ABSTRACT
Best and Horiuchi are good examples of the way that sociologists have widened the approach to contemporary legends. Taking a constructionist approach to social problems and arguing that contemporary legends are responses to social strain, they review news stories about maliciously inflicted injuries to “trick-or-treaters” from 1958 to 1983 and conclude that the danger was exaggerated. Their analysis leads them to a definition of contemporary legends as “unconstructed social problems” i.e., fears and anxieties that have not (or not yet) been taken up by claims makers and made into a political issue. Joel Best is author of many works on the construction of social problems. These include: Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child-Victims. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990; and “Bad Guys and Random Violence: Folklore and Media Constructions of Contemporary Deviants.” Contemporary Legend 1 (1991): 107–21. Gerald T. Horiuchi is a retired Air Force pilot. This essay is reprinted from Social Problems 32.5 (1985): 488–99.
