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Youth, Crime and Media MEP208

Youth, Crime and Media MEP208. 2. Emergence of Youth: Teenage Consumer to Counterculture. Chicago School ethnographies: youth and ‘slum societies’. Studies of immigrant communities during the Depression (Whyte 1943; Cressey 1932)

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Youth, Crime and Media MEP208

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  1. Youth, Crime and MediaMEP208 2. Emergence of Youth: Teenage Consumer to Counterculture

  2. Chicago School ethnographies: youth and ‘slum societies’ • Studies of immigrant communities during the Depression (Whyte 1943; Cressey 1932) • “The younger generation has built up its own society relatively independently of the influence of its elders” (Whyte 1943: p.xviii) • Corner boys (unemployed, uneducated) v. College boys (upwardly mobile) • Racketeering and political activities

  3. The first teenagers • Turn of 20thC – young people enjoy better standard of living, more leisure time and economic independence • Moral panics about delinquency – 1930s statistics show increase in juvenile crime • Fewer marriages in Manchester during 1930s than 50s or 60s (Fowler 1992) • Public dancing and cinema going - first examples of mass teenage consumption

  4. Case study: Ballroom dancing • Standardisation of dance steps (waltz, foxtrot, quickstep, tango) – strict tempo • Late 1930s: US craze for swing and jitterbug (jiving) threatens the conservatism of standardised couple-dance styles • Jitterbug and rumba are controversial: new styles flout social / sexual etiquette • Seeds of rock ‘n’ roll era are sown

  5. WW2 – and after the war • Wartime – closure of schools + youth clubs, high wages, black-outs blamed for high delinquency rates (Baney 1987) • 1948 – National Service Act • 1955 – sharp increase in juvenile offences • National survey - youth enjoying greater autonomy + affluence (Abrams 1959) • 1960s – end of NS, liberal social policies

  6. Youth as a generational unit • Disaffected, delinquent youth – initially linked to family and social class issues • Early models of ‘maladjusted’ youth centre on specific urban, working class communities (e.g. Mays 1954) • Post-1955 youth re-categorised as a distinctive generation – the ‘generation gap’, ‘youth culture’, ‘baby boomers’

  7. Countercultures • Emerge in the 1960s as generational categories (i.e. all young people of a certain social and political bent) • Hippies – middle class, bohemian, politically motivated youth (Melly 1972) • Moral campaigns intended to check the ‘permissive revolution’ (Newburn 1991) • Countercultures fracture into subcultures

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