Beginning with Etan Patz's disappearance in Manhattan in 1979, a spate of high-profile cases of missing and murdered children stoked anxieties about the threats of child kidnapping and exploitation. Publicized through an emerging twenty-four-hour news cycle, these cases supplied evidence of what some commentators dubbed "a national epidemic" of child abductions committed by "strangers."
In this book, Paul M. Renfro narrates how the bereaved parents of missing and slain children turned their grief into a mass movement and, alongside journalists and policymakers from both major political parties, propelled a moral panic. Leveraging larger cultural fears concerning familial and national decline, these child safety crusaders warned Americans of a supposedly widespread and worsening child kidnapping threat, erroneously claiming that as many as fifty thousand American children fell victim to stranger abductions annually. The actual figure was (and remains) between one hundred and three hundred, and kidnappings perpetrated by family members and acquaintances occur far more frequently. Yet such exaggerated statistics-and the emotionally resonant images and narratives deployed behind them-led to the creation of new legal and cultural instruments designed to keep children safe and to punish the "strangers" who ostensibly wished them harm. Ranging from extensive child fingerprinting drives to the milk carton campaign, from the AMBER Alerts that periodically rattle Americans' smart phones to the nation's sprawling system of sex offender registration, these instruments have widened the reach of the carceral state and intensified surveillance practices focused on children.
Stranger Danger reveals the transformative power of this moral panic on American politics and culture, showing how ideas and images of endangered childhood helped build a more punitive American state.
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Stranger Danger combines a skillfully constructed, richly detailed narrative of the moral panic about missing and exploited children in the 1970s and 1980s with an analysis of its political and policy consequences that persuasively ties it to the expansion of the carceral state. Paul M. Renfros consideration of those put in the shadows by the glare of attention given a handful of white, middleclass children ensures that this powerful book offers much more than a picture of a moral panic. * Stephen Robertson, Journal of American History * Renfro's study of how 'stranger danger' shaped national policies and served as a tool to further a Reaganite and, sadly, racist vision of the care of at-risk youth, is a critical contribution.... This story has something for everyone: racism, homophobia, Reaganite 'family values' and Clintonite 'law and order'. It is a story of bipartisan bad policymaking fuelled by irrational fears and political expediency, and a deep commitment to an ethos of surveillance and punishment.... Renfro's book is an impressive feat, weaving together archival sources and bringing historical cases to life, while resisting the temptation to sensationalise these horrific crimes....Ultimately, this book is an original, thought-provoking analysis of America's treatment of its most vulnerable. This powerful book will not only inform historians but could, crucially, inform policymakers, were they only to rely on evidence rather than politics. * Raz Mical, English Historical Review * Novel....Renfro's work highlights that the 'affective politics' of child safety that highlighted children's value and worth...informed the passage of laws as memorials to child victims, and, ultimately, the incontestability of the issue....Particularly striking is the extent to which parents and their political allies were willing to forfeit civil liberties, chiefly privacy, in the service of their anti-crime agenda....Renfro makes a compelling case for the 'primacy of childhood' as a vehicle for the advancement of bipartisan carceral policies in an 'ageist' late twentieth-century political landscape. * Melanie Newport, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth * Stranger Danger is an excellent piece of scholarship, clearly the result of deep and wide archival research. It is essential reading for knowledge about the origins of legal policies that rely on fears over threats to 'white innocence' that have had such monumental consequences for mass incarceration. * Paul Kaplan, Punishment & Society * Renfro (Florida State Univ.) meticulously describes the heightened fear over child abductions and sexual exploitation by strangers over the past four decades, which led to policies resulting in mass incarceration. Summing Up: Recommended * CHOICE * With empathy for the families of missing children...Renfro demonstrates that the knee-jerk, punitive response to heartbreaking-yet exceptional-cases of missing white, middle class boys (and later girls) created a moral panic that has ultimately been responsible for more harm than good. By focusing on the wrong issue, the child safety regime that Renfro identifies obfuscates more pressing issues....Renfro ends with a call for reevaluating this regime * Anna K. Danziger Halperin, Annals of Iowa * Paul M. Renfro masterfully explores the fear those cases [of high-profile missing children] evoked and the punitive laws they produced-invariably named after attractive white children who had been murdered by strangers.... Renfro argues that such legislation was not a rational response to a widespread threat, but a symptom of a culture that had projected many of its anxieties about social change onto the specter of 'deviant strangers emboldened by sexual liberation.'... An innovative mix of political, legal, and cultural history, the book demonstrates...how important a bipartisan family values agenda was in shaping the logos, pathos, and ethos of the punitive state. * Daniel LaChance, Law and Society Review * A well-structured and provocative book, Stranger Danger reveals the transformative power of moral panic on American politics, media and culture, showing how ideas and images of the 'endangered child', and subsequent efforts to save (select) American children from illusory 'strangers', did more harm than good by helping to build a more punitive American state in the process.....This must-read book, and the insight and research therein, is a breath of fresh air. * James Gacek, Crime Media Culture * Paul M. Renfro's excellent new book, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State is an engaging history of how a cluster of high-profile child abductions in the late 1970s and 1980s became catalysts for the expansion of state power, a corporatized national media culture that thrives on crisis, and a bipartisan political consensus built around the idea of security. * Clayton Trutor, The American Conservative * Renfro's new book is a truly needed account of the heart-wrenching origins, as well as the devastating collateral consequences, of this nation's post-1960s obsession with 'stranger danger' and its simultaneous embrace of unprecedentedly punitive policies promising to keep kids safe from abduction and exploitation. Renfro connects, as no other has, the history of this country's most dramatic effort to protect some children from strangers with the story of how other children, simultaneously, had their protections from the state utterly eroded. * Heather Ann Thompson, author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy * Stranger Danger brilliantly demonstrates how the manufactured epidemic of missing children during the 1980s empowered the victims' rights crusade and produced a bipartisan consensus in favor of punitive child protection policies. Renfro persuasively connects the ideology of 'endangered childhood' to the expansion of the carceral state, the double standards between white innocence and nonwhite criminality, the stigmatization of sexual minorities, the corporate exploitation of parental anxiety, and the enhanced social control of all American youth. An extraordinary model of political history beyond the red-blue divide. * Matthew D. Lassiter, University of Michigan * Stranger Danger leaves us with a devastating portrait of a country exposing its children to real dangers by shadow-boxing with imagined ones. In the 1980s and '90s, a burgeoning 'child protection regime' of federalized policing and surveillance leveraged a handful of tragic cases of violent stranger abduction to externalize the threat. Renfro powerfully redirects the gaze away from the missing kid on the milk carton-almost certainly a runaway, a 'throwaway,' or a family abductee-to the malign misuse of personal tragedy to paper over a politically produced societal failure of heartbreaking dimensions. An important contribution to the literature on racialized 'family values' and the growth of the carceral state. * Bethany Moreton, Dartmouth College * Using superb research and gripping narratives,Renfro's book shows that panics about strangers kidnapping, molesting, and murdering kids may have made children less safe, by obscuring the fact that it is overwhelmingly often parents and close relatives who do these things. The book is all the more timely in demonstrating how right-wing activists used these panics to promote their anti-gay and anti-feminist agenda and to expand the carceral and surveillance state in ways that do little to protect children. * Linda Gordon, New York University *
Paul M. Renfro is Associate Professor of History at Florida State University.
Autor*in
Associate Professor of HistoryAssociate Professor of History, Florida State University
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: "The Stark Terror of a Unique Tragedy"
Ch. 1: "He Was Beautiful": Etan Patz, Queer Politics, and the Image of Endangered Childhood
Ch. 2: "Save Them or Perish": Race, Childhood, and the Atlanta Abductions and Murders
Ch. 3: Trouble in the Heartland: Region, Race, and Iowa's Missing Paperboys
Part II: "The Battle for Child Safety"
Ch. 4: "Great Surface Appeal": The Department of Justice and the Affective Politics of Child Safety
Ch. 5: Kids in Custody: Protection and Punishment in the Reagan Era
Ch. 6: "The Business of Missing Children": Child Protection in Public and Private
Ch. 7: Circling the Wagon: Child Safety and the Punitive State in the Clinton Years
Epilogue: To Catch a Predator
Notes
Index
