Kids Gone Wild: From Rainbow Parties to Sexting, Understanding the Hype Over Teen Sex

Kids Gone Wild: From Rainbow Parties to Sexting, Understanding the Hype Over Teen Sex

Kids Gone Wild: From Rainbow Parties to Sexting, Understanding the Hype Over Teen Sex

Kids Gone Wild: From Rainbow Parties to Sexting, Understanding the Hype Over Teen Sex

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Overview

The myths and truths of teen's sexual behavior.
Winner of the 2015 Brian McConnell Book Award presented by the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research



To hear mainstream media sources tell it, the sex lives of modern teenagers outpace even the smuttiest of cable television shows.
Teen girls “sext” explicit photos to boys they like; they wear “sex bracelets”
that signify what sexual activities they have done, or will do; they team up with other girls at “rainbow parties” to perform sex acts on groups of willing teen boys; they form “pregnancy pacts” with their best girlfriends to all become teen mothers at the same time. From The Today Show, to CNN, to the New York Times, stories of these events have been featured widely in the media. But are most teenage—or younger—children really going to sex parties and having multiple sexual encounters in an orgy-like fashion?









Researchers say no—teen sex is actually not rampant and teen pregnancy is at low levels.
But why do stories like these find such media traffic, exploiting parents’
worst fears? How do these rumors get started, and how do they travel around the country and even across the globe?






In Kids Gone Wild,
best-selling authors Joel Best and Kathleen A. Bogle use these stories about the fears of the growing sexualization of childhood to explore what we know about contemporary legends and how both traditional media and the internet perpetuate these rumors while, at times, debating their authenticity. Best and Bogle describe the process by which such stories spread, trace how and to where they have moved, and track how they can morph as they travel from one medium to another. Ultimately, they find that our society’s view of kids raging out of control has drastic and unforeseen consequences, fueling the debate on sex education and affecting policy decisions on everything from the availability of the morning after pill to who is included on sex offender registries.






A
surprising look at the truth behind the sensationalism in our culture, Kids Gone Wild is a much-needed wake-up call for a society determined to believe the worst about its young people.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780814760734
Publisher: New York University Press
Publication date: 08/29/2014
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 200
Product dimensions: 5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Joel Best is Professor of Sociology & Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. He has published more than twenty books on social problems and deviance, including Threatened Children, Random Violence, Damned Lies and Statistics, and The Student Loan Mess (with Eric Best.)

Kathleen A. Bogle is Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at La Salle University in Philadelphia. She is the author of Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus.

Table of Contents

Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xiii
1 These Kids Today 1
2 How Legends Spread 21
3 Parents Beware: Packaging Legends as TV News 45
4 Online Conversations about Kids and Sex 69
5 Controlling Teen Sexting 101
6 Too Sexual Too Soon: Why Believe the Hype? 123
Notes 145
References 161
Index 175
About the Authors 177

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