Moral Panics Case Studies

What is moral panic?
Moral panic is…

an instance of public anxiety or alarm in response to a problem regarded as threatening the moral standards of society.

Teenage Crime
Representations in the media
It is clear that the media has an impact on how youths are labelled in real life as they are often represented as violent and rude which influences how people think of them in modern society. Hoody Culture came about in 2005 and since then has become more of a social panic due to the increase of teenage crime – almost 127,000 10-17 y/o arrested in 2012/3, 11.8% of all 1.07 million arrests. These high teenage crime rates are believed to be caused by an increase in the social class divide leading to poverty.
London Riots 2011 // August 6th-11th

• The riots started in Tottenham on Saturday 6th and triggered major events in several major cities including Birmingham. Crimes that took place included looting and arson. Thousands of pounds of damage was made to infrastructure and there were five fatalities.
• In the media coverage of the riots including television and newspapers, they seemed to focus on the youths as the main offenders. The majority of the footage was teenagers/youth adults and they were therefore seen as the main culprits. A lot of images circulated on social media such as twitter as the majority of the users are ages 29 and below (53%)
• A government report highlighted that around half the people who appeared in court with cases related to the riots were under 18. A summary on the guardian website states that 98 of the arrests in London in one night were born in the 1990’s (63% of all arrests)

• People in the riot areas were afraid to leave their homes and youths were immediately ‘to blame’ for the violence and disruption.
• Even today it is evident that coverage of teenage crime is high – creating labels on all youths which are not always true.
• Youth are often the scapegoat in society.



Ideal Image in the media and links to health problems

It is common from celebrities to be judged and compared to societies high standards of the perfect body image. Images of them are published along with comments on flaws in their bodies leading audiences to think this is unacceptable. This leads the audience (often young girls) to compare themselves to these ideals.
Fat shaming  is commonly seen in gossip  magazines where paparazzi images of celebrities are mocked and analysed and studies into this are linking these issues to health problems.
 

1,791 under 19 year olds were in hospital in 2013-14 because of eating disorders.

Experts believe there is a link between this number and the “increased exposure to images of celebrities’ bodies” (Denis Campbell, The Guardian, June 2015)