Richard Beck

“Here, then, are cases in which the fear that violent pedophiles might abduct children from public places—a vanishingly rare occurrence—was used to justify the punishment of women who were looking for work, women who were at work, or women who simply thought that she and her child might both benefit from the child being allowed some time to play on his own—in other words, women whose failure to devote every moment to their role as mothers was viewed as literally criminal.”
― Richard Beck, We Believe the Children: The Story of a Moral Panic

“Over the course of the 1970s conservatives made the endangered child into a kind of political and rhetorical abstraction, a way of thinking about the country and its citizens that could help advance a wide range of policy initiatives. They opposed the counterculture on the grounds that rock and roll caused adolescents to lose respect for family life. They promoted the War on Drugs with racially tinged morality tales about addicted inner-city mothers and, crucially, the “superpredator” “crack babies” to whom those mothers supposedly gave birth. (That particular epidemic was later shown to be a myth.)40 And when Anita Bryant led a campaign to allow Dade County to discriminate against homosexuals in hiring teachers for public schools, she named the effort “Save Our Children.” The fear that tied all of these campaigns together was of the ease with which children could be victimized or else corrupted and turned against the society that was supposed to nurture them.”
― Richard Beck, We Believe the Children: The Story of a Moral Panic