Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America

Rating:
Summary: The best of it's kind!
Review: Philip Jenkins did it again. His previous book, 'Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain' talked about child-abuse hysteria that swept Britain some time ago. This new book is actually a history of the concept of child abuse and child abuser in USA in the twentieth century. The book talks in details how that concept looked like at the end of the last century and how it looks like now. I have never read before any book that is so accurate and detailed as this one. For anyone interested in the subject of how society viewed child abuse and child abusers and how is viewing it now, this book is must-have. And I am very happy that Jenkins decided to devote this book to the Joel Best who himself wrote similar book, "Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child-Victims"

Contents:

1. Creating Facts, 2. Constructing Sex Crime, 1890-1934, 3. The Age of the Sex Psychopath, 1935-1957, 4. The Sex Psychopath Statutes, 5. The Liberal Era, 1958-1976, 6. The Child Abuse Revolution, 1976-1986, 7. Child Pornography and Pedophile Rings, 8. The Road to Hell: Ritual Abuse and Recovered Memory, 9. Full Circle: The Return of the Sexual Predator in the 1990s, 10. A Cycle of Panic.

Rating:
Summary: A sober and vastly eridite survey - get it!
Review: The emergence of "the child molester" as Public Enemy Number One -- or, conversely, as an image for hip audiences to snicker over -- is the topic of this book, and it examines how American society has responded to pedophilia over the past century. The author sifts through an enormous volume of evidence, and his tone is as sober as a judge.

He suggests that concern with the sexual abuse of children has developed in waves over the past century or so. In each case, public awareness has gone through a kind of cycle -- from reluctant awareness of the problem, to increased public attention, then to a period of intense fascination and horror culminating in the demand that the government move in to act decisively.

Jenkins argues that we have, for some time now, been in the final stages of the cycle. The expression "moral panic," which gives the book its title, is a sociological term. Those who coined it define moral panic as a state in which public reaction to a problem "is out of all proportions to the actual threat offered, when 'experts' perceive the threat in all but identical terms ... [and] when the media representations universally stress 'sudden and dramatic' increases (in numbers involved or events) and 'novelty,' above and beyond that which a sober, realistic appraisal could sustain."

What makes Moral Panic absorbing is not so much Jenkins' diagnosis of the present situation as his careful reconstruction of how medical and legal institutions came to recognize and understand the existence of molestation. "In the opening years of the twentieth century," he writes, "social and medical investigators argued convincingly that American children were being molested and raped in numbers far higher than had been imagined ... By 1910, social investigators were confirming the worst speculations about the prevalence of child sexual molestation, and panic about sex killers and perverts became acute about 1915." A similar pattern of increased attention and growing anxiety ran from the late 1930s through the early 1950s.

Conceptions of the nature and extent of sexual abuse changed from decade to decade. Extensive documentation -- from social-scientific works, newspaper stories, and mass entertainment forms like crime novels and film -- undermines the impression that pedophilia was only recognized a short time ago. Particularly striking are the parallels between the early years of the century and the present day: "In a foretaste of the 1970s and 1980s," Jenkins writes of the Progressive era, "feminists allied with therapists, social workers, and moral reformers in order to defend children, and the new ideas were promulgated by a sensationalistic media." The wave of concern that peaked in the late 1940s brought with it demands -- also heard lately -- that sex offenders be turned over to more or less permanent psychiatric hospitalization.

Following earlier patterns, the cycle of attention, anxiety, and legislation that began in the late 1970s ought to have burnt itself out by now. Clearly it has not. And some of the bogus "data" afloat about the menace suggests that "panic" is just the right word. "Far from marking a new era of indifference," Jenkins writes, "the year 1995 was characterized by the furor over sex predator statutes and the fear of cyberstalkers. The cycle has been broken in the modern era, when child abuse has become part of our enduring cultural landscape, a metanarrative with the potential for explaining all social and personal ills."