Schultz, Pamela D.; Naming, Blaming, and Framing: Moral Panic over Child Molesters and Its Implications for Public Policy; Ch 5: 16 pp
Excerpt from the book: Moral Panics over Contemporary Children and Youth -
Charles Krinsky (Editor).
This book examines for the first time an important and controversial social issue, employing a rigorous intellectual framework to explore the cultural construction of youth through the dissemination of moral panics.
Given here is Chapter 5:
The moral panic over CSA and sexual abusers is the compelling and inexorable result of publicly challenging deeply ingrained taboos about sexual attitudes and practices. The controversy has been heightened by the cacophony of competing statistics and claims regarding the presence of CSA in American society.
Since the dawn of the child welfare movement in this country, the sexual abuse of children and youth has been a pressing concern, but the proliferation of mass media has pushed this preoccupation to an obsessive level. [...]
Undoubtedly, sexual molestation can be a deeply traumatic, life-altering, and painful assault on youth. Nevertheless, the compulsive sense of panic that escalated fear of CSA in the final decades of the twentieth century and first years of the twenty-first century have ultimately overshadowed the less dramatic, but no less disturbing reality.