“The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken,” warned the eminent social thinker Lloyd Demause back in 1974. Over forty years later this nightmare is not only still with us but is arguably more vivid. Barely a week passes these days without further revelations about endemic child abuse.
Demause’s seminal essay on the evolution of childhood is a reminder that children have always been cruelly exploited. In ancient Greece boy brothels flourished and men kept slave boys for abuse. In the literature of the time, Petronius describes the rape of a seven-year-old girl with women clapping in a long line around the bed. And infants in imperial Rome were castrated in the cradle to be used in brothels by men who liked buggering young castrated boys.
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