"He was beautiful" : Etan Patz, queer politics, and the image of endangered childhood -- "Save them or perish" : race, childhood, and the Atlanta abductions and murders -- Trouble in the heartland : region, race, and Iowa's missing paperboys -- "Great surface appeal" : the Department of Justice and the affective politics of child safety -- Kids in custody : protection and punishment in the Reagan era -- "The business of missing children" : child protection in public and private -- Circling the wagon : child safety and the punitive state in the Clinton years -- Conclusion: To catch a predator.
Summary:
"Starting in the late 1970s, a moral panic concerning child kidnapping and exploitation gripped the United States. For many Americans, a series of high-profile cases of missing and murdered children, publicized through an emergent twenty-four-hour news cycle, signaled a 'national epidemic' of child abductions perpetrated by strangers. Some observers insisted that fifty thousand or more children fell victim to stranger kidnappings in any given year. (The actual figure was and remains about one hundred.) Stranger Danger demonstrates how racialized and sexualized fears of stranger abduction -- stoked by the news media, politicians from across the partisan divide, bereaved parents, and the business sector -- helped to underwrite broader transformations in US political culture and political economy. Specifically, the child kidnapping scare further legitimated a bipartisan investment in 'family values' and 'law and order,' thereby enabling the development and expansion of sex offender registries, AMBER Alerts, and other mechanisms designed to safeguard young Americans and their families from 'stranger danger' -- and to punish the strangers who supposedly threatened them"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.