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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.
List of contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Virtual Pedophilia 1
1. Monstrous Sexuality and Vile Sovereignty 29
2. Profiling Virtuality and Pedophilic Data 62
3. Informational Image and Procedural Tone 95
4. Capturing the Past and the Vitality of Crime 128
5. Capturing the Future and the Sexuality of Risk 161
Conclusion. Exceptional Pedophilia and the Everyday Case 194
Notes 209
References 229
Index 263
About the author
Gillian Harkins
Summary
Gillian Harkins traces the genealogy of the transformation of cultural construction of the pedophile as a social outcast into the image of normative white masculinity from the 1980s to the present, showing how his "normalcy" makes him hard to identify and stop.
