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Hardcover
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9780190913984
Overview
Overview
Stranger Danger centers on the moral panic over child kidnapping and exploitation which erupted in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Several high-profile cases of missing and murdered white photogenic/telegenic children helped generate a national panic over child safety. Publicized through an emergent twenty-four-hour news cycle, these cases supplied evidence of what some commentators dubbed "a national epidemic" of child abductions committed by strangers. The bereaved parents of missing and/or slain children--people like John Walsh, father of six-year-old murder victim Adam Walsh and the parents of Etan Patz--turned their grief into a mass movement and helped to propel a moral panic. The Walshes and other parents warned Americans of a supposedly widespread and worsening child kidnapping threat. They couched this threat within a wider narrative of national and familial decline and urged the public and private sectors to address the stranger danger "epidemic." Such child safety crusaders erroneously claimed that as many as fifty thousand American children fell victim to stranger kidnappings annually. (The actual figure is somewhere between one hundred and three hundred.) Though heart-wrenching, stranger abductions of children occur far less frequently than those perpetrated by family members and acquaintances. Yet these exaggerated statistics regarding stranger kidnapping--and the emotionally resonant images and narratives deployed behind them--convinced policymakers, media figures, and everyday Americans alike that stranger danger represented a grave and growing problem. A strong bipartisan consensus congealed around matters of child protection and led to the creation of new legal and cultural instruments designed to keep children safe--and, crucially, to punish those who ostensibly wished them harm. Ranging from the commonplace child fingerprinting drives of the early 1980s to the AMBER Alerts that periodically set off Americans' smart phones to the nation's sprawling system of sex offender registration, these instruments have widened the reach of the carceral net and intensified surveillance practices focused on children.
- Format: Hardcover
- Author: Renfro, Paul M.
- ISBN: 9780190913984
- Condition: Used
- Dimensions: 9.30 x 1.20
- Number Of Pages: 312
- Publication Year: 2020
Language:
English