Virtual Pedophilia: Sex Offender Profiling and U.S. Security Culture

In Virtual Pedophilia Gillian Harkins traces how by the end of the twentieth century the pedophile as a social outcast evolved into its contemporary appearance as a virtually normal white male. The pedophile's alleged racial and gender normativity was treated as an exception to dominant racialized modes of criminal or diagnostic profiling. The pedophile was instead profiled as a virtual figure, a potential threat made visible only when information was transformed into predictive image. The virtual pedophile was everywhere and nowhere, slipping through day-to-day life undetected until people learned how to arm themselves with the right combination of visually predictive information. Drawing on television, movies, and documentaries such as Law and Order: SVU, To Catch a Predator, Mystic River, and Capturing the Friedmans, Harkins shows how diverse U.S. audiences have been conscripted and trained to be lay detectives who should always be on the lookout for the pedophile as virtual predator. In this way, the perceived threat of the pedophile legitimated increased surveillance and ramped-up legal strictures that expanded the security apparatus of the carceral state.

Author: Gillian Harkins
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 03/16/2020
Pages: 288
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.60d
ISBN13: 9781478008118
ISBN10: 1478008113
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Gender Studies
- Social Science | Criminology
- Psychology | Human Sexuality (see also Social Science | Human Sexuality)

About the Author
Gillian Harkins is Associate Professor of English at the University of Washington and author of Everybody's Family Romance: Reading Incest in Neoliberal America.