Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

In 1966, the sexual murder of an eleven-year-old in Prague occupied the media and broader public, reinforcing expert debates about child sex offenders. In this article, we trace changes in medical experts’ understanding of child sex offenders in socialist Czechoslovakia between the late 1950s and mid-1970s. We show that psychiatrists and sexologists discussed forensic evaluation and the need for specialized treatment years before the 1966 case, but therapeutic practices lagged behind. As the networks of expertise shifted after this key crime, medical experts made up new kinds of people – deviant and non-deviant sex offenders – and gradually standardized treatment procedures. We argue that in addition to experts, the media and the lay public represented key agents who contributed to the establishment of a complex system of sexological protective treatment in Czechoslovakia. This system has remained almost unchanged to this day.