Book Review

Canada and the United States

At the heart of this book is Philip Jenkins's desire to understand the hysteria that since the 1980s has surrounded America's obsession with the sexual abuse of children. This is a serious and important social issue that a range of social analysts, such as Joel Best, Neil Gilbert, and Cynthia Gentry, have tried to understand as a social construction: a crisis that is manufactured and grows through the exaggerated claims of advocacy groups and other social stake holders and is rapidly spread through media excess.

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In the second half of the book, Jenkins effectively connects the complex of issues that have become associated with this obsession: child abduction, child molestation, satanic ritual abuse, incest and recovered memory, and, most recently, internet sex rings. He reconstructs the ways in which these issues grew and developed as the media, lawmakers, and, above all, a growing coterie of child advocates embedded in the helping professions have played on social fears and anxieties. In describing this complex, Jenkins raises extremely important questions about how our laws and criminal justice procedures have been affected and recreated as a result of this panic. The current multiplication of Megan's Laws (which require that communities be notified about the presence of sexual predators) is one questionable consequence. Another is the growth of new kinds of sentencing for sexual predators who are increasingly viewed as suffering from an irremediable condition. In some states today, such criminals can be detained in mental institutions beyond the expiration of their sentences, and in some (such as California), they can be chemically castrated. In many ways, the sexual abuse of children has since the 1980s been used to overturn the whole rehabilitative regime in the criminal justice system, and Jenkins does a fine job showing how child sexual abuse has been manipulated so that we are now confronting the cumulative legal consequences of this social panic.

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