“A basic tenet of modern developmental psychology,” Dr. Sam Janus says in his book The Death of Innocence, “always has been the belief that between infancy and adolescence, sexuality goes underground​—becomes ‘latent’—​in the interests of psychic and physical growth.” He then observes that this latency period “is a thing of the past, and that our children are going straight from babyhood to puberty as fully sexual beings, with no intermission. The eroticization of children is becoming a fact of life in modern society.”

Janus later elaborates on this loss of childhood: “Gone are the halcyon days when little boys had time to join boys’ clubs, build clubhouses, and play ball. Some, of course, still do but the numbers decline. The same goes for little girls, who once played with dolls and hoped some day their knights in shining armor would come along, marry them, and live happily ever after with them.”

The new morality that many extol as liberation is actually exploitation. In The Death of Innocence, Dr. Sam Janus asks: “Has liberation become libertine? Has the vaunted liberation of children turned them into sacrificial lambs on the altar of the sexual revolution?”