Critical investigation - 'An investigation into how and why the tabloid press generates moral panics about male teenage deliquency'.
Quotes
1) 'Gangs are usually between 20 to 30 in number and members aged between 15 and 25. People are dependent on you and you have a role. To suggest this is a breakdown of societies values etc is simply to echo numerous moral panics of the past.'
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6399961.stm
2) 'What separates hoodies from the youth cults of previous moral panics – the teddy boys, the mods and rockers, the punks, the ravers have all had their day at the cinema.'
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/nov/05/british-hoodie-films
3) 'The other tabloids including The Post and Today all ran similar stories, many on their front pages along with photographs of writhing masses of sweaty teenagers. thrill seeking youngsters in a dance frenzy at the secret party attended by more than 11,000.' The ravers in the photo look hot, crazed and quite demented. Also, the use of an exclamation mark in a headline is usually reserved for only the most shocking of subjects. The moral panic had begun.'
- http://www.lycos.com/info/moral-panic--moral-panics.html
4) 'The subject of addiction in teenagers receives a great deal of attention from the British media. Stories about drug abuse and gambling addiction are the most popular themes, forming the basis for a number of national “moral panics”.'
- http://www.beatingaddictions.co.uk/drug-addiction-britain.html
5) 'The typical user smokes their first joint in their mid-teens, with use peaking in the mid-20s. The habit then declines steeply as young people move into jobs and discover they have to get up in the morning.'
- http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/the-world-map-of-cannabis-1803642.html
6) 'Two teenagers are due to appear in court charged with gunning down a man as he returned from a Christmas shopping trip.'
- http://www.itv.com/News/Articles/Teenagers-in-court-over-shooting-708538133.html
7) 'Don't think Britons needed a bunch of think-tank eggheads to inform us our teenagers are the developed world's most accomplished binge drinkers.'
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/rowanpelling/6123282/Teenagers-binge-drink-because-adults-think-it-is-cool-and-exciting.html
8) 'Moral panics occur when media and society link youth culture to juvenile delinquency, as video games were to the 1999 Columbine shootings. In all moral panics, patterns emerge of how the media chooses to portray what society finds threatening, and what the panics mean in a larger societal context.'
- http://www.gamebits.net/other/mqp/
9) 'As it is, a young man in Britain today is unlikely to pick up a tabloid newspaper without seeing himself reflected as a "terrifying teen" or "heartless hoodie", wielding a knife or binge-drinking.'
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/18/asbos-youthjustice
10) 'By coincidence, Rhys's murder took place just hours before a planned Downing Street summit on youth crime. But the coincidence gave all concerned a chance to turn up the volume on the dominant social themes of the summer: gangs, guns and anti-social behaviour in all its guises. With the populist press in full panic mode, everyone was out to propose answers.'
- http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-moral-panic-and-a-return-to-gesture-politics-462773.html
Wednesday 16 December 2009
Thursday 10 December 2009
Research on my critical investigation
Critical investigation - 'An investigation into how and why the tabloid press generates moral panics about male teenage deliquency'.
Books and Quotes:
Probert, David, Graham, Andrew, (2008), Advanced media studies , Oxfordshire: Phillip Allan
- 'Classic moral panics - fear of breakdown of law and order, with youth out of control'. pg. 64
- 'Express a 'moral panic', not only about 'teenage gangsters', but also about the perceived lawlessness of internet social-networking like youtube and myspace'. pg. 273
- 'It looks lat what certain media texts do to vulnerable groups - 'recruiting' them as armed 'teenage thugs'. This idea of 'recruitment' and the word 'gangsters' in the striking white-on-black headline connotes a world away from hanging around on street corners to a more systematic, materialistic and organised world of criminality and lawlessness. pg. 172
Hartley, John, (2002), Communication, cultural and media studies The key concepts, London: Routledge.
- 'The term moral panic was originally employed by Jock Young (1971) and Stanley Cohen (1980)'. pg. 147
Bennet, Peter, Slater, Jerry, Wall, Peter, (2006), A2 media studies: The essential introduction, Abington: Routledge.
- 'The period was characterised by social and industrial unrest and successive moral panics about crime waves. A more aggressive and confrontational approach to law and order displaced the emphasis on crim, as a social problem'. pg. 253
Rayner, Phillip, Wall, Peter, Kruger, Stephen, (2001), AS media studies: The essential introduction, London: Routledge.
- Tabloid papers - contain stories that tent to be trivial and are responsible for the creation of moral panics' pg. 223
Kolker, Robert, (2009), Media studies An Introduction, West-Sussex: wiley-blackwell
- 'It is a general and dependable response to modernity as whole, a fear of the new and unknown, a certainity that exists within uncertainity: because something is new and popular - especially if it is popular among young people - it is threatening, and because threatening, dangerous'. pg. 269
Lovin, John, (2000), Media violence alert, USA: Dreamcatcher press inc.
- 'There has been a great deal of public discussion of the link between media violence and children's aggressive behaviour'. pg. 69
Laughey, Dan, (2009), Media studies Theories and approach, Great Britain: Kamera books.
'Major moral panics in recent times have centered on fears about paedophillia, AIDS, drugs, knife and gun crime'. pg. 100
Casey, Bernadette, (200), Television studies The key concepts, London: Routledge.
- Predominantly male adolescent discourse running throughout most music videos constructed around male sexual fantasies, leisure activities and peer reltionships.' pg. 137
Williams, Kevin, (2003), Understanding media theory, London: Arnold publishers.
- The authors showed how the media created public anxiety over the crim of 'mugging', student protests and picketing. pg. 151
Cook, Pam, (1985), The cinema book 2nd edition, London: British film institute.
- The idea and the image of the juvenile deliquent continued to colour films of all kinds made about teenagers in the 1950s and 1960s, from sensationalised crime dramas and social problem films'. pg. 218
Books and Quotes:
Probert, David, Graham, Andrew, (2008), Advanced media studies , Oxfordshire: Phillip Allan
- 'Classic moral panics - fear of breakdown of law and order, with youth out of control'. pg. 64
- 'Express a 'moral panic', not only about 'teenage gangsters', but also about the perceived lawlessness of internet social-networking like youtube and myspace'. pg. 273
- 'It looks lat what certain media texts do to vulnerable groups - 'recruiting' them as armed 'teenage thugs'. This idea of 'recruitment' and the word 'gangsters' in the striking white-on-black headline connotes a world away from hanging around on street corners to a more systematic, materialistic and organised world of criminality and lawlessness. pg. 172
Hartley, John, (2002), Communication, cultural and media studies The key concepts, London: Routledge.
- 'The term moral panic was originally employed by Jock Young (1971) and Stanley Cohen (1980)'. pg. 147
Bennet, Peter, Slater, Jerry, Wall, Peter, (2006), A2 media studies: The essential introduction, Abington: Routledge.
- 'The period was characterised by social and industrial unrest and successive moral panics about crime waves. A more aggressive and confrontational approach to law and order displaced the emphasis on crim, as a social problem'. pg. 253
Rayner, Phillip, Wall, Peter, Kruger, Stephen, (2001), AS media studies: The essential introduction, London: Routledge.
- Tabloid papers - contain stories that tent to be trivial and are responsible for the creation of moral panics' pg. 223
Kolker, Robert, (2009), Media studies An Introduction, West-Sussex: wiley-blackwell
- 'It is a general and dependable response to modernity as whole, a fear of the new and unknown, a certainity that exists within uncertainity: because something is new and popular - especially if it is popular among young people - it is threatening, and because threatening, dangerous'. pg. 269
Lovin, John, (2000), Media violence alert, USA: Dreamcatcher press inc.
- 'There has been a great deal of public discussion of the link between media violence and children's aggressive behaviour'. pg. 69
Laughey, Dan, (2009), Media studies Theories and approach, Great Britain: Kamera books.
'Major moral panics in recent times have centered on fears about paedophillia, AIDS, drugs, knife and gun crime'. pg. 100
Casey, Bernadette, (200), Television studies The key concepts, London: Routledge.
- Predominantly male adolescent discourse running throughout most music videos constructed around male sexual fantasies, leisure activities and peer reltionships.' pg. 137
Williams, Kevin, (2003), Understanding media theory, London: Arnold publishers.
- The authors showed how the media created public anxiety over the crim of 'mugging', student protests and picketing. pg. 151
Cook, Pam, (1985), The cinema book 2nd edition, London: British film institute.
- The idea and the image of the juvenile deliquent continued to colour films of all kinds made about teenagers in the 1950s and 1960s, from sensationalised crime dramas and social problem films'. pg. 218
Wednesday 2 December 2009
Articles - Moral panics on teenagers.
Guardian
Wasted: Why Education Isn't Educating by Frank Furedi
Frank Furedi launches an excoriating attack on our education system and its failings, says Rafael Behr
Sunday 15 November 2009
1) ‘Children are taught to mistrust teachers; teachers are taught to mistrust themselves.’ Photograph by Christopher Thomond
A few years ago, I visited a school in Leicester that inspectors had declared to be outstanding in the provision of classes in "citizenship". This was a subject only recently invented by government in response to nagging national anxiety over "social cohesion". No one seemed to have any idea how, pedagogically speaking, to make citizens. Except, apparently, in the Midlands.
I was told how the citizenship "agenda" was woven through the rest of the curriculum – sequins of political liberalism sewn on to the fabric of other subjects. One history teacher explained to me how she had met her citizenship obligations by placing al-Qaida terrorism in the context of CIA support for Afghan mujahideen during the cold war. A 14-year-old pupil proved he had internalised this long view by explaining that, while the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist attacks were bad, they were also, in a sense, "payback". A statutory duty to inculcate civic mindedness had somehow equipped British teenagers with a pseudo-jihadi notion of terrorist murder as historical quid pro quo.
That Leicester classroom came back to me when reading Wasted, Frank Furedi's onslaught on schooling policy. Furedi devotes several pages to the ill-conceived citizenship agenda, but as just one example of the way our classrooms have become inadvertent laboratories in queasy liberal social engineering. Teachers are also supposed to instil such useful attributes as environmental consciousness, emotional candour and respect for racial and cultural diversity. Some of these goals are made explicit in the curriculum for children as young as two.
Furedi does not necessarily object to the values implied by those requirements (although he is oddly dyspeptic about green issues). His core argument is that the aspiration to fashion children's souls according to political criteria is not really education at all; at least, not as he thinks that word should be understood.
No one could reasonably claim that education has suffered from a lack of political attention in Britain. It was famously Tony Blair's top three priorities before the 1997 election. There has been some new law or initiative every year since: literacy hour, "Every Child Matters", academy schools, Early Years Foundation Stage, the "Gifted and Talented" programme, personalised learning etc. This process, Furedi argues, signals a politicisation of education that makes schools responsible for the correction of social ills. As a result, their proper function – as transmitters of the accrued wisdom of humanity from one generation to the next – is squeezed out.
The curriculum, in Furedi's analysis, has come to be seen by policymakers as an easy tool for the correction of wider cultural and behavioural problems. Obesity epidemic? Teach children about healthy eating. Too much teenage pregnancy? More sex education. By extension, teachers have become mediators in a process of socialisation – policing "values" rather than directing thoughts; a secular political clergy with the education secretary as pope. Pedagogy, meanwhile, has come to look more like therapy, with motivational and psychological techniques coming to the fore, along with a fashionable horror of allowing children to get bored. Everything must be "relevant".
That imperative has, according to Furedi, a pernicious consequence. If schools must always adapt their material to contemporary circumstances, education becomes simply a mechanism for coping with modernity. This is manifest in a shift in emphasis from traditional subjects to a more functional, utilitarian agenda: equipping children with "skills to learn", responding to globalisation and obligatory use of IT in the classroom.
But if education is about negotiated surrender to economic change, the corpus of knowledge possessed by teachers is, by dint of their age, obsolete. Whatever adults know is old-fashioned, prejudiced and a barrier to learning instead of a precious commodity to be passed on.
That observation is central to Furedi's thesis: the current fashion for "child-led" and "personalised" learning is part of a misguided philosophy that is corroding intergenerational relations. Children are taught to mistrust teachers; teachers are taught to mistrust themselves. No one has confidence to extol or exert the simple authority of adulthood and scholastic knowledge. Discipline breaks down, leading to moral panic and even greater pressure on schools to fix the "broken society".
Furedi build his case methodically and argues it carefully, if not elegantly. He supports it with quotes (shrewdly selected, sometimes repeated) from politicians and educationalists. Frustratingly, he tends to give credence to anecdote and sensational news stories that support his account, but not to data – exam results for example – that might nuance the picture. That makes it hard to know if the problem he describes is a tendency on the margins of education or a crisis intrinsic to it.
But the analysis rings true, as does Furedi's defence of a subject-based curriculum and a philosophy of education that recognises the duty of one generation to impart a canon of knowledge to the next. Forget the management jargon and digital neophilia. Let children be inspired by teachers' faith in the great past achievements of humanity.
Furedi admits it is a small "c" conservative view, but he rejects the charge that it is elitist. If, in the past, only the elite had such an education, the policy challenge is how to extend it to all, not how to make it seem worthless by denouncing it as irrelevant in order to teach something easier instead. None of that solves the problem of how to turn children into citizens. But then, perhaps, if they have a good enough education, they can work it out for themselves
Hoodies strike fear in British cinema
If you want to scare a British moviegoer, you don't make a film about zombies – you cast a kid in flammable sportswear and a hoodie
Thursday 5 November 2009 21.35 GMT
2) Fear on the streets … Michael Caine in Harry Brown. Photograph: Rex Features/Everett
Who's afraid of the big bad hoodie? Enough of us, certainly, that the smart money in British cinema is going on those films that prey on our fear of urban youths and show that fear back to us. These days, the scariest Britflick villain isn't a flesh-eating zombie, or an East End Mr Big with a sawn-off shooter and a tattooed sidekick. It is a teenage boy with a penchant for flammable casualwear.
What separates hoodies from the youth cults of previous moral panics – the teddy boys, the mods and rockers, the punks, the ravers have all had their day at the cinema – is that they don't have the pop-cultural weight of the other subcultures, whose members bonded through music, art and customised fashion. Instead, they're defined by their class (perceived as being bottom of the heap) and their social standing (their relationship to society is always seen as being oppositional). Hoodies aren't "kids" or "youngsters" or even "rebels" – in fact, recent research by Women in Journalism on regional and national newspaper reporting of hoodies shows that the word is most commonly interchanged with (in order of popularity) "yob", "thug", "lout" and "scum".
Greg Philo, research director of Glasgow University Media Group and professor of sociology at the university, traces our attitudes to hoodies back to the middle classes' long-held fear of those who might undermine their security. That is what they see in what Philo describes as "a longterm excluded class, simply not needed, who often take control of their communities through aggression or running their alternative economy, based on things like drug-dealing or protection rackets".
"If you go to these places, it's very grim," says Philo. "The culture of violence is real. But for the British media, it's simple – bad upbringing or just evil children. Their accounts of what happens are very partial and distorted, which pushes people towards much more rightwing positions. There's no proper social debate about what we can do about it. Obviously, not all young people in hoods are dangerous – most aren't – but the ones who are can be very dangerous, and writing about them sells papers because people are innately attracted to what's scary. That's how we survive as a species – our body and brain is attuned to focus on what is likely to kill us, because we're traditionally hunters and hunted."
Once the images of the feral hoodie was implanted in the public imagination, it was a short journey to script and then to screen – it's no surprise that hoodies are increasingly populating British horrors and thrillers, generating a presence so malevolent and chilling that there are often hints of the supernatural or the subhuman about their form.
Daniel Barber's debut feature film, the much touted Harry Brown, is the latest and possibly the grisliest movie to exploit our fear of the young, but it follows a steady stream of British terror-thrillers including Eden Lake, The Disappeared and Summer Scars, as well as a seedier breed of ultraviolent modern nasties such as Outlaw and The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael. Soon we'll get Philip Ridley's Heartless, a visceral supernatural horror in which the howling, snarling hoodies who terrorise the estate turn out to be genuine demons dealing not in crack cocaine but in diabolical Faustian bargains. Harry Brown's hoodies, however, are still very much human, and like most cinema hoodies, the ones who circle the eponymous vigilante hero (played by Michael Caine) hunt in packs and move in unison, commandeering the gloomy underpasses and stairwells of the concrete and steel London estate they inhabit. To Barber, the threat they present is very real and was, he believes, the motivating factor for Caine to make the film.
"I'm scared of these kids in gangs," says Barber. "They have no respect for any other part of society. It's all about me, me, me. Life is becoming cheaper and cheaper in this country." And from a director's point of view, hoodies are gold dust. "We're afraid of what we don't understand or know, and there's so much about these kids we just don't understand," he says. "That's a good starting point for any film baddie."
When we first see the bad guys in Harry Brown, they are an amorphous mob of hooded creatures cast in shadow, smoking crack in an under-lit tunnel. They shoot at a young mother pushing a buggy in a park, then batter an old man to death. They show all the hallmarks of the stereotypical youth of "Broken Britain" – the tracksuits, guns and dead eyes – and Barber's overhead framing and murky lighting of them as they swarm over a vandalised car or close in on a passing couple invite comparison with those other cinema villains who gather strength in the dark – vampires and zombies.
Txting: the gr8 db8 by David Crystal
A linguist finds text messaging nothing to fear, discovers Tom Lamont
Sunday 11 October 2009
3) In his study of text messaging culture, linguist David Crystal asks us to picture the investors' meeting when the mobile phone was first unveiled. We've created a method of calling anybody, any time, anywhere, the inventors might have said. Phone home from the middle of a field or hear the voice of a loved one atop Everest! One more thing: we want to put in a facility that allows people to thumb a message of no more than 160 characters, in case they want to communicate that way instead.
"In a logical world, text messaging should not have survived," writes Crystal and he is right. It is ugly, clunky and retrogressive. Yet the "short message service", or SMS, thrived during the mobile telecommunications boom and 250 billion SMS texts had been sent worldwide by 2001.
Such rapid and widespread adoption, inevitably, pinged panic radars, especially given the phenomenon's popularity with teenagers. Were all these abbreviations, initialisations and smiley faces fatally corrupting the English language? Might people forget how to communicate without a keypad?
These are the essentials of the book's "gr8 db8". Crystal's answers are convincing, particularly when he quotes clever "text message poetry" as proof that relentless word-shortening and a strict character count needn't limit linguistic craft. Besides, he suggests, Britain's moral panic brigade should be thankful that trends here haven't developed as they have in Japan, where teenagers enjoy a ritual called keitai dating, sitting around a table in near-silence to flirt by SMS. Or Italy, where texting vernacular has become so robotic it just about realises Orwell's newspeak, the plus sign replacing the superlative ending "-issimo", so that a heartfelt "I miss you so much", or "mi manchi tantissimo", is rendered "mmt+".
It all adds up to a jolly meditation, helped by the enthusiasm of a linguist revelling in newly coined lingo. Oddly, Crystal apologises for being unable to gather much of his own statistical data; it is hard, he says, to get participants to hand over such private information. But this is still a fun trot through little-mapped territory.
Independent
The world map of cannabis
Study demonstrates the extraordinary scale of the drug's global popularity
By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Friday, 16 October 2009
1) It is 40 years since cannabis unleashed the "flower power" revolution of the 1960s, encouraging a generation in Europe and the US to "make love not war". Young people at the time hoped their legacy would be world peace. Instead, it has turned out to be a world of fuzzy dope-heads.
In the intervening decades, the drug whose intoxicating effects have been known for 4,000 years has been increasingly adopted by adolescents and young adults across the globe.
Today, an estimated one in 25 adults of working age – 166 million people around the world – has used cannabis to get high, either in ignorance or defiance of its damaging effects on health. Now, the extraordinary popularity of the drug is posing a significant public health challenge, doctors say.
Writing in The Lancet, Wayne Hall of the University of Queensland and Louisa Degenhardt of the University of New South Wales, Australia, say cannabis slows reaction times and increases the risk of accidents, causes bronchitis, interferes with learning, memory and education and, most seriously, may double the risk of schizophrenia. Yet these effects have failed to dent its popularity.
"Since cannabis use was first reported over 40 years ago by US college students, its recreational or non-medical use has spread globally, first to high- income countries, and recently to low-income and middle-income countries," they say.
Citing figures from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime for 2006, they say cannabis use is highest in the US, Australia and New Zealand (where more than 8 per cent of the population indulge), followed by Europe. But because Asia and Africa have bigger populations, they also have the highest proportion of the world's cannabis users, accounting for almost a third (31 per cent) and a quarter (25 per cent) respectively.
Use of cannabis among young people rose strongly during the 1960s and 1970s, peaking in the US in 1979. There was then a long decline until it increased again in the 1990s, before levelling off once more since 2000. In Britain, Australia and New Zealand, cannabis use has been falling for several years, but it is thought to be rising in Latin America and several countries in Africa.
The typical user smokes their first joint in their mid-teens, with use peaking in the mid-20s. The habit then declines steeply as young people move into jobs and discover they have to get up in the morning. Marriage and babies accelerate the decline. About one in 10 of those who ever smoke a joint become regular daily users, with 20 to 30 per cent using the drug weekly. Regular users are also more likely to use other illicit drugs, including heroin and cocaine, lending support to the theory that "soft" drugs act as a "gateway" to hard drugs. But the authors admit this supposed link "remains a subject of considerable debate".
However, they add that the ill effects of cannabis are modest when compared with the damage done by alcohol, tobacco and other illicit drugs. In Australia, it accounted for just 0.2 per cent of the total burden of disease.
Future to focus on rehabilitation for torture brothers
Boys likely to serve sentence in secure children's home
By Jonathan Brown
Saturday, 5 September 2009
DAVID SANDISON / THE INDEPENDENT
The Youth Justice Board will monitor the boys' progress
2) Support from psychologists and specialist social workers. Twenty-five hours a week of education. A life away from the alcohol, cannabis and violent films that characterised their troubled early years.
Yesterday as the two young boys in the Doncaster torture case awoke to the certain prospect of a lengthy sentence for their barbaric crimes, experts said the next few years of their life had to be as much about rehabilitation as punishment. They will get help from myriad agencies and professionals who will take responsibility for the future of the brothers, aged 11 and 12, to hopefully stop them from reoffending.
Today the boys' childhood home, a council house in an anonymous suburb of Doncaster, is boarded up. Their mother was moved by the local authority for her own protection when the first allegations were levelled against the second and third youngest of her seven sons.
Neighbours believe the mother and her five other sons are living in a caravan on the Yorkshire coast. Their father, who lived seven miles away in Edlington where the two boys – already on the child protection register – were placed with foster parents when they committed their crimes, has not been seen since.
Future contact between parents and offspring, both of which will be protected by lifelong anonymity in the media, will depend on the judgement of social workers compiling pre-sentence reports. They must decide whether visits will help the boys come to terms with their offending and speed their passage back into society.
The brothers are being held at separate secure children's homes and are likely to stay within these highly specialised environments for the duration of their sentence due to be handed down at Sheffield Crown Court in October.
Although a maximum sentence of life imprisonment will be available to the court – and despite the sense of public outrage following their admission of grievous bodily harm with intent – it seems unlikely the judge will impose more than the eight years served by their most notorious predecessors.
Jamie Bulger's killers Jon Venables and Robert Thompson were released from their secure children's home accommodation in 2001 following sweeping criticism of their trial and treatment by the European Court of Justice. The Bulger case led to reforms in British law that made it easier for children as young as 10 to be found guilty of serious crimes by removing the need to prove they were aware of the consequences of their criminal actions. But it also made increased the level of protection for the offenders.
Following sentence, the Doncaster youngsters' time in the so-called secure estate will be under the control of the Youth Justice Board (YJB). Younger more vulnerable offenders are normally sent – space permitting – to one of 15 secure children's homes run by local authority social services departments. Success rates for preventing re-offending among people who enter the system at a very young age are high, experts believe.
Barnardo's assistant director of policy Pam Hibbert explained: "When you have young children who commit these serious offences they tend to have a background of neglect and abuse. But it is very clear if you look at the history of the other notorious cases they actually tend not to go on to commit further offences on their release."
There are currently 165 young people serving sentences in secure children's homes out of a total of 2,500 offenders under the age of 18 in prison. Most are sent to young offenders institutions which are modelled more closely on adult prisons. Although the option of transfer at the age of 15 will be available, it is likely the brothers will remain in children's homes where they will benefit from 25 hours a week of education, the support of a key worker, psychologists and the possibility of a phased return back into the community towards the end of their sentence.
Peter Minchin, head of placement at the YJB, said: "The idea is to make a positive impact on young people, particularly the very youngest ones. These institutions are set up to work specifically with young people who have holistic needs not just offending ones. Our responsibility is to make sure they go into the most appropriate placement that meets these needs."
Inmates benefit from a high staff ratio, with the smallest establishment having five beds and the largest, at Aycliffe in Co Durham where the child killer Mary Bell was held, having 36. As in the Venables-Thompson case the media will be forbidden from identifying where the brothers are being held.
The YJB sets out to maintain family links where possible and to locate young people close to their communities where appropriate. It will meet the costs of a weekly visit for up to two adults and their children and pay for childminders. The board also pays a contribution to overnight accommodation and meals where necessary.
But experts yesterday pointed out that the brothers' case remained rare and that many staff would not have experience in dealing with such serious offenders. Jackie Worrall, director of policy and public affairs at the offender's charity Nacro said: "It will be a number of years before they are back in the community and they will be not be children any more – teenagers or possibly adults. It is so unusual for children of this age to be involved in such an offence so we are left speculating what issues they are going to face."
Sorted for textured alcoholic fruit gel-carb
'Alcopop' drinks should not make us fret about teenage boozing, but about marketing taking over the good night out
SUZANNE MOORE
Wednesday, 4 September 1996
3) You may have noticed there are some vile alcoholic drinks about. They look and taste disgusting and are consumed by strangely dressed types. Such beverages are sold primarily by the notion that they get you out of your head. They are named things like Headcracker, Sneck Lifter, Owd Growler, Original Sheepdip and GBH. Do they encourage alcoholism? Quite possibly, but as men drink them no one seems to mind. Do they make getting smashed seem cool and grown-up? Yes, if beards and beer bellies signify maturity.
No, what we like to get worked up about is another kind of alcohol altogether. The "alcopops", the soft options that disguise the hard drinking that young people, especially young women, get up to. It is all a cynical marketing campaign to turn the nation's youth into lushes. And here's another one. A tangerine hair gel disguised as something you want to knock back while you are dancing around your handbag. Or while you're desperately trying to pull those dancing around their handbags. Or you've given up all hope and want something for bladdered people rather than beautiful people. In other words - the words of the marketing reptiles - it should appeal to "the dance-floor element." A refreshing little "textured alcoholic fruit gel-carb" from Carlsberg-Tetley delicately called Thickhead. It's interesting in a Spacedust sort of way and is hyped as an essential feature of a fun night out. I think the essential feature of a fun night is being sick in bins at bus-stops, but I'm not in PR.
Actually no one could drink masses of this without gagging so the comparison with real ale holds up. Thickhead has done away with those dubious macho anxieties about the authenticity of booze. These new drinks are fizzy, fluorescent, infantile, saccharin-sweet and do a brilliant job of disguising the nasty taste of alcohol. While grown-ups may bore on about good wine,the sad truth is most of us would down a bottle of vinegar if it said Fleurie on the label and some hyperactive bint on TV said it reminded her of Chanel No 5. Indeed the much-maligned alcopops are unpretentious little numbers which just zap you with their artificiality. Just what you'd expect from such post-modern little potions.
They also come pre-packaged with a little post-modern moral panic about drinking and young people. Never mind the research which says that, as always, if teenagers want to get drunk, which they do, they spend their money on that which will get them drunk fastest - beer and cider. This new panic is imbued with the kind of memory lapses that one associates with progressive drinking. There have always been things like alcopops, but they were called shandy, lager-and-lime, cider-and-black.
It is not just lad culture in both its male and female incarnations that encourages excess. The gulf between new lad and old oaf was never as big and bold and bad as everybody liked to pretend. If it was, how come you could buy Oliver Reed T-shirts at the Great British Beer Festival?
The earnest worry about children being lured into "offies" to buy alcopops because honestly they just didn't realise that these drinks had alcohol in them is premised on denial - denial about the culture our kids grow up in, where every soft drink is sold as if it were a hallucinogen, in which imagery, graphic design, video have been under the influence of rave culture for a good few years now; denial about statistics that show that legal and illegal drugs are simply part of everyday experience for the majority of young people. This is not the same as saying that all young people take drugs and drink, but some of them do some of the time. Just like the rest of us. Some lives will be wrecked because of it and some will be enhanced because of it. Among 11-to-15-year-olds, 17 per cent, drink regularly and the majority do not have much disposable income. They are not the "repertoire drinkers" of club 18-30.
The logical conclusion of niche marketing is that new consumer groups have to be aggressively sought out. Drug dealers do it relatively openly; the drinks industry has taken to spiking lemonade in order to achieve its ends. Which is the more hypocritical?
What is most objectionable about these new products is that they no longer exist outside of the marketing loop. The line between product and packaging is blurred. The package, the trends, the inane definitions are conceived and a product invented to fit the bill. Portfolio products for portfolio times matching our taste for portfolio politics.
So don't worry your hungover heads about little girls drinking puke-flavoured Flavours for Ravers but ask yourself what happens when beliefs are replaced by "conceptual currents", when a good night out depends on a selection of chemicals "specifically styled to match the radically revised cultural concerns of pre-millennial youth culture". It's enough to make you yearn for the good old days when Jarvis's melancholy little refrain "Sorted for Es and whizz" sounded just like the real thing.
Ageism Debate
Selina stokes a diversity debate that needs addressing
Monday 8 September 2008
It will come as a surprise to few but a delight to many that Selina Scott is suing Five over ageism in its refusal to hire her for a maternity cover role and choice of younger presenters instead. It is a delight not because Five is worse than anyone else in this respect, but because it stokes a debate which urgently needs to be taken more seriously. Casual sexism, ageism and racism are the collective dirty secret of the vast majority of media institutions, and they represent as much of an industrial challenge as they do a moral one.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission's Report on Sex and Power, published last week, drew a depressing picture for women in the workplace. In general the progression of women at the highest level in the workplace is pitiful and the media are no exception: only 13.6% of national newspaper editors (including the Herald and Western Mail) are women; only 10% of media FTSE's 350 companies have women at the helm; and at the BBC, which has often been held as an exemplar of diversity, women make up less than 30% of most senior management positions. It puts into context Jeremy Paxman's deranged rant about the white male in television. Ethnic minority representation is even worse.
A couple of weeks ago Pat Younge, former BBC head of sports programmes and planning who left to work for Discovery in the US, caused a stir at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International TV Festival by saying that diversity targets should be like financial targets - you don't hit them, you get fired. I have to say that as board champion for diversity at Guardian News and Media I would currently be firing myself and most of the board for some missed targets. But Younge is right - because diversity targets are not just a feelgood add-on, they are vital to the health of any media business. The temptation to hire in one's own image for most managers is as irresistible as it is subliminal - which is why there are a lot of opinionated women working in digital management at the Guardian, and why we all need targets to remind us to look beyond the mirror.
On screen, any number of unconventional-looking ageing blokes (Jeremy Clarkson, Jonathan Ross, Chris Moyles, Alan Sugar, Adrian Chiles, Jeremy Paxman, Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan) are paid at a top rate for the talent they possess beyond their appearance. For women it is an altogether different story - appearance and age are clearly factors in choosing female presenters in a way that they aren't for men.
The media should be deeply concerned about this un-diversity - not because it represents moral turpitude on our part, but because it represents bloody awful business sense. What is happening to the UK population at the moment? It is ethnically diversifying, and it is ageing. It is also the case that it is, as of the 2001 Census, marginally more female than it is male. And we live longer - so older women, and non-white potential audiences are on the rise. In London, the major urban conurbation and key market for so many media brands, the population is around 37% ethnically diverse, yet this is nowhere near reflected in the management structures of media companies. Or indeed in their on-screen or in-paper representation.
How though, can you hope to address audiences for which you have no instinctive feel, and towards which you show casual discrimination? We are all in danger of becoming irrelevant to the changing demographics of our target audience at a time when holding any kind of audience is key to survival. If white men are so good at solving business problems - and given that they represent well over 80% of FTSE 100 directors we can speculate that this is a skill they must possess in measure - then I'm surprised they haven't grasped this one already.
Wasted: Why Education Isn't Educating by Frank Furedi
Frank Furedi launches an excoriating attack on our education system and its failings, says Rafael Behr
Sunday 15 November 2009
1) ‘Children are taught to mistrust teachers; teachers are taught to mistrust themselves.’ Photograph by Christopher Thomond
A few years ago, I visited a school in Leicester that inspectors had declared to be outstanding in the provision of classes in "citizenship". This was a subject only recently invented by government in response to nagging national anxiety over "social cohesion". No one seemed to have any idea how, pedagogically speaking, to make citizens. Except, apparently, in the Midlands.
I was told how the citizenship "agenda" was woven through the rest of the curriculum – sequins of political liberalism sewn on to the fabric of other subjects. One history teacher explained to me how she had met her citizenship obligations by placing al-Qaida terrorism in the context of CIA support for Afghan mujahideen during the cold war. A 14-year-old pupil proved he had internalised this long view by explaining that, while the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist attacks were bad, they were also, in a sense, "payback". A statutory duty to inculcate civic mindedness had somehow equipped British teenagers with a pseudo-jihadi notion of terrorist murder as historical quid pro quo.
That Leicester classroom came back to me when reading Wasted, Frank Furedi's onslaught on schooling policy. Furedi devotes several pages to the ill-conceived citizenship agenda, but as just one example of the way our classrooms have become inadvertent laboratories in queasy liberal social engineering. Teachers are also supposed to instil such useful attributes as environmental consciousness, emotional candour and respect for racial and cultural diversity. Some of these goals are made explicit in the curriculum for children as young as two.
Furedi does not necessarily object to the values implied by those requirements (although he is oddly dyspeptic about green issues). His core argument is that the aspiration to fashion children's souls according to political criteria is not really education at all; at least, not as he thinks that word should be understood.
No one could reasonably claim that education has suffered from a lack of political attention in Britain. It was famously Tony Blair's top three priorities before the 1997 election. There has been some new law or initiative every year since: literacy hour, "Every Child Matters", academy schools, Early Years Foundation Stage, the "Gifted and Talented" programme, personalised learning etc. This process, Furedi argues, signals a politicisation of education that makes schools responsible for the correction of social ills. As a result, their proper function – as transmitters of the accrued wisdom of humanity from one generation to the next – is squeezed out.
The curriculum, in Furedi's analysis, has come to be seen by policymakers as an easy tool for the correction of wider cultural and behavioural problems. Obesity epidemic? Teach children about healthy eating. Too much teenage pregnancy? More sex education. By extension, teachers have become mediators in a process of socialisation – policing "values" rather than directing thoughts; a secular political clergy with the education secretary as pope. Pedagogy, meanwhile, has come to look more like therapy, with motivational and psychological techniques coming to the fore, along with a fashionable horror of allowing children to get bored. Everything must be "relevant".
That imperative has, according to Furedi, a pernicious consequence. If schools must always adapt their material to contemporary circumstances, education becomes simply a mechanism for coping with modernity. This is manifest in a shift in emphasis from traditional subjects to a more functional, utilitarian agenda: equipping children with "skills to learn", responding to globalisation and obligatory use of IT in the classroom.
But if education is about negotiated surrender to economic change, the corpus of knowledge possessed by teachers is, by dint of their age, obsolete. Whatever adults know is old-fashioned, prejudiced and a barrier to learning instead of a precious commodity to be passed on.
That observation is central to Furedi's thesis: the current fashion for "child-led" and "personalised" learning is part of a misguided philosophy that is corroding intergenerational relations. Children are taught to mistrust teachers; teachers are taught to mistrust themselves. No one has confidence to extol or exert the simple authority of adulthood and scholastic knowledge. Discipline breaks down, leading to moral panic and even greater pressure on schools to fix the "broken society".
Furedi build his case methodically and argues it carefully, if not elegantly. He supports it with quotes (shrewdly selected, sometimes repeated) from politicians and educationalists. Frustratingly, he tends to give credence to anecdote and sensational news stories that support his account, but not to data – exam results for example – that might nuance the picture. That makes it hard to know if the problem he describes is a tendency on the margins of education or a crisis intrinsic to it.
But the analysis rings true, as does Furedi's defence of a subject-based curriculum and a philosophy of education that recognises the duty of one generation to impart a canon of knowledge to the next. Forget the management jargon and digital neophilia. Let children be inspired by teachers' faith in the great past achievements of humanity.
Furedi admits it is a small "c" conservative view, but he rejects the charge that it is elitist. If, in the past, only the elite had such an education, the policy challenge is how to extend it to all, not how to make it seem worthless by denouncing it as irrelevant in order to teach something easier instead. None of that solves the problem of how to turn children into citizens. But then, perhaps, if they have a good enough education, they can work it out for themselves
Hoodies strike fear in British cinema
If you want to scare a British moviegoer, you don't make a film about zombies – you cast a kid in flammable sportswear and a hoodie
Thursday 5 November 2009 21.35 GMT
2) Fear on the streets … Michael Caine in Harry Brown. Photograph: Rex Features/Everett
Who's afraid of the big bad hoodie? Enough of us, certainly, that the smart money in British cinema is going on those films that prey on our fear of urban youths and show that fear back to us. These days, the scariest Britflick villain isn't a flesh-eating zombie, or an East End Mr Big with a sawn-off shooter and a tattooed sidekick. It is a teenage boy with a penchant for flammable casualwear.
What separates hoodies from the youth cults of previous moral panics – the teddy boys, the mods and rockers, the punks, the ravers have all had their day at the cinema – is that they don't have the pop-cultural weight of the other subcultures, whose members bonded through music, art and customised fashion. Instead, they're defined by their class (perceived as being bottom of the heap) and their social standing (their relationship to society is always seen as being oppositional). Hoodies aren't "kids" or "youngsters" or even "rebels" – in fact, recent research by Women in Journalism on regional and national newspaper reporting of hoodies shows that the word is most commonly interchanged with (in order of popularity) "yob", "thug", "lout" and "scum".
Greg Philo, research director of Glasgow University Media Group and professor of sociology at the university, traces our attitudes to hoodies back to the middle classes' long-held fear of those who might undermine their security. That is what they see in what Philo describes as "a longterm excluded class, simply not needed, who often take control of their communities through aggression or running their alternative economy, based on things like drug-dealing or protection rackets".
"If you go to these places, it's very grim," says Philo. "The culture of violence is real. But for the British media, it's simple – bad upbringing or just evil children. Their accounts of what happens are very partial and distorted, which pushes people towards much more rightwing positions. There's no proper social debate about what we can do about it. Obviously, not all young people in hoods are dangerous – most aren't – but the ones who are can be very dangerous, and writing about them sells papers because people are innately attracted to what's scary. That's how we survive as a species – our body and brain is attuned to focus on what is likely to kill us, because we're traditionally hunters and hunted."
Once the images of the feral hoodie was implanted in the public imagination, it was a short journey to script and then to screen – it's no surprise that hoodies are increasingly populating British horrors and thrillers, generating a presence so malevolent and chilling that there are often hints of the supernatural or the subhuman about their form.
Daniel Barber's debut feature film, the much touted Harry Brown, is the latest and possibly the grisliest movie to exploit our fear of the young, but it follows a steady stream of British terror-thrillers including Eden Lake, The Disappeared and Summer Scars, as well as a seedier breed of ultraviolent modern nasties such as Outlaw and The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael. Soon we'll get Philip Ridley's Heartless, a visceral supernatural horror in which the howling, snarling hoodies who terrorise the estate turn out to be genuine demons dealing not in crack cocaine but in diabolical Faustian bargains. Harry Brown's hoodies, however, are still very much human, and like most cinema hoodies, the ones who circle the eponymous vigilante hero (played by Michael Caine) hunt in packs and move in unison, commandeering the gloomy underpasses and stairwells of the concrete and steel London estate they inhabit. To Barber, the threat they present is very real and was, he believes, the motivating factor for Caine to make the film.
"I'm scared of these kids in gangs," says Barber. "They have no respect for any other part of society. It's all about me, me, me. Life is becoming cheaper and cheaper in this country." And from a director's point of view, hoodies are gold dust. "We're afraid of what we don't understand or know, and there's so much about these kids we just don't understand," he says. "That's a good starting point for any film baddie."
When we first see the bad guys in Harry Brown, they are an amorphous mob of hooded creatures cast in shadow, smoking crack in an under-lit tunnel. They shoot at a young mother pushing a buggy in a park, then batter an old man to death. They show all the hallmarks of the stereotypical youth of "Broken Britain" – the tracksuits, guns and dead eyes – and Barber's overhead framing and murky lighting of them as they swarm over a vandalised car or close in on a passing couple invite comparison with those other cinema villains who gather strength in the dark – vampires and zombies.
Txting: the gr8 db8 by David Crystal
A linguist finds text messaging nothing to fear, discovers Tom Lamont
Sunday 11 October 2009
3) In his study of text messaging culture, linguist David Crystal asks us to picture the investors' meeting when the mobile phone was first unveiled. We've created a method of calling anybody, any time, anywhere, the inventors might have said. Phone home from the middle of a field or hear the voice of a loved one atop Everest! One more thing: we want to put in a facility that allows people to thumb a message of no more than 160 characters, in case they want to communicate that way instead.
"In a logical world, text messaging should not have survived," writes Crystal and he is right. It is ugly, clunky and retrogressive. Yet the "short message service", or SMS, thrived during the mobile telecommunications boom and 250 billion SMS texts had been sent worldwide by 2001.
Such rapid and widespread adoption, inevitably, pinged panic radars, especially given the phenomenon's popularity with teenagers. Were all these abbreviations, initialisations and smiley faces fatally corrupting the English language? Might people forget how to communicate without a keypad?
These are the essentials of the book's "gr8 db8". Crystal's answers are convincing, particularly when he quotes clever "text message poetry" as proof that relentless word-shortening and a strict character count needn't limit linguistic craft. Besides, he suggests, Britain's moral panic brigade should be thankful that trends here haven't developed as they have in Japan, where teenagers enjoy a ritual called keitai dating, sitting around a table in near-silence to flirt by SMS. Or Italy, where texting vernacular has become so robotic it just about realises Orwell's newspeak, the plus sign replacing the superlative ending "-issimo", so that a heartfelt "I miss you so much", or "mi manchi tantissimo", is rendered "mmt+".
It all adds up to a jolly meditation, helped by the enthusiasm of a linguist revelling in newly coined lingo. Oddly, Crystal apologises for being unable to gather much of his own statistical data; it is hard, he says, to get participants to hand over such private information. But this is still a fun trot through little-mapped territory.
Independent
The world map of cannabis
Study demonstrates the extraordinary scale of the drug's global popularity
By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Friday, 16 October 2009
1) It is 40 years since cannabis unleashed the "flower power" revolution of the 1960s, encouraging a generation in Europe and the US to "make love not war". Young people at the time hoped their legacy would be world peace. Instead, it has turned out to be a world of fuzzy dope-heads.
In the intervening decades, the drug whose intoxicating effects have been known for 4,000 years has been increasingly adopted by adolescents and young adults across the globe.
Today, an estimated one in 25 adults of working age – 166 million people around the world – has used cannabis to get high, either in ignorance or defiance of its damaging effects on health. Now, the extraordinary popularity of the drug is posing a significant public health challenge, doctors say.
Writing in The Lancet, Wayne Hall of the University of Queensland and Louisa Degenhardt of the University of New South Wales, Australia, say cannabis slows reaction times and increases the risk of accidents, causes bronchitis, interferes with learning, memory and education and, most seriously, may double the risk of schizophrenia. Yet these effects have failed to dent its popularity.
"Since cannabis use was first reported over 40 years ago by US college students, its recreational or non-medical use has spread globally, first to high- income countries, and recently to low-income and middle-income countries," they say.
Citing figures from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime for 2006, they say cannabis use is highest in the US, Australia and New Zealand (where more than 8 per cent of the population indulge), followed by Europe. But because Asia and Africa have bigger populations, they also have the highest proportion of the world's cannabis users, accounting for almost a third (31 per cent) and a quarter (25 per cent) respectively.
Use of cannabis among young people rose strongly during the 1960s and 1970s, peaking in the US in 1979. There was then a long decline until it increased again in the 1990s, before levelling off once more since 2000. In Britain, Australia and New Zealand, cannabis use has been falling for several years, but it is thought to be rising in Latin America and several countries in Africa.
The typical user smokes their first joint in their mid-teens, with use peaking in the mid-20s. The habit then declines steeply as young people move into jobs and discover they have to get up in the morning. Marriage and babies accelerate the decline. About one in 10 of those who ever smoke a joint become regular daily users, with 20 to 30 per cent using the drug weekly. Regular users are also more likely to use other illicit drugs, including heroin and cocaine, lending support to the theory that "soft" drugs act as a "gateway" to hard drugs. But the authors admit this supposed link "remains a subject of considerable debate".
However, they add that the ill effects of cannabis are modest when compared with the damage done by alcohol, tobacco and other illicit drugs. In Australia, it accounted for just 0.2 per cent of the total burden of disease.
Future to focus on rehabilitation for torture brothers
Boys likely to serve sentence in secure children's home
By Jonathan Brown
Saturday, 5 September 2009
DAVID SANDISON / THE INDEPENDENT
The Youth Justice Board will monitor the boys' progress
2) Support from psychologists and specialist social workers. Twenty-five hours a week of education. A life away from the alcohol, cannabis and violent films that characterised their troubled early years.
Yesterday as the two young boys in the Doncaster torture case awoke to the certain prospect of a lengthy sentence for their barbaric crimes, experts said the next few years of their life had to be as much about rehabilitation as punishment. They will get help from myriad agencies and professionals who will take responsibility for the future of the brothers, aged 11 and 12, to hopefully stop them from reoffending.
Today the boys' childhood home, a council house in an anonymous suburb of Doncaster, is boarded up. Their mother was moved by the local authority for her own protection when the first allegations were levelled against the second and third youngest of her seven sons.
Neighbours believe the mother and her five other sons are living in a caravan on the Yorkshire coast. Their father, who lived seven miles away in Edlington where the two boys – already on the child protection register – were placed with foster parents when they committed their crimes, has not been seen since.
Future contact between parents and offspring, both of which will be protected by lifelong anonymity in the media, will depend on the judgement of social workers compiling pre-sentence reports. They must decide whether visits will help the boys come to terms with their offending and speed their passage back into society.
The brothers are being held at separate secure children's homes and are likely to stay within these highly specialised environments for the duration of their sentence due to be handed down at Sheffield Crown Court in October.
Although a maximum sentence of life imprisonment will be available to the court – and despite the sense of public outrage following their admission of grievous bodily harm with intent – it seems unlikely the judge will impose more than the eight years served by their most notorious predecessors.
Jamie Bulger's killers Jon Venables and Robert Thompson were released from their secure children's home accommodation in 2001 following sweeping criticism of their trial and treatment by the European Court of Justice. The Bulger case led to reforms in British law that made it easier for children as young as 10 to be found guilty of serious crimes by removing the need to prove they were aware of the consequences of their criminal actions. But it also made increased the level of protection for the offenders.
Following sentence, the Doncaster youngsters' time in the so-called secure estate will be under the control of the Youth Justice Board (YJB). Younger more vulnerable offenders are normally sent – space permitting – to one of 15 secure children's homes run by local authority social services departments. Success rates for preventing re-offending among people who enter the system at a very young age are high, experts believe.
Barnardo's assistant director of policy Pam Hibbert explained: "When you have young children who commit these serious offences they tend to have a background of neglect and abuse. But it is very clear if you look at the history of the other notorious cases they actually tend not to go on to commit further offences on their release."
There are currently 165 young people serving sentences in secure children's homes out of a total of 2,500 offenders under the age of 18 in prison. Most are sent to young offenders institutions which are modelled more closely on adult prisons. Although the option of transfer at the age of 15 will be available, it is likely the brothers will remain in children's homes where they will benefit from 25 hours a week of education, the support of a key worker, psychologists and the possibility of a phased return back into the community towards the end of their sentence.
Peter Minchin, head of placement at the YJB, said: "The idea is to make a positive impact on young people, particularly the very youngest ones. These institutions are set up to work specifically with young people who have holistic needs not just offending ones. Our responsibility is to make sure they go into the most appropriate placement that meets these needs."
Inmates benefit from a high staff ratio, with the smallest establishment having five beds and the largest, at Aycliffe in Co Durham where the child killer Mary Bell was held, having 36. As in the Venables-Thompson case the media will be forbidden from identifying where the brothers are being held.
The YJB sets out to maintain family links where possible and to locate young people close to their communities where appropriate. It will meet the costs of a weekly visit for up to two adults and their children and pay for childminders. The board also pays a contribution to overnight accommodation and meals where necessary.
But experts yesterday pointed out that the brothers' case remained rare and that many staff would not have experience in dealing with such serious offenders. Jackie Worrall, director of policy and public affairs at the offender's charity Nacro said: "It will be a number of years before they are back in the community and they will be not be children any more – teenagers or possibly adults. It is so unusual for children of this age to be involved in such an offence so we are left speculating what issues they are going to face."
Sorted for textured alcoholic fruit gel-carb
'Alcopop' drinks should not make us fret about teenage boozing, but about marketing taking over the good night out
SUZANNE MOORE
Wednesday, 4 September 1996
3) You may have noticed there are some vile alcoholic drinks about. They look and taste disgusting and are consumed by strangely dressed types. Such beverages are sold primarily by the notion that they get you out of your head. They are named things like Headcracker, Sneck Lifter, Owd Growler, Original Sheepdip and GBH. Do they encourage alcoholism? Quite possibly, but as men drink them no one seems to mind. Do they make getting smashed seem cool and grown-up? Yes, if beards and beer bellies signify maturity.
No, what we like to get worked up about is another kind of alcohol altogether. The "alcopops", the soft options that disguise the hard drinking that young people, especially young women, get up to. It is all a cynical marketing campaign to turn the nation's youth into lushes. And here's another one. A tangerine hair gel disguised as something you want to knock back while you are dancing around your handbag. Or while you're desperately trying to pull those dancing around their handbags. Or you've given up all hope and want something for bladdered people rather than beautiful people. In other words - the words of the marketing reptiles - it should appeal to "the dance-floor element." A refreshing little "textured alcoholic fruit gel-carb" from Carlsberg-Tetley delicately called Thickhead. It's interesting in a Spacedust sort of way and is hyped as an essential feature of a fun night out. I think the essential feature of a fun night is being sick in bins at bus-stops, but I'm not in PR.
Actually no one could drink masses of this without gagging so the comparison with real ale holds up. Thickhead has done away with those dubious macho anxieties about the authenticity of booze. These new drinks are fizzy, fluorescent, infantile, saccharin-sweet and do a brilliant job of disguising the nasty taste of alcohol. While grown-ups may bore on about good wine,the sad truth is most of us would down a bottle of vinegar if it said Fleurie on the label and some hyperactive bint on TV said it reminded her of Chanel No 5. Indeed the much-maligned alcopops are unpretentious little numbers which just zap you with their artificiality. Just what you'd expect from such post-modern little potions.
They also come pre-packaged with a little post-modern moral panic about drinking and young people. Never mind the research which says that, as always, if teenagers want to get drunk, which they do, they spend their money on that which will get them drunk fastest - beer and cider. This new panic is imbued with the kind of memory lapses that one associates with progressive drinking. There have always been things like alcopops, but they were called shandy, lager-and-lime, cider-and-black.
It is not just lad culture in both its male and female incarnations that encourages excess. The gulf between new lad and old oaf was never as big and bold and bad as everybody liked to pretend. If it was, how come you could buy Oliver Reed T-shirts at the Great British Beer Festival?
The earnest worry about children being lured into "offies" to buy alcopops because honestly they just didn't realise that these drinks had alcohol in them is premised on denial - denial about the culture our kids grow up in, where every soft drink is sold as if it were a hallucinogen, in which imagery, graphic design, video have been under the influence of rave culture for a good few years now; denial about statistics that show that legal and illegal drugs are simply part of everyday experience for the majority of young people. This is not the same as saying that all young people take drugs and drink, but some of them do some of the time. Just like the rest of us. Some lives will be wrecked because of it and some will be enhanced because of it. Among 11-to-15-year-olds, 17 per cent, drink regularly and the majority do not have much disposable income. They are not the "repertoire drinkers" of club 18-30.
The logical conclusion of niche marketing is that new consumer groups have to be aggressively sought out. Drug dealers do it relatively openly; the drinks industry has taken to spiking lemonade in order to achieve its ends. Which is the more hypocritical?
What is most objectionable about these new products is that they no longer exist outside of the marketing loop. The line between product and packaging is blurred. The package, the trends, the inane definitions are conceived and a product invented to fit the bill. Portfolio products for portfolio times matching our taste for portfolio politics.
So don't worry your hungover heads about little girls drinking puke-flavoured Flavours for Ravers but ask yourself what happens when beliefs are replaced by "conceptual currents", when a good night out depends on a selection of chemicals "specifically styled to match the radically revised cultural concerns of pre-millennial youth culture". It's enough to make you yearn for the good old days when Jarvis's melancholy little refrain "Sorted for Es and whizz" sounded just like the real thing.
Ageism Debate
Selina stokes a diversity debate that needs addressing
Monday 8 September 2008
It will come as a surprise to few but a delight to many that Selina Scott is suing Five over ageism in its refusal to hire her for a maternity cover role and choice of younger presenters instead. It is a delight not because Five is worse than anyone else in this respect, but because it stokes a debate which urgently needs to be taken more seriously. Casual sexism, ageism and racism are the collective dirty secret of the vast majority of media institutions, and they represent as much of an industrial challenge as they do a moral one.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission's Report on Sex and Power, published last week, drew a depressing picture for women in the workplace. In general the progression of women at the highest level in the workplace is pitiful and the media are no exception: only 13.6% of national newspaper editors (including the Herald and Western Mail) are women; only 10% of media FTSE's 350 companies have women at the helm; and at the BBC, which has often been held as an exemplar of diversity, women make up less than 30% of most senior management positions. It puts into context Jeremy Paxman's deranged rant about the white male in television. Ethnic minority representation is even worse.
A couple of weeks ago Pat Younge, former BBC head of sports programmes and planning who left to work for Discovery in the US, caused a stir at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International TV Festival by saying that diversity targets should be like financial targets - you don't hit them, you get fired. I have to say that as board champion for diversity at Guardian News and Media I would currently be firing myself and most of the board for some missed targets. But Younge is right - because diversity targets are not just a feelgood add-on, they are vital to the health of any media business. The temptation to hire in one's own image for most managers is as irresistible as it is subliminal - which is why there are a lot of opinionated women working in digital management at the Guardian, and why we all need targets to remind us to look beyond the mirror.
On screen, any number of unconventional-looking ageing blokes (Jeremy Clarkson, Jonathan Ross, Chris Moyles, Alan Sugar, Adrian Chiles, Jeremy Paxman, Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan) are paid at a top rate for the talent they possess beyond their appearance. For women it is an altogether different story - appearance and age are clearly factors in choosing female presenters in a way that they aren't for men.
The media should be deeply concerned about this un-diversity - not because it represents moral turpitude on our part, but because it represents bloody awful business sense. What is happening to the UK population at the moment? It is ethnically diversifying, and it is ageing. It is also the case that it is, as of the 2001 Census, marginally more female than it is male. And we live longer - so older women, and non-white potential audiences are on the rise. In London, the major urban conurbation and key market for so many media brands, the population is around 37% ethnically diverse, yet this is nowhere near reflected in the management structures of media companies. Or indeed in their on-screen or in-paper representation.
How though, can you hope to address audiences for which you have no instinctive feel, and towards which you show casual discrimination? We are all in danger of becoming irrelevant to the changing demographics of our target audience at a time when holding any kind of audience is key to survival. If white men are so good at solving business problems - and given that they represent well over 80% of FTSE 100 directors we can speculate that this is a skill they must possess in measure - then I'm surprised they haven't grasped this one already.
Saturday 21 November 2009
Information on my critical investigation and linked production.
Critical Investigation - 'An investigation into how and why the tabloid press generates moral panics about male teenage deliquency'
Linked Production - 'A documentary title sequenec and opening about teenage deliquents who may have been influenced by the gangster/Hip Hop genre'.
Contemporary articles on on my investigation..
1) Gang culture threat 'overblown'
By Justin Parkinson BBC News education reporter
British children 'rarely carry weapons'Gang culture is seen as a problem by one in five of England's secondary schools according to a report by the education watchdog Ofsted.
It comes amid concern over levels of disruption and even violence in the classroom and playground.
Stories of weapons checks and drug tests at schools do little to alleviate fears.
But criminologist Simon Hallsworth thinks Britain's political parties are fuelling a "moral panic".
'Fuelling suspicion'
Attitudes to young people - particularly those from poor or ethnic minority backgrounds - had been negatively affected, he told BBC News.
Levels of violent crime had actually fallen but politicians had attempted to out-do each other to appear "tough on crime".
Mr Hallsworth, director of London Metropolitan University's centre for social evaluation and research, said: "The idea of gangs can be dangerous.
"Young people here are only doing what they have always done.
"Only America has an established gang culture. Young people here carry guns very rarely indeed.
Kids are suffering. It's like we are criminalising being young
Simon Hallsworth, criminologist
"Even where there are gangs, such as in parts of south Manchester, members tend not to join until they are 18 to 21."
Mr Hallsworth has carried out research in deprived parts of Hackney, east London.
He found that, although young people hung around together, there was no "gang culture".
He said: "Standing with trousers down to your crutch and your hood on does not make you a member of a gang.
"Some of the poor kids I spoke to were excluded from everything. They were living in homes they shouldn't have to live in and were being called anti-social. Police were moving them on.
"Now we have Asbos [anti-social behaviour orders], which are draconian and politicians are competing to see who can seem the most 'anti-crime'.
"Kids are suffering. It's like we are criminalising being young.
"People branded the usual suspects as gang members. There were black kids and Bangladeshi groups being labelled.
"Young kids are doing what they have always done. Nowadays, when there are three or more of them hanging around they can be moved on."
Mr Hallsworth said that in Moscow - unlike London - groups of young people who spent time together in public were not bothered by police and that this had not resulted in higher levels of gang activity.
Some commentators have linked "tagging" - daubing personalised graffiti on walls - with gangs marking out their "turf".
But, Mr Hallsworth said, the practice had been happening for more than a decade and had only recently been linked to violent group behaviour.
He added: "We've had these panics before with mods, rockers, goths. This is the latest.
"Maybe we should understand more and condemn less."
2) By Tom Geoghegan BBC News Magazine Criminal gangs have been around for centuries but police believe they have become more organised in recent years. So how do they operate?
A prior engagement one night 21 years ago prevented Shaun Bailey from a life of crime.
"I can place to the day the point I missed out on becoming an idiot," he recalls. "A group of friends was going to burgle a factory near where I live. I missed it because I was at the cadets and they were all arrested."
Of the group of 12, three are now dead of gun or knife wounds, and others have been involved in "madness" or suffered mental health problems, says Shaun, 35.
He credits his uncle for making him join the Army cadets, which not only saved him that fateful night but taught him to listen to his mother and grandmother's values and less to the "street".
The camaraderie is unbelievable and is a bit like the Army
Shaun BaileyAfter getting a degree, he returned to the west London estates where he grew up and for more than a decade has helped prevent youngsters drifting into gangs and crime, in the knowledge that the line separating a life of purpose and one of violence is a thin one.
But not everyone escapes. Last week the Metropolitan Police identified 169 gangs in London, a quarter of which have been involved in murder.
A gang led by the men who murdered City lawyer Tom ap Rhys Pryce committed at least 150 robberies, and compiled a robbery guide to Underground stations which rated areas according to police presence and victims.
"The nature of gangs in London is changing and we are starting to see more clearly definable gangs - only a couple or a handful at the moment," says Met Police assistant commissioner Steve Round.
Ganging up
Getting into a gang depends on a recommendation, a family connection or a big reputation, says Shaun, and initiation could mean receiving a beating or stabbing someone. The more organised gangs have tattoos and use websites to spread their message.
When is a gang a gang?"It's a loose association and you might see the others every night or once or twice a week. Now and then someone will plan something or say you need to meet.
"There's a real power in it, especially if someone has a problem and you deal with it. The camaraderie is unbelievable and is a bit like the Army. People are dependent on you and you have a role. There's the safety, the friendship and there's the purpose."
A role could be keeping the gun, cutting up the drugs or even fixing the mopeds, he says.
"You're getting affirmation from alpha males. Another man telling you that you are good or worthwhile is very, very important."
Yob culture
Gangs are nothing new, of course. In Victorian times, there were the Scuttlers in Manchester and the Peaky Blinders in Birmingham at a time when, not unlike today, there was a panic about yobbery and hooliganism. But methods have changed.
It's a brutalising environment that seeks to transform the individual into a complete and utter monster
Professor Gus John"In my time robbing adults was a big step and people were very rarely prepared to do that," says Shaun. "Now it's stabbing people to death. My friends waited until they were 20 before they got shot. Now there are more guns and knives."
Professor Gus John, who has studied gang culture in Manchester and London and advised the Home Office on policy, says that in recent years those using guns are getting younger. They are more likely to take the law into their own hands, and geography is playing more of a part in gang warfare, which used to be defined more by conflict over business deals.
Some gangs demand a loyalty test on joining, which in extreme cases could mean committing an act of violence against a family member.
"It's a brutalising environment that seeks to transform the individual from what could be a reasonable, well-adjusted social being into a complete and utter monster."
Gangs are usually between 20 to 30 in number and members aged between 15 and 25, he says, but their activities are hidden and many communities like Moss Side which have gangs are otherwise well-balanced, vibrant places to live.
"It's not as if the community would be intimidated by seeing 30 or 40 people together, necessarily. It's the way in which they operate within sub-cultures that are on the margins of what the rest of the community is seeing."
Rules of behaviour
There are three common means of income - drugs, robbery and handling stolen goods. The leaders are clearly identified in the more organised gangs, says Professor John, and when one is killed or imprisoned, others vie for top spot.
Children hanging around in large groups is the most natural thing in the world - whether they are a gang is about what they're doing
Shaun BaileyAnd despite the brutality, there is a "moral" code which means younger and elderly relatives are usually off-limits.
"Even within the madness there are certain codes and principles that they ascribe to. But they might not respect the grandparent enough not to hide a gun in their house."
People apply the term "gangs" too liberally and should be careful doing that, he believes, because it confers a status which is worn as a badge of honour.
Shaun Bailey believes government plans for tougher sentences for gangs will glamorise and encourage them, and the notion of what defines a gang is not clear.
"Children hanging around in large groups is the most natural thing in the world," he says. "But whether they are a gang is about what they're doing."
He says the estates in North Kensington where he lives and works have "clicks", groups lacking the loyalty, names and codes of violence associated with the gangs which reside a few miles away in White City and Shepherds Bush.
For instance, if a gang member was attacked then the rest are obliged to exact revenge, but in a click they would not - although they may well do anyway, he says.
Clicks can be formed and dissolved instantly, coming together for an event like the Notting Hill Carnival, and may or may not be involved in crime.
But the distinctions may be irrelevant anyway. In Nottingham, even those not members of gangs imitate the behaviour of those who are, says Karl White, who has 24 years experience working with young people in parts of the city where gangs are rife.
"They may not be a gang member but they become dangerous because they do dangerous things because they want to be gangsters."
3) Are the hoodies the goodies?
By Dominic Casciani BBC News community affairs
The mere sight of a hooded teenager is enough to make some people hurriedly cross the road. But appearances can be deceptive. Not every street-wise youth is out to terrorise you. Meet Mr Hoody Two Shoes.
Sharmarke Hersi fits the description. He's tall with cropped hair and wears a hoodie and trainers. And for those whose fear of teenagers is driven by something more troubling still, the colour of his skin will no doubt make them cross the road.
But he's not happy about society's impression of him or his peers. In fact he's pretty angry about it - not least after he was stopped by police officers last year who were looking for a knife-wielding robber in north London.
When the A-level student asked why he had been stopped, he was told he fitted the description of a tall black man wearing a hoodie. If he meets the same officers again, he will be telling them that, subject to getting the grades, he's probably off to study international relations at university.
"It's like some kind of moral panic," he says philosophically. "I was on the train not long ago and a lady was holding her bag tight because of my dress code. You sometimes see people crossing the road to avoid you or putting their phone away."
Sharmarke Hersi: Tackled gangs, soon to tackle universityGang culture and youth crime is something that Sharmarke and his friends grew up seeing around their neck of Camden in north London.
But after one student died in a knife attack in 1994, the head of one of the biggest schools in the area vowed to turn it around and instil in all his young charges a sense of community solidarity. Huw Salisbury, now retired, was nationally recognised for his efforts at South Camden Community School, particularly because of his pioneering work in integrating refugee children into the mainstream. But Sharmarke says it's the former head's mantra of doing what is right for those around you that stuck with him.
Tackling gangs
"My little brother and his friends were hanging around in groups and had nothing to do. There was violence between the white community and the Asian community and people like me, Somali kids, were sort of in the middle. I didn't want to see them following in the footsteps of others, younger boys looking up to the older ones and thinking that gangs were the thing to do."
That's when youth charity Envision turned up. The organisation works with hundreds of teenagers, predominantly in London, and helps them take leading roles in shaping their communities. Unlike most volunteering organisations, it doesn't tell them what to do. Instead, it supports them in all their ideas - good and bad - and teaches them how to negotiate the roadblocks of officialdom which stand in the way.
"You don't know what's going to work sometimes because every school or community is different - but it's about being willing to put some trust [as adults] in someone's ideas
James Williams of Envision
School ban outlaws 'hoodies' In the case of Sharmarke, he wanted to set up a sports club, based around the martial arts he enjoys, to provide a focus and discipline for younger teenagers at risk of getting into gang culture.
Run on a shoe string budget, the project eventually attracted up to 40 people per session - 40 people who could very well have been hanging around on the streets. As a result, gang culture may be a little bit weaker today in one area of north London than it was two years ago.
"We believe that young people have the ideas and we want to take their ideas and turn them into action," says James Williams of Envision.
"You don't know what's going to work sometimes because every school or community is different. But it's about being willing to put some trust [as adults] in someone's ideas."
Active citizens
Demos, a thinktank that looks at what makes communities tick, says Sharmarke's experience and Envision's other projects have wider lessons.
Its new report looks into what makes Britain's most active volunteers. And it argues that fear of hoodie culture, and the branding of teenagers as apathetic or a threat, is damaging efforts to rebuild communities.
Banned:
Hoodies barred from some shopping centresCrucially, argue authors Paul Skidmore and John Craig, society and officialdom's reluctance to listen misses a trick: if government wants to strengthen communities, then people like Sharmarke need the chance to do the work, rather than just be told what to do.
Rather than focus on Asbo-aggro rhetoric, those in power should actually be asking the hoodie two-shoes in society for help in finding the way out.
The report's publication is timely. This month sees the first Children's Commissioner for England sit down at his desk. Professor Al Aynsley-Green argues that government needs to stop consulting young people and start properly involving them in society as citizens, albeit young ones. It's a view shared by Demos' John Craig who says the approach needs to be applied to volunteering.
"Young people expect to be able to engage and participate in communities on their own terms," says John Craig. "They don't want to sit on a committee and so on. Now that's a challenge for politics and politicians because some of the things that they may want to do are difficult to measure in terms of what they do for a community.
"But that's why we called this report Start with People because much more needs to be done to go to young people and challenge preconceptions that we may have.
"There's this desire [in Whitehall] to 'build capacity' into communities. I think that communities and people are pretty capable already and it's the politicians and policy makers who have to learn from them, not the other way around."
Linked Production - 'A documentary title sequenec and opening about teenage deliquents who may have been influenced by the gangster/Hip Hop genre'.
Contemporary articles on on my investigation..
1) Gang culture threat 'overblown'
By Justin Parkinson BBC News education reporter
British children 'rarely carry weapons'Gang culture is seen as a problem by one in five of England's secondary schools according to a report by the education watchdog Ofsted.
It comes amid concern over levels of disruption and even violence in the classroom and playground.
Stories of weapons checks and drug tests at schools do little to alleviate fears.
But criminologist Simon Hallsworth thinks Britain's political parties are fuelling a "moral panic".
'Fuelling suspicion'
Attitudes to young people - particularly those from poor or ethnic minority backgrounds - had been negatively affected, he told BBC News.
Levels of violent crime had actually fallen but politicians had attempted to out-do each other to appear "tough on crime".
Mr Hallsworth, director of London Metropolitan University's centre for social evaluation and research, said: "The idea of gangs can be dangerous.
"Young people here are only doing what they have always done.
"Only America has an established gang culture. Young people here carry guns very rarely indeed.
Kids are suffering. It's like we are criminalising being young
Simon Hallsworth, criminologist
"Even where there are gangs, such as in parts of south Manchester, members tend not to join until they are 18 to 21."
Mr Hallsworth has carried out research in deprived parts of Hackney, east London.
He found that, although young people hung around together, there was no "gang culture".
He said: "Standing with trousers down to your crutch and your hood on does not make you a member of a gang.
"Some of the poor kids I spoke to were excluded from everything. They were living in homes they shouldn't have to live in and were being called anti-social. Police were moving them on.
"Now we have Asbos [anti-social behaviour orders], which are draconian and politicians are competing to see who can seem the most 'anti-crime'.
"Kids are suffering. It's like we are criminalising being young.
"People branded the usual suspects as gang members. There were black kids and Bangladeshi groups being labelled.
"Young kids are doing what they have always done. Nowadays, when there are three or more of them hanging around they can be moved on."
Mr Hallsworth said that in Moscow - unlike London - groups of young people who spent time together in public were not bothered by police and that this had not resulted in higher levels of gang activity.
Some commentators have linked "tagging" - daubing personalised graffiti on walls - with gangs marking out their "turf".
But, Mr Hallsworth said, the practice had been happening for more than a decade and had only recently been linked to violent group behaviour.
He added: "We've had these panics before with mods, rockers, goths. This is the latest.
"Maybe we should understand more and condemn less."
2) By Tom Geoghegan BBC News Magazine Criminal gangs have been around for centuries but police believe they have become more organised in recent years. So how do they operate?
A prior engagement one night 21 years ago prevented Shaun Bailey from a life of crime.
"I can place to the day the point I missed out on becoming an idiot," he recalls. "A group of friends was going to burgle a factory near where I live. I missed it because I was at the cadets and they were all arrested."
Of the group of 12, three are now dead of gun or knife wounds, and others have been involved in "madness" or suffered mental health problems, says Shaun, 35.
He credits his uncle for making him join the Army cadets, which not only saved him that fateful night but taught him to listen to his mother and grandmother's values and less to the "street".
The camaraderie is unbelievable and is a bit like the Army
Shaun BaileyAfter getting a degree, he returned to the west London estates where he grew up and for more than a decade has helped prevent youngsters drifting into gangs and crime, in the knowledge that the line separating a life of purpose and one of violence is a thin one.
But not everyone escapes. Last week the Metropolitan Police identified 169 gangs in London, a quarter of which have been involved in murder.
A gang led by the men who murdered City lawyer Tom ap Rhys Pryce committed at least 150 robberies, and compiled a robbery guide to Underground stations which rated areas according to police presence and victims.
"The nature of gangs in London is changing and we are starting to see more clearly definable gangs - only a couple or a handful at the moment," says Met Police assistant commissioner Steve Round.
Ganging up
Getting into a gang depends on a recommendation, a family connection or a big reputation, says Shaun, and initiation could mean receiving a beating or stabbing someone. The more organised gangs have tattoos and use websites to spread their message.
When is a gang a gang?"It's a loose association and you might see the others every night or once or twice a week. Now and then someone will plan something or say you need to meet.
"There's a real power in it, especially if someone has a problem and you deal with it. The camaraderie is unbelievable and is a bit like the Army. People are dependent on you and you have a role. There's the safety, the friendship and there's the purpose."
A role could be keeping the gun, cutting up the drugs or even fixing the mopeds, he says.
"You're getting affirmation from alpha males. Another man telling you that you are good or worthwhile is very, very important."
Yob culture
Gangs are nothing new, of course. In Victorian times, there were the Scuttlers in Manchester and the Peaky Blinders in Birmingham at a time when, not unlike today, there was a panic about yobbery and hooliganism. But methods have changed.
It's a brutalising environment that seeks to transform the individual into a complete and utter monster
Professor Gus John"In my time robbing adults was a big step and people were very rarely prepared to do that," says Shaun. "Now it's stabbing people to death. My friends waited until they were 20 before they got shot. Now there are more guns and knives."
Professor Gus John, who has studied gang culture in Manchester and London and advised the Home Office on policy, says that in recent years those using guns are getting younger. They are more likely to take the law into their own hands, and geography is playing more of a part in gang warfare, which used to be defined more by conflict over business deals.
Some gangs demand a loyalty test on joining, which in extreme cases could mean committing an act of violence against a family member.
"It's a brutalising environment that seeks to transform the individual from what could be a reasonable, well-adjusted social being into a complete and utter monster."
Gangs are usually between 20 to 30 in number and members aged between 15 and 25, he says, but their activities are hidden and many communities like Moss Side which have gangs are otherwise well-balanced, vibrant places to live.
"It's not as if the community would be intimidated by seeing 30 or 40 people together, necessarily. It's the way in which they operate within sub-cultures that are on the margins of what the rest of the community is seeing."
Rules of behaviour
There are three common means of income - drugs, robbery and handling stolen goods. The leaders are clearly identified in the more organised gangs, says Professor John, and when one is killed or imprisoned, others vie for top spot.
Children hanging around in large groups is the most natural thing in the world - whether they are a gang is about what they're doing
Shaun BaileyAnd despite the brutality, there is a "moral" code which means younger and elderly relatives are usually off-limits.
"Even within the madness there are certain codes and principles that they ascribe to. But they might not respect the grandparent enough not to hide a gun in their house."
People apply the term "gangs" too liberally and should be careful doing that, he believes, because it confers a status which is worn as a badge of honour.
Shaun Bailey believes government plans for tougher sentences for gangs will glamorise and encourage them, and the notion of what defines a gang is not clear.
"Children hanging around in large groups is the most natural thing in the world," he says. "But whether they are a gang is about what they're doing."
He says the estates in North Kensington where he lives and works have "clicks", groups lacking the loyalty, names and codes of violence associated with the gangs which reside a few miles away in White City and Shepherds Bush.
For instance, if a gang member was attacked then the rest are obliged to exact revenge, but in a click they would not - although they may well do anyway, he says.
Clicks can be formed and dissolved instantly, coming together for an event like the Notting Hill Carnival, and may or may not be involved in crime.
But the distinctions may be irrelevant anyway. In Nottingham, even those not members of gangs imitate the behaviour of those who are, says Karl White, who has 24 years experience working with young people in parts of the city where gangs are rife.
"They may not be a gang member but they become dangerous because they do dangerous things because they want to be gangsters."
3) Are the hoodies the goodies?
By Dominic Casciani BBC News community affairs
The mere sight of a hooded teenager is enough to make some people hurriedly cross the road. But appearances can be deceptive. Not every street-wise youth is out to terrorise you. Meet Mr Hoody Two Shoes.
Sharmarke Hersi fits the description. He's tall with cropped hair and wears a hoodie and trainers. And for those whose fear of teenagers is driven by something more troubling still, the colour of his skin will no doubt make them cross the road.
But he's not happy about society's impression of him or his peers. In fact he's pretty angry about it - not least after he was stopped by police officers last year who were looking for a knife-wielding robber in north London.
When the A-level student asked why he had been stopped, he was told he fitted the description of a tall black man wearing a hoodie. If he meets the same officers again, he will be telling them that, subject to getting the grades, he's probably off to study international relations at university.
"It's like some kind of moral panic," he says philosophically. "I was on the train not long ago and a lady was holding her bag tight because of my dress code. You sometimes see people crossing the road to avoid you or putting their phone away."
Sharmarke Hersi: Tackled gangs, soon to tackle universityGang culture and youth crime is something that Sharmarke and his friends grew up seeing around their neck of Camden in north London.
But after one student died in a knife attack in 1994, the head of one of the biggest schools in the area vowed to turn it around and instil in all his young charges a sense of community solidarity. Huw Salisbury, now retired, was nationally recognised for his efforts at South Camden Community School, particularly because of his pioneering work in integrating refugee children into the mainstream. But Sharmarke says it's the former head's mantra of doing what is right for those around you that stuck with him.
Tackling gangs
"My little brother and his friends were hanging around in groups and had nothing to do. There was violence between the white community and the Asian community and people like me, Somali kids, were sort of in the middle. I didn't want to see them following in the footsteps of others, younger boys looking up to the older ones and thinking that gangs were the thing to do."
That's when youth charity Envision turned up. The organisation works with hundreds of teenagers, predominantly in London, and helps them take leading roles in shaping their communities. Unlike most volunteering organisations, it doesn't tell them what to do. Instead, it supports them in all their ideas - good and bad - and teaches them how to negotiate the roadblocks of officialdom which stand in the way.
"You don't know what's going to work sometimes because every school or community is different - but it's about being willing to put some trust [as adults] in someone's ideas
James Williams of Envision
School ban outlaws 'hoodies' In the case of Sharmarke, he wanted to set up a sports club, based around the martial arts he enjoys, to provide a focus and discipline for younger teenagers at risk of getting into gang culture.
Run on a shoe string budget, the project eventually attracted up to 40 people per session - 40 people who could very well have been hanging around on the streets. As a result, gang culture may be a little bit weaker today in one area of north London than it was two years ago.
"We believe that young people have the ideas and we want to take their ideas and turn them into action," says James Williams of Envision.
"You don't know what's going to work sometimes because every school or community is different. But it's about being willing to put some trust [as adults] in someone's ideas."
Active citizens
Demos, a thinktank that looks at what makes communities tick, says Sharmarke's experience and Envision's other projects have wider lessons.
Its new report looks into what makes Britain's most active volunteers. And it argues that fear of hoodie culture, and the branding of teenagers as apathetic or a threat, is damaging efforts to rebuild communities.
Banned:
Hoodies barred from some shopping centresCrucially, argue authors Paul Skidmore and John Craig, society and officialdom's reluctance to listen misses a trick: if government wants to strengthen communities, then people like Sharmarke need the chance to do the work, rather than just be told what to do.
Rather than focus on Asbo-aggro rhetoric, those in power should actually be asking the hoodie two-shoes in society for help in finding the way out.
The report's publication is timely. This month sees the first Children's Commissioner for England sit down at his desk. Professor Al Aynsley-Green argues that government needs to stop consulting young people and start properly involving them in society as citizens, albeit young ones. It's a view shared by Demos' John Craig who says the approach needs to be applied to volunteering.
"Young people expect to be able to engage and participate in communities on their own terms," says John Craig. "They don't want to sit on a committee and so on. Now that's a challenge for politics and politicians because some of the things that they may want to do are difficult to measure in terms of what they do for a community.
"But that's why we called this report Start with People because much more needs to be done to go to young people and challenge preconceptions that we may have.
"There's this desire [in Whitehall] to 'build capacity' into communities. I think that communities and people are pretty capable already and it's the politicians and policy makers who have to learn from them, not the other way around."
On and Off Screen Representation
On and Off screen representation on my critical investigation..
On and off screen representation is something will affect the audience in how they percieve the text and the opinion they get. I will need to consider this during my critical investigation and linked production. When doing my critical investigation I will notice that the representation on teenagers will be affected because off screen their are many moral panics occuring because of knife crime, gangs and the violent culture so during my linked production i will need to analyse this and on screen i will go against the streotype in the ways not all teenagers are gang related but are still young and whill hang around in groups. For example, black and asian teenagers are representated negatively and dangerous. These are both ethnic minoroties as well which shows that it is usually looked at from a white perspective so because of this the public will view teenagers like this, so i will go against that view and represent in a more positive aspect. For my critical investigation, i will be discussing the issues in newspaper articles and how they create moral panics over teenagers. I will be looking closely at the institution and whether it is a white person perspective and will be analysing why they see ethnic minorities as being violent, involved in gangs and crime, i will be going against the streotype but still looking at reasons for why they could be looked at in this way. On and off screen represention of young teenagers are negative as the opinion given is usually by an older white male that gives the public the image of all teenagers to be like this and makes all teenagers not allowed to hang around together of be in a larger group than three, the teenargers represented are all of aethnic minority (black and asian) and this suggests that the public will see teenagers like that.
On and off screen representation is something will affect the audience in how they percieve the text and the opinion they get. I will need to consider this during my critical investigation and linked production. When doing my critical investigation I will notice that the representation on teenagers will be affected because off screen their are many moral panics occuring because of knife crime, gangs and the violent culture so during my linked production i will need to analyse this and on screen i will go against the streotype in the ways not all teenagers are gang related but are still young and whill hang around in groups. For example, black and asian teenagers are representated negatively and dangerous. These are both ethnic minoroties as well which shows that it is usually looked at from a white perspective so because of this the public will view teenagers like this, so i will go against that view and represent in a more positive aspect. For my critical investigation, i will be discussing the issues in newspaper articles and how they create moral panics over teenagers. I will be looking closely at the institution and whether it is a white person perspective and will be analysing why they see ethnic minorities as being violent, involved in gangs and crime, i will be going against the streotype but still looking at reasons for why they could be looked at in this way. On and off screen represention of young teenagers are negative as the opinion given is usually by an older white male that gives the public the image of all teenagers to be like this and makes all teenagers not allowed to hang around together of be in a larger group than three, the teenargers represented are all of aethnic minority (black and asian) and this suggests that the public will see teenagers like that.
Research for my critical investigation
Last Updated: Tuesday, 1 March, 2005, 16:07 GMT
Gang culture threat 'overblown'
By Justin Parkinson BBC News education reporter
British children 'rarely carry weapons' Gang culture is seen as a problem by one in five of England's secondary schools according to a report by the education watchdog Ofsted.
It comes amid concern over levels of disruption and even violence in the classroom and playground.
Stories of weapons checks and drug tests at schools do little to alleviate fears.
But criminologist Simon Hallsworth thinks Britain's political parties are fuelling a "moral panic".
'Fuelling suspicion'
Attitudes to young people - particularly those from poor or ethnic minority backgrounds - had been negatively affected, he told BBC News.
Levels of violent crime had actually fallen but politicians had attempted to out-do each other to appear "tough on crime".
Mr Hallsworth, director of London Metropolitan University's centre for social evaluation and research, said: "The idea of gangs can be dangerous.
"Young people here are only doing what they have always done.
"Only America has an established gang culture. Young people here carry guns very rarely indeed.
Kids are suffering. It's like we are criminalising being young
Simon Hallsworth, criminologist
"Even where there are gangs, such as in parts of south Manchester, members tend not to join until they are 18 to 21."
Mr Hallsworth has carried out research in deprived parts of Hackney, east London.
He found that, although young people hung around together, there was no "gang culture".
He said: "Standing with trousers down to your crutch and your hood on does not make you a member of a gang.
"Some of the poor kids I spoke to were excluded from everything. They were living in homes they shouldn't have to live in and were being called anti-social. Police were moving them on.
"Now we have Asbos [anti-social behaviour orders], which are draconian and politicians are competing to see who can seem the most 'anti-crime'.
"Kids are suffering. It's like we are criminalising being young.
"People branded the usual suspects as gang members. There were black kids and Bangladeshi groups being labelled.
"Young kids are doing what they have always done. Nowadays, when there are three or more of them hanging around they can be moved on."
Mr Hallsworth said that in Moscow - unlike London - groups of young people who spent time together in public were not bothered by police and that this had not resulted in higher levels of gang activity.
Some commentators have linked "tagging" - daubing personalised graffiti on walls - with gangs marking out their "turf".
But, Mr Hallsworth said, the practice had been happening for more than a decade and had only recently been linked to violent group behaviour.
He added: "We've had these panics before with mods, rockers, goths. This is the latest.
"Maybe we should understand more and condemn less."
Gang culture threat 'overblown'
By Justin Parkinson BBC News education reporter
British children 'rarely carry weapons' Gang culture is seen as a problem by one in five of England's secondary schools according to a report by the education watchdog Ofsted.
It comes amid concern over levels of disruption and even violence in the classroom and playground.
Stories of weapons checks and drug tests at schools do little to alleviate fears.
But criminologist Simon Hallsworth thinks Britain's political parties are fuelling a "moral panic".
'Fuelling suspicion'
Attitudes to young people - particularly those from poor or ethnic minority backgrounds - had been negatively affected, he told BBC News.
Levels of violent crime had actually fallen but politicians had attempted to out-do each other to appear "tough on crime".
Mr Hallsworth, director of London Metropolitan University's centre for social evaluation and research, said: "The idea of gangs can be dangerous.
"Young people here are only doing what they have always done.
"Only America has an established gang culture. Young people here carry guns very rarely indeed.
Kids are suffering. It's like we are criminalising being young
Simon Hallsworth, criminologist
"Even where there are gangs, such as in parts of south Manchester, members tend not to join until they are 18 to 21."
Mr Hallsworth has carried out research in deprived parts of Hackney, east London.
He found that, although young people hung around together, there was no "gang culture".
He said: "Standing with trousers down to your crutch and your hood on does not make you a member of a gang.
"Some of the poor kids I spoke to were excluded from everything. They were living in homes they shouldn't have to live in and were being called anti-social. Police were moving them on.
"Now we have Asbos [anti-social behaviour orders], which are draconian and politicians are competing to see who can seem the most 'anti-crime'.
"Kids are suffering. It's like we are criminalising being young.
"People branded the usual suspects as gang members. There were black kids and Bangladeshi groups being labelled.
"Young kids are doing what they have always done. Nowadays, when there are three or more of them hanging around they can be moved on."
Mr Hallsworth said that in Moscow - unlike London - groups of young people who spent time together in public were not bothered by police and that this had not resulted in higher levels of gang activity.
Some commentators have linked "tagging" - daubing personalised graffiti on walls - with gangs marking out their "turf".
But, Mr Hallsworth said, the practice had been happening for more than a decade and had only recently been linked to violent group behaviour.
He added: "We've had these panics before with mods, rockers, goths. This is the latest.
"Maybe we should understand more and condemn less."
Tuesday 27 October 2009
Critical Investigation and Linked Production
My crictical investigation is about me looking in depth and exploring 'To what extent are young teenage boys represented in the media'. I will be looking specifically at how they are shown in the media negatively because young teenage boys are presented with guns, drugs, gangs and violence. I will be looking at newspaper articles, internet sites and the news.
My linked production piece is on a documentary into the lives of the young teenagers and the lives of teenagers who feel they are stereotyped with the rest and do not follow that stereotype.
MIGRAIN
Media language - Long shots of young males socialising and then looking at the surrounding area, what they are doing and the language they use and then link this back to why the media representations are correct and why they are incorrect.
- The time in which they go out and how they talk, as well as how they talk during the day to show the importance of the language they use and the impact it has on society.
-The music that these dilenquents use and whether they promote their behaviour and the the language used in these songs and if that is appropriate for youngsters to be exposed to and if it links to their actions.
Ideologies - If young males are looked at in a negative light simply because of the media and items like 'hoods' is just a idea in society's minds to be bad because of the streotypes the media put forward.
-Whether intelligent young males are looked at in a negative way and not given a real chance in jobs and life in general because of the negative image they may give off because the media has proclaimed that image to be offensive.
Genre - I can look at the gangs genre and relate it to Americans.
- Relate it back to knife crime and gives facts and figures
- Education and how many young males are successful in school and how many are not.
- Instituions like sky1 and channel 4 simply because it also promoted the Ross Kemp on gangs series and this is very similar.
Narrative - The narrative is going to be based on how young males in London are represented in the media and portrayed in a negative way and streotyped to be bad and associated with gangs, drugs, violence and guns.
- Also, i will be linking to how London young males are following and wanting to be like American gangs e.g. Crips and Bloods
- Lastly, how the narrative links to the news today and make a documentary not following the negative media and showing teenagers in a positive and negative way in order to give people their own judgement.
SHEP
Social - I will have alot of social issues to cover because there is so much information on the news about young teenage boys and it will be easily accessible because it will be all over the internet on 'BBC' news, google and on the television as well as being TV shows about it. Also, it socially attracts many people and it covers many streotypes, moral panics and the public being worried about teenagers.
Historical - Also, this has been covered in the past and it has been growing in the media due to the recession and crimes are up because more people need money and because of past issues in America is has been immited in England.
Economical - This will be economically good because this documentary can be distributed and funded with a low budget. However, alot of money will be produced because it appeals to the economy and will interest all ages and classes and males or females.
Political -This is a major political factor as the government and economy has problems with this issue and it needs to be solved and because it is to due with guns and drugs and makes the society scared, politically it needs to be overcome.
Issues and debates
Representation - This is a obvious issue because my critical investigation is on how young males are representated and shown in the media and i will be discussing the negative news as well as the positive, what these young males are associated with and why and making a personal judgement at the end.
Media theories
My linked production piece is on a documentary into the lives of the young teenagers and the lives of teenagers who feel they are stereotyped with the rest and do not follow that stereotype.
MIGRAIN
Media language - Long shots of young males socialising and then looking at the surrounding area, what they are doing and the language they use and then link this back to why the media representations are correct and why they are incorrect.
- The time in which they go out and how they talk, as well as how they talk during the day to show the importance of the language they use and the impact it has on society.
-The music that these dilenquents use and whether they promote their behaviour and the the language used in these songs and if that is appropriate for youngsters to be exposed to and if it links to their actions.
Ideologies - If young males are looked at in a negative light simply because of the media and items like 'hoods' is just a idea in society's minds to be bad because of the streotypes the media put forward.
-Whether intelligent young males are looked at in a negative way and not given a real chance in jobs and life in general because of the negative image they may give off because the media has proclaimed that image to be offensive.
Genre - I can look at the gangs genre and relate it to Americans.
- Relate it back to knife crime and gives facts and figures
- Education and how many young males are successful in school and how many are not.
Representation - How young males are representated in media and how they are streotyped and associated with guns, drugs, violence and gangs.
- How media has portrayed and presented young males in a positive light and promoted them to be good rather than bad.
Audience - A mass audience can be attracted because young teenagers will want to watch the documentary as they may be able to relate to it, adults as they can see the issues with young males as they may have a child themselves and others because they will want to be aware.
- My target audience which is social class C1, C2 and D, males, aged between 14 + because this is usually the class and gender and age that these issues are based around and these are the people that will be most attracted as they can relate to it my secondary audience will be everyone else.
- The socio-economic class that it will appeal to is C1, C2 and D because these are the people who can relate to these issues and live in the areas where this occurs.
- Instituions like sky1 and channel 4 simply because it also promoted the Ross Kemp on gangs series and this is very similar.
Narrative - The narrative is going to be based on how young males in London are represented in the media and portrayed in a negative way and streotyped to be bad and associated with gangs, drugs, violence and guns.
- Also, i will be linking to how London young males are following and wanting to be like American gangs e.g. Crips and Bloods
- Lastly, how the narrative links to the news today and make a documentary not following the negative media and showing teenagers in a positive and negative way in order to give people their own judgement.
SHEP
Social - I will have alot of social issues to cover because there is so much information on the news about young teenage boys and it will be easily accessible because it will be all over the internet on 'BBC' news, google and on the television as well as being TV shows about it. Also, it socially attracts many people and it covers many streotypes, moral panics and the public being worried about teenagers.
Historical - Also, this has been covered in the past and it has been growing in the media due to the recession and crimes are up because more people need money and because of past issues in America is has been immited in England.
Economical - This will be economically good because this documentary can be distributed and funded with a low budget. However, alot of money will be produced because it appeals to the economy and will interest all ages and classes and males or females.
Political -This is a major political factor as the government and economy has problems with this issue and it needs to be solved and because it is to due with guns and drugs and makes the society scared, politically it needs to be overcome.
Issues and debates
Representation - This is a obvious issue because my critical investigation is on how young males are representated and shown in the media and i will be discussing the negative news as well as the positive, what these young males are associated with and why and making a personal judgement at the end.
Media theories
Gender theory - This relates to my critical investigation because I will be specifically looking at males and how they are shown in the media and how they are portrayed in the eyes of the public because of the media and how they are associated with guns, drugs, violence and gangs. This relates to my critical investigation as is is based this theory and I will be looking at males.
Audience theory - This will relate to my critical investigation and linked production pience as i will need to identify how to appeal to my target audience which is social class C1, C2 and D, males, aged between 14 + and my secondary which is all other people and whether it is because of a specific audience theory.
This study fits into the contemporary media landscape because it is an issue which is recentally been in the media regularly and their has been a negative representation on how young teenage males are been related to guns, drugs, gangs and violence. Furthermore, it will link to many theories as it is occuring right now in the media and this would relate to many theories as it is something that is taking place now and people wanting to know the reason behind these streotypes and if they are true and whether to be afraid or not etc. This will make the study contemporary because i will be looking at news articles and news on TV that is happening right now about young teenage boys in London.
Thursday 22 October 2009
Media Theories Homework.
Audience Theories
Any various theories about audiences behaviour towards any kind of media texts.
Linked to theory
- Hyperdermic Model
- Influence
- Active
- Surveliance
- Two step flow
- Recepients
- Reception
- Society
- Cultivation Theory
- Effects theory
Red Herrings
- Stanley Kubrick
- Hegemony
- Misogyny
- Gramski
- Signs
Gender Theories
- Post Feminism
- Patriachy
- Misogyny
- Stereotypes
- Sexual object
- Representation
- Male gaze
- Maculinity
- Feminimity
- Socialisation
Red Herrings
- Religion
- Active
- Survelience
- Newspaper
- Bootleg
Colonialism
- Military
- Economic
- Politcal
- Cultural
- Power
- Cultural Imperialism
- Domination
- Global
- Westernised
- Colonial
Red Herrings
- Disharmony
- Chomsky Noam
- Patriachy
- Methodology
- Iconography
Any various theories about audiences behaviour towards any kind of media texts.
Linked to theory
- Hyperdermic Model
- Influence
- Active
- Surveliance
- Two step flow
- Recepients
- Reception
- Society
- Cultivation Theory
- Effects theory
Red Herrings
- Stanley Kubrick
- Hegemony
- Misogyny
- Gramski
- Signs
Gender Theories
- Post Feminism
- Patriachy
- Misogyny
- Stereotypes
- Sexual object
- Representation
- Male gaze
- Maculinity
- Feminimity
- Socialisation
Red Herrings
- Religion
- Active
- Survelience
- Newspaper
- Bootleg
Colonialism
- Military
- Economic
- Politcal
- Cultural
- Power
- Cultural Imperialism
- Domination
- Global
- Westernised
- Colonial
Red Herrings
- Disharmony
- Chomsky Noam
- Patriachy
- Methodology
- Iconography
Wednesday 14 October 2009
Critical Investigation - Trailer for a new action film. For example, a new gangster film that is as good as the old classics like 'Scarface' and 'Goodfellas' but it is going to be a british movie that appeals to a british audience and the secondary audience is outside of Britain.
Linked Production - Produce your own magazine which is linked in terms of genre. A magazine that promotes the film, possibly with an interview or review of the movie to make it more appealing to people.
Analogue - This is media technology and a method of recording visual and sound images. This shows the shape or appearance of an object in unbroken form, this could be used for the critical investigation.
Bootleg - This means that the criticial investigation cannot be copied because it would be illegal.
Iconography - Their will be many props and visual details which will catergorize the genre to make it show that it is an action film.
Methodolgy - Research on what the audience wants to see or read so i can collect data and interpret the information used in media research so the magazine and movie will appeal to the right set of people to become successful.
Process Model - Sees mass communication as a series of stages in linear process from sources to destinations. This links to the magazine investigation.
Linked Production - Produce your own magazine which is linked in terms of genre. A magazine that promotes the film, possibly with an interview or review of the movie to make it more appealing to people.
Analogue - This is media technology and a method of recording visual and sound images. This shows the shape or appearance of an object in unbroken form, this could be used for the critical investigation.
Bootleg - This means that the criticial investigation cannot be copied because it would be illegal.
Iconography - Their will be many props and visual details which will catergorize the genre to make it show that it is an action film.
Methodolgy - Research on what the audience wants to see or read so i can collect data and interpret the information used in media research so the magazine and movie will appeal to the right set of people to become successful.
Process Model - Sees mass communication as a series of stages in linear process from sources to destinations. This links to the magazine investigation.
Tuesday 8 September 2009
MEST 4: Research & Production
Boys N The Hood
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoFra_nLJzY
Media Representations
The characters in this movie are presented in a way in which makes the viewer feel upset and sad for them. Characters are shown to be anti heroes which is Dough boy a character that lives and breathes the ghetto, he shoots people and kills people if he feels they are a threat to him or his family. Their is another character called Ricky, the brother of Dough Boy and the main character Tre and these two characters both live in the ghetto along with Dough boy. However, these two characters both seek life outide of the 'Hood' and want to get an education and become successful people in their lives. Their are several stereotypes in this movie for example, Dough boy who is a drug dealer just like how we see the people in the ghetto but there is also many people who go against the stereotype and are looking to be good in the film. They are being represented in this way because the directors and the moral of the film want to show that knowbody cares about the 'Hood' and knowone takes care of problems or issues in them areas and they represent characters to be heroes like Ricky and Tre because they want to educate and leave the 'Hood' to be good people and the anti-hero Dough boy who does bad and uses guns and violence however he cares for his friends and family and would die for them. The twist in the story is that Ricky dies which makes us feel sympathy for him and make us realize the problems.
Media Languages and Forms
The mise en scene is in South central LA, Crenshaw which has drugs, sex, violence and poor conditions and it is set here to connote the problems of 'Ghetto' and what the 'Hood' represents. The music is generally Hip Hop and rap music however when their is a shooting for justice once Ricky dies the music is calm and makes the viewer feel that justice is being done but shooting someone is still wrong. When Dough boy shoots his brother, Ricky's murderer their is a low angle shot of him to show his superiority yet his facial expression is still as if it is the wrong way of going about things and the 'Hood' works in this way and it is not like this anywhere else but knowbody cares. The major themes are love, betrayal and violence. The clothing and props are very much ghetto for example, jeans that are worn low near the legs, old t-shirts or shirts which are yellow, black, blue etc and usually trainers all white. Furthermore, the props used are alcohol in the form of beer bottles and guns and fast cars and drugs which all show the problems that the 'Hood' faces.
Narrative
The film opens in 1984, focusing on three young black male youths, Tre, Doughboy, and Ricky, as they grow up in South Central, Los Angeles. Tre Styles is an intelligent young student, but encounters disciplinary problems at a young age. His mother Reva Devereaux, decides it would be best for her son if Tre were to live with his father, Furious Styles. Furious is a no nonsense disciplinarian who teaches his son how to be a man. Tre begins his new life in South Central L.A. and reunites with old friends Doughboy, Ricky, and Little Chris though shortly after being reunited, Doughboy and Chris are arrested for shoplifting from a local convenience store.
Seven years later in 1991, the three boys lead very different lives. Tre is a high school senior aspiring to become a college man, Ricky an All-American football player, and Doughboy a crack dealing gangster. The film offers a keen insight on racial inequality, drugs, sex, and gang violence.
Doughboy has just been released from prison and spends most of the time hanging out with friends Chris (now confined to a wheelchair), Monster and Dookie. Ricky is a star running back at Crenshaw High School. He has a son with his girlfriend Shanice and is being recruited by the University of Southern California, but needs to earn a minimum SAT score of 700 to receive an athletic scholarship. Tre also attends Crenshaw High School with Ricky and also has a girlfriend, Brandi. Tension exists between the two because he wants to have a sexual relationship with Brandi, who resists the idea because of her Catholic faith.
Tre is torn by his desire to be a success and live up to his father's expectation and the pull of peer pressure to be more involved in the local gang culture of Doughboy and his crew. The climax of the film depicts Ricky's murder by members of the local Bloods, with whose leader he had a minor conflict, ironically after the audience learns that he has achieved the 700 SAT score necessary to attend USC. Doughboy, Monster, and Dookie intend to avenge Ricky's death. Tre, who is Ricky’s best friend, takes Furious' gun, but is stopped by him before leaving the house. Furious convinces Tre not to take the gun and seek revenge and Tre seems to relent, but he soon joins Doughboy and his friends on a revenge mission. Half way through the trip, Tre realizes his father was correct, asks Doughboy to pull the car over, and returns home. Doughboy and his two friends proceed and avenge Ricky's murder, gunning down his killers in cold blood.
The film ends the following morning with a conversation between Tre and Dough Boy. Dough Boy understands why Tre left the revenge mission and both laments the circumstances that exist in South Central and questions whether or not they are locked in an unending cycle of violence. The end titles reveal that Doughboy was murdered two weeks later, and Tre went on to college with Brandi in Atlanta (with Tre enrolling at Morehouse, and Brandi at nearby Spelman).
Genre
The genre cannot be specific but its a cross between gangster and drama. This is because their is gangster conventions like guns and drugs but there is a story line that makes the movie a drama and keeps the audience interested. This movie will generally attract men from 18 and older, however, because the movie is a drama and has a very appealing story and almost a true story because this usually happens in the 'Hood' it will attract women also and other people around the world that want to make a change.
Media Institutions
The target audience is men aged 18 and older and the secondary audience will be women, people in high positions and even children because of the message and the dramatic side of the movie. Many youngsters can relate to the movie because they may feel they live a life of drugs and violence of members in their families have passed in a sad way. Also, men could relate this to their past and women can relate to mothers in the movie of the sons that passed away or went onto university so it makes all different types of people interested and give sympathy. This movie will impact so many people because it is shocking and extremly dramatic and hard hitting which makes us as the viewer want to make a difference and not take life for granted, the main background for this movie is black people because this is the main people in the movie and this is the people that live in the 'Hood'.
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoFra_nLJzY
Media Representations
The characters in this movie are presented in a way in which makes the viewer feel upset and sad for them. Characters are shown to be anti heroes which is Dough boy a character that lives and breathes the ghetto, he shoots people and kills people if he feels they are a threat to him or his family. Their is another character called Ricky, the brother of Dough Boy and the main character Tre and these two characters both live in the ghetto along with Dough boy. However, these two characters both seek life outide of the 'Hood' and want to get an education and become successful people in their lives. Their are several stereotypes in this movie for example, Dough boy who is a drug dealer just like how we see the people in the ghetto but there is also many people who go against the stereotype and are looking to be good in the film. They are being represented in this way because the directors and the moral of the film want to show that knowbody cares about the 'Hood' and knowone takes care of problems or issues in them areas and they represent characters to be heroes like Ricky and Tre because they want to educate and leave the 'Hood' to be good people and the anti-hero Dough boy who does bad and uses guns and violence however he cares for his friends and family and would die for them. The twist in the story is that Ricky dies which makes us feel sympathy for him and make us realize the problems.
Media Languages and Forms
The mise en scene is in South central LA, Crenshaw which has drugs, sex, violence and poor conditions and it is set here to connote the problems of 'Ghetto' and what the 'Hood' represents. The music is generally Hip Hop and rap music however when their is a shooting for justice once Ricky dies the music is calm and makes the viewer feel that justice is being done but shooting someone is still wrong. When Dough boy shoots his brother, Ricky's murderer their is a low angle shot of him to show his superiority yet his facial expression is still as if it is the wrong way of going about things and the 'Hood' works in this way and it is not like this anywhere else but knowbody cares. The major themes are love, betrayal and violence. The clothing and props are very much ghetto for example, jeans that are worn low near the legs, old t-shirts or shirts which are yellow, black, blue etc and usually trainers all white. Furthermore, the props used are alcohol in the form of beer bottles and guns and fast cars and drugs which all show the problems that the 'Hood' faces.
Narrative
The film opens in 1984, focusing on three young black male youths, Tre, Doughboy, and Ricky, as they grow up in South Central, Los Angeles. Tre Styles is an intelligent young student, but encounters disciplinary problems at a young age. His mother Reva Devereaux, decides it would be best for her son if Tre were to live with his father, Furious Styles. Furious is a no nonsense disciplinarian who teaches his son how to be a man. Tre begins his new life in South Central L.A. and reunites with old friends Doughboy, Ricky, and Little Chris though shortly after being reunited, Doughboy and Chris are arrested for shoplifting from a local convenience store.
Seven years later in 1991, the three boys lead very different lives. Tre is a high school senior aspiring to become a college man, Ricky an All-American football player, and Doughboy a crack dealing gangster. The film offers a keen insight on racial inequality, drugs, sex, and gang violence.
Doughboy has just been released from prison and spends most of the time hanging out with friends Chris (now confined to a wheelchair), Monster and Dookie. Ricky is a star running back at Crenshaw High School. He has a son with his girlfriend Shanice and is being recruited by the University of Southern California, but needs to earn a minimum SAT score of 700 to receive an athletic scholarship. Tre also attends Crenshaw High School with Ricky and also has a girlfriend, Brandi. Tension exists between the two because he wants to have a sexual relationship with Brandi, who resists the idea because of her Catholic faith.
Tre is torn by his desire to be a success and live up to his father's expectation and the pull of peer pressure to be more involved in the local gang culture of Doughboy and his crew. The climax of the film depicts Ricky's murder by members of the local Bloods, with whose leader he had a minor conflict, ironically after the audience learns that he has achieved the 700 SAT score necessary to attend USC. Doughboy, Monster, and Dookie intend to avenge Ricky's death. Tre, who is Ricky’s best friend, takes Furious' gun, but is stopped by him before leaving the house. Furious convinces Tre not to take the gun and seek revenge and Tre seems to relent, but he soon joins Doughboy and his friends on a revenge mission. Half way through the trip, Tre realizes his father was correct, asks Doughboy to pull the car over, and returns home. Doughboy and his two friends proceed and avenge Ricky's murder, gunning down his killers in cold blood.
The film ends the following morning with a conversation between Tre and Dough Boy. Dough Boy understands why Tre left the revenge mission and both laments the circumstances that exist in South Central and questions whether or not they are locked in an unending cycle of violence. The end titles reveal that Doughboy was murdered two weeks later, and Tre went on to college with Brandi in Atlanta (with Tre enrolling at Morehouse, and Brandi at nearby Spelman).
Genre
The genre cannot be specific but its a cross between gangster and drama. This is because their is gangster conventions like guns and drugs but there is a story line that makes the movie a drama and keeps the audience interested. This movie will generally attract men from 18 and older, however, because the movie is a drama and has a very appealing story and almost a true story because this usually happens in the 'Hood' it will attract women also and other people around the world that want to make a change.
Media Institutions
Studio: Columbia Pictures
Distributed by: Columbia Pictures
Columbia Pictures usually make dramatic movies and thrillers and they have sent a message about the 'Hood' which makes people want to help and realize the issues that the ghetto faces. Also, because the instituation is a popular and large brand more people will recognize the name and go to watch the film as they know that Columbia make good movies. It is been distributed across all forms like newspapers, trailers and posters by Columbia.
Media AudiencesThe target audience is men aged 18 and older and the secondary audience will be women, people in high positions and even children because of the message and the dramatic side of the movie. Many youngsters can relate to the movie because they may feel they live a life of drugs and violence of members in their families have passed in a sad way. Also, men could relate this to their past and women can relate to mothers in the movie of the sons that passed away or went onto university so it makes all different types of people interested and give sympathy. This movie will impact so many people because it is shocking and extremly dramatic and hard hitting which makes us as the viewer want to make a difference and not take life for granted, the main background for this movie is black people because this is the main people in the movie and this is the people that live in the 'Hood'.
Reviews:
Boyz n the Hood
A film review by Matt McKillop - Copyright © 2005 Filmcritic.com
Boyz n the Hood is a movie so fraught with cultural significance that it’s hard to remember if it’s any good. Upon its release, it was immediately hailed for its startling depiction of gang violence in South Central L.A. But then, in a sort of nightmarish Purple Rose of Cairo twist, the violence jumped from the screen to the audience. All around the country, at scores of theaters showing Boyz, acts of violence—shootings, stabbings, brawls—heaped gasoline on the already burning controversy surrounding the cultural influence of gangsta rap and its glorification of the gangsta lifestyle. Less than a year after Boyz’ release, racial tensions boiled over and rioting swept through the very neighborhoods where the film’s action is set. And while it would be absurd to claim that Boyz had anything to do with the start of the unrest, the riots made it clear that the rage and frustration depicted in the film was eerily on the money. So, more than a decade later, in a completely different racial climate, with gangsta rap now as mainstream as mac-and-cheese, does Boyz n the Hood still play? Yeah, in a very raw way, it does.Writer-director John Singleton was only 23 when Boyz hit the big screen in 1991, and if the intervening years have brought anything into sharper focus, it’s his immaturity as a writer. Boyz is a sledgehammer of a film — powerful, but hardly subtle. Singleton centers his story on the character of Tré Styles, who’s about 11 in the opening sequence. After Tré gets into a fight at school, he’s taken to live with his father, Furious (Laurence Fishburne), who has a better shot at teaching him how to be a man than his mother (Angela Bassett) does. Tré’s best friends are Doughboy — a tough, pudgy, troublemaking little kid — and Ricky — Doughboy’s good-looking, athletic younger brother. As the sequence winds to a close, Furious’ paternal influence keeps Tré out of trouble while the fatherless Doughboy ends up being arrested for shoplifting.Boyz’ first half hour self-consciously mirrors Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me, the filmic equivalent of Wonder Bread. Tré, Doughboy, and Ricky wander down railroad tracks, get harassed by older boys, and go see a dead body, just as in Stand by Me. Throughout these scenes, Singleton does his best work. There is a universal quality to the young boys’ dreams and anxieties, their hunger for adventure and curiosity with the world. The ugliness that surrounds them, the drugs and violence and racism, sharply contrasts with their innocence and basic humanity. What doesn’t fly as well are Furious’ intermittent sermons to Tré. They feel less like a father teaching his son than a filmmaker teaching his audience. Boyz then jumps seven years into the future. Tré (Cuba Gooding Jr.) is now a bright, responsible young man with a great future. Ricky (Morris Chestnut) is a star athlete who hopes to nail down a football scholarship to USC. Doughboy (Ice Cube) is a gangsta who’s in and out of the jail and drinks 40s all day long. Once again, their experiences are in some ways typical — Tré’s trying to lose his virginity, Ricky’s worried about school, Doughboy wants his mom off his back — but in other ways disturbing — worrying about drive-bys, living next door to crack dens, being harassed by racist cops. What changes, though, is that as Tré, Ricky, and Doughboy grow into manhood, they cease to be spectators to their environmental terrors, as they were when they were kids. Instead, they’re drawn into the violence as active participants. For them, the fray is unavoidable.Here lies the real drama of Boyz n the Hood. Singleton, who grew up in South Central himself, has a firsthand awareness of how staggeringly difficult it is for a child to overcome poverty, violence, drugs, racism, etc., and emerge a healthy, successful autonomous adult. For this reason, his excesses — and there are plenty of them — are understandable.Singleton was nominated for two Academy Awards for Boyz — one for Best Original Screenplay and one for Best Director, beating Orson Welles by two years as the youngest person ever to be nominated for the latter award. And while Singleton will never be considered in Welles’ class as a director, or as a writer for that matter, his work on this powerful film deserved all of the commendation it received. Singleton had his fingers on the pulse of South Central at a time when it desperately needed help. It’s too bad we didn’t listen to him soon enough.
Second Review
“Boys N the Hood” was created in 1991 subsequently being nominated for two academy awards, (best original screen play and best director). It is the exploration of masculinity and personal identity at the watershed year of seventeen. Aptly acted by Cuba Gooding Jnr, Lawrence Fisborne and the notoriously controversial rapper Ice Cube, this movie pushed all the limits during the very racially sensitive period of the early 90’s. The movie features the lives of 3 African-American youths trapped in the depths of poverty and institutional Racism. Following the central characters from as far back as the Reagan years this movie vividly paints the plight of the African American which is still, (even after the inception of President Obama) being gradually overcome.
Apart from being an exceptional film “Boys n the Hood” contained a number of important lessons for boys slowly learning to be a man. The movie shows that along the way a number of forces affect the men they are to become and the choices they eventually make. Many credible people have argued these factors, such as not having a mother or being the victim of violence primarily contribute to the exorbitant rate of crime in South Central, LA. This was an astonishingly open discussion of the problems and institutional controls the police sanctioned during the period of the LA race riots. The result of this discussion probably calmed a number in the community down and definitely challenged popular stereotypes a huge step forward for African-Americans embracing the seemingly new political climate of the Clinton administration.
Apart from mending African American relations the film explored the mystifying age of seventeen, eighteen. For most, golden years with the promise of a whole cartful to come, however more than that it signaled the start of life. “Boys n the Hood” captured this perfectly by utilizing the exceedingly intelligent central charter “Trey Styles”, (played by Cuba Gooding Jnr). Trey’s journey to manhood starts with his excessively violent tendencies portrayed as a problem for a young trey when early on in the film he instigates an altercation with a young boy after he insults Africa. He is then forced to live with his father a watershed moment for young Trey who is immediately put to work at raking leaves. After working all night he is made to wash the bath tub and clean his room instilling a strong work ethic and sense of responsibility staying with Trey until he grows in to a young man, queue part two of the film.
The last part of the movie depicts Treys good looks and his expensive dress sense (purchased from seemingly legitimate ends) making him a prime attraction for many of the girls in the neighborhood. Treys account of his, “first time” to his father is awkward and blatantly fabricated a clever and amusing way of portraying sexual discovery and the paramount importance of the condom. Treys friend Doughboy, (played by Ice Cube) attracts a large amount of plot importance throughout the film a testament to Ice Cubes acting talent as much as it is to the importance of the character. Doughboy who grew up without a mother ends up selling Crack Cocaine, (the key revenue earner of the location). This afforded him a gold plated Cadillac, gold chains and seemingly expensive clothing. Combined with his slick talking personality this attracted a large number of women who he flagrantly mistreats and disrespects. This notably occurs during a neighborhood Barbeque referring to the women as Bi**hes resulting in a tongue lashing from his mother. The last character Ricky explores a very different set of avenues fastidiously practicing his football skills from the age of seven always keeping a ball with him. His build also attracts a copious amount of women. However with all Ricky’s spare time spent playing football he probably never studied offering up a legitimate reason for his lack of general knowledge highlighted by Trey’s father when Trey and Ricky visit Furious at his workplace. It is because of this recklessness and lack of common sense, (supposed to be instilled by a father figure) that he knocks his teenage girlfriend up. Rick’s story deserves a little more mention as it highlights the story of a young poor athlete with a world of potential killed before his prime. In other words out of the thousand odd gun deaths in poverty stricken LA at least one could have served a world changing function.
In concluding words the film was absolutely exceptional. It detailed and mapped the trials and tribulations of a young adult whilst effortlessly drawing your brain in to the plot. The acting was brilliant; the writing was also, of course the Director John Singleton who attracted a huge amount of attention from his Oscar nomination. Overall for anybody who has not seen the film you should rent it out right now because whatever you are doing can not compare to the quality of this film.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-11327368.html
Self Evaluation from presentation (score 11)
During my presentation their were many good points as their were bad points. After doing my presentation, looking back on it and getting feedback from the teacher and the class i have noticed that during my presentation i lacked media terminology. For example, when i spoke about the character 'Doughboy' i did not mention he was the anti-hero and this was a fault of mine because the terminology i new i did not mention during my presentation which lead to a lower score. Furthermore, i described four characters and this was too many and took up much of the presentation's time and lingered on for a long while and occasionally the explanations were basic. Also, during my institution slide i was reading off the board and not ellaborating on the information or talking to the audience so the presentation was poor at this time because i did not go into depth or detail. Finally, my introduction was not strong enough, i spoke about the genre but did not convince the audience about the movie or make them interested and did not make the presentation believble, similarly, the conclusion was not strong as it did not impact the audience at the end to promote the film and again did not convince them about the movie.
However, the good points about my presentation were that the characters i made were extremly detailed and the slides on the characters were short and simple for the viewers to understand and made the presentation alot more visual and made me ellaborate myself during the presentation. Also, i was very familiar with the text as i have watched it several times and this made it easy for me to think on my feet and come up with suitable examples when i needed to and these examples helped the audience learn about scenes from the movie to make them to watch it as well as showing my ability as knowing the film. Additionally, the slides were well made and the colour scheme made the presentation good to look at at and memorable for the audience and the colours and patterns stayed in their head, the colour scheme also added an impact the viewers because it made the presentation presentable and easy to understand. Lastly, my presentation style was fluent and this made it simpler for the viewers to understand what i am saying and learn more about the film because i have analysed and told it well.
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