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This chapter examines how American culture was reshaped by sex panics. Full-blown sex panics were slower to develop. Outlines of modern sex panic also were taking shape in discussions of race. Ideas about sexuality and its proper disciplining were displacing expressions of overt racism in the construction of moral hierarchies. The figure of the white child stood at the center of the transformation from racial to sexual politics. Exposés about teenage male prostitution and involvement in pornography evoked earlier sex panics and embodied, in another sort of way, the nascent backlash against gay liberation. Overtly homophobic sex panics of this period turned on the idea that youth was a time of sexual innocence. The most spectacular of these modern child sex panics were the “satanic ritual abuse” (SRA) scares of the 1980s. These panics have been associated with the fear of strangers, suspicion of strange ideas, and the dread of mysterious economic power or uncontrollable social changes. The established culture of child protection actually harms children psychologically and socially. By the late 1980s the SRA/day-care panics were burning out. But the broad civil, media, and government apparatus left in their wake did not cease to sound alarms about sex.

“Moral panic” can be defined broadly as any mass movement that emerges in response to a false, exaggerated, or ill-defined moral threat to society and proposes to address this threat through punitive measures: tougher enforcement, “zero tolerance,” new laws, communal vigilance, violent purges. Central to the logic of moral panic is the machinery of taboo. Moral panics generate certain well-known forms of political organization. The object of panic might be an imaginary threat or a real person or group portrayed in an imaginary manner. Panics can encompass in a single movement any number of forms of dread and loathing. The mass media provides the requisite sources of sensation. Now, as then, news that shocks, scandalizes, or evokes fear and dread brings temporary relief from the tedium of modern life. Media panic is intricately woven into the basic structure of politics and governance; it is a technique for running political campaigns, staging and addressing social issues, and solving problems in a variety of communicative or administrative domains.

There has been a renewed round of intense reportage on the Catholic Church sex abuse scandals which illustrates how proportion and measure are distorted in sex panics. These conflations constructed the menacing image of the “pedophile priest.” In some jurisdictions “high-risk” offenders were convicted of sex crimes involving the use of force against a child aged twelve or younger.” “Moderate risk” refers to people convicted of crimes that involved neither the use of force nor children younger than twelve. “Low-risk” offenders can include those convicted of offenses as minor as public urination, public masturbation, “mooning,” or prostitution. Rehabilitation is the normative goal of criminal justice. That which defines the current wave of sex panics is the desire to discover, publicize, and perpetually punish even minor infractions.

This chapter surveys the landscape, sums up the findings, and ventures a few guesses about the American present and its contradictory tendencies. Antigay crusades appear to be losing their power to mobilize voters. The long tide of punitive lawmaking also shows signs of abatement. There has been renewed interest in the notion of rehabilitation. While penalties for some drug crimes have become less severe, penalties for violent crimes, second offenses, and crimes committed with a handgun continue to intensify. Policing continues to expand, even in the face of falling crime rates. The sex panics constitute the frontier where the punitive state's line of march seems least obstructed. Many assumptions that undergird the punitive state persist, even in policies that initiate important changes. Tying together institutional and popular thinking about subjects such as life, innocence, and risk, sex panics have fostered new social norms and supplied a reliable and reproducible set of tropes for the production of other panics.

Chapter 1 inaugurates several claims that it develops throughout the remainder of the manuscript: that law coproduces the scene of sexual violence; that sexual harm is not synonymous with minor or nonconsensual sex; that the gendered adolescent prefigures a more ecological account of sexual harm than does the child and the sex offender. The chapter initiates these arguments by analyzing NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” alongside and against literature on “moral panics” and “sex panics.”

This chapter analyzes child sex abuse as both a real and phantasmatic phenomenon in the West that has become prominent in the last 40 years. It theorizes the secular ritual of rehabilitation of child molesters in its relation to the changing legal and social regulation of adult child relations. Arising from this relatively new phenomenon are a set of significant issues: defining and diagnosing paraphilia, transforming taboos into illegalities, including sex in anthropological concepts of incest, understanding anew the significance of parricide in the Oedipal complex, redefining intimacy and perversion in the changing lifecourse of men, recognizing disgust in the transference with the phenomenon of child sex abuse, overcoming obstacles to knowledgeability about child sex abuse and child sex molesters, creating untouchability in definitions of transgressive sex, acknowledging evidence of the efficacy of treatment of child sex offenders.

This chapter represents an “autoethnographic” account that focuses on the writer's chance experiences. It retells the story of how the writer became a sex criminal. His experiences reveal something of the texture of events, from a close vantage, and serve as empirical evidence, as ethnographic material to be productively examined. The lives of gay people, including gay teens, have changed dramatically since the 1970s. But if the law no longer criminalizes homosexuality, and if overt expressions of homophobia are considered unacceptable in large portions of society, this is not to say that sexual anxieties have lessened or that accusation has lost any of its occult power, only that these anxieties have acquired new sources of potency. The discourse around child abuse has given stalwart homophobes a seemingly unassailable venue for homophobic ecstasy in the guise of inflamed righteousness. Law, surely, is not justice itself but only a means of attaining it.

This chapter discusses the recent discourse surrounding sex work and pornography that uncannily recalls the rhetoric of the Victorian age. Current bad-faith efforts to combat “sex trafficking” and regulate pornographic access and content signals a return to the sex panic of the nineteenth century. Porn studies as a pedagogical movement is vital in turning the tide toward a more informed and helpful understanding of sex work and sexual representation. Ironically, much of what pornography has to say about the Victorian era applies to the present day, an echo that pornographers are all too aware of. The chapter advocates for further developments in porn studies, greater attention to meaningful engagement with porn as a media product and sphere of labor, and porn literacy as a standard component of education.