On December 26, 1996, JonBenét Ramsey, a six-year-old child beauty queen, was found strangled in the basement of her family home. The day before, on Christmas, the Ramseys opened gifts together; JonBenét’s last present was a “special” one, from her mother, Patsy: a My Twinn doll, designed to look just like her, from photographs Patsy had sent to the company, complete with outfits identical to JonBenét’s so the two could match.

Much to Patsy’s chagrin, JonBenét felt indifferent toward the doll, though the nature of this apathy, reported by Patsy and her husband, John, in their co-authored book The Death of Innocence, has mutated over the years on JonBenét subreddits and forums: The My Twinn doll is never mentioned without some type of dramatic qualifier along the lines of “which she hated.”

Perhaps JonBenét was disappointed with the doll for the same reason she favored American Girl dolls; she owned several. My Twinn seemed to fundamentally misunderstand the appeal of dolls for many girls. Whether Barbies, baby dolls, or American Girls, dolls let girls imagine themselves otherwise—as adults (from astronauts or presidents), as mothers, or as women living through a different era.

The My Twinn doll, on the other hand, offers a mirror. For a girl like JonBenét, so keenly aware of her own appearance from such a young age through the pageant scene, it is not hard to imagine why she might not appreciate seeing herself replicated in doll features—nor is it hard to imagine why her stage mother Patsy did.

After JonBenét’s murder, which remains officially unsolved to this day, police allowed one of Patsy’s sisters to remove several items from the Ramsey home, which was cordoned off as a crime scene—among them, web detectives posit, JonBenét’s American Girl dolls.

On forums related to JonBenét’s murder on sites like Reddit and WebSleuths, users are stuck on this detail: Why remove the dolls?

For user Jahazafat, this question is key to solving the murder, as it solves one of the case’s most curious unknowns: the duct tape found at the scene. Though many believe that a member of the Ramsey family—whether parents Patsy and John or brother Burke—murdered JonBenét, no member of the family has ever been formally indicted. This is due to both a lack of evidence incriminating them and the presence of evidence suggesting a third-party culprit.

The “intruder theory,” as forum users call it, relies heavily on the presence of duct tape, found over JonBenét’s mouth, which John claims to have removed immediately upon finding his daughter’s body. The duct tape, investigators concluded, could not be linked to the Ramseys, as no matching roll was found in the house, and Patsy and John both denied there ever being one. The tape had fibers that likewise could not be matched with anything in the house—some animal fur, and human-made fibers colored red, blue, pink, purple, and brown.

Jahazafat, who identified herself on the forums as a former worker at a call center that filled orders for American Girl dolls, posited the following theory: American Girl dolls have heads that are tied on rather than glued on, making them easier to replace should they become damaged. Jahazafat noted that, in her training at the call center, she was taught to tell customers (who were bothered by the strings) to duct tape them down. Jahazafat believed that the fibers found in the mysterious duct tape would also match the skirt and fabric body of a Molly doll, and that JonBenet’s dolls would show corresponding gummy marks where the tape used had been removed. But, as Patsy’s sister had been allowed, Jahazafat asserts, to remove the dolls alongside the items the Ramseys themselves report were moved, such marks were never found. The smoking gun, for followers of Jahazafat’s theory, is an order for an American Girl sent in days after JonBenét’s death, in her name, delivered to Access Graphics, her father’s place of work. Why would the Ramseys order a doll for JonBenét after her death? Jahazafat posited that it was to replace the doll with the matching fibers and duct tape marks that the family had disposed of.

As a child beauty queen, JonBenét’s murder was perfectly suited for tabloid sensation; it ignited the deepest fears of parents across the country—not only that their own children may be murdered, but that they might be sexualized, too. She also exposed an obscured truth: that, perhaps, the reason we dress girls up in fake adult teeth, makeup, and hair extensions, is that they embody the myth of “true womanhood” and its attendant purity and submissiveness better than adult women do.

To the non-beauty-pageant-regular, it was strange, even perverse, to see a child in full makeup and a fur collar. It’s a fear that has led to a decades-long obsession, with numerous books, movies, and shows made about the crime. Unsolved murders are catnip for conspiracy theorists. Theories include the belief that JonBenét never died, but was, in a collaboration between the Ramseys and the Illuminati, hidden for years, so that she could resurface one day as pop musician Katy Perry. Or that JonBenét was abused and then killed by a pedophile: a convicted sex offender named Gary Oliva even confessed in letters to killing JonBenét although he has never been formally charged with the murder. Since the murder of Charlie Kirk brought his widow Erika into the limelight, the possibility that she is JonBenét has been added to the mix. With the accompanying conspiracies that Erika was a Mossad honeytrap to harness Charlie’s political influence and that Jeffrey Epstein is alive in Israel (based on evidence of Epstein’s ties to the Israeli government). Conspiracy theorists find more and more fodder.

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Epstein and his eponymous Files have brought heightened attention to the sexual abuse of children today. When Pizzagate, the belief in an elite pedophile ring (so named for the theory that this ring met at a DC pizzeria), began in 2016, its support was limited to conspiracy theorists on the ultra-right looking toward the Democratic Party—the initial theory came about from disgraced Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner’s emails, and was later bolstered by the email leak of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign chair John Podesta’s emails. Supporters of Pizzagate, which fed into the development of QAnon, believed the correspondence contained a secret code for communicating the details of a child abuse ring. With the publication of many of Epstein’s emails, which contained suspicious mentions of “jerky” and other foods—including “pizza”—Pizzagate has reemerged, this time with believers across both sides of the partisan aisle, who are theorizing a cabal of child-abusing elites that knows no party alliances. As a conspiracy theory, Pizzagate prefigured the exposure of Epstein and the release of his emails. I’m thus interested less in the party alliances of such conspiracy theories than in what they both obscure and reveal about the broader cultural landscape.

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In 2016, shortly before the release of the Podesta emails, I wrote my senior thesis about pedophilia and brought in the outsider artist Henry Darger as a lens. Darger, who was institutionalized as a child and became a loner as an adult, was unknown as an artist during his life. His work, comprising hundreds of illustrations and thousands of pages of unpublished writing, was found only shortly before his death, when he moved out of his rented apartment. Darger’s writing includes a 15,145-page novel titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco–Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion; an unfinished sequel to The Vivian Girls, called Further Adventures of the Vivian Girls in Chicago, containing around 8,000 pages; and a roughly 5,000-page narrative titled History of My Life, that despite being conceived of as an autobiography, mostly details the narrative of a tornado named “Sweetie Pie” and the destruction it causes. His illustrations, some reaching almost 6 feet in length, feature young girl soldiers—the Vivian Girls—and the violence that befalls them. Many of the girls are imaged nude and/or being massacred: crucified, beheaded, disemboweled.

Prior to 2012, much of the scholarship on Darger classified him within two categories: violent pedophile or child-like saint. Much more interesting, however, is the scholarship that follows, spearheaded by Michael Moon and Mary Trent. In Moon’s Darger’s Resources (2012), the author paints Darger as neither violent nor childlike but rather an observant responder to contemporary pop culture and politics—isolated personally, yes, but fully immersed and engaged in the world of visual culture.

In the 2012 article “'Many Stirring Scenes': Henry Darger's Reworking of American Visual Culture,” Mary Trent gives a specific example of this engagement: a young girl seen in the forefront of Darger’s collage titled At Jenni Richee. Heading first for their own camp with their plans for the raid in mind, who looks playfully out of the picture plane and at the viewer, while she inflates a very round, and very taut, balloon. The sexual innuendo of the balloon—both being “blown” and suckled—is obvious. And yet this pose did not come from Darger’s imagination. It finds its source instead in the July 1947 issue of The American Magazine, the cover of which was found among Darger’s surviving images and documents. Though the cover appears innocent at first, it is difficult to see it in the same light after seeing Darger’s version. In the bottom-right corner of the American Magazine cover, an article is teased: “How Safe Is Your Daughter?” by then-director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. The article’s question traces across generations, from postwar American family fundamentalism to the death of JonBenét to today.

Trent also discusses Darger’s appropriation of a photo that he had collected of the five-year-old murder victim Elsie Paroubek, the loss of which inspired The Vivian Girls (Paroubek is transformed into the character of Annie Aronburg, and a missing photograph of her spurs the war in the novel):

Darger’s novel affirms the double power of the fetish of Romantic Child. Such images intoxicate not simply because they present a blank slate of youthful sensuality desired by adults but also because violations to this emptiness provoke intense, even obsessive, expressions of anxiety, outrage, and aggression against whatever—or whoever—threatens them.

Publishers select pictures, like the one on the cover of The American Magazine, foregrounding innocence, knowing the kind of inspirational power these images can possess. This power, as Trent says, is two-fold: It can incite violence, yes, but it also incites protection. However, the protection needs to respond to the violence—or at least the threat of violence—in order to exist: Without anything to protect against, it wouldn’t exist at all.

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In his book Child-Loving (1992), a study of cultures of innocence and pedophilia, James Kincaid writes that:

By insisting so loudly on the innocence, purity, and asexuality of the child, we have created a subversive echo: experience, corruption, eroticism. More than that, by attributing to the child the central features of desirability in our culture—purity, innocence, emptiness, Otherness—we have made absolutely essential figures who would enact this desire. Such figures are certainly not us, we insist, insist so violently because we must… The pedophile is thus our most important citizen, so long as he stays behind the tree or over in the next yard: without him we would have no agreeable explanation for the attractions of the empty child. We must have the deformed monster in order to assure that our own profiles are proportionate.

Kincaid effectively asks: through the assignment of innocence and purity to the child, features we find culturally attractive, how could we guarantee that our attraction doesn’t steer into the inappropriate?

In the absence of this guarantee, we have done the next best thing: create the figure of the Pedophile that so offensively contains the inappropriate that we are able to distance ourselves from him: to disavow our own complicity through the construction of an Other.

The ubiquity of the capital-P Pedophile as something we must guard ourselves against has the important effect of codifying this figure. The Pedophile, whose desire is innate to the formation of his Otherness, is touted as the catalyst for action—inappropriate desire begins with him, and we respond accordingly through rejection. Like the Pedophile, who, as a type, emerged in the nineteenth century, the modern Father as we know him in post-war America, as a protector of innocence (picture purity rings gifted by Daddy here), is another historically situated figure constructed alongside the figure of the Child.

In Centuries of Childhood (1960), Philippe Ariès demonstrates how the modern construction of the family emerged with the construction of the child, a history we can trace to the centrality of the nuclear family and Lee Edelman’s theory of “reproductive futurism”––the idea that society structures itself morally, politically, and legally around the innocence of the child. Politicians continuously co-opt this philosophy to propose policy in relation to the future of the child.

If the Pedophile represents the inappropriate response to the Child, the Father represents the ideal response: he protects and cares. In discussing these three figures, it is clear that power inevitably comes into play: There is, after all, a power-play between the Father and the Pedophile, over who will win out in their fight for control of the Child. As evidenced in Kincaid’s writing, however, the Pedophile does not start from nowhere—Kincaid states that it is our insistence on the “innocence, purity, and asexuality of the child” that creates the figure of the Pedophile; in our collective decentering of the child’s inherent sexuality and replacement-centering of the Pedophile, we thus obscure the power of purity in its ability to create the Child as the catalyst of the pedophilic scene.

Figured between the dynamics of the Pedophile and Father necessarily sits the Child, objectified as a container of passive power, i.e., power that provokes others to act, rather than what gives one the ability to act. This power is innate to its subject, the Child, unable to escape the power granted to her via the innocence prescribed to her. This power is twofold and contradictory: in the Pedophile, her innocence has the power to inspire and incite violence; in the Father, it is this same innocence that inspires the necessary protection against the Pedophile’s violence. However, this is dependent on the Child’s, especially the Young Girl’s, agreement to perform innocence in something I have termed the “innocence contract.”

The Young Girl requires innocence to get protection. She exercises her passive power over the Father (to obtain his attention and protection). A failure to perform innocence results in the removal of the responding power of protection from the Father. Without the Father’s power, the Pedophile’s power is no longer thwarted. However, the Young Girl does not have an option to negotiate the contract’s terms: Instead, she has only the option to gain as much as possible from it. She is incentivized to perform innocence as properly as possible; however, as innocence is inevitably tied to youth, and a perfect performance of innocence and purity is unachievable, the Young Girl is bound to fail to perform properly, thus failing to uphold her end of the forced contract, and leaving her to reap the punishment of her double bind.

What is obscured, however, is the reality behind the Young Girl’s contractual performance—that it is actually both the Father and Pedophile that have power over her, especially as she cannot opt out of enacting her passive power. The reality behind the performance thus reconnects the Father and the Pedophile: what is the common ground between the Pedophile’s attraction and the Father’s protection? In both instances, a middle-aged man is given dominion and control over a young girl, and even more specifically, her innocence. The Pedophile exerts control through his destruction of it through sexual corruption, while the Father exerts control, often violently, by proposing that the preservation of innocence is completely dependent upon him.

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These tropes, familiar and pervasive across media, form the “specter” of pedophilia—a bogeyman that only slightly resembles the reality of actual child sexual abuse. This bogeyman is the dirty old stranger with a predilection for children for whom we are told to look out and against whom we are taught to protect our children ourselves (as children). In fact, however, the perpetrators in the majority of child sexual abuse cases are people who know the victim—like a family member, family friend, neighbor, or teacher—and, as professor and sexual offense expert Kelly Richards reports, the majority of child sex offenders are not actually “pedophiles,” in the sense of an exclusive attraction to children, but rather abuse children based on opportunity, access, and readily exploitable relations of authority.

And, of course, we know that, in reality, children of all genders and races are abused. But I focus here on the category of the capital-P Pedophile––its sensationalism, its insistence on strangeness––as this category tends to serve as a red herring obscuring these realities. For example, Kincaid writes of the existence of and attitudes toward the Victorian-era chimney sweep and “child prostitute,” both common occurrences in Victorian England (though the former more so than the latter), to call into question today’s impression and mis-remembering of the era as particularly loving and protective of children: “None of this [these unsentimental attitudes] obliterates the notion of the sentimental fixed, ‘innocent’ child,” he writes, “but it casts doubt on it.

What Kincaid’s analysis lacks, however, is a consideration that this “innocence” may have been reserved only for members of the upper classes. What we thus may need to consider is that the categorical coupling of the “child” and its “innocence” are not a result of a stratified society but are structuring of said stratification.

Think of, for example, the widely documented adultification of Black children, in which Black children are “not just dehumanized along with the rest of their communities but routinely treated as if they were adults”—interpersonally and structurally—“their childhood dismissed, denied, and stolen, with those responsible only rarely held to account.”

What has been used to protect the white child has often been wielded to punish the Black one. The implications this has held in the realm of sexual violence are great: Priscilla Ocen writes that Black women and girls have historically been arrested for sex work in situations where white women and girls received protection even following anti-trafficking laws, and Mikah Thompson argues that Black girls’ adultification makes them especially vulnerable to “mistake of age” defenses in statutory rape cases.

Ocen adds,

In the United States, as the notion of the innocent, developmental child emerged, white children began to enjoy greater protections while Black children’s position remained relatively unchanged. This is exemplified by the ways in which state and local governments began to enact some of the first laws regulating child labor while Black children were still enslaved. While local communities established public and private schools to educate white children, enslaved Black children were prohibited from learning to read or write. Following Reconstruction, Black children were subject to mandatory apprenticeship requirements notwithstanding the emergent child labor laws.

Race complicates the triangulation of the Child, Father, and Pedophile above. The Father (both familial and bureaucratic in the paternalistic State) has been the protector of the white child since long before the Victorian era—in this case, innocence was figured more as protecting the “purity” of whiteness, associated less with the absence of sex and more with sex with the “right” person, needing protection against racialized figures: Think of, for instance, of the “one-drop rule,” which stated that children sired by enslavers through the rape of enslaved women would be enslaved, despite the status of their biological father; miscegenation laws; and the fact that the “first white child” born in each “New World” colony has his own Wikipedia page. In this way, alongside the shifting sexual and racial politics of colonial and imperial expansion, the Pedophile may simply be the latest iteration of the Predator—as “innocence” was updated, the Predator was, too.

There has been one representative figure of the Child in US history, one strikingly similar to the ones shown in the illustration to J. Edgar Hoover’s article, “How Safe Is Your Daughter?,” in a now-almost-eighty-year-old issue of The American Magazine. The construction of the innocent white Child, particularly the Young Girl, has constructed the Pedophile while also belying the true realities of child sexual abuse and allowing true abusers, whose image does not look like the one set up by the Pedophile type, off the hook. However, if Epstein has shown us anything, it is that, even when faced with the real-life bogeyman, we cannot pull the trigger—his power goes too deep, his desire structures too much.

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A popular conspiracy theory about Epstein is that he used video footage of child sexual abuse by powerful figures to blackmail them, thereby controlling some of the most powerful titans of industry and governments around the world. A strange precursor to this is found in the ransom note Patsy Ramsey reported finding in her home, which read in part, “We are a group of individuals that represent a small foreign faction. We respect your bussiness [sic], but not the country that it serves.” John Ramsey led Access Graphics, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, a company known for its outsized participation in the American military–industrial complex. Recent social media posts have shown videos of a girl who looks like JonBenét on the shoulders of Jeffrey Epstein and photos of Ghislaine Maxwell at JonBenét’s birthday party. In the age of AI and deepfakes, it is unclear if these are real. The deep-state implications are rampant. John has denied any connection to Epstein and Maxwell, but wouldn’t he?

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In a 1996 advertisement for the My Twinn doll, partnered with FAO Schwarz, the company announces that the toy is a “soft, lifelike doll, individually crafted to resemble the special little girl of your choice.” Rather than appeal to parents via their children (“Your daughter can have a doll that looks like her!”), the company appeals to adults alone, not even specifying who that “special little girl” may be. In a post-Epstein era, this, accompanied by the adjectives “soft” and “lifelike,” gives me pause.

Who were these dolls for? I can imagine, perhaps, why JonBenét “hated” this gift.

This essay builds on Sparapani’s article “American Doll” in Sofa magazine, no. 4 (2020), a screening series titled This Light Stuttgart by artist Andrew Norman Wilson at the Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart on December 3, 2017, and research conducted for Sparapani’s thesis titled “Reading the Pedophile: Deconstruction of Innocence Worship Through the Work of Henry Darger,” completed in 2016 at Vassar College under the advising of Wendy Graham.