Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America (review)

Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America. By Philip Jenkins. Yale University Press, 1998. 302 pp. Cloth, $30.00.

Despite its provocative title, this book is first and foremost an examination of how social facts, orthodoxies, and social control come into being and then get transformed and institutionalized. Jenkins, a premier scholar in the study of moral panics, offers a convincing analysis of how a single and seemingly self-evident social fact -- "that belief that children face a grave danger in the form of sexual abuse and molestation" -- has been organized throughout the history of modern America, as well as in the current moment. To do so, he traces the complex history of concepts that, in one way or another, reference the sexual maltreatment of children; at the same time, he offers a compelling analysis of why moral panics -- in this case around sexual threats to children -- emerge and take the form they do. In other words, this book is exemplary social history and sociology on both empirical and theoretical grounds.

The empirical theme of this book is clearly summarized in the first paragraph of the last chapter, aptly titled "A Cycle of Panic." To use Jenkins's words, this book tells a story about how:

Concern [about child molestation] has fluctuated wildly over the past century, both in the degree of fear apparent at any given time and in the direction from which threats were believed to come: the nature of sexual threats to children was perceived quite differently in 1915 than in 1930, and the child abuse issue was framed quite differently in 1984 than in 1994. Constructions of the molester have been equally fluid. Interpretations have sometimes favored a fairly benign model (the passive, rather than pathetic figure of the 1960s), at other times a model diametrically opposed to the first (the sex fiend of the 1950s or the serial pedophile of the 1990s)

To document this fluctuation, Jenkins divides the bulk of the book into chapters that represent select time periods: "Constructing Sex Crime, 1890-1934," "The Age of the Sex Psychopath, 1935-1957," "The Liberal Era, 1958-1976," "The Child Abuse Revolution, 1976-1986," and "The Return of the Sexual Predator in the 1990s." Combined, these era-based chapters provide a detailed examination of the emergence and changing use of terms like pervert, pedophile, pederast, sex fiend, molester, defiler, psychopath, and predator.

To situate the history of these terms, Jenkins first makes the case that "before the late nineteenth century, crimes involving sex were a commonplace part of the work of the criminal justice system, but there was no sense of the sex criminal as a distinct or especially menacing category of malefactor." With this as a starting point, he then skillfully details how the reframing of sex crime as something done by a distinct type of person -- a "degenerate," "homicidal sex fiend," or "pervert" -- was an outgrowth of a general reshaping of Western thought in the late nineteenth century (i.e., ideas of evolutionary science, industrial progress, eugenics, imperialism, etc.). For example, by the mid 1930s, the "sexual psychopath" began to play a powerful role in claims about sexual threats to children, owing in large part to new psychiatric insights. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, psychiatrists and scholars shifted their opinion and "acknowledged that sex offenders were symptoms of troubled personalities, but they dismissed the stereotype of the lethal sex criminal." This position contributed to and reflected larger trends towards decriminalization, decarceration, and deinstitutinalization. By the late 1970s and mid 1980s, the liberal era had passed and the "child abuse revolution" was featured in public discourse about threats to children. At this point, feminists, humanitarian groups, and conservatives were in agreement that a public campaign against child abuse perpetrated within the confines of the family, as well as child pornography and prostitution rings in the public sphere, was long overdue. The result was the...