"Paul M. Renfro masterfully explores the fear those cases [of high-profile missing children] evoked and the punitive laws they produced—invariably named after attractive white children who had been murdered by strangers.... Renfro argues that such legislation was not a rational response to a widespread threat, but a symptom of a culture that had projected many of its anxieties about social change onto the specter of 'deviant strangers emboldened by sexual liberation.'... An innovative mix of political, legal, and cultural history, the book demonstrates...how important a bipartisan family values agenda was in shaping the logos, pathos, and ethos of the punitive state." -- Daniel LaChance, Law and Society Review
"A well-structured and provocative book, Stranger Danger reveals the transformative power of moral panic on American politics, media and culture, showing how ideas and images of the 'endangered child', and subsequent efforts to save (select) American children from illusory 'strangers', did more harm than good by helping to build a more punitive American state in the process.....This must-read book, and the insight and research therein, is a breath of fresh air." -- James Gacek, Crime Media Culture
"Paul M. Renfro's excellent new book, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State is an engaging history of how a cluster of high-profile child abductions in the late 1970s and 1980s became catalysts for the expansion of state power, a corporatized national media culture that thrives on crisis, and a bipartisan political consensus built around the idea of security." -- Clayton Trutor, The American Conservative
"Renfro's new book is a truly needed account of the heart-wrenching origins, as well as the devastating collateral consequences, of this nation's post-1960s obsession with 'stranger danger' and its simultaneous embrace of unprecedentedly punitive policies promising to keep kids safe from abduction and exploitation. Renfro connects, as no other has, the history of this country's most dramatic effort to protect some children from strangers with the story of how other children, simultaneously, had their protections from the state utterly eroded." -- Heather Ann Thompson, author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
"Stranger Danger brilliantly demonstrates how the manufactured epidemic of missing children during the 1980s empowered the victims' rights crusade and produced a bipartisan consensus in favor of punitive child protection policies. Renfro persuasively connects the ideology of 'endangered childhood' to the expansion of the carceral state, the double standards between white innocence and nonwhite criminality, the stigmatization of sexual minorities, the corporate exploitation of parental anxiety, and the enhanced social control of all American youth. An extraordinary model of political history beyond the red-blue divide." -- Matthew D. Lassiter, University of Michigan
"Stranger Danger leaves us with a devastating portrait of a country exposing its children to real dangers by shadow-boxing with imagined ones. In the 1980s and '90s, a burgeoning 'child protection regime' of federalized policing and surveillance leveraged a handful of tragic cases of violent stranger abduction to externalize the threat. Renfro powerfully redirects the gaze away from the missing kid on the milk carton-almost certainly a runaway, a 'throwaway,' or a family abductee-to the malign misuse of personal tragedy to paper over a politically produced societal failure of heartbreaking dimensions. An important contribution to the literature on racialized 'family values' and the growth of the carceral state." -- Bethany Moreton, Dartmouth College
"Using superb research and gripping narratives, Renfro's book shows that panics about strangers kidnapping, molesting, and murdering kids may have made children less safe, by obscuring the fact that it is overwhelmingly often parents and close relatives who do these things. The book is all the more timely in demonstrating how right-wing activists used these panics to promote their anti-gay and anti-feminist agenda and to expand the carceral and surveillance state in ways that do little to protect children." -- Linda Gordon, New York University
"Renfro's book covers a great deal of territory, including, interestingly, how homophobia dovetailed with the stranger danger panic... [His] most important contention in Stranger Danger, however, is that the missing children panic of the 1980s and '90s played an important political role in the rise in mass incarceration." -- Meagan Day, Jacobin
"Really excellent... this book demonstrates that family values had secular actors behind it, and then that helps us understand its broad and bipartisan appeal and adoption in this period and why it became really the language of American politics for a generation. It's a great book... beautifully written." -- Neil J. Young, Past Present Podcast
"Paul M. Renfro's excellent new book, Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State is an engaging history of how a cluster of high-profile child abductions in the late 1970s and 1980s became catalysts for the expansion of state power, a corporatized national media culture that thrives on crisis, and a bipartisan political consensus built around the idea of security." -- Clayton Trutor, The American Conservative
