(1) Introduction - Fear Eats the Soul

"It is one thing to understand, in the abstract, that presumptions of innocence, standards of reasonable doubt, and assorted procedures of rational law have been eroded by wave after wave of sex crime hysterias in the United States. It is quite another thing to see scary mug shots of a close friend aired on the evening news."(1)

[Dat kan ik me voorstellen.]

"However, many stories that clamored for public attention involved nonviolent, noncoercive offenses of various types. Minor infractions or petty nuisances were portrayed as ominous threats." [mijn nadruk] (2)

[Het opblazen van kleine zaken. Inderdaad,]

"Less about the protection of children than about the preservation of adult fantasies of childhood as a time of sexual innocence, sex panics give rise to bloated imaginings of risk, inflated conceptions of harm, and loose definitions of sex. This book is about sex panics and their relation to other forms of institutionalized fear in the United States to- day." [mijn nadruk] (2)

"Where fear is the order of the day, protection is the name of the game. This has become second nature—that’s what government is for, isn’t it? Law exists to protect the innocent, doesn’t it? Sex panics efficiently condense this neo-Hobbesian approach to law and order. They represent an especially salient subset of the ongoing crime panics that, over time, have prepared the public to surrender key rights and guarantees in exchange for security." [mijn nadruk] (3)

[Goed gezien. Angst bij mensen werkt slecht uit. Ze gaan denken dat andere mensen belangrijker zijn dan zijzelf, omdat die mensen bescherming bieden. ]

"They also act in the name of the vulnerable child, whose demand for protection prods the construction of ever more expansive legal and institutional worlds."(6)

"That is, sex panics have a tendency to spread uncontrollably; they infuse other questions. Once the specter of sex has been raised, everything—a glance, a posture, a pat on the shoulder—becomes sexual. Scenarios of sexual predation leap into happenings far removed from any sexual scene." [mijn nadruk] (7)

[Vooral daar waar seks taboe is, zoals in de VS. ]

"“Playing doctor” and other forms of infantile sexual exploration were also once part of many children’s socialization. But today many teachers, parents, and social workers tend to see abuse or violence in the most mundane forms of child sexuality. And because they fervently wish to believe that children are naturally asexual, these adults look for external or traumatic causes for childhood sexual curiosity or activity when it does appear." [mijn nadruk] (8)

[Prachtig. De man kan schrijven en heeft de goede insteek ook nog. ]

"In the gloomy anxious world of overzealous child protection, it has become the responsibility of adults to anticipate even remote threats to children’s safety and to take preventative measures. And where childhood is essentially reconceived as vulnerability, with children as a special class in need of protection, this is true not only when it comes to sex."(9)

"I am struck too by the perverse appeal of the victim role. Nothing, it would seem, causes the individual to stand out against the mass more than a story of suffering, and nothing induces more empathy, goodwill, and other shows of social support than the claim that one has been victimized. Signs of this perverse appeal seem to be everywhere."(9)

[Nou, ik ook. ]

"The flip side of the victim role is the victims’ advocate, who reenacts a key part of what Susan Faludi calls the “guardian myth” of the United States. The retrograde racial and gender politics involved in guardianship could not be clearer. Historically, the guardian myth casts white men as protectors of white women and children; the villains of the piece were depraved red, black, brown, or yellow men." [mijn nadruk] (9)

"These responses suggest something of the erosion of public discourse across the political spectrum: a realignment of core values connecting truth, law, and fairness."(10)

"An accusation alone does not establish whether a crime has occurred. That remains for a dispassionate process of adjudication to decide. Under the best ideals of U.S. law, burden of proof falls to the prosecution, not the defense, and, moreover, that burden is a substantial one: proof beyond reasonable doubt that the accused is guilty. These legal standards stem from neither humanitarian softheartedness nor liberal soft-headedness; they serve as important safeguards against the power of the state to lock us up or take our lives. They are critically undermined whenever we side with “the victim” before any legal determination has been made that a crime has actually occurred or when we treat law as a political spectator sport in which everyone roots for the home team." [mijn nadruk] (11)

[Precies.]

"What if accusation, adjudication, and determinations of guilt in the individual cases are systematically skewed by fear or paranoia or the hunt for witches?"(12)

"I take the analysis further: sex and sexual fears have also figured prominently in the ongoing redefinition of norms of governance. The menace posed by the inscrutable evil of the (implicitly black) rapist, the (implicitly homosexual) pedophile, or the (supposedly irremediable) child abuser prods ever more extreme—and, I will show, increasingly irrational—security measures. This is, at core, what this book is about."(14)

"I will show how evolving sex crime laws embody radical assaults on rights, guarantees, and protections. As cases in point, recent statutes allow for the indefinite detention of convicts after the completion of their sentences, a practice hitherto deemed anathema to democratic law. In a growing number of cities and states, new laws throw sex offenders out of work and out of their homes, thus creating a permanent pariah class of uprooted criminal outcasts." [mijn nadruk] (15)

"My thinking also owes something to Lauren Berlant, whose essays show how the imperiled child has come to occupy center stage in the national morality play and how “narratives of rescue” have become the dominant justification for political action."(17)

[Vooral als het om witte kinderen gaat natuurlijk. ]

(19) Part one - Sex Panic

"We twenty-first-century Americans seem to be exhilarated by fear; we relish the magical power of the accusation, which, like a psychic atom bomb, flattens all that stands in its way; we savor the heady rush of panic as one might thrill to an amusement park ride."(21)

(23) Chapter 1 - Panic - A Guide to the Uses of Fear

"“Moral panic” can be defined broadly as any mass movement that emerges in response to a false, exaggerated, or ill-defined moral threat to society and proposes to address this threat through punitive measures: tougher enforcement, “zero tolerance,” new laws, communal vigilance, violent purges. Witch hunts are classic examples of moral panics in small, tribal, or agrarian communities. McCarthyism is the obvious example of a moral panic fueled by the mass media and tethered to repressive governance."(23)

"Central to the logic of moral panic is the machinery of taboo: nothing, it would seem, incites fear and loathing, and initiates collective censure, more rapidly than the commission of acts deemed forbidden, unclean, or sacrilegious. Another item from the anthropological curio cabinet seems germane: scapegoating is implicit in the full spectrum of panic’s forms." [mijn nadruk] (23)

"Moral panics generate certain well- known forms of politi cal organization. Self-styled leaders of the movement—“moral entrepreneurs”— convince others that containment, punishment, banishment, or destruction of the person or persons designated as scapegoat will set things right. This is never the case. Moreover, the acute state of fear cultivated by the movement’s leaders effaces meaningful distinctions between threats real and imaginary, significant and insignificant. Invariably, then, moral panics tend to escalate."(24)

"As these examples suggest, imagination plays a prominent role in panic mongering." [mijn nadruk] (24)

"In the culture of modernity, then, periods of panic will alternate with periods of social rest, and journalism, especially yellow journalism, plays a key part in setting the rhythm. [mijn nadruk] (25)"

"Under any scenario mass media are essential to the dynamics of modern moral panics, so much so that Thomas Shevory prefers the term media panic. But not all media panics are the same. Fear and confusion propagate faster through radio and television than by way of mass-produced broadsides or flyers; the Internet is a more efficient means of converting anecdote into evidence than was the Hearst newspaper chain." [mijn nadruk] (26)

"Today alarmist stories and sensational journalism play out in real time. As means of communication have speeded up and expanded, panics too have accelerated and intensified. Media conglomerates, institutional actors, and political factions all have a stake in the production and management of certain kinds of fear; they provoke panic to sell newspapers, to forge “community,” to curb dissent, or to foster various kinds of social discipline." [mijn nadruk] (26)

"The white middle class has repeatedly asserted its claim to be the universal class, the class whose values are life sustaining, by keeping vigil against moral lassitude and by undergoing periodic purifications, renewals, and moral renovations." [mijn nadruk] (29)

"Political responses to perceived moral peril—traditions of moral uplift, temperance movements, rescue missions—necessarily embody a different class orientation than do the sorts of movements that built social democracy in Europe or leftist populism in Latin America: trade unionism, farmer-labor alliances, and social-democratic parties based in these movements. Movements of the former type aim to improve the lower classes from without, to imbue the dangerous orders with middle-class virtues; these movements eschew structural analyses in favor of moral pieties or draconian penalties." [mijn nadruk] (29)

"The vagueness of the concept, sex crime, which covers felonies and misdemeanors, facilitates the constant erasure of meaningful distinctions between violent and nonviolent acts, between acts that cause genuine harm and those that are merely socially disapproved. [mijn nadruk] "(35)

(39) Chapter 2 - Innocents at Home - How Sex Panics Reshaped American Culture

[Hier veel van de typische problemen die in de VS bestaan, maar zeker niet in de meeste andere landen.]

"The positionings of evangelical conservatives expressed a first open, then hidden, connection between racial and sexual politics. Those of us who grew up in the rural South during the 1960s and 1970s recall how the modern religious Right emerged in white fundamentalist churches as an organized backlash against the civil rights movement. In the wake of federal desegregation orders for public schools, conservative churches hastily set up a network of all-white private Christian schools; these schools were often linked, sometimes indirectly, to segregationist colleges such as Bob Jones University.(...) These developments prepared the way for national organizations such as the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition." [mijn nadruk] (40)

"In short order sex panic became the enduring technique of the modern conservative movement—its minimal form, its very essence." [mijn nadruk] (41)

[Yes. Eindelijk zegt iemand anders dat ook hardop.]

"Authorities subsequently discovered the “epidemic” of (white) teen male prostitution during the assorted economic crises of the 1970s—a time when the unsettled future of white heterosexual manhood seemed emblematic of the uncertain future of the nation. The rescue of missing children and their restoration to the bosom of the family, not the punishment of delinquents, then became the prevailing ap- proach, and hustling increasingly fell under the aegis of a new breed of social workers, children’s advocates, and assorted providers of social services. This new approach resonated well with the emergent family values politics of the period—outside the safety of the hearth lurks a predatory homosexual stranger—but it had little to do with the actual lives of teen runaways, whose experiences with family neglect, violence, and homophobia typically had caused them to run away from home to begin with." [mijn nadruk] (44)

[De auteur is zelf homoseksueel, denk ik. Ook op dat punt historisch gezien inderdaad veel morele paniek en eindeloze vooroordelen. Het duurt niet voor niets zo lang voordat mensen uit de kast durven te komen. ]

"Overtly homophobic sex panics of this period turned on the idea that youth was—or ought to be—a time of sexual innocence. This innocence was a vulnerable treasure: an idyllic past, an imagined future, capable of being snatched away at any moment. If such innocence was planted most firmly in childhood, it could not help but encounter peril during adolescence. This crisis, and the dread it aroused at a time when teenagers were engaging in sexual experimentation at younger and younger ages, stimulated the countervailing adult response: fortify childhood, subject it to greater surveillance, progressively extend the domain of innocence to ever older ages. If there was something old in this notion of innocence, there was something new in its explicit attachment to masculinity. Sexed as male and raced as white, this notion of innocence inaugurates many current conventions for talking about teen sexuality, child sex abuse, and irreparable harm to the person."(44-45)

[Geweldig. Maar klopt dat laatste? Jongens gezien als onschuldig? Vanuit de optiek van homoseksualiteit, waarschijnlijk.]

"The most spectacular of these modern child sex panics were the “satanic ritual abuse” scares of the 1980s.(...) Historically, these panics have been associated with the fear of strangers, suspicion of strange ideas, and the dread of mysterious economic power or uncontrollable social changes. In the wake of the social upheavals of the 1960s and economic crises of the 1970s, rumors of witchcraft and devil worship had fanned across rural Christian evangelical communities."(46-47)

"In fact, some parents from every walk of life will occasionally be cruel to their children, but serious abuse and neglect are strongly correlated with poverty, unemployment, and economic turmoil." [mijn nadruk] (47)

"By the early 1980s antiabuse activism and antipornography crusades, ongoing since the mid-1970s, had spurred the development of an increasingly puritanical sect of cultural feminism— a variant whose rhetoric bore little resemblance to either the sexual liberationists of the early second wave or the antiviolence, rape crisis activists of the late 1960s. In a notable feminist broadside from the mid-1970s, Susan Brownmiller had portrayed rape as paradigmatic of relations between men and women and depicted incestuous child abuse not as the pathological exception but as the normative rule under patriarchy. Rhetorical excesses tended to acquire literal authority, fostering practical consequences. By 1982, Nathan notes, some feminists and child advocates were using definitions of consent and coercion developed around discussions of father- daughter incest—a situation where power inequalities are manifest and extreme—to portray any erotic contact of any sort between unrelated adults (of any age) and minors (of any age, including advanced teenagers) as the moral equivalent of incestuous rape. Others went so far as to define penetrative sex, tout court, as tantamount to rape. Andrea Dworkin thus famously depicted penile intromission as synonymous with violation: “The vagina . . . is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is per sistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center. She is occupied.” Such daguerreotypes of male depravity and female purity divested women and minors of sexual imagination and revived motifs from white Victorian feminism. They also mirrored trends on the cultural Right. Social conservatives were taking a keen interest in abuse and neglect as signs of personal disorder and symptoms of the “breakdown of the nuclear family,” and religious conservatives in particular were invoking sexual dangers to urge a return to traditional feminine ideals of domesticity and motherhood. During the 1970s and 1980s, then, religious conservatives developed a network of Christian psychologists and therapists who often attributed adult emotional problems to childhood sexual trauma." [mijn nadruk] (48-49)

"This collaboration accelerated a wider shift in sexual attitudes among the white middle classes and would prove key to the revival of outsized fears of a violent, roving, predatory male sexuality; such efforts would intensify during assorted child sex abuse panics of the 1980s and 1990s."(49)

"Notions of an asexual childhood innocence figured prominently in the thinking of all these camps. A new generation of social workers was thus primed. Add to these converging factors the pervasive parental anxieties about gay visibility, changing gender roles, working mothers, and the treatment of children in day-care centers. The result? It seemed eminently plausible to many that an extensive underground network of sadistic devil worshippers was sexually torturing large numbers of children in preschools and daycare centers across the country— and that these activities had somehow gone undetected for years, if not decades." [mijn nadruk] (50)

"The longest-running trial in U.S. history, the McMartin Preschool case, would also prove paradigmatic of its type. I draw much of my summary from a variety of published accounts, especially pioneering research done by Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, who cowrote the definitive book on satanic ritual abuse."(50-51)

[Geen bewijs gevonden, maar de media bleven dit opkloppen. Schokkend. ]

"Their trials reveal much the same script, outlined by Debbie Nathan as follows: An unreliable accuser makes outrageous charges; letters to parents and sensational media coverage kindle communal fears; suggestive or coercive interview techniques—or hypnotherapy to recover repressed memories— produce more false accusations; families of the victims, aided by crusading therapists and social workers, are recruited into tightly bound support groups that disallow questioning of the abuse scenario and function as public pressure groups; publicity-savvy prosecutors press forward, despite the lack of corroborative evidence; potentially exculpatory evidence is withheld; and the defendant goes to trial under conditions that resemble the classic witch hunt. These cases shattered untold lives, wrecked unblemished careers, bankrupted countless families, and fostered a durable culture of paranoia."(55-56)

"More alarming than the stubborn persistence of “recovered memories” in some quarters is the general residue of 1980s pseudoscience: some vague and highly subjective definitions of sexual infraction. From the early 1980s Diana Russell was using loose definitions of children (to include adolescents), sex (to include tongue kissing), incest (to include cousins), and abuse (to include experiences remembered as pleasant) in sociological studies."(57)

[Geweldig: aandacht voor dom taalgebruik.]

"It is not simply that strained, highly subjective, after-the-fact definitions permeate the burgeoning world of recovery, survivor, and self-help manuals; they also obtain in the realm of official and quasi-official practices."(58)

"Meanwhile, what might count as evidence of child sexual abuse for the vigilant teacher or social worker has come to include any number of innocuous behaviors, as Margaret Talbot shows in her thoughtful review essay about the consequences of 1980s sex panics." [mijn nadruk] (58)

"Nowadays suspicions of abuse can be aroused when children express curiosity about sex, use profane language, sketch anatomically correct drawings, masturbate, attempt to catch a glimpse of naked adults, play doctor, or engage in sexual play with other children. Talbot sums up the resulting culture of child protection as one defined by anxiety and paranoia" [mijn nadruk] (58)

"Because they allied antagonistic social movements against a phantasmic threat, Reagan-era sex panics had important cultural consequences. They buttressed conservative Christian notions of immaculate childhood sexual innocence while joining forces with neo-Victorian feminist accounts of sex as trauma. They distilled diffuse anxieties about sex and children into the pervasive perception that all children everywhere are at perpetual risk of sexual assault. In the resulting culture of hypervigilant child protection, the denial of childhood sexuality and the perpetual hunt for the predatory pervert are opposite sides of the same coin: the innocent and the monster, the perfect victim and the irredeemable fiend." [mijn nadruk] (59)

"In 1975 the United States had 25,000 clinical social workers; by 1990 their ranks had swollen to 80,000, and by 1999 the number was approaching 100,000.(...) Nationally, reports of child sex abuse leaped from 6,000 in 1976 to 113,000 in 1985 and 350,000 in 1988—a fifty-eight-fold increase in twelve years. Sex abuse allegations became a nuclear weapon in child custody cases."(59)

[Geweldige conclusies, zeer to the point geformuleerd. Ook verderop onder het kopje Panic Becomes the Norm op p.60-62, het is teveel om over te nemen, maar allemaal erg goed beschreven.]

"In going about the work of protecting children, institutional actors also do something else: they set up definitions of childhood, innocence, sex, abuse, and so on, in ways that hitherto would have been deemed implausible."(62)

"Judith Levine, Janice Irvine, and other feminists have argued that the established culture of child protection—with its fetishization of virginity and its constant battery of alarmist messages that equate sex with danger and risk—actually harms children psychologically and socially. It certainly disallows pleasure, autonomy, and discovery." [mijn nadruk] (63)

"The U.S. approach to these matters is unique among industrialized democracies. In Europe commonplace noncoercive sex between minors might be cause for parental concern, but it is not framed as cause for legal intervention. And ages of consent are typically lower than in most U.S. states.(...) In the United States the crucial questions pertain to innocence and its preservation. The resulting laws deny ambiguity and prescribe harsh penalties for even minor infractions."(67)

[Ja, het is normatief gezien een vreselijk dom land.]

(73) Chapter 3 - To Catch a Predator - New Monsters, Imagined Risks, and the Erosion of Legal Norms

"In real terms, then, a child’s risk of being killed by a sexually predatory stranger is comparable to his or her chance of being struck and killed by lightning (1 in 1,000,000 versus 1 in 1,200,000). In raw numbers, the fifty abduction-murders rank far below more common causes of child death: disease or congenital illness (36,180), motor vehicle accident (7,981), drowning (1,158), accidental suffocation or strangulation (953), fire (606), firearm accident (167) —or death at the hands of a family member. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that about fifteen hundred children die every year as a result of abuse or neglect. One or both parents is deemed responsible in 70 to 80 percent of these deaths. And less than 1 percent of all child deaths caused by abuse or neglect are attributed to sexual abuse." [mijn nadruk] (77)

Over de Megan Law Registry:

"One might well hope for a classification system that distinguishes menace from nuisance, with rational criteria for sorting violent, repeat offenders, who belong in prison or require close supervision, from non-violent, one-time offenders. But as Gayle Rubin once observed, American thinking admits little nuance when it comes to sex." [mijn nadruk] (80)

"Not so long ago, during the 1960s and early 1970s, rehabilitation was the normative goal of criminal justice. The law acknowledged gradations of offense, and jury members theoretically aspired to a dispassionate view of harm. The need for procedural barriers against police brutality, forced confessions, and prosecutorial misconduct was widely acknowledged and enshrined in important Supreme Court rulings. And so long as a “welfare model” of crime control ruled, pity, not panic, was the prevailing legal attitude toward nonviolent pedophiles. That was before legal and popular cultures took a sharply punitive turn, a shift that occurred sometime after the turbulent year of 1968 but sometime before Ronald Reagan took office in 1980—a period that corresponds to the politicization of crime, especially sex crime. Today, many Americans no longer give lip service to enlightened ideals of justice; they aspire only to measures that protect, punish, and preempt. This will to punish is evident on a wide range of fronts. But nowhere are reason, judgment, measure, and pity more lacking than in ongoing panics about sex." [mijn nadruk] (85)

[Wauw, wat een heldere beschrijving van de fundamentele veranderingen.]

"The result of twenty-first-century waves of sexual hysteria and agitation was another surge of sex offender statutes. In 2005 alone, forty-five states passed 150 new laws, with more to follow in 2006, 2007, and 2008."(86)

"All sides, it would seem, single out sexual assault—more so than grievous physical battery or sustained emotional abuse, not to say the experiences of grinding poverty, homelessness, or acute personal upheaval—as the exceptional, unspeakable, irreparable act of harm against children." [mijn nadruk] (87)

[Geweldig. Precies dat. ]

"In mid-2010 the number of people publicly registered for sex offenses under Megan’s Law exceeded 700,000 and was growing rapidly. (The number of registrants increased by 78 percent between 2001 and 2009.)"(87)

"Part of what defines the current wave of sex panics is the desire to discover, publicize, and perpetually punish even minor infractions. Journalists and parent groups sometimes advocate expanding Megan’s Law listings to require lifetime registration and community notification for all convicted sex offenders, including people arrested for having sex with consenting adults in public restrooms or parks."(89)

"The law— which Spitzer said he hoped would become the “national model”—now permits the indefinite confinement of sex offenders after their prison sentence is served.(...) Predictably, the new law was widely touted as applying to the “most dangerous” sex offenders, those deemed most likely to commit new crimes. In fact, it applies to a wide range of offenses. Even minors, or those convicted of nonviolent offenses such as giving indecent material to minors, could be subject to civil confinement."(89)

"a majority of those held in civil commitment nationwide are white. (Virtually all are male.) The same holds for Megan’s Law registrants nationwide."(91)

"Much of what happens in the realm of governance today is premised on the existence of this or that emergency, some state of affairs so menacing that exceptional measures at once protective, preemptive, and punitive are said to be in order.(...) What Agamben’s textual study of legal documents and political theory ultimately fails to disclose is how deeply embedded undemocratic trends are in both government and civil society and how these trends are involved with deeper institutional and political-economic shifts."(95)

"The techniques used in sex panics have proved replicable in other domains, and sex offender laws have come to serve as a model for new laws and juridical practices. The marking and shaming of convicts by means of public registries seems an especially pop ular technique."(97)

"By increments exception becomes the rule, emotionality replaces reason, and special provisions become ordinary. This happens not through the suspension of the law but through a hollowing-out of law’s essence." [mijn nadruk] (100)

"Assorted laws in twenty-two states and hundreds of municipalities restrict where a sex offender can live, work, or walk. Where a sex offender lives has no known bearing on whether he will commit new crimes. But in twenty-first-century sex panics, residency restrictions have proved especially popular, promoted by citizens’ groups, victims’ rights advocates, crusading journalists, and politicians in a wide variety of settings."(100)

"Florida state law still prohibits all sex offenders from living within a thousand feet of a school, day-care center, park, playground, bus stop, or other places where children gather. And the new Miami-Dade law still prohibits sex offenders from living with twenty-five hundred feet of a school; it simply eliminates the profusion of other laws that kept sex offenders from living within 2,500 feet of various other places that children frequent."(102)

(104) Chapter 4 - The Magical Power of the Accusation - How I Became a Sex Criminal and Other True Stories

[Volgt een persoonlijk verhaal van de auteur als homoseksueel.]

"I survived as outsiders have always survived, by becoming more a spectator than a participant in the world around me, by developing a contemplative attitude toward events, and by escaping, ever more deeply, into the world of words, books, ideas. I read broadly, preferring imaginative, exaggerated literature of the sort accessible to adolescent boys. I wrote poetry and essays with a youthful enthusiasm."(107)

[Zeer herkenbaar. Ik ben ook altijd een outsider geweest.]

"Even during a much later period, three fourteen-year-old girls in my junior high class were dating grown (if somewhat immature) men who were in their late teens or early twenties.(...) Today their boyfriends would be labeled dangerous pedophiles, but in the early 1970s these courtships were known to parents and others and were considered to be within community norms."(109)

"When my parents disowned me, and honest work as a dishwasher would not pay the bills, these men’s gifts and monetary contributions constituted an important source of support."(110)

[Begrijpelijke samenhangen.]

"Actually, court rulings there allowed judges to convict boys as young as twelve of crime against nature—so I became a sex criminal, even before I knew."(110)

"In the late 1970s, as now, there was some variability in how parents treated sexually active gay teens, perhaps especially in the small-town rural South. Some prayed or called the minister. Some called the police. Others threw their kids out of the house. The details were the stuff of gossip." [mijn nadruk] (112)

"By Friday, when Ritchie was released on bail from the Pleasantville Detention Center, his name, address, and photograph had been published in local newspapers and aired on local television news shows. I call attention to details of the reportage—which anyone who follows the news has seen played out dozens of times in dozens of local news stories— because they illustrate how journalism today essentially operates as a propagandistic extension of policing and prosecution. Journalism is panic, officially induced state-sponsored panic, in the reportage of sex crime accusations." [mijn nadruk] (118)

[Opnieuw de bedenkelijke rol van de media.]

(137) Part two - The Punitive State

"In this part I develop this view, moving the book’s focus on sex panics into a wider perspective on the modern fear of crime and connecting both to the eventual war on terror."(137)

[Dit deel is dus nog meer gericht op de VS dan het vorige, omdat het nog specifieker gaat over het bestuur en de wetgeving daar. ]

(141) Chapter 5 - Zero Tolerance - Crime and Punishment in the Punitive State

"But the United States stands out even in comparison with the British model. In less than thirty years the United States more than qua drupled its total prison population. The rate of imprisonment has soared to 753 per 100,000 in 2010. The United States thus imprisons five to ten times more people per capita than do other developed democracies. The country now ranks first in the world both in both the rate of imprisonment (1 in every 99 adult residents is behind bars) and in the absolute number of people imprisoned (2.3 million)." [mijn nadruk] (142)

"The U.S. criminal justice system metes out stiffer sentences, longer incarcerations, and more onerous terms of release and surveillance to far, far more people than any of the nations Americans like to think of as their peers."(143)

"And once the system gets its hooks into a person, it is loath to let him go. Nearly five million Americans are on probation or parole.(...) Extended periods of parole, with their mandatory meetings, reporting conditions, and drug tests, virtually assure future infractions. As a result the number of people in prison today for parole violations alone is the same as the total U.S. prison population in 1980."(144)

"In many states where closely contested elections are common, Republicans have used felon disenfranchisement to purge the voter rolls of minority voters (and to intimidate or confuse other minority voters)."(144)

"By design this penal system churns the poor and marginal, rendering them all but unemployable, thus poorer and ever more marginal. No legitimate theory of corrections, crime, or social order justifies this approach, which can only be understood as vindictive."(145)

"One peculiarity of the U.S. system is that most state judges and prosecutors are elected, not appointed. The U.S. justice system thus is uniquely subject to populist rages. Since the white backlash against urban disorders at the end of the 1960s, voters have clamored for tough prosecutors and judges. In the process Americans have accepted an increasingly lawless law. Overzealous or vindictive prosecutors are seldom brought to heel, even when they conceal exculpatory evidence." [mijn nadruk] (153)

[Ja, we moeten echt alles aan het volk overlaten, dat helpt. ]

"Lawlessness, unleashed as law, has proved difficult to keep within bounds. And in their zeal for punishment, the anticrime warriors have become alarmingly indifferent to the guilt or innocence of the accused." [mijn nadruk] (153)

"A staggering fourteen million Americans are arrested each year, excluding traffic violations—up from a little more than three million in 1960. (That is, the arrest rate as a percentage of the population has nearly tripled: from 1.6 percent in 1960 to 4.4 percent today.)"(155)

[Volgt een reeks voorbeelden waarbij duidelijk de wet aangepast is aan de wil om te straffen. P.155 tot 157 En techniek helpt daarbij.]

"And so, again, the imagined threat trumps traditional arguments for privacy. Remote undocumentable risks become tantamount to dire emergencies. The need to flush out and expose lawbreaking, even when it has no visible victims, has become something no one questions." [mijn nadruk] (160)

"Parental responsi- bility for surveillance and prevention is reinforced by judicial practices that punish parents for their children’s misdeeds. Some states even require parents to report to the police if they discover that their teenage kids are having sex—and make it a crime for them not to do so."(160)

(167) Chapter 6 - Innocents Abroad - Taboo and Terror in the Global War

Over 9/11 en de houding van de VS daarin.

"In the prevailing version the attacks simply were leveled against America’s goodness. Moreover, public narratives invariably rebuffed even friendly suggestions that some measure and proportion be applied in understanding the fiery devastation of 9/11. As Paul Smith, a professor of cultural studies, has noted, the suffering of Americans was to be understood as unique and was not to be compared with the suffering of any others. Discreet silences further sharpened the picture of a wholly innocent, victimized nation: discussion of the U.S. role in cultivating, organizing, and funding Islamist terror cells, including al Qaeda, during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was mostly excluded from the serious public sphere." [mijn nadruk] (169)

"Back home, the Bush-Cheney administration exploited the occasion to get new laws through Congress, expand police powers, and engineer new relations between the state, its citizens, and noncitizens. Federal agents rounded up and detained more than twelve hundred immigrants (often on the word of neighbors), holding them for extended periods without charges, without access to counsel, in solitary confinement." [mijn nadruk] (170)

"Meanwhile, the Patriot Act centralized federal agencies associated with policing and expanded government powers of surveillance.(...) The Bush administration launched a broad domestic spying program, widely monitoring Americans’ e-mail communications, Internet activity,phone calls, phone records, and financial transactions."(171)

[Ik mis toch wel erg de uitleg over de samenhang van dat soort machtsuitoefening met mannetjesgedrag, met mannen- en vrouwenrollen.]

(181) Chapter 7 - Constructing Victimization - How Americans Learned to Love Trauma

"Americans have long imagined themselves to be a nation of innocents. Narratives of rescue are a recurring feature of U.S. social movements, and rites of protection fashioned the pioneer nation around red, black, and brown threats to white women and children long before there was a republic. (...) Understanding how the present state of affairs came to be requires not only a historical accounting but a historicist one, an examination of the various social sources of anxiety and some untangling of the changing relationships among victimization, fear, and punitiveness." [mijn nadruk] (181)

"Social conservatives argue, implicitly or explicitly, that the punitive turn developed as a logical response to high crime rates associated with the turbulent 1960s and 1970s.(...) The real story of crime and punishment in the United States is more complicated than the prevailing conservative version admits." [mijn nadruk] (182)

"The real question, then, is how rehabilitation came to be discredited and how the punitive “lock ’em up” approach—which diverts funds from health, education, and social services, uproots social support networks, devastates poor minority communities, and imposes other enormous social costs—came to be acceptable."(183)

"Social conservatives also claim that the dramatic growth of the carceral state, combined with intensive policing and “zero tolerance” policies, is responsible for the substantial downturn in crime rates since the early 1990s. Again, this is the punitive culture rationalizing its own existence."(183)

"For instance, data comparing visible crimes with nonvisible crimes suggest that simple infrastructural improvements— better street lighting—have a considerable effect on crime rates."(184)

[Ja, dat soort zaken vergeten conservatieven graag: de relatie met armoede, sociale infrastructuur, en zo meer.]

"An important strand of analysis picks up where the conservatives leave off, stressing the role of racism in the development of a burgeoning prison state." [mijn nadruk] (185)

[Ook dat, ja.]

"Some have seen in the punitive turn a new twist on a familiar need for demonized enemies. Deprived of the communist menace abroad by the winding down of the cold war, Americans sought new outsized enemies at home: the inveterate criminal, the violent sociopath. The need to make war on depraved enemies does seem deeply ingrained in U.S. political culture." [mijn nadruk] (186)

"Today schizophrenics, manic-depressive psychotics, and those who suffer from major depression or other severe mental illnesses are four times more likely to be in prison than in a psychiatric hospital; removing these people from the penal system would probably result in at least a 16 percent reduction of the overall prison population. The placement of substance abusers in treatment programs rather than in prisons would remove a much larger percentage."(187)

"Americans chose to invest in prisons, not day care, schools, jobs, or housing—why?"

"The increase of punitiveness at the expense of forgiveness has been particularly acute among the white middle and working classes, while punitive measures have been applied disproportionately against the poor, racial minorities, and the sexually suspect." [mijn nadruk] (190)

"Americans clamor for punishment because they have learned to be always afraid and to be afraid of risks so remote as to defy reason."(191)

[Maar waar komt die neiging vandaan om de ratio aan de kant te schuiven? Er is vast een samenhang met religie.]

"“War on crime” became the battle cry of a countercounterculture, shorthand for an ascendant conservatism centered on law, order, and traditional forms of authority. The rise of the religious Right— whose God is not the God of love and whose apocalyptic fantasies involve blood-drenched divine punishment for nonbelievers—was an important part of the changing po litical picture. Northern secular manifestations of these trends were not much subtler; the rise of “hardhat conservatism” and the defection of blue-collar white ethnics from the Democratic rank- and-file consummated a long-term realignment of the political map." [mijn nadruk] (191)

"The punitive turn that began in the late 1960s continued unimpeded through the mid-1970s, when the new coalition of social conservatives began to consolidate its political gains and modern sex, crime, and drug panics got underway in earnest."(192)

"Emotional presentencing testimony by victims and their families is now as much a part of regular criminal trials as it is a part of congres- sional hearings, but the mandatory admission of such testimony strains against one of the most ancient principles of Western law: the idea that law ought to be dispassionate, free of emotion."(201)

"Wendy Kaminer judiciously sums up the case against victims’ rights— the idea that victims ought to occupy the center of attention in court proceedings,"(201)

"Today the victims’ rights movement is everywhere. It has an institutionalized and growing presence in law enforcement. It has changed assumptions and practices in the judiciary system. Its rhetoric inflects news reportage and primetime television entertainment. The constitutionally suspect notion that victims have rights as victims has become all but unimpeachable.(...) The results of the deep ideological and institutional entrenchment of victims’ rights thus bear closer inspection" [mijn nadruk] (202)

"During the 1980s and into the 1990s victimization emerged as a durable new source of identity. As a quasi-religious movement, the new victimology extended an evangelical invitation to every corner of society. On television the relatives of crime victims evangelized the public; their anticrime activism would redeem a terrible loss, and the story of their recruitment to the social movement would also serve as an inspirational example for others to follow. In bookstores the altar call went out through tracts on recovery, self-improvement, addiction, and true crime stories. Nowhere was the call more sweeping than on matters related to sexual victimization. Self-help recovery books invited readers to engage in serious introspection, searching for experiences of childhood sexual victimization. Of course, if every uninvited pinching, fondling, groping, or bit of adolescent horseplay-turned-amour is construed as abuse, the ranks of the abused will be quite numerous. And theories of repressed memories meant that everyone was a potential victim. The results were not only a long season of terrifying madness—the day-care witch hunts— but, in its wake, the consolidation of what the sociologist Joel Best has called “the victim industry.”" [mijn nadruk] (204)

"Whereas victims of abuse or violence once were expected to cope, heal, and (in the vernacular) “get over it,” the practices of victims’ support groups and new therapies associated with the incest survivors’ movement urged victims to perpetually retell their experiences, to relive their ordeals, to make trauma an essential part of their identity, and to make these traumatized identities into political subjects. Americans stopped “getting over it”—age-old wisdom for how to deal with unfortunate events—and learned to love trauma." [mijn nadruk] (204-205)

[Precies dit. Geweldig. ]

"The liberal hero of yore—the risk- taking individual who takes responsibility for his or her own fate and triumphs over adversity—gave way to the aggrieved victim who perpetually recounts unhappy experiences and calls for the punishment of others."(205)

"The mainstream of an increasingly conservative women’s movement embraced a punitive approach to rape, abuse, and battery, forging alliances that would reshape U.S. society for decades to come. In hindsight this all has come to seem inevitable."(211)

(214) Chapter 8 - The Victimology Trap - Capitalism, Liberalism, and Grievance

"Two questions of a different slant and scale have arisen in various ways: What is the connection between the punitive turn, with its expressly authoritarian politics, and the liberal political tradition, with its emphasis on individual rights? And how is the punitive state related to capitalism, especially the privatized, deregulated variant that has prevailed since the end of the 1970s and is known as neoliberalism?" [mijn nadruk] (214)

"I am scarcely the first to suggest that the dominance of a vengeance orientation today is linked not only to various forms of conservatism but also to a genealogy of liberalism. Wendy Brown develops stark claims in her influential book States of Injury..."(214)

"Not all analyses have been oblivious to the interplay of race, sex, and class competition in U.S. capitalism. Scholars who study the penal system have developed a large body of work connecting neoliberal economic policies to neoconservative social policies by way of race/class dynamics."(216)

"Others take a roundabout approach to the reverberations of cause and effect in a stratified social system: deregulation and privatization exacerbate social inequalities and therefore also tend to foster more fear of crime."(216)

"Let me put my cards on the table: I have no doubt that business elites plot to fleece the public, that money and power distort U.S. elections, and that empire is corrosive of democracy. These effects were well known to socialists, populists, and anti-imperialists more than a hundred years ago and still need to be shouted from the rooftops. I am quite convinced that liberal law legislates formal equality in ways that sustain substantive inequality, and I am certain that the maintenance of social inequality requires various forms of coercion and incurs costs—some obvious, others concealed. Last, I have no doubt that a “purer” form of capitalist culture was planted in the United States than in most other parts of the world, as my colleague Paul Smith succinctly argues in a virtuoso reading of U.S. politics, and that Americans are constantly reckoning, wrestling, with this tradition. These are important conditions, recurring tendencies." [mijn nadruk] (217)

"Just how did it come to pass that in the late twentieth century the balance of political forces shifted so markedly in favor of business interests, turned so decisively against the redistributive functions that had defined government legitimacy during the mid-twentieth century? How was consent constructed for this rewriting of the social contract? And is this return to a deregulated and nakedly predatory variant of capitalism a cause or effect of the proliferation of panic, punishment, and related themes in U.S. culture?" [mijn nadruk] (217-218)

[Goede vragen. Maar dit is wel een hoofdstuk met ontzettende abstracties. Voor mij is het voldoende om te weten dat conservatisme en neoliberalisme samengaan.]

"But these changes have played out uniquely on the U.S. political landscape. Recent punitive turns in Europe, even at their worst, do not remotely approach the scale and intensity of the U.S. phenomenon—even though European states too experienced generational turmoil in the 1960s, economic shocks in the 1970s, varying degrees of neoliberal reform in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and crime spikes at various times. Why the difference?" [mijn nadruk] (224)

(227) Conclusion - Whither the Punitive State?

"These and other indicators suggest that key institutional actors are beginning to question the desirability of or ganizing social relations around panic."(228)

[Dit hoofdstuk blijkt vooral over de Amerikaanse politiek te gaan. Maar het boek is van 2011. Ik vraag me af ... Mij lijkt dat elke conclusie niet voorzien kan hebben hoe idioot een Amerikaanse president kan zijn en hoe irrationeel conservatieve Republikeinen zijn gebleven. ]

"Polls suggest that a majority of Americans think torture is justified if it keeps the country safe. If history is any guide, it seems likely that a broad sector of the public would clamor for extreme measures, for new forms of surveillance and control, in the event of a major new terror attack."(229)

[En dat is alleen maar erger geworden door de socale media en zo meer.]

"New laws prescribe harsher sanctions for sex offenders, including offenders whose crimes were nonviolent, noncoercive, and did not even necessarily involve sex. While some state courts have blocked or modified the implementation of sweeping “child safety zone” laws designed to summarily evict sex offenders from the community, the Supreme Court has upheld public registries, civil confinement, and other extraordinary procedures."(230)

[Uiteraard, ook dit wordt alleen maar erger.]

"Meanwhile, public and private surveillance technologies are rapidly expanding and intensifying."(230)

"The constant element in successive waves of panic is the figure of the imperiled innocent child—a child whose innocence is defined in terms of his imagined sexlessness and whose protection from sex looms as an ever more urgent and exacting demand. The resulting cult of the sacred child becomes larger, more influential, and less questionable in public culture.(...) Under the new logic—which is in step with other risk-averse tendencies in U.S. culture—if a risk can be imagined, then preventative measures must be taken. This working assumption underlies the obsessive-compulsive character of constantly evolving sex crime laws." [mijn nadruk] (232)

"Americans make sex a key criterion of their moral hierarchy with a zeal that is not equaled in any other industrialized democracy."(234)

"As with the U.S. case, the culture of child protection expanded, and the British eventually developed sex offender registries. Yet the differences between the two countries’ implementation of such registries are striking. British registries are a closely guarded secret, available only to police, probation officers, social ser vices authorities, and officials of other relevant agencies; American registries post the names, photos, and proximate addresses of sex offenders on the Internet. The British also monitor many fewer offenders than Americans do." [mijn nadruk] (235)

"Because the cultivation of panic involves the collaboration of a style of journalism, a type of advocacy, and a mode of political opportunism, and because the punitive state consolidates distorted ideas about risk, justice, and citizenship, rolling back this state of affairs will require changes on a variety of fronts. The legal front alone seems formidable, given the scale of victimist statutes and the scope of punitive laws; true reform would entail the meticulous rewriting of thousands of local and national laws. I offer only a handful of quick pointers here, notes to- ward the desired cultural shift, brief memorandums to the citizen who would be defined by something more than his or her vulnerabilities."(243)