media as a cause of crime

• Fenwick and Hayward - commodification of crime

  • suggest media uses crime as a way of selling goods to young people
  • ‘crime is packaged and marketed to young people as a romantic, exciting, cool, and fashionable cultural symbol.’
  • crime has credibility and status due to media representations of criminal activities
  • this allows companies to capitalise on this credibility by associating their products with criminal activities
• Hayward and young - commodification of crime

  • see the commodification of crime as romanticising crime and making it culturally acceptable
  • Corporations and advertisers use media images of crime to sell products, especially in the youth market.
  • e.g hiphop combines images of street hustler criminality with images of consumerist success
• ways media can cause crime and deviance

  • imitation
  • arousal
  • desensitisation
  • knowledge of criminal techniques
  • target for crime
  • stimulating desires
  • glamourising offending
  • portraying police as incompetent
• imitation

  • media provides deviant role models
  • resulting in copy cat behaviour - bandura social learning theory
  • e.g kids shows such as horrid Henry
• a03 - schramm et al

  • most studies have tended to find that exposure to media violence has at most a small and limited negative effect on audiences.
  • argue that for most children, television is not particularly harmful nor particularly beneficial
• livingstone

  • people continue to be preoccupied with the effects of the media on children because of our desire as a society to regard childhood as a time of uncontaminated innocence in the private sphere.
• Gerbner cultivation theory

  • found that heavy users of television (over four hours a day) had higher levels of fear of crime.
  • makes audiences develop a mean world syndrome - fearful of the outside world
• Greer and reiner

  • research on effects of media ignore the meanings viewers give to media violence
  • e.g give different meanings to violence in cartoons, horror films and news
  • reflects the interpretivist view that if we want to understand the possible effects of the media, we must look at the meanings people give to what they see and read.
• lea and young

  • argue mass media helps to increase sense of relative deprivation
  • In today’s society, where even the poorest groups have media access, the media present everyone with images of a materialistic ‘good life’ of leisure, fun and consumer goods as the norm to which they should conform.
  • leads to poorer groups gaining sense of relative deprivation and exclusion as they cannot afford
• Hayward and young - cultural criminologists

  • see late modern society as a media-saturated society, where we are immersed in the ‘mediascape’ – an ever-expanding tangle of fluid digital images, including images of crime.
  • blurring between the image and the reality of crime, so that the two are no longer clearly distinct or separable. 
  • gang assaults are not just caught on camera, but staged for the camera and later packaged together in ‘underground fight videos’.
• cultural criminologists

  • argues that the media turn crime itself into the commodity that people desire. 
  • Rather than simply producing crime in their audiences, the media encourage them to consume crime, in the form of images of crime.