Robachicos: Historia del secuestro infantil en México (1900–1960)

Few crime topics elicit as much fear and concern as child abduction, which is also commonly known as child kidnapping. Child abduction, or kidnapping, is a criminal offense that entails the wrongful taking of a minor by force or violence, manipulation or fraud, or persuasion. There are basically two types of child abduction; familial-parental and the much-exaggerated stranger abductor. Parental abductions are heavily contextualized in child custody and involve far less physical danger to child victims than stranger abductions, which include the majority of violence and sexual violence associated with more extreme abduction events. Despite the popular culture myth of “abduction waves” and pedophiles lurking in the shadows, child abduction is actually a rare phenomenon, as indicated by Shutt, et al. 2004 (cited under Social Constructions), which likened abduction likelihood to the rarity of a lightning strike. Nonetheless, media hype and sensationalism have framed both popular culture and social-legal constructions of abduction frequency, risk, and offender and victim stereotypes, most notably stranger/pedophile abductors and abduction epidemics. The extant academic literature on child abduction can be observed as a three-pronged typology of 1) historical works, more so accounts of well-known US child kidnappings such as the Lindbergh baby, Adam Walsh, and, more recently, Elizabeth Smart, and international research on abduction for ransom, custody, vice work, and military servitude; 2) legal overviews and opinions, both domestically and internationally, with the latter especially focused on abduction legislation initiatives within Hague Conference; and 3) the focus of this article, empirical scientific works primarily appearing in refereed journal articles. The majority of this literature originates from the behavioral (psychology) and social sciences (criminology and criminal justice, sociology, and political science) and, to a lesser degree, from professional school orientations (social work, nursing, and public health). As a rare event and relatively myopic, though seriously consequential, phenomenon, there isn’t a discernable number of reference works, anthologies, or established published bibliographies informing the child abduction knowledge base. Fortunately, there is a sizeable body of empirical works on child abduction to characterize the nature of the offense, its perpetrator and victim participants, and responses by juvenile and criminal justice as well as other stakeholder agencies. While substantial research attention has addressed child abduction in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Europe, this coverage is based on American research over the last few decades. This empirical literature on child abduction is presented in annotated form as a thematic taxonomy comprised of the following: 1) General Overviews, 2) Offense, Offender, and Victim Characteristics, 3) Familial Abduction, 4) Stranger Abduction, 5) Awareness and Prevention, 6) AMBER Alert and Other Official Responses, and 7) Social Constructions.

Over the past decade the problem of child abduction has received extensive attention. New legislation, special law enforcement efforts, and new prosecution techniques have focused on child abduction cases where victims remain within the United States. A new and complex type of child abduction involves the transporting of children to foreign countries by a parent. This paper examines 2292 cases of international child abduction by a parent reported to the United States Department of State Office of Consular Affairs. The child abductions occurred prior to a custody decree or following a court order. The study reports on the extent of such offenses, site of abduction, and destination country. It also assesses the United States response to American children abducted to a foreign country. Finally, the paper reports on proposed international agreements responding to international child abduction by a parent.

Child abduction has generated extensive media attention due to deep-seated fear elicited by infamous incidents. Perceptions of an abduction epidemic during the 1970s and 80s entrenched a perception of ‘stranger danger’. Limited research on child abduction overemphasizes stranger abductions, which account for fewer than half of all abductions. As a result, less is known about the victim/abductor relationship across other abduction types. Prior work has emphasized simplistic stranger vs. family dichotomies, and similar trichotomies. This study, drawing on officially reported child abductions employing NIBRS datasets (N = 29,293), emphasizes differences across abductors/victims in a four category relationship-based typology, including a newer category – ‘intimate partner abductions’. Findings contribute baseline knowledge about child abductions by countering misplaced media driven fears and placing empirical findings in a more accurate context. Findings also reveal that intimate partner abductions have a unique victim/offender/incident profile and are the most serious and most consequential to adolescent female victims.

We examined elementary students' beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge regarding the missing children issue. A 22-item questionnaire on missing children was distributed to a sample of 315 fifth-grade children in a large midwestern city. In ranking five concerns, 49% of the students ranked someone grabbing them as their primary concern. The students perceived themselves as susceptible to the problem of missing children and thought that it was a serious issue. Fifty-nine percent of the children were afraid to be friendly toward people they did not know, and 44% believed it was likely or highly likely that they would become missing children. The mass media was their leading source of information on missing children. Their level of knowledge regarding the issue was poor; the majority did not know who usually takes children, how many are taken, or what usually happens to missing children.

An exploratory study of residential child abduction: An examination of offender, victim and offense characteristics

In 20th-century Mexico, as in many other places, consumer culture and mass media have shaped everyday experiences, helped give meaning to ordinary lives, and opened up spaces in which political ideologies could be created and contested. Cultural forms such as dance, song, cuisine, clothing, and sports have been deployed to distinguish regions from one another, while at the same time, print media, radio, television, recorded music, film, and other cultural forms have connected Mexicans across regional and international borders (and across lines of gender, class, ethnicity, language, religion, political affiliation, and more) from the 1880s to the present day. Consumer culture—meaning the distribution, sale, and use of mass-produced goods such as clothing, as well as agricultural commodities like sugar and coffee—linked Mexico to a wider world in the historical era in which Mexico joined in the global process of rapid-fire modernization. The study of mass media and consumer culture in Mexico has been, at its best, highly interdisciplinary: historians and art historians, literary critics and cinema studies specialists, sociologists, and ethnographers have worked with journalists, folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and others in developing a sophisticated scholarly literature. This literature has its roots in two interrelated schools of scholarship: one that interpreted the products of culture industries as well as the creativity of ordinary people in a search for clues to Mexican national identity, and another that interpreted both locally made and imported mass media to understand how they shaped and supported the political, social, and economic status quo, both locally and globally. Since the 1980s, however, scholarly attention has broadened its focus from the images, narratives, movements, sounds, and objects produced by Mexican and foreign culture industries, and recent scholarship has looked to processes of creation, distribution, criticism, and consumption as well. Identities—whether regional, national, local, ideological, sexual, or political—are no longer understood as stable categories, but rather as a highly contested set of ideas, stories, and pictures that have changed radically over time. Much scholarship on mass media and consumer culture now begins with the understanding that culture industries have provided the tools with which discourses of identity could be shaped and reshaped, and that audiences and consumers have sometimes picked up those tools and turned them to their own purposes. And they have moved beyond taking the nation as a central category of analysis to ask how Mexican consumers and culture industries have participated in international and transnational processes of modernization.

On the morning of September 19, 1985, an 8.1 magnitude earthquake shocked Mexico City. Approximately 10,000–15,000 people died and hundreds of buildings collapsed. Many representations of this event emerged in the aftermath. Newspapers, chronicles, testimonials, and photographs were some of the mediums that reported this tragic event, and the most immediate comic book response to the catastrophe was Terremoto 85: Historias reales del dramático suceso (1986). This graphic narrative draws from a long line of Mexican comic books that had promoted conservative cultural values for decades. By portraying the nuclear family as an allegory of the nation, its characters are represented as ignoring—rather than participating in—the sociopolitical upheaval taking place around them. The comic suggests that it is only by embracing normativity and gender norms, as well as by contributing to the procreation and production of the nation, that readers can become exemplary citizens. Furthermore, this graphic narrative shows that only characters depicted as “exemplary” get to have “happy endings.” By articulating disaster in this manner, Terremoto 85 obscures the real civil disobedience and direct action that surged after Mexico City’s earthquake of 1985. In so doing, the comic book participates in the erasure of well-recorded civil responses to the earthquake. It also demonstrates how national narratives often glorify exemplary citizens and contribute to the exclusion of vulnerable and precarious populations. A careful read of this graphic text can help one examine 20th- and 21st-century national emergencies in Mexico, Latin America, and beyond.

The sociologies of India's missing children merit spatial and contextual examination. The sociological space into which a child goes missing is highly under‐researched in India. Building on overarching narratives emerging from secondary sources and existing literature on Indian children's vulnerability and precarity, the article aims to evaluate the landscape of missing children. The analyses suggest that a number of interconnected sociologies contribute to the phenomenon of missing children – these children are mainly from the poorer backgrounds, who are kidnapped, trafficked, or lured largely for social, commercial, and sexual exploitation. This research was conducted to gain a deeper understanding into the problem of missing children in order to address the gaps that require intervention.

This article traces the role of the mass media in the social construction of the “missing children issue’ as a social problem. The social construction explanation of social problems offered by Blumer (1971) and Spector and Kitsuse (1977) has been criticized (cf. Best and Horiuchi 1985) for lacking a conception of extra-media influences that can affect audiences beyond the initial viewing situation. Recent work in mass communication indicates that a media logic is adapted by other institutions to amplify television imagery and themes about crime, danger, and child abuse. A case study of the origins and claims and counterclaims about the nature and extent of missing children is combined with an empirical analysis of the impact of various sources of information about the missing children issue in order to demonstrate the process by which a social problem is constructed. The impact of additional information is analyzed by administering a self-report questionnaire to 96 respondents before and after viewing a two-part documentary on the complexities of the issue. The data suggest that mass-mediated imagery and formats forge an interactive informational context for social problems by sustaining what is viewed in one's living room with imagery in bulk mail, milk cartons, and posters. It is further suggested that mass media depictions of problems such as “missing children’ carry over into consonant images such as child abuse. This conceptualization is capable of encompassing other accounts of social problems (e.g., “urban legends”) within claims-making activity.

Purpose. This study examined the offence of child abduction in England and Wales. Specifically, the relationship of perpetrator to victim and motivation of the perpetrator were considered. It was hypothesized that discrete types of child abduction would be identifiable.Methods. The sample consisted of all offenders convicted of child abduction between 1993 and 1995 identified by the Offenders Index. For each conviction further data were gathered from police records at New Scotland Yard. The resulting sample comprised 149 offenders. These offenders were categorized in terms of relationship to victim and motivation.Results. Four different motivational types of child abduction were identified: sexual, custodial, maternal desire, and ‘other’. The majority of child abductions were sexually motivated, and most child abductions involved female victims.Conclusions. Offence categories are useful for summarizing criminal data but mask factors such as relationship of the perpetrator to the victim, and motivation.

The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City

This book review of Shawna Kidman’s Comic Books Incorporated: How the Business of Comics Became the Business of Hollywood highlights the works crucial intervention in comic book studies. In the face of a rote history of the comic book as a persistent subcultural phenomenon, Kidman argues that attending to the various legal, social, and industrial infrastructures of comic book culture can illustrate the ebbs and flows of comic book popularity, its shifts in genres and tone, and its movements across mediums as the path of a “fundamentally corporate” medium, “a dominant form in a culture built to support its growth.” The review sketches the book’s chapters, which each focus on a different form of infrastructure relevant to the history of the comic book: distribution, copyright law, subculture, and financing. I end with further areas of research suggested by this work, particularly within the field of historical ethnography. While Comic Books Incorporated tells its story through the history of industrial logics, a closer attention to comic book reading practices during the time in which this story takes place can deepen our understanding of the transformation from a mass medium with seemingly equal readership across gender to a niche subcultural fascination for college aged white men.Throughout the text, the work demystifies a prevailing narrative that the comics industry and fanbase tells: that the success of the medium is due to the inherent quality of the source material. This book thoroughly demonstrates that the evolution of the comic book was driven not by creativity and iconoclasm, but by corporate logic.

Parental kidnapping is an increasing problem throughout the world and the social consequences of globalization have made international child abductions more frequent. In the United States alone, the Department of Justice states that 354,100 children are reported to have been abducted by a family member in a single year. Estimates indicate that one in five parental kidnappings involves a child being taken across international borders. The United Kingdom states that in the last three years there has been a “58 percent increase in the number of international parental child abductions.” In 2000, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which handles all U.S. international child abduction cases, reported 1,697 international abductions, up 66.7 percent over 1999. The increase of international child abductions has been attributed to the increasing access of international travel and rising divorce rates. International ab-

As the world shrinks and people travel all over the world to work and live so do they establish families and roots where they go. International marriages are becoming increasingly common as immigration and vast diasporas’ becomes a reality of the world. As a result, the development of a body of private international family law has been crucial to resolving the inevitable issues that arise. A significant issue is that of child custody where parents may not only be of different nationalities but also may simply live or be present in different countries for what become crucial periods of time. Before, the issue of custody and best interest of the child can even be addressed the first matter of inquiry is which country can rightfully adjudicate the custody matter. To avoid, competing jurisdictions and purposeful wrongful removal of children by a parent attempting to divest the other parent of any custody rights, the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction serves as the comprehensive body of law that first establishes which country has the right to adjudicate custody which is crucial as stated above, to avoid, multiple jurisdictional fights, and entanglement of politics on what become emotional issues of nationhood, cultural standards for children and issues surrounding parental kidnapping. There has been a strong push by practitioners for India to sign the Convention. To be a part of the global community, the case is made, that India must be seen as a place where standard international Conventions especially as they relate to child custody will be honoured. In fact the Indian Law Commission in 2009 completed its report authored in part by Justice Lakshmanan, concluded that India must accede to the Convention and sign it rather than become a haven for parental kidnapping. This is however controversial for a number of reasons where realities of spousal abuse, fraudulent marriages and lack of ability to litigate are cited. Further, so far, the judiciary in India has been extremely quick to adjudicate custody disputes even when the child has not resided in India for any substantial period or arguably has been “wrongfully removed” per standards of the Convention. The chapter will explore the case law generated specifically in the Indian case law and also changes in it, while at the same time explore what reasons Court’s have applied to resolve these issues.

Paula S. Fass, a pathbreaker in children’s history and the history of education, turns her attention in Children of a New World to the impact of globalization on children’s lives, both in the United States and on the world stage. Globalization, privatization, the rise of the “work-centered” family, and the triumph of the unregulated marketplace, she argues, are revolutionizing the lives of children today. Fass begins by considering the role of the school as a fundamental component of social formation, particularly in a nation of immigrants like the United States. She goes on to examine children as both creators of culture and objects of cultural concern in America, evident in the strange contemporary fear of and fascination with child abduction, child murder, and parental kidnapping. Finally, Fass moves beyond the limits of American society and brings historical issues into the present and toward the future, exploring how American historical experience can serve as a guide to contemporary globalization as well as how globalization is altering the experience of American children and redefining childhood. Clear and scholarly, serious but witty, Children of a New World provides a foundation for future historical investigations while adding to our current understanding of the nature of modern childhood, the role of education for national identity, the crisis of family life, and the influence of American concepts of childhood on the world’s definitions of children's rights. As a new generation comes of age in a global world, it is a vital contribution to the study of childhood and globalization.