Children as Prey: A Case of the Utmost
Children as Prey: A Case of the Utmost

Contemporary Legends of Organ Theft, Children’s Disappearances, Kidnappings, and the Sexual Abuse of Children and Adolescents

Summary/Abstract: This article discusses several sets of rumours and contemporary legends studied by the author since the 1990s. The common theme concerned with children as prey, victims of ruthless predators, unites narratives of organ theft, the social construction of disappearances and kidnappings, and sexual abuse of children and adolescents. In light of these facts, the denial of yesterday has turned into an ever-growing obsession. This paper examines children as prey through three subthemes, attending to the individual features and to the ways they overlap and also engage contemporary anxieties. An overview of recent events in the United Kingdom and France indicates the persistence of some scary and hazardous hypotheses regarding the children as prey theme.The concluding remarks are presented in three parts: first, a review of key transformations in the discourse around the children as prey by the adoption of a different approach; second, an in-depth discussion of the well-known tale of the Slaughter of the Innocents, as always present in the successive sets of accusations linked to the emergence of collective faces of the Evil; and third, an analysis of the concept of the utmost, a special type of the extreme. Finally, the author’s hypotheses on the contemporary obsession with child sexual abuse are presented.

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