SCLY 4: Crime and Deviance with Methods in Context
[CRIME AND DEVIANCE REVISION]
• Others have argued that exposure to violence in the media can cause people to become ‘desensitised’ so that they lose the self control which stops them from acting in such a way. • More recently music and videos featuring rap artists have been accused of glamorising crime and presenting it as not only acceptable but desirable as a lifestyle. This has been linked to the rise of a ‘gun culture’.
• Lea and Young claim that the media bombards people with a consumer orientated lifestyle where success and social acceptability are measured by the material possessions one can accumulate. This can produce a feeling of relative deprivation where many groups cannot achieve the lifestyle portrayed and hence feel socially excluded. • This can be the trigger which encourages some to turn to crime to gain material success and hence status in society. • However because this link is indirect it cannot be full tested.
• Deviancy amplification or copycat crime: Media attention on a particular crime leads to people copying it and thus increasing the amount of it being committed. E.g. Football hooliganism; happy slapping. Folk devils and Moral Panics • Cohen (1972) and others (especially Jock Young (1971)) showed how agents of social control, particularly the police, 'amplified' deviance. They also demonstrated the media's role in this process.
• Such studies were used to demonstrate how the media helped to avoid wider conflict in society by focusing our attention on the supposedly deviant behaviour of outsider groups, including youth gangs, welfare scroungers, trade union militants and so on.
• Hall argued that the way in which the crime of mugging is reported had a number of important effects for the ruling class: It leads to the scapegoating of black people, or immigrants in general could be blamed for society’s problems instead of the inequalities of the capitalist system; it distracted attention away from the periodic crises of capitalism (as a Marxist Hall argues that capitalism is an unstable system which periodically goes through severe economic and political crises); Hall suggests that media professionals have a shared culture, including elements of racism, and taken for granted assumption that the police are right, capitalism is a good thing and society was ‘breaking down’. This has the effect of legitimating (making seem right or fair) the position of the ruling class in capitalist society.
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