Customer Reviews

A much needed book!
It is a pity that those who most need to learn from this book are not the ones who will be reading it. Mr Kincaid`s work is greatly needed at the present time, in this era of anti-"paedophile" hysteria. As he points out, 99% of child disappearances and of cases of child molestation have nothing to do with sex nor with paedophiles. Paedophiles are the current scapegoat for the ignorant, who would otherwise be targetting Jews, Africans, Gypsies (who were considered to be child-abductors for a long while due to our obsession with "the Child" as an eroticized image) or ~ as is the case in Britain when "paedophiles" are less in the limelight ~ asylum-seekers and immigrants. Mr Kincaid points out that most, non-sexual, cases of child abuse are comparatively ignored: neglect, poverty, domestic violence, exploitation. Yet it takes one tragedy with a sexual ingredient to launch a hue and cry against "paedophiles" in the age-old tradition of the pogrom against minorities. The assumption in society at large is that all is well with the world if only we eliminated criminals, sex-offenders specifically, etc. The fact is we live in an exploitative and alienating society which produces crime and violence. Sexual offenses and sexual hysteria are two sides of the same coin, the name of which is social despair. Mr Kincaid rightly suggests that we change the dialogue; experiment with new dialogues on this issue that take everything into account. Hysteria cannot bring any solution. It leads directly to more exploitation and to more alienation from one another (so much so that touch between humans of any kind is rendered more suspect). Only knowledge is the answer: rational thought. Therefore, it is more to be regretted that this book will only be read by the rationally mature who already understand the issue; not by the vigilante street-hordes of confused and frustrated proletarians who are the very ones needing to familiarise themselves with clarity of thought. Highly recommended! Anthony Walker. anthonykarl@awalker28.freeserve.co.uk

Unscientific writing which doesn't prove the thesis.
Mr. Kincaid presents the reader with an in-depth look at what lies behind the average person's idea of what a child is. Similarly, he shows how this (apparently flawed and dangerous) concept is commonly fit into what he calls a "story," which is a subjective, but shared, view of a certain type of situation. He concentrates on accounts dealing with sexual abuse. Whenever someone is accused of sexually abusing a child, Kincaid says, there is an almost universal compulsion to put people into roles of innocent victim (the child,) protector (the police, and others) and inhuman monster (the accused,) even if it does not fit the facts. Further, he says, this ideal of "child" is very commonplace in works of art, showing that adults have a strange compulsion to be entertained by a certain kind of child, in a certain kind of situation. Then, Kincaid comes to his emphatic conclusion: The reason children are treated and thought of in this way is because adults, all adults, are sexually attracted to children, and simultaneously feel that it is wrong and act to deny and hide it.

The above explanation does not follow from the book's contents. The author presents no evidence (short of listing countless plots of novels and movies involving children, then insisting that they are erotic,) makes no attempt to validate or support his thesis with either psychological, empirical, or sociological data, and worst of all, acts as if this methodology is just hunky-dory. His irrational and similarly unsupported contention that all knowledge and accounts of past events are merely malleable, subjective "stories" is simply a sloppy way of covering up the fact that his entire explanation is arbitrary and unsupported by any logic or truth.

I was certainly willing to consider his ideas, indeed, that is why I read the book at all. In fact, _Erotic Innocence_ is not without its worth. Buried underneath the rambling, egg-headed prose lie some interesting insights. For example, that many people do have a false and harmful idea of what children are or should be. That these same people obsessively and emotionally try to make a predetermined Gothic melodrama play out in every sexual abuse case involving children, even in defiance of facts. Those points, to varying degrees, are reasonably well argued. What is not, is his fantastic explanation of why this is so.

The most ominous thing about this book, though, is that Kincaid purports to be one of but a few people who can cut through the hysteria with truth, when in fact he adds to it a hundredfold by saying that EVERYONE is a pedophile and that (nearly?) every work of art involving children eroticizes them. Furthermore, his solution is not for people to wake up from the "story" and see things as they are, but to instead construct new "stories," i.e. to delude themselves into believing something else. This, he has the gall to call "rational."

"I believe most adults in our culture feel some measure of erotic attraction to children and the childlike; I do not know how it could be otherwise," he writes, in a statement which summarizes the book's logic.

Sorry, Mr. Kincaid. I need a lot more than your testimony of faith to believe such a fantastic story.

Oh no, he's exactly right!!!
Want your eyes opened? Read this book. I must warn you though, after flipping through channels a few hours following the introduction of this book, you may want to get rid of your television. Kincaid really ticked me off initially in his intro, but by the end of it I was mesmerized clear through to the end of the book. The thought that we have and still do sexualize children in our country (and world) really sucks at first, but then you realize its true and it almost makes you sick to your stomach. It took so much strength to write this book. I commend you Mr. Kincaid.