Gender and Family

Cree, Viviene E., Viviene E. Cree

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781447321910
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781447321927
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This Byte offers readers insight into some of the central debates and questions about gender and the family, examined through the lens of moral panic. It begins with an overview of the part played by moral panics, together with an appraisal of the work of Stanley Cohen, one of the chief architects of moral panic ideas. Drawing on research and practice examples from different parts of the world, it explores interconnections between gender, class, 'race' and age, and interrogates the role of the state (and social work) in intervening in family life.

ONE

Women and children first: contemporary Italian moral panics and the role of the state

Morena Tartari

Introduction

This chapter interrogates moral panic through examination of the treatment of child abuse and femicide in Italy in recent years. The discussion builds on my own research in this field. I will argue that child abuse and intimate partner violence are social problems that have both generated moral panics in contemporary Italy. These issues are real phenomena and they must not be neglected or denied, but their severity may have been over-emphasised and over-represented within the public and media arenas, giving rise to peaks of public concern and anxiety that, in turn, have provoked reactions that can be seen as moral panics. As we will see, waves of concern about child abuse were apparent in the years 2006 to 2009; then a new kind of phenomenon emerged in 2012: ‘femicide’. This term and its menace spread through different arenas under the pressure of feminist movements, moral entrepreneurs and politicians, thus provoking widespread social alarm and calls for action.

The chapter discusses my research into the emergence of these concerns and panics, the role of moral entrepreneurs and the disproportionality of the reaction, as well as the consequent legislation and the role of the state in reinforcing the social concerns. In what follows, I first explain how we can understand these issues as moral panics and what makes them such; then I identify some of the key ingredients of these contemporary moral panics; lastly, I discuss how the state can be seen as a particular kind of definer with strong power and control over the legitimisation of social concerns. I begin, however, with a brief introduction to the methodological approach taken in my study.

The approach used in my study

The methodological approach of this study is based on a flexible form of grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) and the use of sensitising concepts (Blumer, 1969), stemming from the seminal work of Cohen (1972), Hall et al (1978), Beck (1992), Jenkins (1992), Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994), Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995), Critcher (2003 and 2009) and Hier (2011). The corpus of data is constituted by national newspaper articles (from 1992 to 2013), TV programmes (2007 for the child abuse moral panic and 2012–13 for the femicide moral panic), 60 in-depth interviews with social actors involved in the emergence of panics, ethnographies of conferences and public events about child abuse and femicide, and journalism essays about these issues.

Child abuse and femicide as moral panics

Waves of heightened public concern about children and child abuse emerged between the 1980s and the 1990s across the United States and Europe, leading to numerous judicial inquiries (as discussed in full by de Young, 2004 and Jenkins, 1998). In particular, the focus of concern was a new kind of sex crime, the ritual abuse of children; and the perpetrators (the ‘folk devils’ in moral panic language) were held to be day-care providers and others who had contact with the children at the day-care centres. Although a great many of those who were accused of sexual abuse at this time were later acquitted, there were calls for changes in the law, sometimes successful. The moral entrepreneurs who had played such a significant role in the UK and the US panics also became well known in Europe, where they disseminated their studies at staff training events for professionals. Furedi (2004) has described this as a vital element in enhancing what he has identified as ‘therapy culture’, in other words vulnerability has become a salient feature of people, and the therapeutic culture fuels a representation of people as powerless and ill. Hence the problems of everyday life must be read as emotional problems, and this exacerbates audiences’ anxieties concerning ‘risks’ and ‘emotional damage’. In Italy, some professionals organised themselves into associations that became pressure groups and interest groups, and entered media arenas. They led moral crusades, sensitising parents to the innumerable risks for children and the danger of emotional damage, thus producing anxieties for both parents and a wider public. In particular, therapy culture gained consensus in social services and among social workers, and this engendered child-abuse moral panics.

Concerns about femicide are more recent; the term first appeared in Italy in 2012. Previously, Lagarde, a Mexican academic anthropologist and politician, had coined the term to describe the social phenomenon of the women killed in her country. She campaigned for the Mexican government to acknowledge the crime of femicide by extending the meaning of the term to encompass all crimes of hate and violence against women. The pioneering work of the feminist criminologists Russell and Radford (1992) identified femicide as a criminological category and brought it to public attention. In the Italian media, the term was used in a broad sense to refer to different situations ranging from abuse to murder. The femicide moral panic, which began as a cultural operation of sensitisation, followed the protests of the left-wing and feminist movements against the sexual scandals of Prime Minister Berlusconi. Campaigners railed against the image of the ‘woman as sexual object’ that had been highlighted by these scandals and by the media that Berlusconi owned; they also bemoaned the general degeneration of behaviour, and the potential threat of Berlusconi’s re-election. In the wake of the political controversy, the media concentrated its attention on this kind of crime.

It is my contention that campaigns centred on child abuse and femicide have all the fundamental ingredients of a moral panic; the process of their development and decline is similar to the processes described by the classic moral panic models, as will now be explored in more detail.

Key aspects of the child abuse and femicide moral panics in contemporary Italy

Analysis of national newspaper articles between 1992 and 2013 clearly demonstrates the course taken by the panic around child abuse in Italy, as seen in the disproportionality between real crime rates, on the one hand, and concerns and reactions in the media and public arenas on the other (Tartari, 2013 and 2014). The terms ‘paedophilia’ and ‘child abuse’ entered the media lexicon in the 1980s, but it was in the 1990s that their frequencies increased exponentially, with a similar trend for each of them. The term ‘paedophilia’ now predominates, while the term ‘child abuse’ has become less visible. ‘The paedophile’ has become unequivocally a ‘folk devil’; his representation is influenced by the construction of childhood in Western societies (Zelizer, 1994; James, Jenks and Prout, 1998), where the risks and menaces towards all children are perceived to have increased (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995).

The two main Italian national newspapers give different coverage to the perceived problem of child abuse: the left-wing newspaper emphasises social issues like this to a much greater extent. The media reflect the increase of public concern, and expert opinions enter the public debate. Interest groups are effective in gaining consensus among the elites, and moral entrepreneurs are efficient in drawing public attention to paedophilia issues – making a strong contribution to the creation of local moral panics. The emotional and moral components are over-represented in the discourses of moral entrepreneurs, and their claims are taken up by the state and its key institutions.

Politicians have progressively involved themselves in the child-abuse moral panics. The discourses of right-wing politicians stress the value of the traditional and patriarchal family, shifting the attention to paedophilia in order to underline the extra-familial nature of child abuse. In parallel, they promote a policy of uncertainty based on the sensationalisation of crimes and insecurity (Maneri, 2013). Left-wing politicians meanwhile focus their attention on children as victims to be protected, as subjects ‘at risk of suffering by the hands of adults’ (Critcher, 2009). This clashes with a progressive representation of children as participative subjects with agency: autonomous and active.

The child-abuse moral panics in Italy produced changes in the law, with the introduction of harsher penalties for crimes related to child abuse. The state funded public and private centres for the prevention and treatment of child abuse; it promoted campaigns against paedophilia; it supported public events against the phenomenon; and, through ministers, it sometimes took direct action by issuing ad hoc decrees. The state was receptive to the child-abuse moral panic and legitimated the claims raised by interest groups. The media, interest groups, experts and moral entrepreneurs, and the state with its institutions, created spirals of signification that led to moral panic.

Analysis of newspaper articles shows that the problem of femicide is also over-represented in the press, specifically in one of the main national newspapers that supports the social protests of left-wing women. While in 2006 cases of violence against women in the crime news were predominantly presented as murders of women by immigrants (Giomi and Tonello, 2013), by 2012 the focus was on intimate-partner violence. The victims were women involved in intimate relationships, not ‘women in general’; the offenders were their partners, husbands, ex-partners or ex-husbands – men with whom they had had a relationship. The folk devil, in this instance, was now the ‘man as a man’. Headlines like ‘We have become the country where the male has a licence to kill’ became common. Crimes figures were either over-emphasised or ignored or misused (see, for example, data from ISTAT and EUROSTAT). The publishing industry became interested in the phenomenon, and during 2012–13 the number of critical essays and popular works on femicide rapidly increased.

It is important to note that the interest groups involved in this moral panic were politically close to the interest groups of the child-abuse panic. The feminist movement and its related associations sought to raise funds from government sources, the aim being to reactivate already-existing centres for the protection of women or to create new centres for the treatment of women ‘at risk’ of violence, or victims of it. The sensitisation concerned risks and dangers that might originate from male power, from male cultural dominance and from the imbalanced relationships between men and women. The woman was represented as a victim, weak, unable to protect herself, in need of emotional, psychological, social and financial support. Left-wing politicians were active in underlining the ‘gender question’, while right-wing politicians did not constitute an effective opposition. How could they stand against something that was presented as so appalling? The femicide moral panic gained consensus among the elites and, in response to their demands, new and harsher penalties were introduced by the state.

Helping the weak: the rhetoric of the state close to citizens

Since the early 1990s, profound changes have taken place in the Italian social and political setting. In 1992, at national level a series of judicial inquiries were conducted against politicians and other members of Italian institutions. They revealed a system of corruption and illegal party funding in the form of bribes, with a consequent strong increase in public distrust of the institutions.

From 1994 to 2011, Berlusconi was Prime Minister four times: so-called ‘Berlusconism’ arose as a social, moral and political phenomenon (Giachetti, 2010; Genovese, 2011). Berlusconism is considered an expression of the crisis of moral values in conjunction with the country’s structural crisis (economic, financial, political and institutional). Berlusconi engaged in direct dialogue with the masses and belittled the value of the civil service, institutions and magistrates. His governments promoted large-scale campaigns on the fear of crime, where risks and social anxieties became useful instruments with which to foster insecurity and uncertainty. Hence the state, through its action to protect citizens, and law and safety enforcement, could become reconciled with citizens and also ‘converse’ with them, thereby providing a representation of the ‘state close to citizens’. As Jenkins (1992) suggests, a social, political and economic crisis is a factor that can sometimes engender panics, and the exaggeration of threats is sometimes a strategy to divert attention from a political and economic crisis. Paradoxically, the representations by feminist movements of women and children as vulnerable and victims gave liberal and conservative governments opportunities to reinforce the consensus. Citizens’ mistrust of institutions fostered the direct relationship between the charismatic leader (Berlusconi) and the mass, the government and citizens.

The problem of safety (Maneri, 2013) thus became a core issue. The focus on marginal groups, the idea of a society with a high crime rate, the certainty of punishment, harsher sentences and reassurance were strategies and rhetorical instruments with which to govern citizens’ mistrust. Paedophilia and femicide were crimes that forcefully entered the discourses on safety. Sensationalism on these themes was easy because they linked with moral and sexual issues.

Berlusconi’s scandals disrupted the dialogue and the ideal bond of trust between himself and citizens. The power and dominance of Berlusconi became synonymous with immorality. The sex theme, originated by feminist discourses, became a sensitive topic on which different projects of moralisation (Hunt, 1999) converged and cla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Series editors’ preface
• Introduction
• 1 Women and children first: contemporary Italian moral panics and the role of the state
• 2 Myths, monsters and legends: negotiating an acceptable working-class femininity in a marginalised and demonised Welsh locale
• 3 Making a moral panic: ‘feral families’, family violence and welfare reforms in New Zealand. Doing the work of the state?
• 4 The wrong type of mother: moral panic and teenage parenting
• 5 Amoral panic: the fall of the autonomous family and the rise of ‘early intervention’
• Afterword: when panic meets practice