ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the unfairly accused teen male, whose life is almost destroyed by a combination of Police inefficiency, judicial system bias, and the mass hysteria spread by the media. The Central Park Five (2012)—by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon—denounces the unfair sentencing of a group of black teens for the brutal assault and rape of a white female jogger in New York's Central Park. The filmmakers explore the racism behind the accusations and the convictions; however, they overlook how the profound misogyny of the actual perpetrator extends beyond race. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996), Paradise Lost: Revelations (2000), and Paradise Lost: Purgatory (2011) as well as Amy Berg's West of Memphis (2012) expose how three low-class white teens were absurdly sentenced for the murder of three little boys following spurious accusations of Satanism. The four films miss, it is argued, the intra-masculine gender politics of hatred which condemned these young men for their resistance to fit normative masculinity, and also neglect to analyze the position of the victims as casualties of aberrant patriarchal masculinity.
