Sexual inclinations towards children are especially apt to be associated with sadistic acts. In a comparatively large proportion of cases, children are the victims of lust-murder, if this term be used in its strictly limited signification, and not to include all possible sexual acts complicated with murder, but simply to signify cases in which the very act of murder provides a sexual stimulus, or when the corpse is utilised for a lustful act; that is to say, we must exclude from lust-murder proper, all the cases in which, for other reasons than a sadistic impulse, the sexual act is complicated with murder, as when the female witness of a previous sexual crime must be got out of the way. Children, too, are often the victims of other sexual acts, such as rape, which in a few instances only can be included in the category of sadism. In some cases force is employed only because the victim resists the act of violation, and here there is no question of sadism; but the rape is sadistic when the use of force is _per se_ a sexual stimulus. Moreover, children are often endangered by "stabbers." In the year 1899, there was much anxiety in the city of Cologne on account of such a stabber. Those injured were all schoolgirls, and ultimately no children were sent alone to school, but they were always accompanied by a servant or a relative. In 1901, there was a similar series of cases in Moscow, a number of half-grown girls being stabbed by a man with a dagger. In the year 1896, a stabber appeared in Berlin. He enticed schoolgirls into the vestibule of a house, under the pretence that he wanted to brush some mud from their clothing; then, drawing a knife, he would inflict on the child a long and deep incised wound. In the summer of 1901, the inhabitants of northern Berlin were terrorised by a man who stabbed one girl fatally, and wounded two others severely. A remarkable point about this case was that the stabber made three separate assaults in a single afternoon, at very brief intervals. Unless the offender is discovered, it is naturally impossible to ascertain whether he has acted under the influence of some ordinary mental disorder (such as mania or post-epileptic insanity), or if he is a sexual pervert. The act alone will not enable us to answer this question.