Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State

Beginning with Etan Patz's disappearance in Manhattan in 1979, a spate of high-profile cases of missing and murdered children stoked anxieties about the threats of child kidnapping and exploitation. Publicized through an emerging twenty-four-hour news cycle, these cases supplied evidence of what some commentators dubbed "a national epidemic" of child abductions committed by "strangers." In this book, Paul M. Renfro narrates how the bereaved parents of missing and slain children turned their grief into a mass movement and, alongside journalists and policymakers from both major political parties, propelled a moral panic. Leveraging larger cultural fears concerning familial and national decline, these child safety crusaders warned Americans of a supposedly widespread and worsening child kidnapping threat, erroneously claiming that as many as fifty thousand American children fell victim to stranger abductions annually. The actual figure was (and remains) between one hundred and three hundred, and kidnappings perpetrated by family members and acquaintances occur far more frequently. Yet such exaggerated statistics-and the emotionally resonant images and narratives deployed behind them-led to the creation of new legal and cultural instruments designed to keep children safe and to punish the "strangers" who ostensibly wished them harm. Ranging from extensive child fingerprinting drives to the milk carton campaign, from the AMBER Alerts that periodically rattle Americans' smart phones to the nation's sprawling system of sex offender registration, these instruments have widened the reach of the carceral state and intensified surveillance practices focused on children. Stranger Danger reveals the transformative power of this moral panic on American politics and culture, showing how ideas and images of endangered childhood helped build a more punitive American state.

About the Author :
Paul M. Renfro is Assistant Professor of History at Florida State University.

Review :
"Renfro's new book is a truly needed account of the heart-wrenching origins, as well as the devastating collateral consequences, of this nation's post-1960s obsession with 'stranger danger' and its simultaneous embrace of unprecedentedly punitive policies promising to keep kids safe from abduction and exploitation. Renfro connects, as no other has, the history of this country's most dramatic effort to protect some children from strangers with the story of how other children, simultaneously, had their protections from the state utterly eroded." -- Heather Ann Thompson, author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy "Stranger Danger brilliantly demonstrates how the manufactured epidemic of missing children during the 1980s empowered the victims' rights crusade and produced a bipartisan consensus in favor of punitive child protection policies. Renfro persuasively connects the ideology of 'endangered childhood' to the expansion of the carceral state, the double standards between white innocence and nonwhite criminality, the stigmatization of sexual minorities, the corporate exploitation of parental anxiety, and the enhanced social control of all American youth. An extraordinary model of political history beyond the red-blue divide." -- Matthew D. Lassiter, University of Michigan "Stranger Danger leaves us with a devastating portrait of a country exposing its children to real dangers by shadow-boxing with imagined ones. In the 1980s and '90s, a burgeoning 'child protection regime' of federalized policing and surveillance leveraged a handful of tragic cases of violent stranger abduction to externalize the threat. Renfro powerfully redirects the gaze away from the missing kid on the milk carton-almost certainly a runaway, a 'throwaway, ' or a family abductee-to the malign misuse of personal tragedy to paper over a politically produced societal failure of heartbreaking dimensions. An important contribution to the literature on racialized 'family values' and the growth of the carceral state." -- Bethany Moreton, Dartmouth College "Using superb research and gripping narratives, Renfro's book shows that panics about strangers kidnapping, molesting, and murdering kids may have made children less safe, by obscuring the fact that it is overwhelmingly often parents and close relatives who do these things. The book is all the more timely in demonstrating how right-wing activists used these panics to promote their anti-gay and anti-feminist agenda and to expand the carceral and surveillance state in ways that do little to protect children." -- Linda Gordon, New York University "Renfro's book covers a great deal of territory, including, interestingly, how homophobia dovetailed with the stranger danger panic... [His] most important contention in Stranger Danger, however, is that the missing children panic of the 1980s and '90s played an important political role in the rise in mass incarceration." -- Meagan Day, Jacobin "Really excellent... this book demonstrates that family values had secular actors behind it, and then that helps us understand its broad and bipartisan appeal and adoption in this period and why it became really the language of American politics for a generation. It's a great book... beautifully written." -- Neil J. Young, Past Present Podcast "Paul M. Renfro's excellent new book, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State is an engaging history of how a cluster of high-profile child abductions in the late 1970s and 1980s became catalysts for the expansion of state power, a corporatized national media culture that thrives on crisis, and a bipartisan political consensus built around the idea of security." -- Clayton Trutor, The American Conservative