Change, Media and Moral Panic in Contemporary Youth Justice

The moral panic model helps shed light on the role the media plays in society’s changing perceptions of deviance. During the 1960s, Cohen proposed that media portrayals depicted youth, like the Mods and Rockers, as challenging traditional conceptions of social conduct, including manners and respectability. I propose that contemporary institutional responses to urban youth gang crime can also be understood in terms of Stanley Cohen's moral panic framework. However, instead of challenging the hierarchical, differential order, media portrayals depict urban, youth as violent, representing a risk of physical harm to others. This presentation focuses on the media’s role in the changing representations of urban, youth and deviance, moving from respectability to risk.