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“Monster, give me my child”: how the myth of the paedophile as a monstrous stranger took shape in emerging discourses on child sexual abuse in late nineteenth-century Britain

In the late-nineteenth century, a set of intersecting medical and legal theories concerning the notion of sexual harm to children coalesced to produce what would become the modern concept of child sexual abuse (CSA). Although current understandings of CSA as a public health issue did not crystallise until considerably later, this was the period which witnessed their initial formulation, especially in the new science of sexology. Here theories of pathological sexual attraction to children began to be developed, with an 1894 medico-legal textbook making the shocking claim that the “[r]ape of children is the most frequent form of [all] sexual crime” (Chaddock 1894, 543). The concept of CSA was additionally shaped by two adjacent bodies of work which tended to reach wider audiences: sensational journalism on violent crime, in which W. T. Stead’s infamous 1885 “Maiden Tribute” exposé of child prostitution looms large; and a related strand of popular fiction, which used metaphor to hint at the possibility of sexual harm to children. Most research in this area to date focuses on the ways in which sexual harm to children became formulated as a discrete social problem, or on the ways in which the abused child was understood, because, as Victoria Bates argues, “[t]he moral panic... of the late-nineteenth century... focused on defining and constructing the ‘victim’ rather than the perpetrator or the crime” (2016, 12). However, the perpetrator of sexual harm to children – or “paedophile” in current popular parlance –was not absent from nineteenth-century discussion of the subject and is worthy of more detailed scrutiny. This article focuses on the characterisation of this reviled figure in the set of overlapping discourses which shaped the emerging concept of CSA, revealing how the perpetrator was typically portrayed as an outsider or stranger, someone external to the family circle and even to humanity itself. Contemporary research shows that most CSA is perpetrated by family members or others well known to the victims (Kenny 2018), and the historical record suggests this was also the case in the nineteenth century (Jackson 2000, 43). However, although domestic cases were quietly and steadily reported on in the press, far more coverage was afforded to sensational cases of strangercommitted abduction and “lust-murder.” Here, I demonstrate that the origins of the