Book Description
Over the past century public images of child molesters have varied widely, ranging from a view of sexual offenders as confused individuals unlikely to repeat their crimes to a much more threatening notion of compulsive predators with little hope of cure. This timely book explores the cultural and political contexts of responses toward child molestation and examines how and why attitudes have fluctuated.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent chronicle of sex offender policy.......2007-03-12
Jenkins' book is a very well written and documented study of the various child sex abuse panics that have taken place during the past century. It demonstrates the role of the moral panic in the policy making process and shows how decisions have been made on popular opinion and misguided beliefs rather than solid facts. It is objectively written and is a very good resource for anyone interested in sex offender policy. The only down side of the book is its relatively limited information on moral panic theory as a general topic. For this, you will need to look at Goode and Ben Yehuda or Cohen.
"Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is strong" - Nietzsche........2006-05-17
The title quote is quoted in Chapter 13, "Full Circle."
Jenkins leads us through the history of the sex abuse "panics" from the Progressive Era to the modern day. We find that in the early 1900s research/science found there was a problem worse than imagined. How else could young children get STDs? When facts became panics, the problem was buried under political self gain and the requisite rhetoric: from the F.B.I. vying for funds and power against the newly created Federal Bureau of Narcotics, to the feminist blame of the "patriarchy," to the conservative cry of decadence. And so much more.
The real issue, as is happening today, got buried under rhetoric and unchecked extremism. Backlash was inevitable.
This book is a valuable read in general even if one is not interested in the subject. It is an excellent primer on how to read an article, or listen to a speech or a news anchor, and see though the propaganda and rhetoric.
To close with another Nietzsche quote: "A people wants to hurt with the evil that is evil today." This book explains how some can hijack a hot issue, worthy though it may be, for their own political gain. Anyone who cares about child abuse, especially knee jerk lawmakers too cowardly to speak their real minds about the shallow laws they pass, should read this book.
A sober and vastly eridite survey - get it!.......1999-01-01
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."
The best of it's kind!.......1998-10-11
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.
Book Description
For the past twenty-five years, American culture has been marked by an almost palpable sense of anxiety about the nation's inner cities. Urban America has been consistently depicted as a site of moral decay and uncontrollable violence, held in stark contrast to the allegedly moral, orderly suburbs and exurbs. In Urban Nightmares, Steve Macek documents the scope of these alarmist representations of the city, examines the ideologies that informed them, and exposes the interests they ultimately served. Macek begins by exploring the conservative analysis of the urban poverty, joblessness, and crime that became entrenched during the post-Vietnam War era. Instead of attributing these conditions to broad social and economic conditions, right-wing intellectuals, pundits, policy analysts, and politicians blamed urban problems on the urban underclass itself. This strategy was successful, Macek argues, in deflecting attention from growing income disparities and in helping to secure popular support both for reactionary social policies and the assumptions underwriting them. Turning to the media, Macek explains how Hollywood filmmakers, advertisers, and journalists validated the right-wing discourse on the urban crisis, popularizing its vocabulary. Network television news and weekly news magazines, he shows, covered the inner city and its inhabitants in ways consonant with the right's alarmist discourse. At the same time, Hollywood zealously recycled this antiurban bias in films ranging from genre thrillers like Falling Down and Judgment Night to auteurist efforts like Batman and Seven. Even advertising, Macek argues, mobilized fears of a perilous urban realm to sell products from SUVs to home alarm systems. Published during the second term of an American president whose conservative agenda has been an ongoing disaster for the poor and the working class, Urban Nightmares exposes a divisive legacy of media bias against the cities and their inhabitants and issues a wake-up call to readers to recognize that media images shape what we believe about others' (and our own) place in the real world-and the consequences of those beliefs can be devastating. Steve Macek teaches media studies, urban and suburbia studies, and speech communication at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.
Customer Reviews:
Is the media biased against cities?.......2006-11-06
College-level collections strong in urban studies will welcome the survey teacher Steve Macek offers up in URBAN NIGHTMARES: THE MEDIA, THE RIGHT, AND THE MORAL PANIC OVER THE CITY. Its chapters survey issues of urban blight, crime, and hopelessness, drawing links between these conditions and the media, which has validated the right-wing analysis of the urban crisis through news and TV reports. Is the media biased against cities?
Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch
Book Description
This third edition will publish on the 30th anniversary of its original publication. Stanley Cohen's study of Mods and Rockers in the 1960's was a foundational text both in terms of investigating the workings of subcultural groups and identifying the concept of a "moral panic" generated by the media, which lead to groups being vilified in the popular imagination, and inhibits rational debate about solutions to the social problems such groups represent. Cohen's classic study of "deviant" subcultures and the "moral panic" they generate is reissued with a new author's introduction commenting on the demonization of asylum seekers (refugees) and on the recent "name and shame" campaign against pedophiles.
Book Description
How are social problems defined and responded to in contemporary society? How useful is the concept of moral panic in understanding these processes? What does an examination of recent examples reveal about the role of the media in creating, endorsing and sustaining moral panics?
The term 'moral panic' is frequently applied to sudden eruptions of concern about social problems. This book critically evaluates the usefulness of moral panic models for understanding how politicians, the public and pressure groups come to recognize apparently new threats to the social order. The role of the media, especially the popular press, comes under scrutiny. Two models of moral panics are initially identified and explained, then applied to a range of case studies: AIDS, rave/ecstasy, video nasties, child abuse and pedophilia. Experience is compared across a range of countries, revealing many basic similarities but also significant variations between different national contexts. Common to all is an increasing focus on threats to children, evoking images of childhood innocence. The conclusion is that moral panic remains a useful tool for analysis but needs more systematic connection to wider theoretical concerns, especially those of the risk society and discourse analysis.
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- He who forgets history is doomed to repeat it...
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Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta Rap, 1830-1996
John Springhall
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
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This book sets out to show that modern-day fears about the supposed moral threat posed to the young by violent movies or interactive computer games have their roots in nineteenth-century anxieties about the ill effects of popular forms of amusement on the "children of the lower classes." These concerns stretch in an almost unbroken line through successive "moral panics" in both Britain and America, as throughout history there have been attempts to shift the blame for social breakdown onto the entertainment forms of the age: penny theatres, "penny dreadfuls," dime novels, gangster films, horror comics. All these are discussed, evaluated, and placed in context. A postscript refers to "video nasties," violence on television, "gangsta rap," and computer games, each in turn playing the role of "folk devils" which must be causing delinquency. The book argues that since "moral panics" over popular culture are perennial, this tells us a great deal more about adult anxieties--fear of the future, technological change, and the erosion of moral absolutes--than about the nature of juvenile misbehavior.
Customer Reviews:
He who forgets history is doomed to repeat it..........2004-03-15
This entertaining and carefully researched book reveals the uncanny and depressing parallels between historical panics over gangster movies and horror comic books, and today's political grandstanding over violent TV and video games.
Book Description
This wide-ranging account of moral panics shows how and why institutions and groups of individuals mobilize around issues and supposed problems by which they feel threatened. From the Renaissance witch craze to the American drug panic of the 1980s, the authors explore the genesis, dynamics, and demise of moral panics - and examine their impacts on the societies in which they take place. Moral Panics is not only the first, serious book-length treatment of a fascinating subject, but also a superb introduction to wider themes in the sociology of deviance and social problems.
Customer Reviews:
Excellent overview of moral panic theory.......2007-03-13
Goode and Ben Yehuda did an excellent job of taking Cohen's case study in Folk Devils and Moral Panics, and transforming it into a general resource for moral panic theory. The book is well organized and provides ample insight into the inner workings of the theory and is invaluable to anyone interested in how the media, the public, the criminal justice system, and the political system interact and influence each other. This book not only provides the basics on moral panic theory, but also provides good general examples of different moral panics throughout human history. While I had originally written off the theory, further research, including reading this book, has changed my mind. Anyone interested in this theory needs to read this and Cohen's work at a minimum.
Did Nancy Reagan cause a moral panic?.......2003-04-20
"Moral panics" as a defined concept has been around since 1972 when the British sociologist Steven Cohen was attempting to explain the peculiar hysteria surrounding a small, but violent incident between British youths at a seaside resort. The incident took place in 1964 between two youth groups who became known as the Mods and the Rockers.
What fascinated Cohen was how an incident seemingly so trivial as that between the Mods and Rockers, could have been taken by the news media, parents groups, and politicians to such hyperbolic heights. Due to Cohen's amazement and his search for a thesis topic, the beginning of a theory explaining the rise and fall of hysteria on a mass scale began. "Moral Panics" is an excellent introductory text to the concept of moral panic theory, besides Cohen's own study - "Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers" (1972).
The correlation of moral panic theory and the wide-scale phenomenon during the 1980s of a growing irrational perception that all drug users were dangerous miscreants, that if drug users are not eradicated the state of America would quickly deteriorate, &c. may not be explicitly evident at first. However, when a false dichotomy between what is really the case and what is thought to be case is exposed and the difference which caused an over-reaction is recognized, then the notion of a moral panic becomes more tenable as an explanation. Not necessarily in the pejorative sense, but naturally, groups of people can be easily led to believe something that is simply not true. Oftentimes, this is because the only perceived source(s) of information are the official mainstream news programs which have from time to time (maybe many, many times) shared in disinformation and/or sensationalism.
This book is dedicated to defining moral panics, how they occur, how they are sustained, and, finally, how they decline in the context of what sociologists call Cultural Constructionism. As was mentioned in Erich Goode's book "Strange Bedfellows: Ideology, Politics, and the Drug Legalization Debate in Between Politics and Reason," constructionism is a member of the group of competing notions that either support, study, or oppose drug policy, both nationally and internationally. I would suggest that this entire text be read in order to not only understand drug policy studies in the context of radical (cultural Constructionism) but to understand how moral panics can be created to support any regime's agenda.
Chapter 12, for instance, discusses the "crack baby" myth that was taken by the media, politicians, and parents to a height of misinformation and paranoia similar, perhaps, to "reefer madness" back in the 1930s; the crack baby hysteria is discussed in detail, it demonstrates just how easy it is to cause a "panic" about something when relevant information is not either not available or withheld and only rumour, hyperbole, and political rhetoric are the sources of information.
It is a good idea to know about moral panics in general, even though I'm writing this review from the perspective of a person interested in the dynamics of US drug policy. Knowing that what a politician or talking head is saying could very well be nothing but disinformation can at least encourage a healthy skepticism in all matters of public affair.
I encourage you to read this, however it may be beneficial to read Cohen's study first.
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Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britian (Social Problems and Social Issues)
Phillip Jenkins
Manufacturer: Aldine Transaction
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With the increasing number of moral panics in recent years triggered by the AIDS crisis, rock music, sex and violence, this book examines their wider significance particularly in terms of the functioning of the mass media.
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Critical Readings: Moral Panics and the Media (Issues in Cultural and Media Studies)
Chas Critcher
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CRIMINAL CONVERSATIONS: VICTORIAN CRIMES, SOCIAL PANIC, & MORAL
JUDITH ROWBOTHAM
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