2 - Media representation of young people and crime Flashcards
Youth as the ‘other’
The process of attaching moral codes of inferiority to difference.
Othering is a critical discursive tool for discrimination.
Linked to cultural and political themes within any given society.
Otherisation results in the marking of ‘normative boundaries’ - the Other is positioned as outsider.
Moral panics (Cohen)
The media simplifying an issue thus creating a panic in society.
Criminalisation
A process and a tool by which state penal and legal and regulation are imposed upon ‘folk devils’.
Processed or coded images of the ‘folk devil’ as a threat to societal values helps to legitimate new modes of social control (a hardening of the law) by soliciting the public’s consent for these measures.
Criminalisation is used as a tool to manage social problems.
Multiple scapes (Appadurai)
Ethnoscapes - emigration and immigration of people
Mediascapes - ways information is shared
Technoscapes - technological advances
Financescapes - how money moves
Ideoscapes - dominant (political) ideologies and counter ideologies
Gangsta culture
MEDIASCAPES
Rap videos, video games, hip hop fashion, etc.
Mobilises groups of young people to imagine and feel things together.
IDEOSCAPES
The image is a sign code of the dangers of encounters with the Other which threatens ‘us’.
The images draw on affects or emotions such as connected to terror, shame, disgust which are distributed within a partially globalised public stage.
Cultural reductionism
Culture as the property of an ethnic group or race: as a distinctive and bounded entity; and as internally homogeneous.
Racialisation of youth gangs
Media claims: ethnic youth are violent, race as the cause of crime.
Research evidence: less than 23% of SYV, causes of crime - social structural, categorisation errors.
Mediated solution for ethnic youth gangs
Pre-emptive policing
Treat individual crimes as a ‘gang matter’
Responsibilisation of ethnic communities
Stamp out gangs by attacking multiculturalism
