Postgraduate

By Paul Mokrzycki| Originally published in the Vol. 7 no. 1 (Fall/Winter 2013/14) issue.

After allegedly being held involuntary for ten years in a Cleveland, Ohio, home, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus broke free in May 2013 with the help of Charles Ramsey, a neighbor of accused kidnapper Ariel Castro. Ramsey, an African-American, achieved Internet fame after his post-rescue interview went viral. In the televised exchange with a local reporter, Ramsey contended that something seemed amiss “when a little, pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here,” he quipped. “Dead giveaway! Dead giveaway!” Ramsey might have been referring to either Berry or the six-year-old girl she had with her captor but these descriptors of innocence could apply to both, especially when considered alongside the stock media narrative seemingly evident in Cleveland and other abduction cases like it. More specifically, the argument goes, mainstream media outlets tend to emphasize “innocence” as a trope in missing child or person “events,” and young, telegenic, blond white women and girls seem to elicit the most attention in this paradigm.[2]

There can be little doubt that the media and, by extension, the American public obsess over child kidnappings—especially those involving white, visually attractive victims. This fascination builds on historically rooted conceptions of beauty and innocence articulated through film, television, and print media. Moreover, the seductive image of white female victimhood as a call to political action or sociocultural change in the United States dates back to at least the Reconstruction South. Other scholars have also posited that countless fairy tales and myths—for example, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and Andromeda—provide a fertile base upon which claims of protecting white womanhood can be constructed.[3]

Yet this reductive understanding of missing children cases papers over the contingent histories of both youth kidnappings and the concept of “childhood innocence.” At once revered as innocent and worthy of protection, young Americans also shoulder broader national anxieties about race, class, sex, and crime. Their innocence renders them malleable and in need of social control—deserving or requiring defense against the perceived evils of the modern world. However, our contemporary conception of childhood, premised largely on Victorian ideals of civility and gentility, also rests on countervailing Calvinist notions about “children’s capacity to be possessed by evil.”[4] In analyzing the “new wave” of missing children cases that inaugurated a moral panic in the late 1970s and early 1980s—a wave that in many ways persists to this day— this essay will chronicle the ways in which American adults sought to police, protect, and define American childhood and adolescence at the dawn of the conservative counterrevolution. The ways in which these new “child savers” framed youth—as a time of innocence, vulnerability, or peril—illustrates how American society treated, and treats, its youngest members.

Although American children have gotten lost, run away from home, or fallen prey to kidnappers for centuries, only in the late twentieth century did these distinct phenomena converge into a single political issue under the problematic yet widely used heading of “missing children.”[5] This fixation grew out of a milieu characterized by uncertainty, anxiety, and fear. Beset by economic stagflation, widespread distrust of government, the so-called culture wars, and what President Jimmy Carter termed “malaise,” many Americans found in a number of missing children cases further confirmation of national declension and moral chaos. Historians Steven Mintz and Philip Jenkins have examined the various panics that marked the final decades of the twentieth century. Jenkins perceives these fits as symptomatic of a national anxiety born out of the vexing 1970s, which he dubs the “anti-sixties.” Mintz, on the other hand, adeptly notes that this “series of widely publicized panics” centered almost exclusively on “children’s wellbeing,” which seemed at the time to be in crisis.[6]

But whereas Jenkins and others consider the Reagan years “the end of the innocence,” as Don Henley once sang, the spike in interest in a specific type of child disappearance confirms Americans’ desire to reaffirm the national value of innocence.[7] More specifically, in the late seventies and early eighties, the disappearances of numerous young boys—but very few girls—captured national headlines. As feminists, African-Americans, and members of the lgbt community challenged white male patriarchy and heterosexism, the abductions and presumed abductions of numerous white boys took on symbolic salience as threats to the future of the white American male. Beginning in the late 1970s, these isolated episodes triggered local and eventually national responses that contributed to a metanarrative about national decline catalyzed by the sexual and moral permissiveness of American liberalism. These responses lamented social change and sought to reassert American innocence as embodied by the transhistorical, naïve, and asexual yet teleologically heterosexual white boy.[8]

News of John Wayne Gacy Jr.’s horrific crimes surfaced in late 1978. The thirty-six year old lured over thirty teenage boys to his Chicago-area home before chloroforming, molesting, and murdering them, after which he stashed their bodies in his crawlspace. Media accounts of Gacy’s atrocities energized antigay sentiments in the Chicago area and beyond. Newspapers appeared to assign causative value to Gacy’s presumed sexual orientation. “Authorities today unearthed the body of the 27^th presumed victim of alleged homosexual murderer John Wayne Gacy,” one article in the Washington Post read. The story also drew parallels between Gacy and the 1970–73 “Candy Man” murders in Houston, in which “victims also were homosexually molested before they were slain.”[9] When Milwaukee’s lgbt community felt besieged following the grisly discovery of Jeffery Dahmer’s victims in 1991, some recalled their experiences when Gacy’s transgressions came to light over a decade earlier. “This case is like the John Wayne Gacy case all over again,” a member of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force lamented, “and I’m afraid the reports of these kinds of horrible murders reinforce anti-gay sentiments within the [Milwaukee] community.”[10] The emphasis on “deviant sexual behavior,” as one New York Times article euphemized homosexuality, buttressed widely held assumptions about “predatory” and “sexually violent” gay men and the threat they posed not only to traditional sexual mores but also to the “innocent” children—primarily boys—who might fall victim to these perversions.

Less than a year later came the case that “awakened America” and, many argue, launched the missing children campaign.[11] On Friday, May 25, 1979, six-year-old Etan Patz left home to board his school bus in the SoHo area of Manhattan. For the first time ever, Etan would be unaccompanied as he walked to the bus stop; he never made it there.[12] Similar to the Gacy tragedies, Etan’s disappearance stoked American fears about pedophilia and homosexuality.[13] In late 1982, police raided a Wareham, Massachusetts, apartment inhabited by three members of the notorious North American Man-Boy Love Association (nambla). After the raid and subsequent arrests of the nambla affiliates, investigators found a photograph featuring a young boy who resembled Etan Patz. The discovery followed the admission by retired cabdriver Chester Jones that he had transported Etan and a young blond man on the day Etan went missing. nypd officials confirmed Jones’s testimony through a lie detector test. Days after news of the photograph broke, police eliminated it as evidence, announcing that the boy in the picture was not Etan.[14]

Anxieties about homosexuality also suffused the Atlanta crisis of 1979–81, in which twenty-nine poor African American youngsters, mostly boys, went missing, never to be seen alive again. Rumors abounded within and beyond the black community that one or more gay men mutilated and molested the bodies of African-American boys for sexual gratification. No evidence ever materialized to substantiate these allegations. “There is no homosexuality in this case,” Atlanta public safety commissioner Lee P. Brown stated flatly. “There had been rumors about homosexuality, but nothing at all to prove it.”[15] Unlike the other incidents highlighted here, Atlanta’s victims, on account of their race and social status, found themselves characterized as “street hustlers.” One article in the Atlanta Constitution referred to eleven-year-old victim Patrick Baltazar as a “‘hustler’ with street sense.”[16]  The news media rendered—and continually renders—most other missing and murdered children as “innocents” who fell victim to a “subhuman” (often “deviant” or “homosexual”) predator. Here we see how “innocence” assumed very specific racial, class, and gendered meanings, especially when compared to the ways in which media outlets depicted other missing boys as asexual victims of presumptively homosexual pedophiles.

The 1981 kidnapping and murder of Adam Walsh in Hollywood, Florida, offers one such example. Walsh’s death further accelerated the missing children’s movement and seemed to substantiate fears about the “predatory homosexual” as well. While incarcerated on arson charges in 1983, Ottis Elwood Toole confessed to Adam’s murder, shedding light on his seedy history and fulfilling the archetype of the degenerate gay man. Described in newspaper accounts and police reports as a “homosexual drifter,” Toole often committed crimes with his reputed “lover,” a convicted murderer named Henry Lee Lucas. According to an investigator, the couple’s nefarious exploits “made Charles Manson sound like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.”[17] One newspaper article seemed to blame Toole and Lucas’s assumed sexualities for their unspeakable acts. The writer first quoted a sheriff’s sergeant involved in the case: “Both men were necrophiliacs. They had sex with their victims after killing them[;] sometimes they had sex with their victims before killing them.” Next, the journalist clarified, “Toole is homosexual, Lucas bisexual.”[18] Anxieties about homosexuality could almost always be found lurking in political and media rhetoric on missing children. In 1984, U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell—then a Jefferson County, Kentucky, judge—blamed the supposed increase in “child tragedies” on “child liberation” and the “increasing openness regarding homosexual activities,” which he claimed “created a market for young male ‘street hustlers.’”[19]

Johnny Gosch and Eugene Wade Martin, both paperboys from the Des Moines, Iowa, area, disappeared in 1982 and 1984, respectively, and became the first missing youngsters featured on milk cartons. Some locals still deploy conceptions of regional innocence to counteract the shock of the presumed abductions. “Here’s little sleepy Des Moines,” one detective mused in 1996, “[with] two paperboys out doing their job. I had—I had a paper route as a kid. Most people I knew had one…[child kidnappings] don’t happen here. It can’t happen here [sic].”[20] A local newspaper article in 2012 advanced a similar sentiment: “It’s not the type of crime that happens in Iowa.” The piece went on to quote a nostalgic local bemoaning the Gosch disappearance. “There were kidnappings but it was never kids, at least not that we’d seen in our lives,” the man recalled. “We were all raised watching The Andy Griffith Show and Leave It to Beaver, and these things didn’t even occur to us. … That was the most bothersome thing[,] that [the Gosch case] kind of stole our innocence from us.”[21] The evocation of wholesome sitcoms that aired at the height of the cold war underlines the power of nostalgia, childhood, and “innocence lost” in political memory. In these incidents, some kidnapper or kidnappers ostensibly removed two “innocent” boys from their idyllic, sleepy town where they could safely perform the ultimate boyhood task of delivering newspapers. Something had changed; boyhood innocence was in crisis.

These and other cases prompted swift federal action. Two pieces of legislation, the 1982 Missing Children Act (mca) and the Missing Children’s Assistance Act (mcaa) of 1984, seemed more invested in the safety of young boys than that of girls. U.S. congressman Paul Simon (D-Ill.), cosponsor of the 1982 bill, cited the Etan Patz disappearance as the impetus for his involvement in the issue. In his remarks on the House floor, furthermore, Simon extended his sympathies to the families of three missing or deceased young males—the Clinkscales, whose son disappeared on his drive back to college; the Walshes; and the Patzes—but made no mention of abducted or runaway girls.[22] While the 1984 hearings on the mcaa made over forty references to “girl” or “girls,” many of these references dealt with organizations involved in the missing children’s movement—such as the Girl Scouts or Girls Clubs of America. For comparison, participants in the hearings cited Adam Walsh—or the made-for-tv movie that bore his name—nearly fifty times.[23]

When President Ronald Reagan showed his interest in the missing children issue, he reinforced the movement’s emphasis on missing and exploited boys and their innocence, however implicitly. Alongside John and Reve Walsh—parents of Adam Walsh—as he signed the mca, Reagan celebrated the couple’s resilience in the face of adversity. “It is high time the legal system showed the honest citizen as much concern as it does the criminal,” the president intoned. “Today, it is not the wrongdoer who falls through the cracks of our criminal justice system. Too often, it is the innocent victim and the dutiful witness.”[24] The following year, Reagan marked May 25—the day of Etan Patz’s disappearance—as National Missing Children’s Day. When Reagan spoke at the opening of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in June 1984, he cited Johnny Gosch, ten-year-old Kevin Collins, and Adam Walsh, but only one girl: twelve-year-old Ann Gotlib from Louisville, Kentucky.

The pattern proffered here seems especially curious because available data confirms that girls are more likely than boys to fall victim to “nonfamily abductions.” According to the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children (NISMART) initiated under the mcaa, female children constitute sixty-five (65) percent of the total number of “nonfamily abduction” victims and sixty-nine (69) percent of the total number of “stereotypical kidnapping” victims. Although different in their research methodologies, both the first and second NISMART studies, released in 1988 and 2002 respectively, concluded that teenage girls went missing at the hands of nonfamily abductors more frequently than any other contingency. Further, runaways comprised—and still comprise—more than ninety-five percent of the total number of “missing children.” Both these findings run counter to the dominant image presented in the news media in the 1980s—that is, the story of a very young, “innocent-looking” white boy like Adam Walsh or Kevin Collins abducted by a sinister male stranger:

The NISMART–2 findings reinforce the 1988 study’s conclusion that teenage girls are the most frequent targets of nonfamily abductions and stereotypical kidnappings. To some extent, this finding contrasts with the image drawn from media accounts of the abduction of very young children such as Adam Walsh and Samantha Runnion. Perhaps the innocence and vulnerability of younger children ensure more publicity and greater notoriety for these cases.[25]

By the 1990s, this gendered discrepancy had seemingly been rectified and the paradigm began to skew toward missing young girls and women. Anxieties about manhood and homosexuality gave way to a crisis in American girlhood as the public obsessed over the disappearances of telegenic white females. Their names and corresponding images seared themselves into the national consciousness and racked up thousands of hours of news footage. An ample amount of scholarship has investigated these incidents, the media coverage they received, and how these sensationalized stories further marginalized nonwhite women in the media narrative. Many appraisals of “missing white woman syndrome” come from feminist scholars who rightly assail the ways in which national media outlets both infantilize and glamorize female victims. Rebecca Wanzo, for instance, argues that the “Lost Girl Event” serves a political purpose by “reconfigur[ing] and imbu[ing]” the female body “with more meaning than she can possibly hold, becoming a powerful symbol through the carefully crafted representation of her disappearance or death.” Wanzo continues: “She becomes not only the ideal girl but the ideal citizen that the nation’s policies are designed to protect.”[26] This “slippage” between child and citizen cited by Wanzo and most notably conceptualized by Lauren Berlant first applied to missing and murdered young boys in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but as the public sphere expanded, so too did the public’s understanding of “future citizens.”[27]

In the 1990s and 2000s, “missing white woman syndrome” afflicted the American populace en masse. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson attested to this fact: “Someday historians will look back at America in the decade bracketing the turn of the 21^st century and identify the era’s major themes: Religious fundamentalism. Terrorism. … Information technology. … The rise of superpower China. And, of course, Damsels in Distress.”[28] The period Robinson identifies, roughly stretching from 1995 to 2005, saw the independent disappearances of and subsequent media obsessions over JonBenet Ramsey, Elizabeth Smart, Chandra Levy, Jessica Lynch, Laci Peterson, Jennifer Wilbanks, Lori Hacking, Danielle van Dam, Carlie Brucia, Natalee Holloway, Carole and Juli Sund, and Silvina Pelosso, among others.

Reporters, politicians, and members of the justice system regularly depicted these girls and young women as “innocent.” In one particularly strident example, Boulder County, Colorado, district attorney Alex Hunter explained the nature of the JonBenet Ramsey case to the press corps: “This is a difficult case. This is a circumstantial evidence case. … I hope that, for your viewers, and for your readers, you will talk about the difference between some kind of eyewitness case and the kind of case that we have dealing with the death of this sweet, innocent, beautiful child.”[29] But in the Ramsey case also resided anxieties about the proper performance of girlhood.[30] That JonBenet participated in beauty pageants aroused questions about the sexual exploitation of children and the supposed corruption of innocence with makeup, lipstick, and “flippers.” JonBenet’s father, John Ramsey, ruminated on these apprehensions in a 2012 interview with ABC:

Patsy [John’s wife and JonBenet’s mother] had [JonBenet] sitting atop a friend’s convertible in the Christmas parade waving at the people lining the streets. Patsy’s mother later told me that a strange man approached the car during the parade and it made her uncomfortable. I think about these things now and it makes me cringe. We were so naïve. I now believe with all my heart that it’s not a good idea to put your child on public display.[31]

Likewise, the Natalee Holloway case revealed the tension between genteel girlhood and sexual immodesty. The eighteen-year-old Holloway, revered in the media as a goal-oriented “good girl” with a full ride to the University of Alabama, elicited both sympathy and scorn when she disappeared on a high school trip to Aruba. Despite what her “angelic” blond locks connoted to some, others blamed Natalee for the tragedy that had befallen her. Joran van der Sloot and Deepak Kalpoe, persons of interest in Holloway’s disappearance, both chastised the Alabama teenager’s excessive drinking, psychological issues, and moral depravity. “The girl was crazy,” van der Sloot argued. “She came on to me huge. Dancing suggestively. Like a slut. I did belly shots on her, on the bar.”[32] Kalpoe echoed this sentiment: “To tell you quite frankly,” he told CBS, “[she] dressed like a slut, [and] talked like one, too. [Who] would go into a car with three strange guys[?] … and her mother, claiming her to be the goody-two-shoes. Enough with this bs [bullshit] already.”[33] Perhaps no one knows what happened to Holloway, but the fact that she might have spent her final hours in a drunken, sex-crazed stupor rubs many folks the wrong way. After all, what upstanding young woman would act in such a manner? Yet she still occupies a place of privilege in the American media canon. As a telegenic, blond, white American woman, or “girl,” she commands attention—in major network studios, in the living rooms of ordinary television viewers, and in the segregated fraternity and sorority mansions at the University of Alabama.[34]

This interplay between wide-eyed innocence and culpability comports with a broader social tendency to blame the female victims of sex crimes. In Cleveland, Texas, in 2012, a defense attorney compared an eleven-year-old girl who had been repeatedly gang raped to a spider luring flies to its “parlor.”[35] When a Toronto police officer told York University students in 2011 that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized,” activists organized a “SlutWalk” to reappropriate the term in question and assert their sexual agency. Scholars Leigh Moscowitz and Spring-Serenity Duvall astutely note how this “victim-blame” mentality shapes coverage and public perceptions of youth abductions and disappearances. The “virgin-vamp myth,” they insist, governed news coverage of the Elizabeth Smart disappearance and those of other teenage girls. With Smart, “speculations about whether she invited sexual attention from her attacker or chose to stay with him rather than escape builds on myths that girls are ‘asking for it’ when they are kidnapped.” Indeed, “victims must conform to gender norms in order to be granted legitimacy as victims.”[36]

Of course, this policing of girls’ sexualities often coupled with the “victim-blame” pathology both have deep historical roots in the United States. Within the cauldron of chattel slavery, white men frequently deployed the myth of the “jezebel” to justify their sexual congress with black women. The unbridled, primordial sexuality of female slaves, they attested, practically forced them into bed. This myth, of course, belies the fact that male slaveholders had full access to the bodies of not just their slaves, but those of all blacks.[37] Historian Mary Odem, moreover, charts the dual-phased regulation of adolescent female sexuality in two California counties at the turn of the century. Moral reformers initially raised the age of consent to “protect” female youngsters from male predation. However, in a second wave of Progressive reform, advocates stripped these young women of their victimhood, taking direct aim at their sexual freedom through legal mechanisms. Young men faced no equivalent suppression.[38]

Historian Susan Cahn makes a similar case regarding southern girls from 1920 to 1960. These youngsters, simultaneously portrayed as harbingers of a bright southern future and threats to its moral purity, carried the burden of a region and a nation. Reformers thus sought to enact social policy to constrain the sexualities of both white and black adolescent females.[39] Beginning in the twenties, a burgeoning youth culture kindled fears about young women’s sexual delinquency, disease, and “pollution” of the gene pool. From eugenic sterilization to the regulation of “pick-up girls” spreading venereal disease during World War II, southern moral reformers aimed to temper the ostensibly deleterious impact of female adolescents on the region. Cahn does well to underline the contested visions of girlhood that informed “purity” campaigns and desegregation efforts. On one hand, girls and young women in the South—particularly white ones—demanded protection from the ills of racial integration and miscegenation; on the other, they subverted firmly entrenched racial and gender hierarchies by crossing the color line and challenging male patriarchy through their sexual and social autonomy.[40]

As Cahn suggests, apprehensions about youth structured both opposition to and support for the domestic upheavals of the mid-twentieth century. Historians Steven Mintz and Rebecca de Schweinitz both note the constellation of historical factors that motivated the youth and student activism of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. The military draft; heightened expectations from the state following the Second World War and the establishment of a New Deal “consensus”; persistent segregation in schools and public accommodations; the postwar baby boom; the Emmett Till tragedy; the Brown decisions; the Great Migration; and the rapid expansion of education opportunities all increased young people’s willingness and ability to mobilize.[41] These developments also buttressed critics’ claims about the hazardous effects of social permissiveness. Authors penned books with titles such as Suburbia’s Coddled Kids, and Newsweek magazine plastered on its cover a photograph of a “child manipulating mother and father dolls.”[42] Student activism resulted, in this critical view, from the privileges bestowed upon undeserving and ungrateful young Americans.

Nonwhite children and adolescents helped build the rights revolution, de Schweinitz observes, yet their victories in proclaiming innocence soon drowned under depictions of young black and Latino men as criminally deviant. The Watts riots in 1965 Los Angeles promulgated nationwide the image of the “black demon,” patterned off of the historical archetypes of the “black brute” and “black beast rapist.” The hundreds of urban “race riots” that enveloped the nation in the late sixties and beyond bolstered this stereotype. Sociologist Jonathan Markovitz argues that these archetypes served to justify lynching as an extralegal mechanism intended to constrain the African American delinquent, and they remain central—at least in popular memory—to the carceral and law enforcement habits that continue to criminalize nonwhite youths at unconscionable rates.[43]

While cold war anxieties about race, gender, sexuality, and crime have long influenced adults’ posture toward American youth, these anxieties surfaced with increasing frequency in the post-rights era. Changing conceptions of childhood protection and security—in tandem with larger national fears about safety and crime—gave rise to the missing children panic, which reified existing patterns of innocence that “queered” white boys. Kathryn Boyd Stockton, for one, explores the white, middle class, asexual childhood that American society seeks “to safeguard at all costs.”[44] In conversation with Lee Edelman, James Kincaid, Judith Levine, and others, Stockton propounds the eroticization of innocence and youthful purity—innocence itself can be perceived as an alternate sexuality celebrated by the adults who no longer possess it. When considered against the ways in which the news media and general public paint girls of any age and background as innately sexual, however, Stockton clearly overstates the asexuality of female youngsters. The social importance placed on virginity and purity falls almost exclusively on girls, whose physical and psychological transformations into adolescence are often met with revulsion and shame.[45]

The double standard revealed here bespeaks a national obsession with innocence. The title of historian William S. Bush’s 2010 book asks, “Who gets a childhood?”[46] We might also ask, “Who gets innocence?” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the stark disparities in how Americans dispense the perquisites of childhood purity follow existing patterns of inequity. Missing young women endure scrutiny and sexual mischaracterization in ways that white boys do not. The missing children scare, which already privileges the normative—white, middle class, asexual, photogenic—child and draws attention away from more pressing problems that youths of color disproportionately face, exacerbates pervasive misconceptions about race, gender, and sexuality.[47] White boyhood, the diminutive form of white manhood, seems like a pretty cushy gig—one good enough to steal.

Notes

• [1] This title originally appears in Eugene Robinson, “(White) Women We Love,” Washington Post, June 10, 2005, A23.
• [2] “Charles Ramsey, Cleveland man who helped Amanda Berry, others escape becomes Internet sensation,” May 7, 2013, ABC-7 News online (Denver, Colo.), http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/watercooler/charles-ramsey-clevelan..., accessed May 9, 2013. For a brief survey of the literature on “missing white girls” as a media trope, see Carol M. Liebler, “Me(di)a Culpa? The ‘Missing White Woman Syndrome’ and Media Self-Critique,” Communication, Culture, and Critique 3, 4 (Dec. 2010): 549–65; Helen Benedict, Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Rebecca Wanzo, “The Era of Lost (White) Girls: On Body and Event,” Differences 19, 2 (Summer 2008): 99–126; Sarah Stillman, “‘The Missing White Girl Syndrome’: Disappeared Women and Media Activism,” Gender and Development 15, 3 (Nov. 2007): 491–502; Mia Moody, Bruce Dorries, and Harriet Blackwell, “How National Media Framed Coverage of Missing Black and White Women,” Media Report to Women 37, 4 (Fall 2009): 12–18.
• [3] J. Mitchell Miller, Megan Kurlycheck, J. Andrew Hansen, and Kristine Wilson, “Examining Child Abduction by Offender Type Patterns,” Justice Quarterly 25, 3 (Sept. 2008): 524. For more on white womanhood and the postbellum South, see Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
• [4] Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York: Viking Press, 1988), 29.
• [5] Paula S. Fass has delivered the most comprehensive historical portrait of child kidnappings in the U.S.; however, she does not delve sufficiently into the “new wave” detailed in this essay. Paula S. Fass, Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
• [6] Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
• [7] Don Henley, The End of the Innocence, Geffen Records, 1989; Charles Leonard Ponce de Leon, “The End of the Innocence,” review of Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America, by Philip Jenkins, Reviews in American History 34, 4 (Dec. 2006): 557–64.
• [8] For more on family as an organizing principle in postwar American politics, see Natasha Zaretsky, No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Robert O. Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012). For more on the child “queered by innocence,” see Kathryn Boyd Stockton, The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), 30.
• [9] Rob Warden, “A 27^th Body is Unearthed at Gacy Home,” Washington Post, Dec. 30, 1978, A3.
• [10] Jacob Smith Yang, “‘Media disaster’ in Milwaukee,” Gay Community News (Boston, Mass.) 19, 3 (Aug. 3, 1991), 1.
• [11] “CNN: Missing Child Case ‘Awakened America,’” republished on the Congressional Victims’ Rights Caucus website, http://poe.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=8651&Item... =default&view=article&date=1982-10-01, accessed Dec. 14, 2012.
• [12] Peter Kihss, “Boy Missing from SoHo was on Own First Time,” New York Times, May 30, 1979, B3.
• [13] Fass contends that the most recent “wave” of national concern over missing children has assumed a profoundly sinister sexual connotation. Nevertheless, she fails to associate this development with Americans’ broader fears about social change in the latter half of the twentieth century. See Fass; Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
• [14] “Photo in Patz Case Released by Police,” New York Times, Dec. 23, 1982, B3; Associated Press, “Patz Clues Sought in 3 Apartments,” New York Times, Dec. 24, 1982, B3; Sydney H. Schanberg, “Not Getting Involved,” New York Times, Dec. 28, 1982, A23.
• [15] Chester A. Higgins Sr., “Atlanta Holds Its Breath!” Crisis, Aug.–Sept. 1981, 352–63, Box 177, Series i: Office Files, Lee P. Brown Papers, ms 509, Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston [hereafter lpb].
• [16] For more on this stereotyping, see Joyce Egginton, “Why the Atlanta murders became a media event,” The Press (New York City, N.Y.), June–July 1981, Box 180, Series i, lpb. One article in the Atlanta Constitution referred to eleven-year-old victim Patrick Baltazar as a “‘hustler’ with street sense.” See T. L. Wells and George Rodriguez, “gbi Agent Gets a Top Role in Kids Cases,” Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 13, 1981, 1-A, Box 180, Series i, lpb.
• [17] Michael Hirsley, “‘Fluke Led to Confession in Kidnap-Murder of Adam,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 23, 1983, 3.
• [18] Paul Taylor, “Two Drifters May Be Worst Mass Murderers of Modern Times,” Washington Post, Oct. 27, 1983, A6. In 2008, Hollywood, Florida, police finally closed the Adam Walsh case and named Toole as the likely killer. However, doubts persist about the case, especially considering that Toole had previously lied about his participation in various murders to inflate his “body count.” See John Holland, “Adam Walsh case is closed after 27 years,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 17, 2008, http://articles.latimes.com/2008/dec/17/nation/na-adam17, accessed Oct. 21, 2013.
• [19] U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Missing Children’s Assistance Act: Hearings held by Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice, Ninety-Eighth Congress, first session, s. 2014, Feb. 7, 21, and Mar. 8, 13, 21, 1984, 36. It might be argued that McConnell demonizes children here for their ostensible participation in the “gay lifestyle.” However, he actually denounces the social conditions that, he thinks, made their “sexual liberation” possible.
• [20] “Lost Lives; Pictures of Missing Children on Milk Cartons Discontinued Because It Struck Fear in Parents and Children,” 48 Hours, CBS News, Feb. 15, 1996.
• [21] Emily Schettler, “Thirty years after missing child Johnny Gosch vanished, volunteer relive case,” Des Moines Register, Sept. 4, 2012, http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120904/NEWS01/309040025/1001/..., accessed Dec. 11, 2012.
• [22] U.S. Congress, House, Missing Children Act, Ninety-Seventh Congress, second session, h.r. 6976, Congressional Record 128, 18 (Sept. 20, 1982), 24306–12.
• [23] U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, Missing Children’s Assistance Act: Hearings held by Subcommittee on Juvenile Justice, Ninety-Eighth Congress, First Session, Feb. 7, 21, and Mar. 8, 13, 21, 1984.
• [24] Don Irwin, “Reagan Signs Bills to Protect Victims, Help Parents Locate Missing Children,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 13, 1982, A18.
• [25] David Finkelhor, Heather Hammer, and Andrea J. Sedlak, “Nonfamily Abducted Children: National Estimates and Characteristics,” NISMART Bulletin, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Oct. 2002, http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/documents/nismart2_nonfamily.pdf, accessed May 30, 2013, 12.
• Even between the two youngsters listed in this NISMART excerpt, Adam Walsh and Samantha Runnion, we see a considerable discrepancy in news coverage. A Lexis-Nexis newspaper search for “Samantha Runnion” yields 177 results, while a similar search for “Adam Walsh” yields 548.
• [26] Wanzo, 101.
• [27] For more on this “slippage,” see Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).
• [28] Eugene Robinson, “(White) Women We Love,” Washington Post, June 10, 2005, A23.
• [29] JonBenet Ramsey press conference, videotape, CNN, Feb. 13, 1997, Box 67, no. 16, Series vii, lpb. Emphasis added.
• [30] This argument relies heavily on the work of feminist scholars and gender theorists. See especially Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
• [31] Juju Chang, “JonBenet Ramsey’s Father Regrets Letting Her in Pageants, Says ‘Toddlers and Tiaras’ Is ‘Bizarre,’” ABC News online, Mar. 13, 2012, http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/03/jonbenet-ramseys-father-re..., accessed June 14, 2013.
• [32] Bryan Burrough, “Missing White Female,” Vanity Fair 545, Jan. 2006.
• [33]Gina Pace, “Suspect: We Had Sex with Natalee,” CBS News online, Feb. 11, 2009, http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500202_162-919948.html, accessed May 23, 2013.
• [34] At the start of the 2005 school year, some fraternity and sorority members at the University of Alabama hung yellow ribbons around the campus to signify the absence of their (expected) Greek sister Natalee. Like most Greek systems across the United States, the University of Alabama’s acquiesces to a historically located racial separatism. See “Holloway Remembered,” WTVY (Dothan, Ala.) News online, Aug. 16, 2005, http://www.wtvy.com/home/headlines/1681141.html, accessed May 23, 2013; Paul Mokrzycki, “After the Stand Comes the Fall: Racial Integration and White Student Reactions at the University of Alabama, 1963–1976,” Alabama Review 65, no. 4 (Oct. 2012): 290–313.
• [35] Cindy Horswell, “Lawyer likens gang-rape victim to a spider luring men into web,” Houston Chronicle online, Nov. 27, 2012, http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Lawyer-likens-ga..., accessed July 21, 2013.
• [36] Leigh Moscowitz and Spring-Serenity Duvall, “‘Every Parent’s Worst Nightmare’: Myths of Child Abductions in U.S. News,” Journal of Children and Media 5, 2 (2011): 149.
• [37] Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985).
• [38] Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
• [39] Susan K. Cahn, Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
• [40] Cahn, esp. chapters one, two, and ten.
• [41] Mintz, esp. 317 and 334; Rebecca de Schweinitz, If We Could Change the World: Young People and America’s Long Struggle for Racial Equality (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
• [42] Mintz, 314.
• [43] Jonathan Markovitz, Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 90. See also Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).
• [44] Stockton, 30.
• [45] Lee Edelman, “The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive,” Narrative 6, 1 (Jan. 1998): 18–30; James Kincaid, Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998); Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
• [46] William S. Bush, Who Gets a Childhood? Race and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-Century Texas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010).
• [47] Fass.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Archival Materials

• Lee P. Brown Papers, Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston

Government Sources

Newspapers, Periodicals, and Other News Sources

• ABC News
• ABC-7 tv (Denver, Colo.)
• Atlanta Constitution (Ga.)
• CBS News
• Chicago Tribune
• Crisis
• Des Moines Register (Ia.)
• Gay Community News (Boston, Mass.)
• Houston Chronicle (Tex.)
• Los Angeles Times
• New York Times
• The Press (N.Y.)
• Vanity Fair
• Washington Post
• WTVY News (Dothan, Ala.)

Other Media Sources

• Henley, Don. The End of the Innocence. Geffen Records, 1989.

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• Benedict, Helen. Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
• Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.
• Bush, William S. Who Gets a Childhood? Race and Juvenile Justice in Twentieth-Century Texas. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010.
• Cahn, Susan K. Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.
• de Schweinitz, Rebecca. If We Could Change the World: Young People and America’s Long Struggle for Racial Equality. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.
• Edelman, Lee. “The Future is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive.” Narrative 6, 1 (Jan. 1998): 18–30.
• Fass, Paula S. Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Finkelhor, David, Heather Hammer, and Andrea J. Sedlak. “Nonfamily Abducted Children: National Estimates and Characteristics.” NISMART Bulletin, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Oct. 2002, http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/documents/nismart2_nonfamily.pdf. Accessed May 30, 2013.
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• Kincaid, James. Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998.
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• Mintz, Steven. Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004.
• Mokrzycki, Paul. “After the Stand Comes the Fall: Racial Integration and White Student Reactions at the University of Alabama, 1963–1976.” Alabama Review 65, 4 (Oct. 2012): 290–313.
• Moody, Mia, Bruce Dorries, and Harriet Blackwell. “How National Media Framed Coverage of Missing Black and White Women.” Media Report to Women 37, 4 (Fall 2009): 12–18.
• Moscowitz, Leigh, and Spring-Serenity Duvall. “‘Every Parent’s Worst Nightmare’: Myths of Child Abductions in U.S. News.” Journal of Children and Media 5, 2 (2011): 147–63.
• Odem, Mary E. Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
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• Stockton, Kathryn Boyd. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009.
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• White, Deborah Gray. Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985.