Abstract
In recent years, sensational press reporting of violent crimes committed by and against children has led, periodically, to a host of opinion-makers denouncing ‘video nasties’ or violence in movies and on television as somehow contributing to a general collapse in moral standards. British Prime Minister John Major told the Conservative Central Council meeting in Harrogate on 6 March 1993 that those who made and distributed films and videos should ‘think whether a relentless diet of violence won’t have a serious effect on the young’. He was responding to the shocking abduction and murder a few weeks before in Bootle, Merseyside, of 2-year-old James Bulger by two 10-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. ‘UNPARALLELED EVIL AND BARBARIC KILLERS SAYS JUDGE BUT DID HORRIFIC VIDEO NASTY TRIGGER JAMES’S MURDER?’ queried a tabloid newspaper headline on the day after their conviction.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
‘Keep Violence off our Screens, Says Major’, The Independent on Sunday, 7 Mar. 1993, p. 1 ; ‘Unparalleled Evil…’, Today, 25 Nov. 1993, pp. 2–3. For serial killer, child abuse, paedophilia, ritual abuse and other constructed media panics see: Les Levidow, ‘Witches and Seducers: Moral Panics for our Time’, in Barry Richards (ed.), Crises of the Self: Further Essays on Psychoanalysis and Politics (London, 1989) pp. 181–215;
Philip Jenkins, Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain (NewYork, 1992).
‘Bulger Case Judge Urges Debate on Parenting and Violent Videos’, Guardian, 27 Nov. 1993, p. 1; Martin Barker, ‘Sex, Violence and Videotape’, Sight and Sound, iii (1993) pp. 10–12. For acquittal of the Child’s Play 3 video in Manchester’s Suzanne Capper case see: Beatrix Campbell, ‘Moral Panic’, Index on Censorship, 24 (1995) pp. 57–61.
James B. Twitchell, Preposterous Violence: Fables of Aggression in Modern Culture (New York, 1989) pp. 48–89;
John Springhall, ‘ “Corrupting the Young”? Popular Entertainment and “Moral Panics” in Britain and America since 1830’, Aspects of Education:Journal of the Institute of Education: The University of Hull, 50 (1994) pp. 95–110.
James Gilbert,A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York, 1986) p. 4;
Graham Murdock, ‘Disorderly Images: Television’s Presentation of Crime and Policing’, in C. Sumner (ed.), Crime Justice and the Mass Media (Cambridge, 1982) p. 104;
J. J. Tobias, Crime and Industrial Society in the Nineteenth Century (Harmondsworth, 1972 edn) p. 53.
Jenkins, Intimate Enemies, pp. 9–10; Steven Starker, Evil Influences: Crusades against the Mass Media (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991 edn);
Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave, Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock ‘n’Roll (Hamden, CT, 1988).
Mark. I. West, Children, Culture, and Controversy (Hamden, CT, 1988) p. 7;
Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth (New York, 1954);
John Fulce, Seduction of the Innocent Revisited (Lafayette, 1990) p. 76;
Michael Medved,Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values (London, 1993 edn) pp. xviii–xix. See The Sunday Times Film Forum, 11 Mar. 1993, for a panel discussion of Medved’s polemical book.
Jock Young, The Drugtakers: The Social Meaning of Drug Use (London, 1971);
Stan Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (Oxford, 1972) pp. 9–10;
Stuart Hall, with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: ‘Mugging’, the State and Law and Order (London, 1978).
Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda., Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance(Oxford, 1994) pp. 138–41;
Rob Sindall, Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century : Media Panic or Real Danger? (Leicester, 1990) pp. 29–36.
Victor Neuburg, Popular Literature: A History and Guide: From the Beginning of Printing to the Year 1897 (Harmondsworth, 1977) pp. 254–6;
Kirsten Drotner, English Children andtheir Magazines, 1751–1945(New Haven, CT, 1988)pp. 17–27.
Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1981) pp. 72–5;
Mary V.Jackson, Engines of Instruction, Mischief and Magic: Children’s Literature in England from its Beginnings to 1839 (Aldershot, 1990);
Susan Easton et al., Disorder and Discipline: Popular Culture from 1550 to the Present (Aldershot, 1988) pp. 62–5.
Kirsten Drotner, ‘Modernity and Media Panics’, in Michael Skovmand and Kim Christian Schrøder (eds), Media Cultures: Reappraising Transnational Media (London, 1992) pp. 42–62;
Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Harmondsworth, 1982) pp. 44–5.
Stanley Cohen, Visions of Social Control: Crime, Punishment and Classification (Cambridge, 1985) p. 156;
Angela McRobbie and Sarah L. Thornton, ‘Rethinking “Moral Panic” for Multi-mediated Social Worlds’, The British Journal of Sociology, xlvi (1995), pp. 559–74; ‘The Hammer Blow to our Conscience’, The Independent on Sunday, 21 Feb. 1993, p. 21; Richard Sparks, Television and the Drama of Crime (London, 1992) pp. 65–6.
Pierre Bordieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London, trans. 1984);
Lawrence W. Levine,Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA, 1988).
W. H. Groser, The Opening Life: Studies of Childhood and Youth for Sunday School Teachers(London, 1911) p. 30;
James Grant,Sketches in London (London, 1838) p. 163.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1998 John Springhall
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Springhall, J. (1998). Introduction. In: Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27458-1_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27458-1_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-66083-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-27458-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)