Familiar strangers, juvenile panic and the British press: the decline of social trust.

Morrison, James

Abstract

Though we have long regarded our children as subjects of moral scrutiny and concern, rarely have they been treated with such heightened anxiety - or profound ambivalence - as they are in today's Britain. Late-modern childhood, as this book demonstrates, is perceived and portrayed as a state of both innocence and savagery, with juveniles besieged by a barrage of menaces while also presenting potential threats themselves. This ambivalence can be traced back through cultural deposits accumulated down the centuries - from political speeches and pedagogic tracts to folk-tales, children's fiction and visual art. Taken together, they present a continuum of oppositions in portrayals of the young that, in many respects, has remained remarkably consistent through time. As Chapter 2 showed, wide-eyed infants have repeatedly been distinguished from wild-eyed youths, girls from boys, middle-class from working-class (and underclass) kids and one's own from other people's. Moreover, a recurring undercurrent of all these antinomies has been an implicit moral distinction between 'worthy' and 'unworthy' children - and (more often than not) parents and families, too. The file for this record represents only a sample chapter from the whole work, which is available for purchase from the publisher.

Citation

MORRISON, J. 2016. Familiar strangers, juvenile panic and the British press: the decline of social trust. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan [online]. Available from: https://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9781137529954

• Book Type: Monograph
• Online Publication Date: Mar 23, 2016
• Publication Date: Mar 23, 2016
• Deposit Date: Aug 13, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 13, 2018
• Publisher: Springer
• ISBN: 9781137529947; 9781349708338
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137529954
• Keywords: Journalism; Media and communication; Youth culture; Crime and society; Youth offending and juvenile justice; Media studies
• Public URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10059/3065
• Additional Information: The file accompanying this record represents a sample chapter extracted from the full book, which can be purchased from the Springer website: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9781137529954