Panic Attack: Sex and Terror in the Homeland
Lancaster, Roger N.
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2008 report: homeland security Panic Attack: Sex and Terror in the Homeland one of 25 “criminal alien sex offenders” arrested by ICe in August 2006 courtesy...
...In Virginia, after casting about for various ways to frame driving 20 miles per hour or more above the speed limit as a felony—“reckless driving,” “road rage,” “aggressive driving”—the Democratic governor and the Republican state legislature eventually settled on “abusive driving,” a term eerily resonant with ubiquitous talk about sex abuse and child protection...
...Undocumented border crossing is a violation of civil, not criminal, law, but the point seems moot in ongoing hysterias...
...In the end, the defendant was convicted for “unlawful detention,” a charge that carries no jail time but was sufficient to have the man deported and barred from reentering the country...
...In one study, 133 of 144, or 92.4%, of such overturned convictions between 1989 and 2003 were originally for rape or sexual assault...
...By the time the man’s trial began, the newspaper was promoting a full-tilt anti-immigrant hysteria using techniques that eerily duplicated the logic of ongoing panics around child sex abuse: The singular or statistically anomalous event becomes the occasion for sensational reporting, the sounding of alarms, and the proposal of draconian laws...
...4 For these stories provide an infinitely malleable template for producing recurring narratives about victimization and innocence, inventing new identities around these terms, and manufacturing an inexhaustible “need” for ever more discerning modes of surveillance, supervision, and protection...
...Now the shopkeeper drew out a broad connection between crime panics, sex panics, and the post-9/11 culture of fear: “You used to be a nation of businessmen...
...His public attorney had difficulty finding character witnesses because his co-workers viewed him as a surly, bitter alcoholic...
...In fact, there was nothing gradual about the Patriot Act’s extension into sex...
...The stated purpose of the initiative was to rid the country of immigrant child molesters and predatory sex offenders, thus restoring integrity to an immigration system widely viewed as “broken,” while also capturing U.S...
...By every account, the somewhat drunken man stood in the sidewalk and gently took the girl’s wrists in between his thumbs and index fingers (with the remaining three fingers on each hand pointed aloft) to exclaim upon how lovely she looked in her summer outfit...
...Although they provide distractions from what rational people have usually regarded as the real news—political deliberations over how to steer the ship of state, whether to go to war, and whose bread should be buttered— they are not, as Gore suggests, without “impact on the fate of the Republic...
...he was convicted of “indecent exposure” and rounded up for deportation hearings...
...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 that proposes to address this threat through punitive measures: tougher enforcement, “zero tolerance,” new laws, communal vigilance, violent purges...
...MaryLu Cianciolo, an immigration lawyer, told the Chicago Tribune: “In Operation Predator, the purpose is to rack up the numbers and say, ‘Oh, we’ve deported thousands of dangerous sex offenders.’ . . . Some of them are dangerous sex offenders...
...Quite a lot, I suggest...
...brian Plonka / the sPokesMan-review / worlD Picture news immigrants...
...they may be prohibited from congregating (often in the name of public safety...
...Simpson trial, the JonBenét Ramsey case, the murder of Laci Peterson, the Chandra Levy tragedy, along with assorted disappearances, kidnappings, sexual peccadilloes, and celebrity scandals—as exhibit A in his argument that “something has gone fundamentally wrong” in U.S...
...sexual and racial fears in new forms...
...First came the teen male prostitution scares of the 1970s, followed by AIDS terrors and the Satanic ritual abuse and day care panics of the 1980s...
...Assorted actions by various of these groups have sometimes tilted rightward, other times leftward, but have always traded on the dominant cultural logic of the victims’ rights movement, which derives a sort of sacral authority from aggrieved victimization...
...law, and with how politics and citizenship in general are imagined...
...Law exists to protect the innocent, doesn’t it...
...linked sex, For the moment, who one is or terror, and what one believes or what one is presumed to be becomes “evidence” immigration in a criminal charge...
...Conservatives, of course, have always had but one approach to crime: Lock up the bad guy and throw away the key...
...The lurking pedophile has become a stock figure in U.S...
...the public The abject victim crying out for to surrender vengeance now stands center stage key rights in in the national political drama...
...A driver who was an undocumented worker from Mexico had struck and grievously injured two young African American children at a school crosswalk...
...As far as I can tell, voters have never rejected a ballot initiative to “get tough” on crime, to assess additional punishments for infractions, or to “crack down” on various imagined abuses of government services...
...Articles, editorials, and letters to the editor raised questions about the prevalence of lawlessness among “illegal” immigrants— persons defined, in their very condition, as unlawful...
...You cannot stop inspecting your neighbors for signs of transgression...
...Something, it would seem, has gone terribly wrong not only with public discourse, but also with U.S...
...One sunny Saturday afternoon, he had greeted a 14-year-old white girl, accompanied by a gaggle of her friends, in the green commons of the sprawling apartment complex where they all lived...
...A similarly high percentage (88.5%) of the 208 post-conviction DNA exonerations listed by the Innocence Project (innocenceproject.org) were also for rape and sexual assault.10 Empathy for victims also revives less benevolent intentions, reconstituting old-time U.S...
...They keep the public in a perpetual state of fear and watchfulness...
...Then a veritable avalanche ensued from the 1990s onward...
...It was thus easy for the prosecutor to depict him as a rootless drifter, and this, no doubt, shaped the verdict, although the challenge of appearing trustworthy and likable in the face of vague sexual accusations could overwhelm almost anyone...
...You cannot let go of your hurts...
...all protections policies...
...In other cases, it arouses fears about the future of the heterosexual nuclear family, anxieties about highway conditions, or feelings of dread and desire in the imagination of disaster...
...Increasingly, punitive laws have been directed against undocumented NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2008 report: homeland security A GPS tracking device is attached to the ankle of a sex offender in Spokane, Washington...
...Today, the mysterious brown-skinned stranger and the lurking white pedophile cathect sexual anxieties, perhaps more readily and with less guilty conscience than does the figure who historically carried this burden, the phantom black man...
...And so the good citizens did their part, producing a brown scapegoat in the name of the white victim child...
...culture, which is suffused with fear of crime, particularly sex crime, through various media (from milk box ads to instant-messaging notifications) and new modes of organization (victims’ rights organizations, e-lists...
...they may be denied driver’s licenses...
...The sexuality of the 9/11 terrorists—whose devotion to an extremist Wahabi politics allowed them to drink and cavort at Hooters as part of their “cover”—was the object of some media attention...
...Although she has never been to the United States, she is an avid reader with an alert mind and progressive, anti-clerical sensibilities...
...But some of them aren’t.8 In the present political dispensation, the best of intentions—empathy with the victims of violence, rape, andabuse—hastiltedoursystemoflawtoward the worst of practices: a presumption of guilt, which shifts the burden of proof to the defense and fuels, not blind justice, but a blind rage to punish the bad man.9 Indeed, a very large majority of convicts later exonerated on DNA evidence were convicted of rape or sexual assault...
...At first glance, the connection might seem a non sequitur: What, after all, could overwrought fear of pedophile predators have to do with post-9/11 fear-mongering...
...culture...
...They leave their traces, imprints, residues, in the hardware of the state...
...Worse yet, it was initially a hit-and-run incident, and the motorist was unlicensed, uninsured, and driving while intoxicated...
...Over the years, voters have vented ballot-box rages at sex offenders, welfare cheats, and convicts of various stripes...
...Similar technology is being used to monitor thousands of undocumented immigrants (see page 29...
...He is the author, most recently, of The Trouble With Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture (University of California Press, 2003...
...For the flip side of this empathy is suspicion, para operation noia: dread of the stranger whose Predator in strangeness can derive, depend 2003, the dHS’s ing on the occasion, from manifold sources of racial, sexual, or ideologiImmigration cal otherness—or even, simply, from and Customs the accusation itself, which produces the inference of invisible otherness, enforcement hidden weirdness, in the accused...
...Atwitter with excitement, the teenagers quickly turned out their parents from nearby apartments...
...The logic of sex panic is essentially promiscuous...
...And where sexual fears blurred with ethnic resentments, it seemed better to err on the side of caution: Something must have happened, or have been in the process of happening, or else the “children” (actually, teenagers) would not have reacted as they did...
...The organized response likewise drew on familiar templates: Families of the victims of 9/11 organized to press for compensation, to monitor congressional hearings on intelligence failures, to serve as a pressure group in lower Manhattan redevelopment plans, and to press for redress in varied criminal trials having little or nothing to do with 9/11...
...Because ICE agents review Megan’s Law registries to identify sex offenders, the quirks and imprecision of one system of enforcement is conferred to another: One long-term Mexican immigrant, convicted years ago on statutory rape charges stemming from his relationship with his girlfriend when he himself was also a minor, faces deportation as a sexual predator...
...7 The rhetorical association of one disapproved thing with another is old hat, but new connections between sex and terror developed in the course of events...
...Worse yet, this empathy plants what is said to be the most arWith the chaic aspect of law at the heart of the launching of modern social order...
...Where fear is the order of the day, protection is the name of the game...
...The fact that he ran—who wouldn’t?—was later cited as evidence of evil intent in the criminal trial...
...sex laws...
...With the launching of Operation Predator in 2003, the DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency expressly linked sex, terror, and immigration policies...
...Sex panic” looms large in the arsenal of techniques that have stoked the culture of fear...
...The resulting laws represent a significant exchange for change in the legal culture: They security...
...they may be screened by local police, who now effectively function as an extension of border enforcement...
...This trial occurred not in some rural backwater, but in the urbanized and politically liberal section of a border state...
...In The Assault on Reason, former vice president Al Gore presents a string of nonstop news stories about sex and violence—the O.J...
...Today, a growing legion of “strangers to the law” live under the evil spell of accusation, including those accused of sex crimes, those suspected of plotting terror, undocumented workers—defined from the outset by their lack of legality—and other effectively stateless peoples who exist outside the closed and foreboding circle of official empathy...
...program...
...Fear of sexual salient predation serves as both metonym instances of the and metaphor for other conditions of nervousness in the body politic: ongoing crime It is a part that stands for the whole, panics that and also a cultural figure whose have prepared meaning is readily transferred to other figures...
...and they may be denied housing under hodgepodge zoning laws that prohibit unrelated, unmarried persons from living in the same house—all by popular demand...
...And that was the extent of his offense, which involved neither sexual touching nor lewd or suggestive language...
...Another immigrant urinated in an alley behind a garbage can...
...You are becoming a nation of victims...
...For decades now, tough-talking politicians of both major parties have cultivated voters’ fears of crime in order to win elections...
...have progressively eroded the rights of the accused and shifted the burden of proof from the prosecution to the defense, while tilting the balance of legal reasoning away from rehabilitation and toward punishment as a norm...
...citizens traveling abroad who violate U.S...
...Fear of sexual predation thus has become a key social metaphor for menace in general...
...When the Patriot Act was first passed into law, civil libertarians worried that aggressive new surveillance tactics would not be restricted to the detection of terror plots but would gradually be applied to everyday, routine law enforcement...
...Public portrayals of an immaculate nation’s “lost innocence” resonated with long-standing cultural motifs around child abuse, and the naming of the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with its intimation of a national hearth under siege, reverberated eerily with the logic of the antecedent sex panics...
...metonymically, they figure as especially salient instances of the ongoing crime panics that, over time, have prepared the public to surrender key rights and guarantees in exchange for security...
...The problem, say immigration lawyers, is that ICE has also swept up people who pose no conceivable threat to safety and welfare...
...The prosecutor initially piled on charges: battery, attempted rape, kidnapping...
...Almost immediately, DHS was boasting that new border screening measures were keeping pedophiles out of the country, and the Justice Department was defending Internet “data mining”—which never caught any terrorists at work— as a means to detect child pornography and to catch online sex predators...
...Such cases, I think, are emblematic of wider tendencies in U.S...
...But liberals have scarcely been innocent bystanders in a 38-year trend that has ballooned the prison population to more than 2.3 million at latest count: a fivefold increase since 1970, which makes the United States number one worldwide in incarcerations, whether measured in raw numbers or in per capita rates.2 Worse yet, this punitiveness shapes the behavior of voters and the way citizens understand their citizenship...
...Such stories rework yellow journalism’s familiar dynamics of titillation, scandal, and terror, blurring the difference between major and minor crimes, statistically common and uncommon events, and horrific and imaginary offenses...
...Sex panics efficiently condense this neo-Hobbesian approach to law and order...
...The local newspaper ran daily coverage of the incident over several weeks, meticulously reporting on the children’s medical condition...
...Reportage on violent pedophile predators, the perils of the Internet, the priest abuse scandals, the Michael Jackson trial, and so on have made sex crime stories part of the furniture on 24-hour news services, local TV news stations, and even highbrow newspapers of record...
...Small wonder: The same techniques that perpetually produce new sex crime laws—sensational journalism covering statistically uncommon occurrences, emotional congressional testimony by victims and their families, collusion between law en NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: homeland security forcement and victims’ rights groups—also produced the abusive driving law (penalties include possible jail time and fines as high as $3,000...
...Shortly after sitting through the Salvadoran man’s trial, I followed the news of a case from my hometown in the rural section of a southern state...
...The man’s few seconds of drunken patter could be ominously construed as “unlawful detention” because abuRoger N. Lancaster teaches anthropology and cultural studies at George Mason University, where he directs the cultural studies Ph.D...
...There’s power in the victim role,” observed a middle-aged Mexican shopkeeper I interviewed last year on her perceptions of U.S...
...To make matters worse, the defendant himself was not the sort of man who evokes empathy...
...You are becoming more like us,” she continued— and this was not meant as a compliment...
...For a time, speculation that Mohamed Atta was homosexual was a staple of the yellow press.6 “Predator,” a term generally used to describe pedophile child stalkers, was the favored euphemism for “terrorist,” and Jerry Vines, twice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, stirred news stories when he called Muhammad a “demon-possessed pedophile...
...The history of modern sex panics is a closely sequenced one...
...Emergency becomes routine, exception becomes the rule, panic becomes the law.5 After the attacks of September 11, 2001, mass-mediated terror panics mixed with sex panics...
...public discourse...
...Sometimes, the outsider looking in sums it up best...
...Robert Sillen, a hospital administrator appointed by federal court to clean up California’s prison health care mess, succinctly described the nature of the problem to The New York Times: “No one gets elected in Sacramento [or anywhere else] without a platform that says, ‘Let’s get rid of rapists, pedophiles and murderers.’ ”3 This has become second nature—protecting the public is what government is for, isn’t it...
...ICe) agency And it is here that fellow feeling for expressly the victim, real or imagined, does its most destructive work...
...The panic around sex thus infuses other panics—in this case, the hysteria around immigration...
...NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2008 report: homeland security Measure and proportion proved elusive on other fronts, too...
...Depending on the state, county, or municipality, undocumented workers may be denied social, educational, or medical services...
...Now you are a nation of commemorators, memorial builders...
...of rational law have been forfeited, and the accusation itself acquires a magical power...
...First came extensive media coverage of the attacks...
...Correlatively, the vic figure as tim child looms large in the public especially imaginary, and he or she is usually but not always white...
...NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: homeland security sive sexual intent was already attributed to him...
...you buried the dead and faced forward to the future...
...The original charges themselves were nonsense, but I think I understand the reasoning, as it were, of the white and black jury...
...political culture: a monster whose cultural presence far outweighs statistically meanSex panics ingful threats to children’s safety and welfare...
...The prosecution repeatedly insinuated that the man was a dangerous pedophile...
...And when the crowd came running after the Salvadoran man, he ran and locked himself in his own apartment...
...Research assistance: Lucas Witman...
...Sex panic is that subset of moral panics that revolve around sex.1 What is the relation between sex panics and other forms of institutionalized fear in the present-day United States...
...NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2008 report: homeland security Panic Attack: Sex and Terror in the Homeland one of 25 “criminal alien sex offenders” arrested by ICe in August 2006 courtesy of iMMigration anD custoMs enforceMent by roger n. lancaster Afew years ago, i sat in on the trial of a Salvadoran man—an “illegal alien,” as they say—who had worked for years in the construction industry...
...The pernicious effects of such public sphere furbishings have been amply noted, and not only by queer theorists and sex radicals...
...it has fused with other ongoing panics apparently having little to do with sex...
...The logic of the one panic dovetailed with the other’s in less subtle ways, too...
...They are to be found neither in the psyches of individuals who manifest the symptoms (acute anxiety disorders) nor in the physiognomic reactions of a public defined by its fears (chronic stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system), but in the outer world of media images, collective beliefs, and political narratives—that is, in the social machinations that actually manufacture and perpetuate panic...
...The psychological mechanisms of sex panic are there for everyone to see...
Vol. 41 • November 2008 • No. 6
