Beasts in the shadows

Dread has been a significant factor in the Mexican definition of childhood. Review: The Fear of Robachicos in Mexico, Susana Sosenski, by Gavin O'Toole

The Fear of Robachicos in Mexico: Media, Childhood, and Child Kidnapping 1900–1968, Susana Sosenski, translated by Quentin Pope, 2024, Bloomsbury Academic

It is something all parents recognise—the fear of what might happen when they allow their children out to play by themselves—and those imagined hazards that lurk in the shadows and fuel this dread multiply with every generation.

But although this fear is transgenerational, indeed, ancient, so nervous have we become today about the risks of letting our offspring outside, it is transforming our culture, redefining family relationships, and damaging child mental health.

In the UK, the charity Save the Children says only one in four children now play out regularly on their street compared with their grandparents’ generation, when three-quarters did so.

Fear of strangers, excessive traffic, increased screen time, poorly maintained public spaces  and other hazards are curbing children’s ability to play outside, with consequences for the development of social skills, freedom, independence and the negotiation of shared spaces.

In short, manifold fears have been turning traditional understandings of childhood—and the social interactions underpinning these—on their heads.

And as with all moral panics, the media has played an outsized role in generating unease, with sensationalist coverage about child abductions and the many dangers of the contemporary world outside the home.

Translate all these factors to a country like Mexico, where police impunity and corruption mean that crime is rarely solved and justice rarely served, and a moral panic becomes a crisis in which the dark, central protagonist has been the faceless “robachicos” (child-snatcher).

Susana Sosenski’s book examines this disturbing theme in the period 1900 to 1968, with a special focus on media narratives about child abduction and their impact on society.

More importantly, it delineates the ways in which mass media act to create and shape our understanding of childhood, the attitudes to and policy on which never occur in a vacuum.

At the heart of this fear of child abduction is a protagonist largely dreamed up through a tradition of scaring children that can be found across many cultures—the child-snatcher, the sum of all our fears.

The figure of the robachicos, Sosenski writes, “was a character who was simultaneously complex, real, criminal, metaphorical, literary, and who condensed humans’ deepest fears into actions, practices, and policies”.

Adults create these fearful narratives across many forms of media, which children then internalise, and hence this is a book, the author says, “that links the history of childhood with the history of fear and … with the media and uses of public space”.

The Fear of Robachicos in Mexico explores how mass media and the entertainment industry produced collective fear about childhood, influenced policies linked to minors, affected opinions, and exposed the ineffectiveness, disinterest, and corruption of Mexico’s criminal justice system and government officials.

It takes as its historical focus a specific period of Mexican modernity in which the tentacles of the mass media began to reach into every corner of the national imaginary.

Corruption and impunity are, of course, rife in Mexico and as such Sosenski argues that they are defining aspects of this topic. Child abduction is clearly not exclusive to Mexico, but unlike so many other countries it is one where justice is rarely served, fostering a particularly grisly relationship between a system without rules and a tabloid media without scruples.

Fear sells newspapers, and the Mexican media used child kidnapping, and the figure of the robachicos in particular, as a major trigger of social alarm in connection with childhood, often fuelling racist, classist, and xenophobic stereotypes about potential perpetrators.

All of these factors can be identified in the UK, for example, in the press coverage of cases such as that of Madeleine McCann, who disappeared in Portugal in 2007 and has never been found. If it were possible to calculate how much revenue her story has generated in the British press, it would be a tidy sum indeed.

In turn, the robachicos has served to provide a mechanism of control by the state over parents, by men over women, and by the latter over children—a hierarchy of social control—while excluding children from the public realm by forcing them to reside in controlled, private spheres.

In a country such as Mexico, this might be seen as an apprenticeship for citizenship, where the public realm has long been so restricted and controlled.

Sosenski is an academic at UNAM’s Historical Research Institute whose specialisms include the history of childhood in Mexico City. The Fear of Robachicos in Mexico examines how incipient fears about child abduction in the early 20^th century were stoked by the press.

The author provides not only a history of these fears when they became most hysterical during the 20^th century, but a history of “kidnapping” itself, the legal context in which this crime has been situated, and policies on childhood.

She looks at how children and adolescents were used and trafficked between the 1920s and 1960s—often for sexual abuse and prostitution—based on the legal documents of cases in the capital.

Sosenski zooms in on the case of Fernando Bohigas, whose abduction rattled the middle-classes and proved to be a watershed that led to the first reform in the penal code related specifically to this crime.

In a fascinating chapter on the Granats case—the kidnapping of the daughter of one of Mexico’s wealthiest families during the 1950s—the author explores how power and corruption taint the approach of the criminal justice system. Critics of judicial reform in Mexico would do well to read this.

Sosenski’s aim throughout is to demonstrate the outsized role of narratives generated by the press, film and entertainment industry in nurturing fear and constructing stereotypes for commercial gain—but with real emotional consequences.

Bigger mechanisms, however, may have been at work behind the scenes. It was the revolutionary state, and patriarchy, that would probably benefit most in the endeavour to remodel society in ways that enabled greater control of both the public and private realms.

The author writes: “The consolidation of the hegemonic idea of the nuclear family, which began in the post-revolutionary years, coexisted with the growing idea that children, especially from the middle and upper classes, needed to be shut away in the home.

“Like school, the domestic setting became synonymous with children’s safety, even though this was often not the case in reality. The public space very slowly ended up turning into an imaginary of a hostile environment for children, aided by various social actors (the press, authorities, media audiences, school teachers).”