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The fact is that technology heavily mediates between children and adults – here the editor speaks – in the sexual realm; and not merely current technology but technology throughout modern history. If we can control our runaway technology, including the uses to which it is being put so far as children are concerned, we may be able to lower the temperature of the current malaise. But technology is controlled by business interests that governments find almost impossible to monitor: profit before national policy.

George Rousseau 31 5. His classic work of 1960 (French), Centuries of Childhood (London: J. Cape, trans. Robert Baldick, 1962). For astute appraisals of Ariès’ work see Adrian Wilson, ‘The Infancy of the History of Childhood: An Appraisal of Philippe Ariès,’ History and Theory 19 (1980); Patrick H. Hutton, Philippe Ariès and the Politics of French Cultural History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004) ; and chapter 1 of Robert Woods (n. 4). 6. One exception is the group of anthropologists and historians of the family centred around Professor David Kertzer of Brown University, an authority on Italian politics, society and political history.

The dark corridors and sequestered interiors of Oxbridge colleges, like those of much plusher Continental chateaus and palazzos, or English country houses of the type where the child Pamela in Samuel Richardson’s novel of that name works for the adult Mr. B, were natural habitats for corruption of the young – especially if only two of the authority figures in college were in residence. This is probably what occurred at Wadham College Oxford in 1739. 58 Spin the chronological dials forward a century to the nineteenth and sexuality itself is being radically reconfigured.