Overseas, there has been a gradual backlash against what some critics perceive as excessive laws and public hysteria.
The defence is frequently mounted in the name of art.
Last year, the failure of film director Adrian Lyne to find a distributor in the US for his film version of Vladimir Nabokov's classic paedophile novel Lolita - and the outrage over its release in Britain - was interpreted by critics as tacit art censorship.
Controversial author A N Wilson has published a new novel, Dream Children, about a philosophy professor's mutually satisfying affair with a 10-year-old girl. She grows up to become a well-adjusted person and a successful investment manager, and remembers the affair as the only truly erotic and loving experience she has had.
The late French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault has argued that the classification of sexual deviations such as paedophilia - and the identification of individuals as deviants on the basis of their sexual inclinations - only began with the rise of modern pedagogy and clinical practice in the past century.
In his book The History of Sexuality, he claims the ethical model of the mentor-disciple relationship in ancient Greece was pederasty in many respects.
Foucault's historical accuracy has been challenged, but anthropological evidence shows the erotic use of children was widely accepted in most cultures until recently.