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Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State
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.
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.
296 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 10, 2023
3.5 stars—
Stranger Danger offers a great opportunity for people who are interested in crime history to not only see how the language we are familiar with came about, but also how it was **deeply** shaped by the cultural context around it.
But, as a historian who does a lot with race and sexuality, I wish Renfro would have maintained these threads beyond Part 1. While the opening argument that young white male children served as ideal victims for Reagan- era conservatism to latch on to in order to fight feminism/ racial equality/ queer liberation/ and other leftist ideologies was strong, we lost it in Part 2. As incarceration and surveillance rose to the forefront of his argument, we needed to see him address the counter argument more to both acknowledge it’s perceived merits and to strengthen his points about its faults. Including more on race, sexuality, and gender in the world of incarceration policy would have bolstered his criticism of child safety policy. Tell me about Black offenders being punished differently than white offenders, or how race impacted perceived victimhood! Tell me more about homophobia in the 1990s in both culture and policy! Tell me why “missing white woman syndrome” developed post- 9/11! Renfro is an excellent writer, and I wish I could have seen his ideas about these topics because he knocked his analysis of them out of the park in Part 1. I would still definitely recommend this book!
Stranger Danger offers a great opportunity for people who are interested in crime history to not only see how the language we are familiar with came about, but also how it was **deeply** shaped by the cultural context around it.
But, as a historian who does a lot with race and sexuality, I wish Renfro would have maintained these threads beyond Part 1. While the opening argument that young white male children served as ideal victims for Reagan- era conservatism to latch on to in order to fight feminism/ racial equality/ queer liberation/ and other leftist ideologies was strong, we lost it in Part 2. As incarceration and surveillance rose to the forefront of his argument, we needed to see him address the counter argument more to both acknowledge it’s perceived merits and to strengthen his points about its faults. Including more on race, sexuality, and gender in the world of incarceration policy would have bolstered his criticism of child safety policy. Tell me about Black offenders being punished differently than white offenders, or how race impacted perceived victimhood! Tell me more about homophobia in the 1990s in both culture and policy! Tell me why “missing white woman syndrome” developed post- 9/11! Renfro is an excellent writer, and I wish I could have seen his ideas about these topics because he knocked his analysis of them out of the park in Part 1. I would still definitely recommend this book!
February 9, 2021
If you’re into this niche topic, then you would find this book interesting. Little too wordy for me though.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews