[PW] ?cycle of worry about child molesting?

[Daphne Drewello]

Dan Goodman wrote

> I've been told there's a cycle of concern about child molesting.  At the
> high point (which we're now in), police and others are over-sensitive.
> At the low point (which the US was in around 1963-1964), it's very hard
> to get the police interested in complaints.

 From an LJ review (on Amazon) of the paperback edition of  "Moral Panic:
Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America" by Philip Jenkins
(Yale University Press, 2004)

http://tinyurl.com/269kt4

"Alarm over threats of child sexual abuse has not always been as widespread
as it is today. Periods of heightened concern have been followed by troughs
of neglect, as in the 1920s and 1960s. Jenkins (history and religious
studies, Pennsylvania State Univ.; Pedophiles and Priests, Oxford Univ.,
1996) discusses the social, political, and ideological factors that have
influenced public opinion about sexual crimes, both real and imagined."


Daphne Drewello
Alfred Dickey Library
Jamestown, ND