Moral Panics over Contemporary Children and Youth

Charles Krinsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754674658
• eBook ISBN: 9781351916783
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The concept of moral panic has received considerable scholarly attention, but as yet little attention has been accorded to panics over children and youth. This is the first book to examine this important and controversial social issue by employing a rigorous intellectual framework to explore the cultural construction of youth, through the dissemination of moral panics. It is accessible in manner and makes use of the latest contemporary research by addressing some of the pressing recent concerns relating to children and youth, including cyber-related panics, child abuse and pornography, education and crime. A truly international collection, this volume features new global research focusing on the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and France as well as the United States. Genuinely multidisciplinary in approach, it will appeal to researchers and students across the social sciences and humanities - from sociology and social theory, to media, education, anthropology, criminology, geography and history.

Part I
Defining Youth and Youth Culture

Introduction to Part I

Researchers have long recognized that moral panics help construct youth cultures not only as adults imagine them, but also as they are experienced by young people themselves. In Folk Devils and Moral Panics, sociologist Stanley Cohen takes a decidedly critical view of this phenomenon:

Adult society actively uses the whole idea of adolescence and the youth culture in particular, to neutralize any real generational conflict. The young are consigned to a self-contained world with their own preoccupations, their entrance into adult status is frustrated and they are rewarded for dependency. The teenage culture makes them into ineffectual outsiders. (Cohen 2002, 150)

Cohen notes that young people retain some capacity to define youth cultures for themselves, primarily through consumerism, conceding, "the adolescent consumer is also an active agent in creating modes of expression which reflect his cultural experience" (Cohen 2002, 151). Nevertheless. Cohen maintains, moral panics typically exploit youth cultures in order to deter youthful rebellion – and in the process keep young people from defining their own cultures freely.

In "Subcultures, Cultures and Class" (1974), cultural studies scholars John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, and Brian Roberts somewhat complicate Cohen's perspective, arguing that moral panics over youth can have the unintended effect of advancing social change. They write.

As we have already hinted, the dominant society did not calmly sit on the sidelines throughout the period and watch the subcultures at play. What began as a response of confused perplexity – caught in the pat phrase, 'the generation gap' – became over the years, an intense, and intensified struggle. In the 1950's, 'youth' came to symbolize the most advanced point of social change; youth was employed as a metaphor for social change. The most extreme trends in a changing society were identified by the society's taking its bearings from what youth was 'up to': youth was the vanguard party – of the classless, post-protestant consumer society to come. (Clarke et al. 1974, 71)

Clarke, Hall, Jefferson, and Roberts differ from Cohen in believing that youth cultures (regularly appropriated by adults during moral panics) can sometimes effect a degree of progress. Still, they share Cohen's conviction that moral panics over youth (like the youth cultures they help create) characteristically advance the interests of adult society.

In their influential 1995 essay, "Rethinking 'Moral Panic' for Multi-Mediated Social Worlds" (also discussed in the introduction to this volume), sociologists Angela McRobbie and Sarah L. Thornton contend that moral panics, including those over youth, could well be more divided and contradictory than was originally thought:

In original moral panic theory, 'society' and 'societal reactions' were monolithic and, as others have already argued, ultimately functionalist . . . In the 1990s, when social differentiation and audience segmentation are the order of the day, we need take account of a plurality of reactions, each with their different constituencies, effectivities and modes of discourse. (1995, 564)

Although initiated and given momentum by fear, moral panics (at least those of recent years) encompass competing communities and cultures, varied intended effects, and diverse media viewpoints. Moreover:

The 1990s youth culture is steeped in the legacy of previous 'moral panics'; fighting mods and rockers, drug-taking hippies, foul mouthed punks and gender-bending New Romantics are part of their celebrated folklore. Whether youth cultures espouse overt politics or not, they are often set on being culturally 'radical'. Moral panic can therefore be seen as a culmination and fulfillment of youth cultural agendas in so far as negative news coverage baptizes transgression. What better way to turn difference into defiance, lifestyle into social upheaval, leisure into revolt. (McRobbie and Thornton 1995, 565)

Earlier moral panics have resulted in a youth culture capable of defining itself and fostering dissent largely on its own terms. Rather than becoming utterly excluded from mainstream society, contemporary youth cultures embrace the "difference" that can turn into "defiance." The youthful consumerism (to which such terms as "lifestyle" and "leisure" seemingly allude) that Cohen saw as mere diversion and Clarke and his coauthors considered a deeply flawed engine of social change can, according to McRobbie and Thornton, lead to "social upheaval" and "revolt."

In the wake of McRobbie and Thornton's research, a number of scholars have looked at the contradictions inherent in recent moral panics that have stirred up adults' fears about the young – and compelled young people to internalize those fears – but have also produced youthful resistance, self-definition, and cultural cohesiveness. For example, in "Reel Revolutionaries: An Examination of Hollywood's Cycle of 1960s Youth Rebellion Films," film historian Aniko Bodroghkozy asserts, "The moral panic around youth 'tyranny' and 'arrogance' was symptomatic of ideological struggle. The discourses of rebellious youth seemed to be forcing themselves onto a sector of the culture industry" (2002, 40). While Hollywood movies of the 1960s and early 1970s such as Zabriskie Point (1970) and The Strawberry Statement (1970) were largely symptomatic of adult panic, the views of the young also found some expression in them. Bodroghkozy goes on to note, however, that the dissenting viewpoints of the young can be found in such films only "in mediated and compromised form" (Bodroghkozy 2002. 40); youth culture manages to leave its mark on these films, but only after being substantially revised by adults.

In "'I'd Sell You Suicide': Pop Music and Moral Panic in the Age of Marilyn Manson," historian Robert Wright examines the controversy that arose in the late 1990s concerning heavy metal's supposed negative effects on the psyches of young American listeners. He concludes that shock rocker Marilyn Manson recreated his public image precisely to cultivate adult fears. According to Wright:

Manson has gone further down the road of pop cultural infamy than any of his 'shock rock', punk or heavy metal forebears by painstakingly deconstructing contemporary North American culture and 'mutating' (his word) into a prophetic persona whose very essence is to be reviled, condemned and ultimately sacrificed by that culture. (2000, 377)

An icon of youth culture, Manson rebels against adults' fears by the very act of embodying them. In this instance, youthful self-expression can be considered the product of panic, created in mediated interaction between youth culture and adult society.

Public health researchers Tom Ogwang, Leonie Cox, and Jude Saldanha's "Paint on their Lips: Paint-Sniffers, Good Citizens and Public Space in Brisbane" (2006) presents their study of a moral panic, which reached its peak in 2003, that centered on alcohol and drug use (including paint sniffing) by young people (mostly Indigenous youth) in two inner city civic spaces in Brisbane, Australia. As Wright argues in regard to Marilyn Manson, the authors find that these youth sometimes encourage panicked responses as a form of rebellion:

These young people made visible the concrete nature of power by their refusal to hide from the surveillance apparatus of the state, a refusal that made evident their disdain for state discipline and dramatized their difference from and refusal to conform to the society that had never served them. (Ogwang, Cox, and Saldanlia 2006, 413-414)

Outsiders because of their race, age, class, by their behaviors and appearance these young people invite White society's censure as a means of resisting conformity.

In the following pages, Bernard Schissel's "Justice Undone: Public Panic and the Condemnation of Children and Youth" looks at a series of moral panics over youth crime that have effectively relegated many children and youth to the margins of Canadian society (or, to appropriate Stanley Cohen's words, "consigned [them] to a self-contained world with their own preoccupations"). In particular, repressive laws and policies regarding young offenders have kept Aboriginal young people from integrating fully into either mainstream or indigenous culture.

According to Schissel, although adult responses to youth crime have not always privileged punishment over reformation, in recent years moral panic has initiated a trend toward stigmatizing and controlling young offenders. Results of this development include the Youth Criminal Justice Act, which came into force in 2002. The act makes it easier for Canadian courts to put young offenders in adult prisons and, along with other laws and policies, denies young people access to democracy and justice.

Robert Payne's "Virtual Panic: Children Online and the Transmission of Harm" investigates adult panic over children's access to sexual materials or expression of sexuality on the Internet. Payne's essay is the first of several in this book that include discussion of the influential ideas of sociologists Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda. Briefly, Goode and Ben-Yehuda suggest that moral panics can be recognized by five attributes: concern (anxiety over a perceived threat), hostility (animosity toward seemingly threatening behaviors or cultures), volatility (sudden starts and stops), consensus (agreement within one or more segments of society about the nature of a threat), and disproportionality (excessive or unnecessary cultural or governmental response to a threat) (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994, 157-59).

In Payne's view, that adult reactions were indeed out of proportion to the actual problem of online sexual exploitation of children can be confirmed by, for example, the Child Pornography Prevention Act and the Communications Decency Act, two bills passed by the US Congress in 1996 but subsequently ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Payne avers that such panicked responses ultimately prevent adults from fully understanding the character of children's virtual selves and sexualities as achieved online, an understanding needed in order to arrive at reasonable laws and policies protecting children from sexual abuse of exploitation. Although it addresses sexual issues and therefore could have been incorporated into part two of this book, Sex Panics, "Virtual Panic" has been included in this section because it concerns computer-based youth cultures such as, for example, those involving teenage "camgirls."

Like Payne's piece, John Springhalt's "'The Monsters Next Door: What Made Them Do It?' Moral Panics over the Causes of High School Multiple Shootings (Notably Columbine)" would perhaps fit equally well elsewhere in this collection. A study of moral panics over violence on high school campuses, the chapter might have been placed in Part III of this anthology. Schools and Schooling. It appears in this section, however, based on its in-depth commentary on youth cultures such as the so-called "Trench Coat Mafia" at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, and Goths at Columbine and elsewhere, whose tastes in music and fashion are personified by Marilyn Manson (whom Springhall, like Wright, discusses in depth).

Springhall focuses on the tragedy that occurred at Columbine on 20 April 1999, when Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, shot and killed 12 students and one teacher, injuring 24 others, before killing themselves. Placing this tragedy in the context of other high school shootings. Springhall (in common with Payne) alleges that adult panic, because it obscures rather than sheds light on the actual cultures in which young people live, makes instituting effective policies and laws to protect children and youth problematic. Specifically, Springhall maintains that adults panicked over the causes of high school multiple shootings look for the sources of student violence narrowly in the psychology of individual perpetrators rather than also questioning elements of American culture and society such as gun use and broken educational systems, thus impeding any effort to keep students safe.

References

Bodroghkozy, A. (2002), "Reel Revolutionaries: An Examination of Hollywood's Cycle of 1960s Youth Rebellion Films." Cinema Journal 41:3, 38-58.

Clarke, J., Hall, S., Jefferson, T., and Roberts, B. (1991), "Subcultures, Cultures amend Class: A Theoretical Overview," in Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds).

Cohen, S. (2002), Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 30th Anniversary Edition, 3rd Edition (London: Routledge). First published as Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972).

Goode, E. and Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994), "Moral Panics: Culture, Politics, and Social Construction," Annual Review of Sociology 20, 149-171.

Hall, S. et al. (1978), Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Critical Social Studies (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan).

Hall, S. and Jefferson, T., (eds) (1991). Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London: Routledge). First published as (1975) Working Papers in Cultural Studies 7/8.

McRobbie, A. and Thornton, S. (1995), "Rethinking 'Moral Panic' for Multi-Mediated Social Words." The British Journal of Sociology 46:4, 559-574.

Ogwang, T., Cox, L., and Saldanha, J. (2006), "Paint on their Lips: Paint-Sniffers, Good Citizens and Public Space in Brisbane," Journal of Sociology 42:4, 412-28.

Wright, R. (2000), "'I'd Sell You Suicide': Pop Music and Moral Panic in the Age of Marilyn Manson." Popular Music 19:3, 365-85.

Chapter 1
Justice Undone: Public Panic and the Condemnation of Children and Youth

Bernard Schissel

There is a growing antipathy among the North American public toward youth due to a widespread perception that young people are more disrespectful now than in the past, and that consequently they are more dangerous. In fact, in 2005 a national poll indicated that 63 percent of Canadians believed that sentences given to criminals –including sentences for young offenders – were not severe enough (Ottawa Citizen 2005, Al). Politicians, in concert with lobby groups (often organized by families of victims), argue that the epidemic of adolescent misbehavior is the result of poor parenting, dysfunctional families inhabiting certain geographical areas and class positions, and, most importantly, a lenient justice system. The conservative mantra decrying inadequate law and order is fraught with simplistic arguments that young people are getting away with murder. According to such logic, it follows that Canada's young offenders' law should be made tougher to stop youth from breaking the law. Politicians and other lawmakers are sensitive to public opinion polls and often act to assuage the fears of the public. There is, however, a contradiction between the public perception that youth are getting away with murder in part because of a lenient justice system and the empirical reality that children and youth are no more criminal or dangerous than in the past.

In the case of young offenders' law, the Canadian government's reaction has been to legislate a new act for young offenders that has responded to the fears and demands of the voting public. The Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA), legislated in 1999, came into effect in 2002, replacing the former Young Offenders Act (YOA). The YCJA has reduced the age at which a child can be considered a young offender (from 12 to ten) and the age at which a young offender could be transferred to adult court and ultimately, adult prison (from 16 to 14). The act, however, is accompanied by a set of principles that allows the diverting of youth from the justice system to restorative, community-based alternatives. The act, then, contains harsh provisions for locking up ostensibly dangerous youth but, paradoxically, is framed in a context of restorative justice and diversion.

There is a stark reality that flies in the face of any government policy to toughen young offenders' law, especially with respect to the transfer of youth to adult prisons. Firstly, Canada locks up more young offenders than any other jurisdiction in the industrialized world – proportionately more youth are incarcerated per capita than are adults despite the fact that adult crimes far surpass youth crimes in gravity and in number (Bell 1999). Secondly, the use of adult correctional facilities for youth constitutes not only a fundamental human rights violation, but also, as I discuss later in this chapter, a real threat to the well being of young offender...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: DEFINING YOUTH AND YOUTH CULTURE
• PART II: SEX PANICS
• PART III: SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLING
• PART IV: URBAN YOUTH
• Index