Fictional representation of crime

• Fictional representations from the TV and novels are important sources of our knowledge of crime.
• Fictional representations follow Surettes ‘law of opposites;: they are the opposite of the official statistics – and strikingly similar to news coverage.
  • Property crime is under-represented, while violence, drugs and sex crimes are over-represented.
  • Fictional sex crimes are committed by psychopathic strangers, not acquaintances.
  • Fictional police usually get their man.
• However:
  • ‘Reality’ shows tend to feature, young, non-white ‘underclass’ offenders.
  • There is a increasing tendency to show police as corrupt, brutal and less successful.
  • Victims have become more central with police portrayed as avengers and audiences invited to identify with their suffering.

The media as a cause of crime

• There has long been concern that media such as computer games, rap lyrics and ‘video nasties’ for encouraging criminality.
• There are several ways in which the media might cause crime and deviance including:
  • Imitation – by providing deviant role models, resulting in ‘copycat’ behaviour.
  • Arousal e.g. through viewing violent imagery
  • Desensitisation through repeated viewing of violence
  • Transmitting knowledge of criminal techniques
  • Stimulating desires for unaffordable goods e.g. through advertisements.
  • Glamourising crime
• However, studies have tended to show that exposure to media violence has at most a small negative effect on audiences

Fear of crime

• The media exaggerate the amount of violent crime and exaggerate the risk of certain groups to be victims of crime e.g. old people, young women.
  • Research shoes the media causes a fear of crime. E.g. Schlesinger and Tumber found tabloids readers and heavy users of YV expressed greater fear of going out at night and becoming a victim.

The media, relative deprivation and crime

• Lea and Young found that the media increases relative deprivation among marginalised groups.
  • In todays society, even the poor have media access, the media present everyone with images of a materialistic ‘good life’ as the goal of which they should strive.
  • This stimulates the sense of relative deprivation and social exclusion felt by marginalised groups who cannot afford material goods and so turn to crime.
• Cultural criminologists
  • Hayward and Young argue that late modern society is a media-saturated society that emphasises consumption and excitement. The media turn crime itself into a commodity or style to be consumed, and corporations use images of crime to sell products, especially to the young.

Moral Panic

• The media cause crime and deviance by creating a moral panic
• A moral panic is an exaggerated and irrational over reaction by a society to a perceived problem, where the reaction enlarges the problem out of proportion to it real seriousness.
  • The media identifies a group as a folk devil or a threat to societal values.
  • The media negatively stereotype the group and exaggerate the problem.
  • Moral entrepreneurs, editors, politicians etc condemn the behaviour of the group, leading to calls for a ‘crackdown’.
  • In turn, this may create a self-fulfilling prophecy, amplifying the very problem that causes the panic in the first place e.g. setting up special drug squads led to the police to discover more drug-taking.
  • As the crackdown identifies more deviants, calls for even tougher action create a deviance amplification spiral.

Mods and rockers

• Cohens folk devils and moral panics examines how the medias response to disturbances between wo groups of teenagers, the mods and rockers, created a moral panic.
  • In the early stages, distinctions were not clear cut and not many young people identified themselves as belonging to either ‘group’
  • The initial confrontations occurred on Easter weekend at Clacton, with a few scuffles and minor property damage.
• The media over-reaction to these events involved three elements
  • Exaggeration and distortion, the media exaggerated the numbers and seriousness, distortion the picture through sensational headlines.
  • Prediction – The media predicted further violence would result
  • Symbolisation – The symbols of the mods and rockers (clothes, bikes and scooters etc) were negatively labelled.

Deviance application spiral

• The media’s portrayal of events produced a deviance amplification spiral in two ways:
• By making appear that the problem was getting out of hand.
  • This led to calls for an increased control response from the police and courts.
  • This produced further stigmatisation of the mods and rockers and deviants
• By defining the two groups and emphasising their supposed differences.
  • This led to more youths adopting these identities and drew in more participants for future clashes.
• This encouraged polarisation and created a self-fulfilling prophecy as youth acted out the roles the media assigned to them.
• Cohen notes the medias definition of the situation is crucial in creating a moral panic, because in large-scale modern societies, most don’t have a connection the situation so rely on the media to give them the information on the situation.
• Cohen argues that mora panics are a result of a boundary crisis, where there is uncertainty about where the boundary lies between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in a time of change. The folk devil gives a focus to popular anxieties about disorder.

Perspectives on moral panics

• Functionalism and moral panics
  • Moral panics are in ways of responding to the sense of anomie (normalness) created by change. By dramatizing the threat to society in the form of a folk devil, the media raise the collective consciousness and reassert the social controls when central values are threatened.
• Neo Marxists
  • Neo-Marxists such as Hall et al claim the media creates a moral panic to distract the public over the real issues e.g. using mugging to provide a distraction for the failures of capitalism in the 1970s.

Global cybercrime

• Thomas and Loader define cybercrime as computer-mediated activities that are either illegal or considered illicit and are conducted through global electronics network.
• As Jewkes notes, the internet created opportunities to commit both conventional crimes e.g. fraud and ‘new crimes using new tools’ e.g. software piracy.
• Wall identifies four categories of cybercrime:
  • Cyber trespass e.g. hacking.
  • Cyber-deception e.g. identity theft.
  • Cyber Pornography
  • Cyber-violence e.g. cyberbullying.
• Policing cybercrime is difficult partly because of the sheer scale of the internet and because its globalised nature poses problems of jurisdiction.
• Surveillance – ICT provides police and state with greater opportunities for surveillance and control, e.g. through CCTV cameras, electronic databased, digital fingerprinting.