There used to be a time when inquisitors and others hunted for witches—incidentally, by no means female ones only. In some countries, and at some times, as many men were caught in the dragnet as women.

To contemporaries, men and women, witches were real. Both the learned and the unlearned firmly believed in their existence. Those who tried witches were invariably men; however, women could and did participated in the hunts. Motivated by the desire to settle accounts with their neighbors, at some times and places they formed the majority of the accusers. Midwives and other women who assisted during or after child delivery were particularly at risk. And no wonder, given how prevalent the death of children and mothers was. More witches were executed in England under Queen Elizabeth I, and in France during the regency of Catherine dei Medici, than at any other time.

Many of the witches’ alleged crimes were strange indeed. They mounted broomsticks and flew out at night to meet the devil, it was said. They associated with him, danced with him, worshiped him, kissed his ass, and had sex with him, it was said. Some “experts”—then as now, there were many such, some official, others self-appointed—maintained that the devil had a forked penis. This enabled him to commit fornication and sodomy at the same time. In return for selling their souls and bodies witches of both sexes received powers ordinary humans did not possess. They used them to kill or maim people and livestock, destroy crops, bring on draughts, and much more. From lightning to plague, hardly any natural phenomenon that could not be, and occasionally was, attributed to witchcraft.

How tolerably normal, tolerably sane people could believe such things is a mystery. Worse still, when confronted with facts that might have undermined their beliefs, they clung to them with all their might. Witches were supposed to leave their home at night. When a husband, to protect his wife, claimed that she had never left their bed, he was told that it was only her image, placed there by the devil, which had stayed whereas her real essence had flown away. Judges who acquitted witches were regarded with suspicion as having been influenced by them and might be accused of being witches themselves. Those, and there were always some, who did not believe in witchcraft stood in grave danger of being accused themselves. Perhaps a clue of sorts may be found in the fact that those who prosecuted and condemned witches were entitled to a share of their victims’ property. The entire episode, which peaked between about 1500 and 1700, remains as a monument to human folly, credulity, cruelty, and, in not a few cases, greed.

And today? All over the “advanced” world, not a day passes without many cases of “sexual child abuse” being “discovered.” Informers, some official, others self-appointed, put on disguises and spend days and nights exposing “pedophiles.” The latter are supposed to form entire societies—“rings” is the current term for this—using all kinds of secret methods to communicate with each other. Once discovered they are denounced, brought to trial, condemned, and punished. If and when released from prison they are treated like wild beasts unfit for human society.

Some—nobody knows how many—of the cases are probably genuine in the sense that they involve physical attacks by adults against children too small to understand, say no, and resist. That they should be punished with the full rigor of the law hardly requires saying. But a great many others are much less clear cut. They were created by society which, in a strange return to supposedly out of date, Victorian values, insists that sex is the most dangerous thing in the world. So dangerous that people under such and such an age “cannot handle it” and are faced with all kinds of terrible consequences if they engage in it, or witness it, even out of their own free will.

Never mind that, from the recently deceased writer Garcia Marquez down, the world is full of lads who were initiated into sex at an early age and, decades later, still look at the experience as a blessing. Never mind that, at a time when many countries are raising or thinking of raising the age of consent, the age at which owing to improved nutrition, young women start menstruating as well as wearing push-up bras and lipstick is steadily declining.

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Never mind, too, that cyberspace, the media, the movies, and society in general are all so saturated with sex as to make it impossible even for the most unknowing child to avoid it and, in many cases, see what it is all about. Not seldom it is the most “liberated” people who are most opposed to children, their own and others, learning about sex at “too early” an age.

As during the period of the great witch hunts, some denunciations are motivated by greed and anger. I personally have heard urchins, perhaps 9-10 years old, threatening an adult who was trying to prevent them from committing some mischief that, if he persisted, they would accuse him of sexual child abuse.

Nor does persecution, official and unofficial, cease at this point. Anyone who dares look at an image of a naked child, let alone draw one and show it in public, is in danger. By that standard countless artists of all ages should have been proscribed; luckily for Leonardo and Michelangelo, they died before the onset of our “enlightened” age. Fathers during or after divorce proceedings are in danger, given that mothers sometimes use “sexual abuse” as a way to prevent them from seeing their offspring and, if possible, punish them. Those who try to instruct children any number of fields that involve physical contact—swimming, say, or wrestling—are in danger, given that any accidental touch may and sometimes is interpreted as “sexual abuse.” But that is not all; I know a case when a mother, a photographer by trade, took pictures of her children in their bath. The shop which developed the film called in the police, which in turn called in the “social services” which promptly took the children away. Recovering them took months as well as a small fortune in lawyers’ fees—to say nothing about the traumatic effect on the children themselves.  

To repeat, many of those involved in witch-hunting were able to derive financial advantage from their work. This may not be the case in the same form today. Nevertheless, it remains true that lawyers, social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists who work on these cases before or after they come to trial benefit from them in all kinds of ways. Furthermore, those found guilty of sexual child abuse are often required to pay compensation. Would it be rash to say that, since the victims are too young to control their own finances, often those who benefit are their adult guardians?

Worst of all, the witch-hunt may very well be counterproductive. Throughout history, young people often had sex with each other or with adults without, as far as can be seen, suffering any negative consequences. The same is true in many present-day “developing” countries where the age of consent is low. I have yet to see a study which shows that mental disease is more prevalent among their citizens than elsewhere; judging by the number of mental health workers per capita, indeed, the opposite may be the case. Presenting sex as a dangerous thing with incalculable psychological consequences from which it is hard if not impossible to recover, society may do the young more harm than good. In some cases it may turn them into mental cripples.

At all times and ages, the need to “protect” the young has often served to cover some of the worst crimes of all. Ask Socrates who was executed for “corrupting” the youth of Athens. Could history be repeating itself?