o have shared this
opinion; and although modern psychiatry takes quite a different view of
pyromania, we have none the less to insist that unduly retarded
development may, just as much as premature development, give rise to
undesirable consequences.

CHAPTER VIII

THE CHILD AS AN OBJECT OF SEXUAL PRACTICES

We have now to consider a matter which bears but indirectly on the
sexual life of the child, and yet may be of the greatest importance in
relation to that life; we have to consider cases in which the child is
the object of sexual practices by others. I have previously referred to
instances in which one child loves another. But the child may also be an
object of sexual desire to adults; for in certain men and women, sexual
inclination is directed towards children. By von Krafft-Ebing this state
is termed _paedophilia erotica_.

Not all the cases in which sexual acts are performed on children belong
to the province of paedophilia. It is well known that in certain
countries--Germany is one of them--a superstition prevails among certain
strata of the population to the effect that venereal diseases may be
cured by means of sexual intercourse with children. Where this is the
motive of the sexual act, the case does not belong to the class of
paedophilia; and many other sexual acts in which children play a part
must also be excepted from this class. It sometimes happens that
debauchees, after having practised all kinds of venereal excesses,
finally take to misusing children; nursemaids, again, and other
servants, will carry out all sorts of sexual acts on the children
entrusted to their care, sometimes merely in order to quiet the
children, sometimes "for fun." Von Krafft-Ebing refers to a special
group of young men who do not feel sufficient confidence in their sexual
potency to attempt intercourse with grown women, also to masturbators
affected with psychical impotence; such persons are apt to seek an
equivalent for coitus in improper contacts with little girls.

One very large group of cases belongs to the sphere of psychiatry. In
quite a number of congenital and acquired states of mental defect or
disorder, sexual acts performed on children appear as symptoms of moral
and intellectual degeneration. In this connexion may be mentioned,
congenital imbecility, progressive paralysis (paralytic dementia),
senile dementia, chronic alcoholism, cerebral syphilis, and
post-epileptic dementia; with or without these co