Volume 49, Number 10 · June 13, 2002
Priests and Boys
By Garry Wills
Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain
by Philip Jenkins
Aldine de Gruyter, 275 pp., $45.95; $24.95 (paper)
Beyond Tolerance: Child Pornography on the Internet
by Philip Jenkins
New York University Press, 290 pp., $24.95
Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis
by Philip Jenkins
Oxford University Press, 214 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex
by Judith Levine, with a foreword by Dr. Joycelyn M. Elders
University of Minnesota Press, 299 pp., $25.95
Goodbye, Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption into the Catholic Church
by Michael S. Rose
Aquinas, 276 pp., $27.95
Philip Jenkins was a fairly obscure historian until 1996, when reactionary Catholics made him an improbable star. He began his career as a professor of criminal justice at Pennsylvania State University, specializing in the debunking of alleged 'crime waves.' For criminological journals he wrote four articles on what he considered the unjustified fear of serial murderers in England.[1] In his 1992 book, Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain, he broadened his analysis of 'constructed' social fears to cover 'witch hunts' over Satanism, rape, incest, pedophilia, child pornography, homosexuality, and drugs. In each case an 'imaginary menace' is manufactured by 'moral entrepreneurs' as a form of 'symbolic politics.'
Review, 4033 words
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