Minotaur Unveiled

Minotaur Unveiled: The Truncated Account of Adult-Child Erotic Attraction (Essays on Law, Policy and Psychiatry, Vol. 5, 2018) is a historical assessment of adult-child sexual relations as they are to be found not only in historical and forensic literature, but also in the poetic writings of many famous authors around the world. The study produces a quite stable basis of cross-cultural evidence for the fact that pedophile attraction by adults toward children, and perhaps as a correlate, gerontophilic attraction by children toward adults, is a software that was installed early in the human computer, so to speak in the cradle of patriarchy, if not much earlier in the cradle of matriarchy. Without being able to say precisely when, and avoiding the daring speculation that some scientists come up with, which says that pedophilia was a product of sexual repression and that it never existed in sexually liberal matriarchal cultures, the study establishes rather a basis for the view that adult-child sexual interaction is a universal phenomenon that passes over cultural and epochal borders. What also strikes the observer is that sadly, many of those adult-child sexual relations were and are the result of social and moral corruption and have to be called abusive and exploitative. This is especially true for ancient patriarchy and particularly, the Roman Games. But it is also true for the times to come that are further examined in the study: Christianity, Victorian Era and Modern Times. Also during these epochs, the abundant majority of the accounts of adult-child sexual relations have to be qualified as child abuse by any sensitive and unprejudiced observer. The study does not attempt to qualify adult-child sexual relations as 'pedophilia' as this term is part of a modern attempt to cognize these relationships and the term as the whole public discussion about it is not without bias, not to say that it is overshadowed by the diabolization of a group of people called 'pedophiles' who cannot be made out as the sole perpetrators of historic child abuse for the regular client in child prostitution old and new is the ordinary heterosexual, as all qualified academic studies show with abundant evidence.