Stranger Danger

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 * 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 * 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 * 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 *