“The Business of Missing Children”

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

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.

Introduction

The introduction sketches the contours of the book. It details the construction of a moral panic concerning the abduction of children by strangers in the late twentieth century and lays out the political and cultural ramifications of this panic. As the introduction indicates and the rest of the book demonstrates, this panic—precipitated by the bereaved parents of missing and slain children, the news media, and politicians—led to the consolidation of a “child safety regime” and the expansion of the American carceral state. The introduction situates this argument within the existing historiography of late twentieth-century United States politics and culture, as well as the growing literature on carceral studies.

Trouble in the Heartland

Chapter 3 centers on the disappearances of Des Moines Register paperboys Johnny Gosch and Eugene Wade Martin in 1982 and 1984, respectively. These incidents challenged white Midwestern ideas about childhood and regional innocence, as locals took the paperboy cases as signs of regional and national decline. White Iowans responded by demanding state protection for their children, who supposedly faced new threats from strangers emboldened by moral relativism and sexual liberation and impervious to the symbolic power of an innocent and secure Midwest. Many of the legal and cultural mechanisms adopted in the service of protecting young Iowans—including the iconic milk carton campaign—were replicated in the construction of the national child safety regime.

Circling the Wagon

Chapter 7 shows how so-called New Democrat Bill Clinton seized upon the stranger danger myth and hitched it to his racialized “law and order” and “family values” policy programs. As president, Clinton underwrote the passage of the Jacob Wetterling Act, the federal “three strikes” law, and Megan’s Law, which together federalized systems of sex offender registration and community notification. Imprinted with the names of white child-victims and awash in the imagery of endangered childhood, these laws enlarged and formalized the child safety regime, thus augmenting a carceral and surveillance state that disproportionately ensnares queer Americans, people of color, and youth.

“He Was Beautiful”

Chapter 1 concentrates on the disappearance of six-year-old Etan Patz in Manhattan in May 1979. It shows how pictures of Patz—taken by his father, a professional photographer, and disseminated around New York City and beyond—inaugurated a new cultural form called the image of endangered childhood. This form foregrounded white childhood innocence and assumed sexual overtones, which shaped the ascendant child safety movement and the news media’s coverage of it. Specifically, observers more readily assigned sexual motives to missing child cases beginning in the late twentieth century. In the Patz case, the racialized and sexualized image of endangered childhood led investigators, activists, and the news media to (wrongly) implicate the North American Man/Boy Love Association in Etan’s abduction. The case thus revealed key fault lines in the LGBTQ and feminist movements, and in late twentieth-century American politics more broadly, while setting the foundation for the child safety regime.

“Great Surface Appeal”

Chapter 4 recounts how the United States Department of Justice obstructed missing child legislation in the early eighties but eventually buckled under pressure from activists, who deployed an affective politics of child safety to paint the DOJ as cruel and obstinate. The DOJ subsequently transformed into the federal entity most committed to the child safety cause, working to publicize and combat the problems of child abduction, exploitation, sexual abuse, and pornography. The Department’s “conversion” proved vital to the making of a punitive child safety regime in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Conclusion

The conclusion traces the expansion of the child safety regime in the George W. Bush and Barack Obama years, looking specifically at the global reach of this regime through the 2003 PROTECT Act, the 2006 Adam Walsh Act, and the International Megan’s Law implemented in 2016. It reveals the continuities between the country’s major political parties on matters of child safety and criminal justice while also analyzing various forms of resistance against the child safety regime and mass incarceration—namely the “free range” movement, the Right on Crime initiative, and the popular cultural push to “humanize” those deemed sex offenders. In closing, the conclusion charts a path for dismantling the child safety regime and the carceral state.

“Save Them or Perish”

The second chapter focuses on the 1979–1981 kidnappings and murders of twenty-nine black youths in Atlanta. These abductions and killings, which primarily targeted young males from Atlanta’s poor and working-class neighborhoods, exacerbated African American anxieties about racial violence and raised the specters of Southern racism and the myth of gay pedophilia. Some responses to these murders emphasized the victims’ “street smarts,” “hustling,” and even their alleged same-sex sex work, thereby depriving them of the individualized innocence so readily lavished upon Etan Patz and other missing or murdered white youth. Moreover, in an effort to preserve Atlanta’s reputation as progressive and business-friendly, the city’s biracial political and economic establishment sought to downplay the racial and class dimensions of the abductions and slayings. The Atlanta tragedies thus exposed the racial and class limitations of the image of endangered childhood and illustrated how notions of white child-victimhood grounded the child safety regime.