's headlines, visits to classrooms and clinics, and a look back at the ways sex among children and teenagers has been viewed throughout history, Judith Levine debunks some of the dominant myths of our society. She examines and challenges widespread anxieties (pedophilia, stranger kidnapping, Internet pornography) and sacred cows (abstinence-based sex education, statutory rape laws). Levine investigates the policies and practices that affect kids' sex lives—censorship, psychology, sex and AIDS education, family, criminal, and reproductive law, and the journalism that begs for "solutions" while inciting more fear.

Harmful to Minors offers fresh alternatives to fear and silence, describing sex-positive approaches that are ethically based and focus on common sense. Levine provides optimistic, though realistic, prescriptions for how we might do better in guiding children toward loving well—that is, safely, pleasurably, and with respect for others and themselves.

About the Author

	© University of Minnesota Press

(from the Richard J. Margolis Award site) Judith Levine is an author and journalist who over the past 25 years has combined reportage, history and social science, and personal writing to explore the cultural politics of sexuality, gender, family, and the overlapping practices of psychology and criminal justice. She has always seen writing as a creative activist act connecting the personal with the political.

She is also the author of My Enemy, My Love: Women, Men & the Dilemmas of Gender (Doubleday, 1992), as well as scores of articles, which have appeared in both popular and academic national publications, including Harper's, The Village Voice, My Generation, Index on Censorship, Salon, and Nerve. She is currently working on a memoir about her father, a meditation on loss, duty, and compassion.

Levine is a founder of the National Writers Union and the feminist guerrilla theater group No More Nice Girls and continues to be active in the union, feminism, and the defense of free speech. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, and the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.