The moral panic about this totally disregards the broader forces that cause violence towards children and sexual partners. Children are always more likely to be abused, physically or sexually, by a family member or someone they know, rather than an individual hiding in a windowless van with an amazon.com book as @atomic suggests. But rather than addressing the unequal power dynamic in the family, in schools, or in the church, we would prefer to flip-out as if one newly-printed book started a new child-abuse fad. This doesn't even begin to address the media's role in fetishizing underage women and mixing violence with sexual desire, or society's disregard of non-statutory power imbalances (high-level politician targeting an intern comes to mind).

I'm not trying to defend abusive relationships with children, but if the panic is over books that merely broach the subject in an alternative way, such as Tony Duvert's work, than I think it is more about a desire to avoid having an uncomfortable discussion about power, youth, and sex in our society that could point to mainstream institutions as culprits and not just lone wolfs. It seems silly to label this a 'free speech issue' when no one, including the Mercury, is willing to have a conversation on the issue, and instead just wants to reify whats 'normal' (to most Americans any letter in Savage Love wouldn't strike the reader as normal). You can't just draw a line at 18, label any desire south of that as a disease, and pretend like everything above it is perfectly fine.

As long as they do not pull the Sam Adams book.