One in five children will be sexually abused before their eighteenth birthday. This isn't a problem confined to a single country, city, or neighborhood. It's something that happens everywhere, and what it costs can be enormous: depression, PTSD, and elevated long-term risk for physical illness, including heart disease and cancer.

In One in Five: Why Child Sexual Abuse Is Our Biggest Public Health Crisis—And What We Can Do to Stop It (Basic Books, 2026), Elizabeth Letourneau and Luke Malone make the case that child sexual abuse is not inevitable. It is preventable, and at this moment in time, we have the tools to stop it before it begins.

Letourneau and Malone don't stop at describing the problem. The book creates a clear picture of how much of the harm is caused by other children. They lay out a road map, built on years of research and real compassion, for keeping kids safe and reaching young people at risk of causing harm before anyone gets hurt.

In this episode of the New Books Network, we follow that road map and ask what changes when prevention rather than punishment becomes the organizing idea behind child safety. The conversation is energized and respectful of survivors and their families, and it projects an urgency that does not lose hope.

I hope you find it worth your time. I think you will, if you are interested in what child sexual abuse prevention can look like in 2026.

- Aniss Benelmouffok

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Do you look back at your sex ed classes and wonder WTF?! Are you a parent looking at your kid’s curriculum and asking the same question?

Sex Education 101: Approachable Essays on Folklore, Culture, & History (Fox Folk Press, 2023) is less of a how-to of sex education and more of a why. Why does abstinence-only sex ed receive so much federal funding? Why do instructors show gross images of STIs to scare students? The answers, believe it or not, have a lot to do with folklore.

Folklore—informally transmitted traditional culture—has a lot to say about sex. And it is often people’s first point of contact with information and messages about sex. Folklore encompasses urban legends, moral panics, and rumors, which influenced early U.S. policies around sex, and also includes jokes, raunchy folk songs, and beliefs and slang about menstruation or STIs. And thus, folklore shapes sex ed classrooms and school sex ed policies.

Jeana Jorgensen earned her PhD in folklore at Indiana University. She is a lecturer in anthropology at Butler University and part of the editorial team at Marvel's & Tales. Her books include Folklore 101 (2021), Fairy Tales 101 (2022), and Sex Education 101 (2023), and her work has appeared in the Journal of American Folklore, Fabula, Journal of Folklore Research, and elsewhere.

Rachel Hopkin PhD is a folklorist and audio producer.

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The definitive feminist analysis of reproductive and ‘caring’ labor to emerge from Italian feminism of the 1970s.

Emerging from the great social upheavals that contested the sexual and racial divisions of labor globally in the 1970s, Leopoldina Fortunati’s classic work expands and transforms how we analyze the sphere of reproduction, redefining the value of the individual’s life and the labor performed in the home.

Released here for the first time in its unabridged form with historical notation and contemporary commentary, The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital (Verso, 2025) is a foundational text and essential contribution to today’s discussions of social reproduction and the history of Italian feminism. Fortunati’s work provides some of the earliest theorizations of ‘immaterial,’ ‘affective,’ and ‘caring’ labor, and of the role of technology in reproduction, articulated decades before their popular reception in English academic literature. Reading this work some 50 years after its original publication gives us the tools to analyze the contemporary state of capitalist development and of women’s lives today. The text remains prefigurative and essential in our era of digital labor.

Leopoldina Fortunati was a core member of Lotta Femminsta and the Wages for Housework Movement internationally. Along with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and Silvia Federici, she composed many of the group’s core theoretical and political texts. Her early work continues to inform movements concerned with struggles over reproduction globally and in subsequent work as a theorist of media and technology, Fortunati has been at the vanguard of contemporary theory addressing the relation between gendered labor and technology.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

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