4 MEDIA CONSTRUCTIONS OF CHILDREN EVIL MONSTERS AND TRAGIC VICTIMS Chapter Contents Children as Evil Monsters104 Children as Tragic Victims109 Guilt, Collusion, and Voyeurism114 Moral Panics and the Revival of Community: Some Concluding Thoughts115 Summary117 Study Questions118 Further Reading118 Overview Chapter 4 provides: A discussion of the complex and frequently contradictory assumptions made about children. An analysis of public fears and anxieties surrounding childhood, using as a case study the murder of two-year-old James Bulger by two older children in the UK in 1993. A comparison of media representations of this crime and other reported incidents that portrayed children as persistent offenders, evil monsters, and so on, with alternative media accounts representing children as vulnerable innocents who must be protected, not from other children, but from adults who seek to harm and exploit them. Evidence that suggests that children killed by strangers are much more likely to receive media attention than those who are killed by close relatives in the home. Support for the suggestion (which, in a somewhat crude formulation, underpins the moral panic thesis) that high-profile crimes involving child victims draw people together and mobilize their feelings of loss and guilt to produce a sense of imagined community. Key Terms adultification 107 children 104 dangerousness 109 doli incapax 107 evil monsters 104 imagined community 116 infantilization 106 pedophile 104 precautionary principle 112 stranger danger 110 tragic victims 104 In the last chapter, we noted that some aspects of the behavior of contemporary youth that might once have been conceived as normal, natural, and an inevitable part of growing up are increasingly becoming subject to moral censure and viewed as symptomatic of a fractured society. Yet, alongside the manufacture of fears about young people and crime, there has been a homogenization of age brackets into aspirational lifestyle categories that has resulted in a blurring of the distinctions between youth and adulthood. It might be argued, then, that the hostility once directed at an age group who were fundamentally different in appearance and aspirations to their parents generation has, more recently, transmuted into something more confused. Children and adolescents are still the subjects of moral panic and public outrage but, as we saw in our discussion of news values in Chapter 2, they are frequently also cast as tragic victims. In fact, never have societys attitudes toward young people been as polarized as they are currently. Alongside youth as folk devils, we now have children as the victims of folk devils. It is precisely this confusion that will be discussed in this chapter. First we will explore changing social constructions of childhood, then develop a more detailed critique concerning the paradoxical attitudes toward children and young people that emerged in the mid-1990s, when children became regarded both as evil monsters capable of committing the most depraved of acts and as impressionable innocents who must be safeguarded, especially from the new number-one demonspedophiles. Children as Evil Monsters Since the teenage rebellions of the 1950s and 1960s, the age at which young people have been criminalized, if not demonized, has been in flux, and at least since the early 1990s there have been regular reports of preteenage children committing increasingly serious offenses ranging from burglary to rape. This trend has only served to reinforce the equivocal attitudes to youth noted by Cohen, to the extent where the precise boundaries of youth and adolescence are now unclear; no one seems to be sure exactly when childhood is left behind or when adulthood is achieved (Muncie, 2009). This problem is compounded by the fact that ideas about the onset of adolescence and the age at which children are deemed to understand the difference between right and wrong are not fixed but subject to contestation and change over time. Prior to the mid-19th century, when positivism emerged to challenge it, ideas about crime and punishment were dominated by a theoretical perspective known as classicism. A central feature of this approach was that punishment should fit the crime, not the individual offender. As a result, children were seen as equally culpable as adults when they committed an offense and were liable to the same penalties, including incarceration in prisons and prison hulks and transportation to penal colonies. However, in the 19th century, a new conception of childhood emerged out of the dominant cultural, medical, and psychological discourses of the time. For the first time in modern history, childhood was thought of as a separate stage of development prior to the independence and responsibility that came with adulthood. Children were seen as requiring social and legal protections, and as such, it was during this period that compulsory schooling was introduced and laws were passed limiting the number of hours children could work and prohibiting them from working in certain industries. Figure 4.1 Juvenile age of jurisdiction and transfer to adult court laws. Source: Based on data from National Conference of State Legislatures (2017). As criminologist Tony Platt (2009) has shown, the Child Saver movement of the early 1900ssupposedly founded on the altruistic desire of the wealthy to improve the conditions of poor children living in the ghettos of rapidly expanding American citieswas also driven by fear and the desire to control and contain future generations of the dangerous classes. And so, despite the benefits of compulsory schooling and labor protections, the social reality of childhood and particularly the culpability of youthful offenders remain fraught with complexity. For instance, with children winning the right to divorce their parents and young girls modeling the behavior of adult women and perhaps becoming overtly sexualized, some suggest we have seen the emergence of the adultified child. United States courts not only criminalize children at a much earlier age (see Figure 4.1) but also are by far more inclined to lock children up than. Watch Cold Case: Who Killed JonBent Ramsey on Netflix
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