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The political and economically based social system of neoliberalism fosters an individualistic perspective that informs people’s actions when confronted by a stranger in crisis. When a stranger is witnessed in crisis, the witness follows the lead of the neoliberal individualistic social structures that deny the plight of those in crisis. The stranger is feared and left to fend for herself in her plight. The creation of spectacles and imaginary notions of ‘stranger danger’ as combined with individuals having blasé attitudes reinforce an individualistic perspective. The mass media help in circulating an archive of images in which the stranger is dangerous, different and to be feared. Because these images are so available, and have become expected, compassion fatigue is set in motion when people are confronted with images of strangers in crisis; compassion fatigue is reinforced by the surrounding individualistic social structures.

The political and economically based social system of neoliberalism fosters an individualistic perspective that informs people’s actions when confronted by a stranger in crisis. When a stranger is witnessed in crisis, the witness follows the lead of the neoliberal individualistic social structures that deny the plight of those in crisis. The stranger is feared and left to fend for herself in her plight. The creation of spectacles and imaginary notions of ‘stranger danger’ as combined with individuals having blasé attitudes reinforce an individualistic perspective. The mass media help in circulating an archive of images in which the stranger is dangerous, different and to be feared. Because these images are so available, and have become expected, compassion fatigue is set in motion when people are confronted with images of strangers in crisis; compassion fatigue is reinforced by the surrounding individualistic social structures.

My dissertation addresses the phenomenon of stranger danger to children and tries to answer the question of how the category of sex offender has been produced to become the primary target in contemporary sex crime control. I examine the period from the 1960s through the 1990s, the period beginning with the rising awareness of child abuse and criminal and psychiatric patient rights challenges to preventive confinement and ending with institutionalizing the regime of sex offender risk management. I attend particularly to psychological techniques that were designed and used to produce sex offender categories, by focusing on three interconnected dimensions: first, the formation of a new discipline of forensic psychology in the crime control area; second, the methods of knowledge production about sex offenders; and third, the institutional aspects of crime control centered on repeat stranger offenders. This dissertation examines the shaping of risk as a value-laden cultural product, involving the identification of risks to be managed, the selection of risk factors, and the decisions of "acceptable" levels of risk. In engaging in conversation about ongoing policy issues, my work intends to go beyond the opposition between civil rights and public safety to understand how the politics of crime control came to center on the dangerous stranger, a center around which the two political values of rights and safety have collided and been negotiated. I provide a genealogy of actuarial risk management and situate its origins in relation to the civil rights revolution. By examining the shift from psychiatric dangerousness prediction to psychological risk management, I argue that the risk management regime is an outgrowth of psychologists' attempts to accommodate civil rights claims in a broader context where socio-cultural tensions over the changing family values have zeroed in on stranger danger. While psychologists initially promoted actuarial justice as a rational method of balancing conflicting social values, its implementation was dictated by institutional demands for efficiency in regulating an increasing number of sex offenders. Risk management technologies led to the mutual reproduction of crime data and criminal populations at risk of reoffense, which contributed to the expansion of populations under criminal supervision. / Ph. D.

Working within a social constructionist paradigm, the focus of this study is on the way in which the social problem of campus sexual assault is constructed and the way in which these constructions determine the proposed solutions. To address the issue, the study focuses on a high-profile case of a violent sexual assault that occurred at Carleton University in the fall of 2007. Drawing upon the work of Joel Best and Donileen Loseke, I approach this issue by focusing on the claims-making activities that emerged in response to this event. Using a mixed methods analysis of newspaper coverage of the event consisting of a quantitative content analysis combined with a more detailed thematic analysis focusing on the specific claims made and the more general themes they reflect, this study analyzes the dominant claims-makers identified by the media, the claims they put forth, and the proposed solutions that follow from their particular constructions of the problem. Results of this analysis illustrate the contested nature of the construction of campus sexual assault as well as the way in which competing discourses reflect features of a broader social discourse relating to crime, individualization, and the responsibilization of women to protect themselves from sexual violence.

From January 2016 until August 2021, at least 436 women or girls have been deliberately murdered in Spain by men. Non-intimate femicide (and, particularly, murder committed by complete strangers to the victim, to which this study refers as “stranger femicide”) has historically been, and still is, the most covered type of femicide in the media. This is also the case in the Spanish press, and more specifically, El País, the most read media outlet in the country. This thesis examines how El País framed Diana Quer’s case, the most high-profile, intensively covered femicide case in Spain in the past 5 years. It will also examine which ethical problems the reporting presented. From a feminist perspective and through a mixed-method approach of content analysis and frame analysis, this study examines 86 articles corresponding to the two informative peaks of Diana Quer’s case coverage. The periods go from August to October 2016, the first two months of her disappearance, and from December 2017 to January 2018, the 15 days following her killer’s arrest and crime confession. The findings reveal that the coverage in El País constructed a victimization iconography with DQ’s case that engendered cautionary tales and failed to address femicide as a social issue. The reporting also presented a series of critical ethical problems calling for a reformation of femicide reporting guidelines.