1. Teenagers in the 70s /
80s / 90s / 00s
Case Study : Kidulthood
(2006)

2. Teenagers in the 1970’s – Punks
The punk subculture emerged in the United States, the United
Kingdom, and Australia in the mid-1970s.
Early punk had an abundance of antecedents and influences, and
Jon Savage has described the subculture as a "bricolage" of almost
every previous youth culture that existed in the West since the
Second World War "stuck together with safety pins".

3. Teenagers in the 1970’s – Punks
The punk subculture is centered around
listening to recordings or live concerts of
a loud, aggressive genre of rock music
called punk rock, usually shortened to
punk.
Early British punks expressed nihilistic
views with the slogan No Future, which
came from the Sex Pistols song "God
Save the Queen".

4. Teenagers in the 1970’s – Punks
Context : The favourable economic conditions that had paved the way
for the post-war explosion of youth consumption – economic growth,
full employment and rising living standards – increasingly unravelled
during the 1970s. Advanced capitalist economies slid into a long
downturn punctuated by particularly severe recessions in the
mid-1970s, the early 1980s and the early 1990s.
Youth employment was a major casualty of the slump. By 1986, the
number of unemployed aged between 16 and 24 had reached 727, 000
– nearly a third of Britain’s jobless total (International Labour Office,
1988 : 651). Generally, young people’s routes into employment were
extended and became more unpredictable.
(Cohen and Ainley, 2000:83)

5. Teenagers in the 1980’s and 1990’s
An authoritarian stance on law and order, however, remained a key
theme of political programmes into the 1990s, and developments in
youth culture regularly prompted political sabre-rattling.
In Britain, for example, anxieties about the general trajectory of
cultural change were projected onto youth culture in moral panics
that seemed to echo the social concerns of the 1950s and 1960s.
In 1988 the anxieties found specific focus, a moral panic developing
around incidents of drunken violence in provincial towns.

6. Teenagers in the 1980’s and 1990’s
The finger of blame was pointed at a
‘new’ generation of affluent but
undisciplined youth, the media and
politicians such as Douglas Hurd (the
Home Secretary) coining the term ‘lager
louts’ to describe young people ‘with too
much money in their pockets and too
many pints inside them, but too little
self-discipline and too little notion of
the care and responsibility which they
owe to others’ (Hurd, cited in The
Guardian 10 June 1988).

7. Teenagers in the 1980’s and 1990’s
The period’s most intense episode of media alarm, however, arose in
response to the ‘acid house’ phenomenon of the late 1980s.
Pioneered in American black and gay clubs such as Chicago’s
warehouse and New York’s Paradise garage, new forms of dance
music-house, garage, techno – filtered into British youth culture
during the 1980s and early 1990s. Manchester’s Hacienda Club
became a hub of northern dance culture.
The drug ‘ecstasy’ had also become a feature of the Ibiza club scene,
and during the late 1980s ‘E’ rapidly became British clubbers’
recreational drug of choice.

8. Teenagers in the 1980’s and 1990’s
By the early '90s, the Tory government, the police, the tabloid press
and middle England had all had enough of rave culture. The
government acted, passing the Criminal Justice and Public Order
Act (1994). This Act gave the police the power to order people to
leave an area if they were believed to be preparing to hold or attend
a rave. The Act effectively stopped free parties or events not
licensed through local government.

9. Teenagers in the 1980’s and 1990’s
Task : Watch the following World In Action documentary from 1988
on the acid house culture.
Think about how you can apply Cohen’s ‘folk devil’ and moral panic idea
to what you see in the programme.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5iB17HamJ8

10. Teenagers in the 1980’s and 1990’s
What are some of the wider contextual issues that are explored in
this documentary?
How are young people represented in this text? How is this similar
and/or different to other historical representations you have looked
at?
What tone or point of view do you think this documentary takes?

11. Teenagers in the 1980’s and 1990’s
World in Action was a British investigative current affairs
programme made by Granada Television from 1963 to 1998. The
efforts of its production team not infrequently had a major impact
on events of the day. It often took audacious risks and gained a
reputation for its frequently unorthodox, some said left-wing,
approach and for its campaigning journalism. How might the ideology
behind the programme have been influenced by the institution that
created it?
Who do you think the target audience is for this programme? How
does this affect the representations and ideology behind it?
How might you apply the Reflective or Constructionist View to your
analysis of this documentary?

12. Teenagers and Moral Panics in the 1980’s
and 1990’s - Case Study
The rise of Heroin addiction in the 1980s prompted a series of teen
addiction storylines in popular programmes like Grange Hill and saw
the broadcast of several public information films.
Look at the following youtube clips for more information :
Heroin Screws You Up – Public Information Video – 1980
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc4RyqXbonk&feature=PlayList&p=45
Grange Hill – Zammo takes Heroin - 1986
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3lcFhN8zoE
Grange Hill Spin off Single – ‘Just Say No’ -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVxtJB-MBxU&feature=related

13. Teenagers and Moral Panics in the 1980’s
and 1990’s - Case Study
There are many interesting representations and subsequent moral panics
concerning young people during this time. Try to look at some of these in more
detail for your own individual case study :
Effects of Ecstasy - Leah Betts was a schoolgirl from Latchingdon in Essex,
England. She is notable for the extensive media coverage and moral panic that
followed her death several days after her 18th birthday. On her birthday,
November 11, she took an ecstasy tablet, and, four hours later, collapsed into
a coma, from which she did not recover. Subsequently, it was discovered that
the direct cause of her death was water intoxication. Her parents issued this
photo of Leah in intensive care to alert audiences to the dangers of the drug.

14. Teenagers and Moral Panics in the 1980’s
and 1990’s - Case Study
The media onslaught after her death focused heavily
on the fact that it was the first time she had taken
the drug. It arose later - though was much less
publicized - that she had taken the drug at least three
times previously.
Her father, Paul, subsequently became a vocal public
campaigner against drug abuse. He and his wife were
present at the press conference at which Barry Legg
MP launched his
Public Entertainments Licences (Drug Misuse) Act,
which allowed councils to close down licensed venues if
the police "believed" controlled drugs were being used
"at or near" the premises.

15. Teenagers and Moral Panics in the 1980’s
and 1990’s - Case Study
It was reported that the £1m Sorted posters campaign (an image of
Leah before she died smiling at the camera with the caption "just one
ecstasy tablet took Leah Betts", Ecstasy was the pro-bono work of
three advertising companies: Booth Lockett and Makin (media buyers),
Knight Leech and Delaney (advertising agency), and FFI (youth
marketing consultants).
Additionally, it is claimed that their motives were not altruistic.

16. Teenagers and Moral Panics in the 1980’s
and 1990’s - Case Study
Booth Lockett and Makin counted brewers Löwenbräu as one of its
major clients, at a time when the alcohol industry saw increasing
ecstasy use as a threat to profits.
The other two companies represented energy drink Red Bull, a
professional relationship that had earned Knight Leech and Delaney
£5 million and was described by one of FFI's executives who
remarked that, "We do PR for Red Bull for example and we do a lot of
clubs. It's very popular at the moment because it's a substitute for
taking ecstasy."

17. Teenagers and Moral Panics in the 1980’s
and 1990’s - Case Study
Q. In what way does this demonstrate a conflict between the
ideological message and the organisation behind the media
campaign?

18. Teenagers and Moral Panics in the 1980’s
and 1990’s - Case Study
Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton questioned the accuracy and
relevancy of Cohen’s moral panic idea in more contemporary times.
They argued that the proliferation and fragmentation of niche and
micro-media had generated a ‘multiplicity of voices, which compete
and contest the meaning of the issues subject to “moral panic”
(McRobbie and Thornton, 1995:560).
Overall, they challenged the original moral panics’ model idea of
sending generalised messages to a gullible audience. They said that
in contemporary cultural life, social reality was increasingly made up
of competing media representations and was decoded in a variety of
ways by more sophisticated audiences.

19. Teenagers and Moral Panics in the 1980’s
and 1990’s - Case Study
Q. What do you think of this idea?
How applicable is it to some of the media texts you have
analysed in this module so far?

20. Teenagers and Moral Panics in the 1980’s
and 1990’s - Case Study
After two teenage bystanders were killed in a gun battle between
rival gangs at a New Year party in Birmingham, both the media and
the government railed against an apparent upsurge of gang culture
and gun crime in British cities. Superficially, the responses bore
many of the features of a classic moral panic.
Focusing on urban black youth, histrionic stories in the tabloid press
painted a picture of a ‘new’ wave of ‘gun madness’ sweeping through
‘Violent Britain’ (The Sun, 6 January 2003), while the government
scurried to introduce tougher laws to deal with gun crime and gang
violence. Elements of ‘media panic’ were also prominent, with
suggestions of a causal link between rap music and violence.

21. Teenagers and Moral Panics in the 1980’s
and 1990’s - Case Study
Echoing American anxieties about the negative ‘effects’ of gangsta
rap during the 1980s and 1990s, Culture Minister Kim Howells
argued that the events in Birmingham were ‘symptomatic of
something very, very serious’. ‘
For years’, Howell averred, ‘I have been very worried about these
hateful lyrics that these boasting macho idiot rappers come out
with…It has created a culture where killing is almost a fashion
accessory.’ Reserving his most scornful ire for London garage outfit
So Solid Crew, Howells asserted that ‘Idiots like the So Solid Crew
are glorifying gun culture and violence It is very worrying and we
ought to stand up and say it’ (The Guardian, 6 January 2003).

22. Teenagers and Moral Panics in the 1980’s
and 1990’s - Case Study
Others joined the fray, tabloid newspapers pointing not only to ‘rap
music’s link to the scourge of gun crime’, but also targeting new
‘video nasty’ computer games that seemed to ‘glamorize violence’
(Daily Mirror, 7 January 2003a).
There had always been a degree of slippage between the media
stereotypes of ‘youth-as-fun’ and ‘youth-as-trouble’ identified by
Hebdidge (1988b), but during the 1990s it seemed as though they
were giving way to a much more blurred, ambiguous and open-ended
set of media representations.

23. Teenagers and Moral Panics in the 1980’s
and 1990’s - Case Study
Task : Contemporary Moral Panics
Take a recent moral panic based on negative effects theory – such
as ‘cyber bullying’ – and look at the differences in age / gender /
social position of those perceived to be ‘at risk’ compared to those
discussing the risk.
What assumptions do the researchers or campaigners make about
the ‘at risk’ group?
Does the ‘at risk’ group have access to the same communications
resources as the researchers/campaigners?
Has there ever been a media moral panic about white, middle-class
men? If not, why not?

24. Case Study - Kidulthood
Kidulthood (rendered as KiDULTHOOD) is a 2006 British drama film
about the life of several teenagers in Ladbroke Grove and Latimer
Road area of Inner West London. It was directed by Menhaj Huda
and written by Noel Clarke, who also stars in the film and directed
the sequel, Adulthood.

25. Case Study - Kidulthood
Watch the film and make notes on the points below….
How are the teenage characters represented in the film?
Are there any stereotypical representations of teenagers in this film? In what
ways are the representations similar and/or different to those you would find
in other teen pics? Why is this?
What are the main themes of the film?
In what way has this film been influenced by contemporary social and cultural
issues?
“The film that speaks to Britain's youth in words they understand” Miranda
Sawyer, www.guardian.co.uk, 26.02.06 – What do you think Sawyer means by
this? Give some examples from the film to support your points.