Familiar Strangers, Juvenile Panic and the British Press

The Decline of Social Trust

James Morrison

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137529954
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book argues that Britain is gripped by an endemic and ongoing panic about the position of children in society – which frames them as, alternately, victims and threats. It argues the press is a key player in promoting this discourse, which is rooted in a wide-scale breakdown in social trust.

1

Trust, Risk and Framing Contemporary Childhood

Panics about the risks faced by children are nothing new. A wealth of literature testifies to a long British tradition of problematizing the status and condition of childhood – with news media, politicians, police and other key definers repeatedly voicing (or consciously whipping up) deep-seated societal neuroses about juvenile vulnerability. Threats, we are continually reminded, come in any number of forms: everything from mundane household objects (Hood et al., 1996; Kelley et al., 1997), to injury and sickness (Hier, 2003, 2008) to drug treatments specifically designed to protect children from ill health (Mason & Donnelly, 2000; Evans et al., 2001; Ramsay et al., 2002; Boyce, 2007) can present potential dangers to the wellbeing of the young. All the while, kids are continually at risk of being preyed upon by an omnipresent rogues’ gallery of malevolent deviants. Among the most feared ‘folk-devils’ (Cohen, 1972) is a baleful figure straight out of the Brothers Grimm: the predatory paedophile who threatens to poach unsuspecting innocents as they play, walk to school or pop around the corner to visit friends (Fritz & Altheide, 1987; Best, 1990; Jenkins, 1992; McNeish & Roberts, 1995; Valentine, 1996a, 1996b, 1997a, 1997b; Valentine & McKendrick, 1997; Gentry, 1988; Scott et al, 1998; Kitzinger, 1999; Gallagher et al., 2002; Meyer, 2007). Then there are familiar strangers: half-known figures we encounter as we go about our daily lives. This amorphous array of individuals encompasses everyone from more obviously suspicious loners and eccentrics to neighbours, shopkeepers or fellow parents with whom we are on nodding terms but whose benign exteriors might one day turn out to mask diabolical intent.

Concerns about deceitful and untrustworthy familiar strangers pollute our perceptions of childhood in other respects, too. If there is one lesson to be drawn from the extensive academic literature on media-fuelled ‘moral panics’, which began with Stanley Cohen’s seminal 1972 study of the feeding frenzy over 1960s clashes between Mods and Rockers, it is that the discourse of juvenile risk very often has the boot (so to speak) on the other foot. While dominant day-to-day risk narratives about children tend to focus on younger juveniles, framing them as actual or potential victims – as this book demonstrates – an equally powerful, if slightly less prominent, secondary discourse caricatures older kids (typically dubbed ‘youths’ or ‘teenagers’) as threats (Fishman, 1978; Hall et al., 1978; Davis, 1980; Pearson, 1983; Valentine, 1996a). In recent years, this has been articulated as a problem of ‘antisocial behaviour’ (ASB): a highly politicized term which, though not theoretically confined to the young, is closely associated with them (Farrington & Coid, 2003; Squires & Stephen, 2005; Solanki et al., 2006; Rodger, 2008; Squires, 2008; Waiton, 2008). There are, then, clear contradictions at work in the way perceptions of childhood are constructed (and reconstructed) in Britain today. And, as in the parallel discourse around ‘victims’, many juvenile malefactors typically identified as ‘threats’ surface in the guise of familiar strangers: from playground bullies (Valentine, 1996a; Jago et al., 2009) to the loitering ‘hoodies’ blighting our shopping malls (Lett, 2010) and the troublesome offspring of our noisy neighbours. A key argument of this book is that this moral ambivalence about the position of children (a term that will, from now on, be applied to anyone under the age of 18) both shapes the way juveniles are commonly discussed (in the media, by our law-makers and law-enforcers – and by ourselves) and is perpetuated by these popular framings. Whatever its origins or causes (subjects explored at length in coming chapters), a self-reinforcing juvenile panic seems to have taken root in late-modern Britain, with the very concept of childhood now viewed through a distorted prism which foregrounds risk and menace over all other aspects of children’s lives (and selves). This confused and conflicted social construction is reflected in every arena of discursive life – from our snatched conversations in the dinner queue or at the school gates to our exchanges on Facebook and other social media, to the speeches of politicians and judges and (perhaps especially) reports and commentary in the news.

Fuzzy and contradictory positioning of childhood as a state of, simultaneously, innate goodness and untamed badness – of children themselves as both potential victims and threats – became a running thread throughout the various levels of empirical research carried out for this study. A trainee nursery worker from a low-income working-class background who participated in a series of focus groups designed to explore the rationales underpinning parental decisions about how much freedom to allow their children – and the roots of safety fears that informed their behaviour – was one of several interviewees who contrasted the secure world in which she grew up with the more dangerous one of today. She recalled how ‘when I was younger, my mother said, “there are some people that are bad, so don’t talk to strangers”’, while ‘nowadays … it [the threat] don’t even have to be a stranger – it can be a kid in your class that … has brought a knife to school’. Alluding to a story ‘in the news’ about ‘children stabbed … in class with scissors’, she concluded, ‘for some reason, as a culture we’ve got more violent’. A volunteer teaching assistant with three children in the same group summed up the consensus by evoking nebulous, all-encompassing fears about ‘the risks out there’ and ‘what could happen in life’ if children were permitted too loose a rein. These views were widely shared by mothers in a parallel focus group recruited from a middle-class postcode area in the same city. ‘It feels like an angrier world’, observed a special needs worker with three children, while a former teacher articulated a widely shared feeling that it had become harder to trust individuals one met ‘through’ one’s children – including other parents. Recalling an encounter with a mum she ‘hadn’t met before’ who ‘came up to me in the playground and said, “can my son come out for the day?”’, she admitted, ‘at the back of my mind … I’m thinking, “I know absolutely zero about this person”’. And the risks posed by the world that today’s children inhabit are far from confined to external threats, according to these parents: kids are also capable of harming themselves. ‘Friends’ may ‘get distracted’ and cause ‘accidents and stuff’, observed a working-class mother-of-four, who fretted about her primary school-aged children injuring themselves by fooling around outdoors with mates. The eldest son of a middle-class midwife remained a source of worry in his teens – chiefly because she suspected he ‘dabbles in smoking pot and stuff with his friends’. Questions of trust, then – a subject to which we return throughout this book – loomed large in the willingness (or unwillingness) of parents to permit their children to socialize independently in ways that, most conceded, they once had themselves. And feelings of distrust and suspicion were intimately bound up with not only their perceptions of the social environment at large (and potential dangers it presented) but also their degrees of confidence about the trustworthiness of their own children – to heed warnings, to only stray so far, to take specified routes home, even to behave civilly and responsibly towards others.

This widespread perception of today’s social world as a scarier, more disconcerting, place than it once was – one becoming progressively more menacing over time – not only emerged from focus groups. Perhaps unsurprisingly – given that media coverage of child abductions, murder and abuse was frequently cited as a key source of such anxieties – it was heavily reflected in another key strand of research: a month-long textual analysis of routine newspaper narratives and online reader discussion threads accompanying them. The most widely covered ‘child victim’ stories invariably revolved around children being terrorized by familiar strangers – with multiple reports about a girl finding her mother murdered by a ‘hair fetish fiend’ (e.g. ‘Teen’s Horror’, Nash, 2011, p. 11) posing as a benign next-door neighbour and a fast-food takeaway manager who lured schoolgirls to his bedsit to abuse them in exchange for money. The next most prominent category (‘child threats’) also emphasized the menace of familiar strangers, through a litany of stories about teenage hoodies and unruly schoolchildren. Common to all these cautionary tales was an undercurrent of emphasis on questions of trust – with the most extensively reported story of the whole period aptly symbolizing this in the form of a ‘hybrid’ narrative positioning juveniles as both victims and threats. This hinged around the trial of a callous teenager who murdered his girlfriend by bashing her over the head with a rock, and abandoning her dead body to go and watch television with friends. In the lengthiest article about this case – a double-page spread, published in The People (Jeffs, 2011, pp. 16–7) – the youth was framed as a classic familiar stranger, with the victim’s uncle remembering him as ‘an ideal teenager’ who was ‘from a church-going family, academically gifted – everything you could want for your own daughter’.

As the extensive interviews with journalists also conducted for this study demonstrate, the ‘scarier word’ paradigm promoted by newspapers is a highly commercially motivated discourse: a form of ‘market-driven journalism’ (McManus, 1994) that sensitizes and exploits popular fears about juvenile risk and threatening familiarity for monetary gain. But, as with all such phenomena, it would be glib to suggest that news producers are engaged in a simple process of myth-making, with no basis in reality. If that were the case, the discourse would lack the ‘salience’ (Critcher, 2003) it clearly holds not only for audiences but practitioners themselves. Journalists interviewed appeared to view the world as scarcely less threatening than parents, grandparents and children themselves imagined it. As one tabloid assistant news editor put it, ‘when I was a kid … we were shit scared of our granddad’, whereas ‘now, “I’m a granddad, I go on the street, and I’m shit scared of the children and, in fact, my own grandchildren”’. This view ‘in some ways … reflects social reality’, he argued – in that ‘there has been a change’. For a broadsheet feature writer, by contrast, the heightened profile of stories focusing on juvenile risk and threat – particularly those involving familiar strangers – is less a reflection of an overblown media obsession with child abuse and murder than a largely positive development which, in recent years, has helped expose denials of the past. Today’s world may be no more dangerous for the young than it used to be, but the reason we are now aware that child abductions and murders, when they occur, are ‘almost always’ committed by ‘someone they know’ (however vaguely) is because of ‘20 years of reporting of these kinds of cases’. Indeed, these words echo a sentiment voiced by the founding father of moral panic theory, Cohen himself, who used a recent address to a Moral Panics in the Contemporary World conference to argue in favour of the deliberate construction of ‘positive panics’ analogous to ‘anti-denial movements’ and ‘consciousness-raising’ campaigns of the 1960s (Cohen, 2010, p. 1) – to counteract precisely the same elite agendas that framed earlier panics. Nonetheless, whatever justifications there may be for the dominance of media narratives positioning juveniles as, alternately, victim and threat (or prey and predator), it is hard to escape the conclusion that we are living through a prolonged period in which all of us – from families agonizing over how to regulate their children’s daily activities to journalists and policy-makers who rush to portray every new alarming case as evidence of a growing pattern and need to act – are so extraordinarily sensitized to issues of juvenile risk that we are gripped by panic. But what form of panic is this? What are its root causes – and, perhaps most importantly, what does the fact we are experiencing one tell us about the state of our society generally? It is to these questions, one by one, that this book turns.

News media and panics about threatened childhood and youth disorder

Before examining the shifting theoretical paradigms about what constitutes a panic – and the various forms they can take – it is important to introduce some real-world context. Precisely what evidence is there to support the contention that Britain has become locked in a mind-set of juvenile panic? In addressing this question, we will consider what might best be likened to ‘two sides of a coin’: the popular positioning of children as (actual or potential) victims on the one side, and threats on the other. By way of justifying this conceit – which is central to this book – it is worth noting that the paradoxical nature of today’s dual (and, as we shall see, far from mutually exclusive) problematization of children has itself been the subject of growing academic attention since the 1990s – with several scholars arguing that the underlying motives behind it are ideological. Like historical portrayals of Mods versus Rockers (Cohen, 1972) and teenage muggers (Hall et al., 1978), the conflicted images of childhood consistently conjured up by Britain’s elite(s), according to Goldson (1997, p. 5), reflect ‘the emergence and consolidation of moral anxieties and reactionary political concerns’, while Scraton (1997, p. x) sees them as providing ‘popular legitimation for authoritarian interventions’ by politicians, judges and police. For Scott et al. (1998, p. 1), such ‘contradictions’ represent a tension between ‘two conceptualizations of children’: as both ‘active, knowing, autonomous individuals’ and ‘passive, innocent dependants’. Yet, beyond identifying this contradiction, and speculating about possible reactionary motives behind it – largely by cross-referencing key events, like the 1993 murder of toddler James Bulger by two 10-year-old boys, to subsequent draconian policies and legal judgments – few studies have offered satisfactory explanations as to how and why such a perceived sea change in conceptualizing childhood should have occurred when it did. Too little emphasis has been placed on the media’s role in constructing/reinforcing this discourse; their reasons for doing so (ideological and/or commercial); and the extent to which news narratives influence the reactions of politicians, control agencies, public and juveniles themselves. All these dynamics will be addressed, to a greater or lesser degree, as we attempt to anatomize this double-sided juvenile panic.

One side of the coin: child safety and the great ‘parenting panic’

Recent studies have identified clear evidence of significant increases in parental protectiveness. An influential Policy Studies Institute monograph found the average ‘home habitat’ of a British eight-year-old – the area within which he/she is allowed to wander at leisure – shrank to one-ninth of its former size between 1971 and 1990 (Hillman et al., 1990), with the number of children walking to school alone at this age plummeting from 80 to nine per cent. Revisiting this study two decades later, the PSI found children’s independence had diminished further – with the overall proportion of primary-aged pupils walking home from school unaccompanied plummeting from 86 to 35 per cent between 1971 and 1990, before dropping to one in four by 2010 (Shaw et al., 2013). Separate studies for the Children’s Play Council (Children’s Play Council, 2006, and Gleave, 2008), Children’s Society (2007) and National Trust (National Trust, 2008, and Moss, 2012) paint similar pictures. Meanwhile, a 1995 Barnardo’s survey found that seven out of ten parents judged their neighbourhoods unsafe, with half saying they would never let their children play out unsupervised (McNeish & Roberts, 1995). Ninety-five per cent of parents interviewed for another study admitted restricting their activities due to safety fears (Valentine, 1996b).

Approaching their subject from a socio-geographical perspective, both PSI studies combined comparative longitudinal surveys of official data on ‘children’s independent mobility’ with focus group interviews in both England and Germany to identify why parents were restricting their children’s outdoor activities. Both concluded that the extent of parental protectiveness was significantly greater in England, with parents primarily concerned about their children being run over (a threat exacerbated, potentially, by increases in school-run traffic stemming from resultant over-protection). The former cited road safety figures demonstrating that, while three-quarters of junior schoolchildren were allowed to cross roads unaccompanied in 1971, this had dropped to barely half by 1990. As a result, the number of children killed on roads nearly halved in that period, but the volume of traffic doubled. Road safety fears have since been highlighted by Lansdown (1994), Valentine (1996a, 2004), Grayling et al. (2002), and Jago et al. (2009). That traffic fear broadly qualifies as a panic (albeit not a strictly moral one) is supported by government statistics showing that between 1977 and 1987 child death rates on Britain’s roads dropped from six to less than four per 100,000 (Hillman et al., 1990), despite evidence of continued parental sensitization to the prospect of their children being killed or injured. BBC news programme Frontline Scotland identified a similar degree of ignorance about the true scale of this threat north of the border, reporting a survey in which eight out of ten respondents said they believed accidents involving juveniles had increased in the previous 20 years. In truth, the number run over in that period had fallen by 60 per cent (as cited in Furedi, 2001). As official government figures demonstrate (e.g. Department for Transport, 2014), the prospect of serious or fatal road accidents is a genuine threat to children – at least compared with other concerns examined in this book. However, it does not axiomatically follow that the extent of parental anxieties about speeding vehicles is justified. The argument is not that no threat exists (when it clearly does), but rather that parents’ perceptions of the likelihood of their children being injured or killed on the roads are out of all proportion to the probability of this happening. In 2013 (the latest 12-month period for which statistics were available at time of writing), the number of children seriously injured by vehicles fell year on year by 13 per cent, to 1,932, while the number of under 15-year-olds killed on the roads dropped to 48, down from 61 in 2012 – continuing a long-term trend interrupted only by a fleeting blip two years previously (Ibid.).

Of greater significance to this book, however, is the fact that several of Hillman, Adams and Whitelegg’s interviewees also mentioned ‘fear of molestation’ as a reason for their protectiveness (Hillman et al., 1990, p. 24) – with concerns about girls being attacked particularly marked (Ibid., p. 32) and parents of older children more worried about ‘stranger-danger’ than traffic (Ibid., p. 30). The authors’ identification of this as a growing concern from the 1970s onwards chimes with a historical overview by Meyer locating the point at which the media ‘discovered’ paedophilia in the growing ‘problematization of child pornography and homosexuality’ during that decade (Meyer, 2007, p. 9). Research has also identified a fear of ‘bullies’ and older children (Valentine, 1996a; Jago et al., 2009), pointing to a partial overlap with the flipside of the parental panic: the youth ASB furore. Worries about extra-familial sexual threats to children have repeatedly emerged from empirical research since the 1990s – a point at which Meyer sees the discourse on paedophilia undergoing a ‘conceptual shift’ away from ‘child sexual abuse as a problem of the family’ (as epitomized by the 1980s scare about an alleged Cleveland child sex ring) to ‘a problem outside the family’ (Meyer, 2007, p. 9). ‘Strangers’ emerged as the chief fear of 950 out of 1,000 parents surveyed in 1993 by children’s charity Kidscape, while the same concern topped the Barnardo’s study (McNeish & Roberts, 1995) and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Trust, Risk and Framing Contemporary Childhood
• 2 ‘Worthy’ vs ‘Unworthy’ Children: Images of Childhood through Time
• 3 Our Children and Other People’s: Childhood in the Age of Distrust
• 4 Commercializing Distrust: Framing Juveniles in the News
• 5 ‘Every Parent’s Worst Nightmare’: The Abduction of April Jones
• 6 Strangers No More: Towards Reconstructing Trust
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index