"The kind of person who would mess with a kid": Cultural Fantasies of Stranger-Danger and AM Homes' "Looking for Johnny"

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-105
Author(s):  
Mica Hilson
Keyword(s):  
Stranger Danger

Stranger Danger

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul M. Renfro
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Sex Offender ◽  
The United States ◽  
Family Values ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Amber Alerts ◽  
Actual Figure ◽  
Stranger Danger ◽  
Murdered Children

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.

scholarly journals Stranger Danger!

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karla Badillo-Urquiola ◽  
Diva Smriti ◽  
Brenna McNally ◽  
Evan Golub ◽  
Elizabeth Bonsignore ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Stranger Danger

scholarly journals Stranger Danger

2022 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-60
Author(s):  
Geralyn Colette Moody
Keyword(s):  
Stranger Danger

scholarly journals The Stranger Danger: Exploring Surveillance, Autonomy, and Privacy in Children’s Use of Social Media

2011 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Nolan ◽  
Kate Raynes-Goldie ◽  
Melanie McBride
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Technology Use ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Internet Safety ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Online Activities ◽  
Use Of Social Media ◽  
Parental Mentoring ◽  
Stranger Danger

In this paper, we argue that censorware is one of the bogeymen that instills fear in parents whose children have access to the Internet. It is a fear that has the potential to restrict children’s autonomy and opportunities for engagement in social media. Fear regarding children’s online activities is one of the issues surrounding children’s Internet safety that does not appear to be situated in any particular social or cultural context. Among the most popular means of monitoring children online, censorware may prove even more harmful to children’s socioemotional wellbeing and development than any other form of monitoring (Boyd & Jenkins, 2006; Cloke & Jones, 2005; Helwig, 2006; Kamii, 1991; Laufer & Wolfe, 1977; Marx & Steeves, 2010; Pettit & Laird, 2002; Rooney, 2010). Inherent in the design and use of censorware are structures that inhibit children’s online and offline social interactions, their ability to develop fully as social actors, and their experience of being empowered to make informed and critical decisions about their lives, including choices relating to privacy. As well, reliance on surveillance-based approach-es to monitoring online activities of chil-dren (aged 5-14) may actually be leading to a greater danger: a decrease in oppor-tunities for children to have experiences that help them develop autonomy and independence. Our inquiry is located within a growing body of research that addresses the social implications of restricting, surveilling and controlling young children’s online activities versus nurturing individual autonomy through parental mentoring and critically reflec-tive software and social technology use.

“The Business of Missing Children”

2020 ◽  
pp. 171-189
Author(s):  
Paul M. Renfro
Keyword(s):  
Private Sector ◽  
Reagan Administration ◽  
Family Values ◽  
Predatory Behavior ◽  
First Century ◽  
Child Safety ◽  
Missing Children ◽  
American Children ◽  
Stranger Danger

Chapter 6 chronicles how the Reagan administration lauded the role of the private sector in protecting American children. The celebration by Reagan, other conservatives, and neoliberals of private sector (and especially business sector) efforts to “save” certain American youngsters and promote “family values” cleared the way for a more expansive child safety regime pieced together at the turn of the twenty-first century. Such private sector solutions enlisted the American public in the increasingly punitive, pervasive, and invasive project of child safety. Liberally deploying the image of endangered childhood, private sector programs and products surrounded Americans with evidence of stranger danger and called on them to police and prevent predatory behavior against the nation’s children.

Kids in Custody

2020 ◽  
pp. 143-170
Author(s):  
Paul M. Renfro
Keyword(s):  
Juvenile Offenders ◽  
Juvenile Justice ◽  
Safety Issue ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Family Values ◽  
Child Safety ◽  
Youth Policy ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Stranger Danger

The fifth chapter shows how the child safety issue further splintered federal juvenile justice and youth policy along racial fault lines. Tracing the movements of rightwing luminary Alfred S. Regnery, chapter 5 illustrates how public fears about stranger danger served to lengthen the punitive, policing arm of the federal welfare state, to undercut the children’s rights gains of the 1960s and 1970s, and to bolster the politics of “family values.” As OJJDP director, Regnery used the child safety scare to “toughen” juvenile justice policies targeting working-class, nonwhite youth, while simultaneously embellishing the severity of moral threats facing “innocent” children (coded as white and middle-class). To that end, Regnery employed racialized language that cast virtually all juvenile offenders as nonwhite. The “typical candidate for juvenile arrest,” he claimed, was “most likely black, possibly Hispanic.” Such rhetoric prefigured the “superpredator” discourse that crystallized in the 1990s and helped exacerbate racialized mass incarceration.

scholarly journals Sexual Consent as Voluntary Agreement: Tales of “Seduction” or Questions of Law?

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucinda Vandervort
Keyword(s):  
Legal Reasoning ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Sexual Consent ◽  
Legal Analysis ◽  
Voluntary Agreement ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Trial Judges ◽  
Stranger Danger ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Affirmative Consent

This article proposes a rigorous method to map the law on to the facts in the legal analysis of sexual consent using a series of mandatory questions of law designed to eliminate the legal errors often made by decision makers who routinely rely on personal beliefs about and attitudes toward “normal sexual behavior” in screening and deciding cases. In Canada, sexual consent is affirmative consent, the communication by words or conduct of “voluntary agreement” to a specific sexual activity, with a specific person. As in many jurisdictions, however, the sexual assault laws are often not enforced. Reporting is lowest and non-enforcement highest in cases involving the most common type of assailants, those who are not strangers but instead persons the complainant knows, often quite well—acquaintances, supervisors or coworkers, and family members. Reliance on popular narratives about “seduction” and “stranger-danger” leads complainants, police, prosecutors, lawyers, and trial judges to truncate legal analysis of the facts and leap to erroneous conclusions about consent. Wrongful convictions and perverse acquittals, questionable plea bargains and ill-considered decisions not to charge, result. This proposal is designed to curtail the impact of prejudgments, assumptions, and biases in legal reasoning about voluntariness and affirmative agreement and to produce decisions that are legally sound, based on the application of the rule of law to the material facts. Law has long had better tools than the age-old and popular tales of “ravishment” and “seduction.” Those tools can and should be used.

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