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Book reviews
they come about and their effects. They are focused through the prism of popular culture, but
from there their approaches diverge. Jenkins, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, looks
at the civil liberties costs of ill-conceived legislation passed during sexual panics. Sonenschein, a
former Kinsey researcher, details how society constructs images of pedophiles, children and the
adults who protect them.
PERIODS OF PANIC
Jenkins charts a conventional course in describing how claimsmakers who advocate greater
censure of adult-child sex have used—and been used by—the news media. He breaks no new
ground in reporting how social workers, police and the mental health establishment formulated
exaggerated claims in order to advance budgetary agendas.
Jenkins describes three major child-sex panics in the last 100 years. He shows how beliefs have
shifted profoundly and repeatedly between a relative lack of concern and panic, and says the
reversals mean they are irrational. The result has been,
"Outrage at random violence [against children] is transformed into a largely
symbolic crusade against the nonviolent and thus squanders resources on the
mildly deviant" (p. 9).
Jenkins performs a valuable service in drawing parallels between new laws which resulted from
the latest child-sex panic and their antecedents, such as the now-discredited sex psychopath
laws. The far reaching new measures were enacted in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Despite
their breadth, they have had little historical characterization.
On the other hand, his is a broad-brush approach, superficial and at times inaccurate. For
example, he implies the first federal child-pornography law prohibited mere possession, when in
fact this provision was enacted later (p. 145). This may have been due to his reliance on
inaccurate secondary sources such as the popular press for legal citations.
The book's biggest flaw is that it does not fully illuminate new laws' civil liberties costs, which
go well beyond the groups they target. This may be seen in Jenkins' discussion of the sexually
violent predator statutes.
In effect in more than 16 states and under consideration in more than 20 others, they require civil
commitment, potentially for life, for anyone who may commit a vague array of non-violent
sexual behavior, including, in most states, "any criminal act [found] to have been sexually
motivated" (Lieb & Matson, 1998).
The statutes and mechanisms used to implement them generally exclude incest but are weighted
against homosexuals, a fact not discussed by Jenkins.
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