‘Up to 700 young British jihadists could be in Syria:
Terror chief says authorities are powerless to stop young Muslims travelling to the country’.62 The combined effect of tabloid reporting on ‘deviant’ youth and the discourse of politicians is to exacerbate the initial ‘problem of deviance’. Responses to negative ‘societal reaction’ (labelling) can lead to ‘secondary deviance’,63 whereby
56 Rob WHITE, ‘Young People, Crime and Justice’, in Andy FURLONG (ed.), Handbook of Youth and Young Adulthood, London: Routledge, 2009, p. 445.
57 Peter SQUIRES, ‘Anti-Social Behaviour: Marginality, Intolerance and the “Usual Suspects”’, in Sarah PICKARD, 2014, op. cit., chapter 19.
58 See Sue BOND-TAYLOR, ‘The Politics of “Anti-Social” Behaviour within the “Troubled Families” Programme’, in Sarah PICKARD, 2014, op. cit., chapter 10.
59 https://www.gov.uk/government/policies/helping-troubled-families-turn-their-lives-around [accessed 12 May 2014].
60 Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, Part 1: Injunctions, 1, http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2014/12/pdfs/ukpga_20140012_en.pdf [accessed 5 May 2014].
61 Elizabeth BURNEY, op. cit., p. 47.
62 Chris GREENWOOD, ‘Up to 700 Young British Jihadists Could Be in Syria’, Daily Mail, 24 April 2014.
63 ‘When a person begins to employ his deviant behaviour or a role based upon it as a means of defense, attack, or adjustment to the overt and covert problems created by the consequent societal reaction to him, his deviation is secondary. Objective evidences of this change will be found in the symbolic appurtenances of the new role, in clothes, speech, posture, and
which the ‘deviant’ comes to accept the external definition of deviance, encouraging him or her to be (more) deviant or defiant. For example, the headline ‘21 beers, 44 shots, 17 vodkas, 7 whiskies—in ONE night. The shocking proof students are drinking themselves to death’ (Daily Mail, 16 April 2014)64 may actually encourage some students to drink more alcohol. Or the article headlined ‘Clubber pulls pants down and does “no 2” on dance floor‘ (The Sun, 15 April 2014)65 might encourage the perpetrator to repeat the act, as might ‘Serial culler. A teenager obsessed with killing animals proudly poses with a rifle to show off his latest prey’ (The Sun, 3 April 2014).66 Thus, the self-image of the individual (the image he/she has of himself/herself) changes so that the self becomes consistent with the deviant label, leading to a greater degree of negative behaviour. Furthermore, the labelling of young people as feckless, irresponsible, selfish, violent and lazy, and their behaviour as problematic, worrying, risky, dangerous and threatening, may lead members of the group to remove themselves further from society and to reject societal norms.
This social isolation or social exclusion can encourage the group to create and nurture its own specific subculture. In turn, society may consider the group to be a threat and exclude it further, thus creating a ‘spiral of deviancy’.67
The term ‘deviancy amplification’ was employed by Leslie Wilkins in the 1960s to describe how small acts of deviancy are reported in an exaggerated way and gain disproportionate significance in the media.68 The labelling of deviants leads to a popular overreaction to deviant stereotypes. Jock Young, writing about drug users in Images of Deviance (1971), pointed out the effect of the media presenting consistently negative news about young people in terms of creating a ‘moral panic’:
The media, then—in a sense—can create social problems, they can present them dramatically and overwhelmingly, and, most important, they can do it suddenly. The media can very quickly and effectively fan public indignation and engineer what one might call a ‘moral panic’
about a certain type of deviancy. Indeed because of the phenomenon of over-exposure—such a glut of information in a short time on one topic that it becomes uninteresting—there is institutionalized into the media the need to create moral panics and issues which will seize the imagination of the public.69
mannerisms, which in some cases heighten social visibility, and which in some cases serve as symbolic cues to professionalization’. (Edwin LEMERT, Social Pathology: Systematic Approaches to the Study of Sociopathic Behavior, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951, p. 76.)
64 Kathryn KNIGHT, ‘21 Beers, 44 Shots, 17 Vodkas, 7 Whiskies—in ONE Night: The Shocking Proof Students Are Drinking Themselves to Death’, Daily Mail, 16 April 2014.
65 Karen MORRISON, ‘Clubber Pulls Pants Down and Does “No 2” on Dance Floor’, Sun, 15 April 2014.
66 Ben ARCHIBALD & Kevin DUGUID, ‘Serial Culler: A Teenager Obsessed with Killing Animals Proudly Poses with a Rifle to Show Off His Latest Prey’, Sun, 3 April 2014.
67 Jock YOUNG, The Drugtakers: The Social Meaning of Drug Use, London: Paladin, 1971.
68 Leslie WILKINS, Social Deviance: Social Policy, Action and Research, London: Tavistock Publications, 1964.
69 Jock YOUNG, op. cit., 1971, p. 37.
The term ‘moral panic’ was created by Stanley Cohen in his 1971 PhD thesis on young people and deviance that became his classic study: Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and the Rockers, in which he commented, ‘the media play on the normative concerns of the public and by thrusting certain moral directives into the universe of discourse, can create social problems suddenly and dramatically’.70 First, the mass media give a distorted and exaggerated impression of the level of crime committed by young people, which gives rise to public concern for their personal safety and about the risk of being a victim of crime: a moral panic.
This infers that there is something fundamentally wrong with the moral fabric of society due to the behaviour of young people. The young thus become defined as a moral threat to traditional societal values and interests. ‘Public consciousness is then aroused to identify other disorder problems, which in turn increases sensitivity to anything that might be seen in this category’.71 Subsequently, related crime and other forms of crime and delinquency committed by young people are over-reported in the media and gain more importance than they would have otherwise gained. For example, in April 2014, one girl died after taking the legal high Meow Meow and on the following days there were more stories on young people and drugs than there would have been otherwise (see Tables 3 and 4). More drugs were probably not being consumed and more young people probably did not suffer from related health problems, but the initial episode led to similar issues being given more prominence in the media.72 This also happens with knife crime.73 For example, following the fatal stabbing of a schoolteacher on 28 April 2014, the tabloid coverage—both the language employed and the number of articles on similar incidents—made it look like there was an epidemic of knife crime, whereas it was the first fatal stabbing of a teacher on school premises for almost twenty years.74
Over-reporting keeps the specific issue high on the public agenda and people—voters—demand from local authorities, the police and politicians that something is done to deal with the problem. As a result, the police become more sensitive to the issue and notice more related crime, which leads to more arrests, reinforcing the idea that there is more crime. For example, dispersal powers75 can increase police–youth antagonism, bring young people to police attention on the
70 Stanley COHEN, op. cit., p. 71.
71 Elizabeth BURNEY, op. cit., p. 11.
72 ‘The relation between youth and illicit drugs, in fact, represents one of the most enduring moral panics of the post-war period’. (Bill OSGERBY, Youth in Britain since 1945, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998, p. 45.)
73 See Sarah PICKARD, ‘Blade Britain and Broken Britain: Knife Crime Among Young People in Britain Today’, Jean-Philippe FONS (ed.), Regards sur la jeunesse britannique, Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique, vol. 15, n° 3, 2009, pp. 65-78.
74 In 1995, Philip Lawrence, a head teacher was stabbed to death outside a school in Maida Vale, London, when he attempted to help a pupil who was being attacked.
75 Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill. Fact Sheet: Dispersal Powers, 2013, p. 1, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/202891/Fact_s heet_Police_Powers.pdf [accessed 5 May 2014]. Dispersal orders ‘give the police the power to disperse individuals or groups causing or likely to cause ASB in public places. Police officers and police community support officers (if designated the power by their chief constable) will be able to require a person to leave an area and not return for up to 48 hours.
The power can be used in any public place and in common areas of private land with the landowner or occupier’s consent (such as shopping centres)’.
basis of the company they keep, render young people more vulnerable, and reinforce a perception of young people as a risk to others rather than as at risk themselves.76 The state response is to introduce stricter forms of social control through tougher legislation. Thus since the 1960s, ‘a sequence of moral panics about “depraved youth” has been a dominant and recurring feature of media representations of young people’77 and the political elite now overreact and are at the centre of promoting panics and issues associated with a loss of order.78 This leads to the marginalisation, stigmatisation and ‘othering’ of young people.
Crime and delinquency are socially patterned: certain categories of young people are labelled and criminalised more than others due to their social circumstances.79 First, labelling by the powerful popular press and politicians is primarily of working-class youth. In the 1970s, selective enforcement of the law and selective reporting in the media gave the impression that young criminals were largely working class.80 This is still the case in the 21st century during which ‘the approach of politicians and the media has been to encourage fear and loathing of working-class youth’.81 Political responses add to this othering of the working classes and, according to Owen Jones, ‘it is difficult to deny that [ASBOs] have increased the bad reputation of young working-class kids and popularized the chav caricature’.82 Young people from poor backgrounds have increasingly become labelled as anti-social and deviant because the burden of the new laws proposed to discipline parents falls disproportionately on the inhabitants of Britain’s poorest and most deprived neighbourhoods, social housing estates and communities.83 This sets working class youth apart from the mainstream and the rest of society causing their demonisation, marginalisation and social exclusion:
The demonization of the working class is the legacy of a concerted effort to shift public attitudes, which began under Thatcher, continued with New Labour and has gained further momentum under the coalition. Poverty and unemployment were no longer to be seen as social problems, but to do with moral failings. Anyone could make it if they tried hard enough, or so the myth went. If people were poor, it was because they were lazy, spendthrift or lacked aspiration.84
Second, young people belonging to ethnic or religious minorities tend to be labelled more than others. Thus, a young black and/or Muslim man from a poor background is ‘at the bottom of the heap’, in general he has the least power and he is attributed negative labels the most. According to John Muncie, young black males
76 Adam CRAWFORD, ‘Criminalizing Sociability through Anti-social Behaviour Legislation:
Dispersal Powers, Young People and the Police’, Youth Justice, vol. 9, n° 1, 2009, pp. 5-26.
77 John MUNCIE, op. cit., p. 9.
78 Stuart WAITON, op. cit., p. 121.
79 Rob WHITE, art. cit., p. 446.
80 Dave GORDON, ‘Capitalism, Class and Crime in America’, Crime and Delinquency, vol. 19, n° 2, 1973, pp. 163-87.
81 Owen JONES, op. cit., pp. 211-12.
82 Ibid., p. 95.
83 Peter SQUIRES & Dawn STEPHEN, op. cit., p. 5.
84 Owen JONES, op. cit., p. xii.
are more likely to be apprehended and convicted.85 The police might tend to apprehend or arrest those already known to them—it is easier and it is a form of targeting of specific groups emanating from labelling (or discrimination). For example, during the inner city riots of August 2011, the police first arrested young people already known to them—i.e. youngsters who had been previously ‘come to their attention’. Therefore, young black males were overrepresented in initial police arrests.86 The tendency to label young Muslims as deviant due to their religion, marginalises them and this might encourage radicalisation, the very thing the tabloids seem concerned about.87 These circumstances lead to the marginalisation and stigmatisation of all young black and Muslim people who become outsiders88 and are therefore socially excluded.
Controversially, David Farrington and Brandon Welsh89 suggest that through the accumulation of risk factors (living in a disadvantaged neighbourhood, attending an under-performing school, being raised in a family blighted by poverty, unemployment, criminality, low educational attainment and marital breakdown), it is possible to predict before the age of ten whether a child will become a young offender. Whilst this might lead to suitable intervention and help for some children, it can easily slide into the labelling of such minors and to the stigmatisation and targeting of specific groups. This harks back to 19th century biological and psychological theories regarding the criminal class.90
Young people are responsible for a high proportion of recorded crimes91 with the peak offending age being 18 for males and 15 for females.92 It is possible that young people do commit more crime as their lifestyles take them into environments where crime is more likely to take place. According to official statistics, the most common crime is theft of property; young people are more likely to be in public areas where pickpocketing and mugging usually occurs. But it must be borne in mind that young people often hang around in noticeable groups on the streets and other public spaces. They are thus highly visible and if they commit an act of anti-social behaviour, delinquency or criminality, they are more likely to be observed than other sections of the population who might be criminal but whose acts go
85 John MUNCIE, op. cit. p. 295.
86 GUARDIAN AND LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS (LSE), ‘Reading the Riots’, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/series/reading-the-riots [accessed 5 May 2014].
87 See the articles in the Sun during April 2014 on a young Muslim man born in Britain who died after going to fight in Syria and subsequent articles suggesting that other young men might return as terrorists.
88 Howard BECKER, op. cit.
89 David FARRINGTON & Brandon WELSH, Saving the Children from a Life of Crime:
Early Risk Factors and Effective Interventions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
90 See Cesare LOMBROSO, L’uomo delinquente, 1876; English translation: Cesare LOMBROSO with Gina LOMBROSO-FERRERO, Criminal Man, According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso, Montclair NJ: Patterson Smith, 1972. Raffaele GAROFALO, Criminologia, 1885; English translation: Raffaele GAROFALO, Criminology, Montclair NJ: Patterson Smith, 1968.
91 Andy FURLONG, op. cit., p. 188.
92 OFFICE FOR NATIONAL STATISTICS (ONS), Social Trends, London: Home Office, n° 41, 2011.
unnoticed.93 This is all the more true since due to labelling by the popular press and by politicians, the public are more alert to young people and potential deviancy. Do young people commit more crime than other age groups? They are arrested more often by the police because the crimes they commit are more visible with more witnesses, for example, graffiti. Nonetheless, young people are targeted more by the police through surveillance and monitoring due to labelling. Lastly, young people are more likely to be convicted of crime in court in part due to prejudices or because they cannot pay for lawyers.
Similarly, media reporting of youth crime makes the problem seem more visible than it is in reality. The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) (previously called the British Crime Survey) asks respondents about their perceptions of anti-social behaviour problems in their local area. Readers of The Sun and the Daily Mail have much higher perceptions of crime than readers of other newspapers (see Table 1), as do younger age groups (see Table 2). This might be because readers of these two tabloids live in areas where there is a lot of anti-social behaviour. Or it might be because portrayals of anti-social behaviour within their newspapers give the impression that anti-social behaviour is more widespread than it really is. Respondents were also asked about whether levels of crime had changed over the previous two years. Whilst a big majority believed that crime had increased nationally, only a small proportion thought that crime had increased in their local area. However, according to the Crime Survey for England and Wales statistics and police recorded crime statistics, crime has been dropping in Britain since the early 1990s. Such inaccurate perceptions among the public of ‘deviant’ young people bear little relation to reality and they must surely be informed by the negative labelling of young people in the tabloid press and elsewhere in the media, for example in television programmes such as Little Britain (BBC) and Skins (Channel 4).94 Politicians also contribute to these perceptions.