Title Stranger danger : family values, childhood, and the American carceral state / Paul M. Renfro

Published New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2020] ©2020

Click on the following:
Oxford Scholarship Online

Copies

Description 1 online resource (x, 297 pages) : illustrations, maps Contents "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 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 Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on May 07, 2020) Subject Kidnapping -- United States -- History Kidnapping -- Press coverage -- United States Missing children -- Press coverage -- United States Children and strangers -- United States Moral panics -- United States -- History Children -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- United States -- History Crime and the press -- United States -- History Children and strangers Children -- Legal status, laws, etc. Crime and the press Kidnapping Moral panics United States Genre/Form History Form Electronic book LC no. 2019034332 ISBN 9780190913991 0190913991 9780190914004 0190914009 9780190914011 0190914017

  Permalink