What are crime panics?
The final chapter in the discussion of the media’s portrayal of youths
as threats to law and order and the safety of the community, is the grounds
and the way in which the media goes about creating moral panics, or, more
specifically, crime panics. According
to Schissel (1997), “crime panics are targeted at vulnerable, marginal,
and identifiable people who occupy social categories that are based on
race, gender, class, and geography,” resulting in a media-created folk
devil of youth criminals. Schissel’s research (1997) primarily concerned
itself with youth crimes, moral panics and the news in Canada. Here he
found that “non-white minority groups receive harsher treatment in the
legal system than do their white counterparts”. A cyclic pattern seemed
to formulate among the disadvantaged; becoming more disadvantaged in terms
of their treatment in relation to the law and, ultimately, the media. This
is particularly true of those of aboriginal ancestry, a “minority-group
youth” in Canadian society (Schissel, 1993 & 1997):
They [aborigines] experience high rates of unemployment, low levels
of educational
achievement...(cf Wotherspoon & Satzewich, 1995)...that negative
images of
minority-group youth appear in the media when they are already...disadvantaged...
illustrates the nature of the oppression whereby those already victimized
[sic] by the
courts or the socioeconomic system are doubly victimized [sic] in the
media.
(Schissel, 1997)
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