Charles Krinsky - Moral Panics over Contemporary Children and Youth

I can see why young people and people who identify as sub-cultures become easy targets in the media. Lets list some of the disadvantages these groups have going against them using young people as the main example. First of all young people (teenagers in particular) have no political platform to defend themselves, if you are of school age you can not be employed nor can you become part of an establishment where people will listen to you and take you seriously. Teenagers have very little power, they are too young to work, too young to vote, too young to be elected for a political position and as a whole they are too young to build up a powerful establishment where they can have an impact and hold a position of power. Young people do not have any of those things. Age discrimination against the young is one of the few types of widespread discrimination that people will not object to, it is true there are forms of immaturity that come with being young but considering immaturity is the biggest problem maker younger people have the odds unfairly weighed against them.

Although Jock Young was referring to drug users in the book The Drugtakers: The Social Meaning of Drug Use (1971), it is not difficult to apply the issues faced by drug users with the issues faced by under 18's.
"Young’s book shows that media condemnation of drug taking not only led to more arrests, but also resulted in a greater sense of community and shared identity among drug users, who increasingly felt alienated from the mainstream." (Krinsky, 1)
Young people have been alienated so much in the media that part of the problem with handling young people now is how can an adult communicate with them. Examples of youth culture and the divide between adults and teenagers can be seen in films such as Kidulthood (Menhaj Huda, 2006). Kidulthood is a narrative about the lives lived by intercity high school children as they struggle with their own concepts of maturity (sex, drugs, pregnancy, gang violence, crime etc). Kidulthood is an interesting case as the main characters are all people teenagers are meant to identify with, depending on how you choose to view the film the characters can either be conflicted and confused teens who are learning harsh truths about the real world or you can see the characters as unethical people who don't fully understand what is acceptable behavior. Many have defended the film saying that what the characters go through are all things teenagers go through and I find those kind of statements to be unintentionally negative. Although there are cases of it happening do we really want characters from films like Kidulthood to be seen as the popular image of the average teenager, more importantly do teens themselves want to be stereotyped as being no different to the characters portrayed in such films?
Maybe the problem is with me but I haven never personally bought into this idea that the teenage lifestyle is about secretly trouble making while adults look the other way. I will congratulate Kidulthood though as those issues tie into one concept that is undoubtedly part of the teenage life and that is getting around the restrictions put on you by others. That is the real teenage life, having to deal with what feels like being trapped in a dome, you can't go where you want, you can't do what you want and you can not buy what you want because your age says otherwise. There is very little else as frustrating as feeling like you are on the same level as someone else but at the same time looked down upon. This sort of thing can leave a person incredibly frustrated and even angry and the worse part is it will never get better because there is no way we can ever possibly judge everyone's maturity on a case by case basis. Mental and physical maturity are two different things but you can not track mental maturity so the only manageable solution is to use age caps.

There is a long list of reasons why a young person might feel repressed or discriminated against, not all cases are the same, teenagers are unique as they are seen as a social group but it is one of the few social groups where every member is from a completely different place, from a different background, of a different sex, ethnicity, nationality, class etc. How do you define a group that is so diverse that it can contain people who are total opposites? The answer is you ignore it.

Images such as the above are used as the populist image of the British youth, dangerous, aggressive, intimidating and possibly living in poverty. When the 2012 London riots took place this image became the poster image for the riots, to the media the person in the image was the problem. This is a person many of us know, we may live next door to them, we may have gone to school with them, they might even be our children. That was the story the media was going for, they wanted people to buy into the story of a nation of dysfunctional young people who don't know how to act civilized. Images such as these is where our moral panics come from in relation to teenagers.

I strongly agree with a lot of the things said by Stanley Cohen in regards to moral panics over youth culture. They have indeed been demonized and "have occupied a constant position as folk devils in moral panics” (Cohen 2002, 2). Youth culture is such a big moral panic topic and when the focus isn't on condemning this youth culture it is instead on trying to find the things that are considered the cause of troubled youth. Following the James Bulger murder the tabloid media became obsessed with "video nasties" violent films that were not intended for children, many people blamed the film Child's Play (Holland, 1988), calling it the cause of the incident and the reason why Robert Thompson and John Venables murdered the 2 year old Bulger. This moral panic has been used again and again for different topics. Following the Bulger case video games such as Mortal Kombat (and Night Trap, hilariously) created such a large moral panic among politicians that it was made a law that video games had to be given age ratings. Video games are often blamed as the cause of violent incidents involving youth.

To be fair that is pretty violent.

I do agree that the 1990's was definitely the time period where the moral panic was at its peak. There are a lot of reasons for why this may be, one theory I personally have is that with the fall of the USSR the media needed a new fear to latch onto because bad news sells more paper than good news. Bad news is almost like a trend, if a story is proven to hook an audience then the newspapers will keep running the story until people stop following it. Pedophilia has become the moral panic that keeps on giving for the tabloids because it is undoubtedly the one area where no one will ever oppose them. Krinsky sums up the whole issue quite well.

"Needing no enhancement or mediation, the facts of child molestation can generate enough “genuine public horror” to bring about necessary policy changes without the additional impetus of moral panic. On the other hand, a moral panic enables reformers to turn an actual danger into a symbolic evil, which they can then exploit to distract the public and divert limited resources toward suppressing largely unrelated and less harmful sexual behaviors" (Krinsky, 5).

The moral panic issue could be best seen as an indicator of how the media reacts towards world affairs. Moral panics never creates the news the news creates the moral panics. If you preach enough eventually people will begin to listen, that is and always has been the way of the moral panic story.

References:
Young, J. (1971). The Drugtakers. 1st ed. London: MacGibbon and Kee.
Krinsky, C. (2008) Moral Panics over Contemporary Children and Youth. Aldershot: Ashgate. Chapter 1.