Tuesday, 30 March 2010

“Watch out! – I am from the evil and hated generation."
To What Extent Are Male Teenagers Negatively Stereotyped In The UK News Media?


“Stereotypes are simple, one-dimensional portrayals of people – usually based on sex, race, religion, profession or age.[1]” Crime, alcohol, and general bad behaviour: almost every time you hear the news today, there seems to be an endless supply of stories about teenagers in the UK taking part in negative, anti-social activities, stereotyping their generation as criminals. A sizeable proportion of male teenagers causing crime in the UK is, of course, an important issue as it affects society, regardless of anyone’s age, ethnicity, profession etc. But is this a true reflection of teenager’s lives today? Or is it only a small proportion of the teenage generation who are being focussed on by the media, generating moral panics and making teenage stereotypes worse? This essay will be looking into the various, but often limited, representations of male teenagers. It will pay particular attention to the representations of teenagers in the news media, contrasting and comparing those in the UK with those abroad and considering why young males living in different countries behave the way they do. The focus will also be on different contemporary and historical texts and will examine the possible reasons as to why teenagers today may act and subsequently appear in the media as different to teenagers’ years ago.


It has been said that: “the problem with the youth market is that it is a very difficult one to address because youth’s level of engagement with the mass media in general is less than the average.[2]” Perhaps this is why negative stereotyping is ubiquitous in the UK media: “Watch out! – I am from the evil and hated generation. Believe it or not, not every single teenager around my age goes around beating up people and smashing up cars. Can you seriously claim that today’s youth are that much worse than the mods and rockers of the former generation? My generation never gets a positive thing said about them – GCSEs for example – we do better than the past generation and the courses must be getting easier – obviously. Is it really any wonder then certain youth rebels?” This articulates the views of many teenagers, arguing that not all youths are delinquent. Crimes committed by teenagers today include such things as theft and robbery, gun and knife crime, and vandalism. These are, of course, some of the worst forms of crimes that destabilize our society and lead to Conservative claims that we are living in a ‘Broken Britain’. As stated by the quotation, it could be argued that male teenagers may be committing these crimes as a reaction of the hatred they receive from the news media. In his book, Media Violence Alert, Chris King informs us that: “there has been a great deal of public discussions of the link between media violence and children’s aggressive behaviour.[3]” Galtung and Ruge’s news values research explicitly informs us that negativity sells. This reinforces King’s idea of media violence and children’s behaviour being linked as, they are being continuously shown negative representations of them and therefore aspire to be like what they see because it is ‘cool’. However, the cultivation theory challenges this idea as it discusses the fact that the more coverage a topic has, the audience becomes more desensitised to it. “Cultivation theory (sometimes referred to as the cultivation hypothesis or cultivation analysis) was an approach developed by Professor George Gerbner. Also Cultivation theorists argue that television has long-term effects which are small, gradual, indirect but cumulative and significant."[4]


When comparing the representation of teenagers in the United Kingdom, to those aboard, many similarities could be found. The most common representations of teenagers naturally include being loud, hyperactive, and curious about the world. Unfortunately, to some extent, this leads to moral panics being created about them and frequently this stereotype leads to teenagers becoming motivated to commit illegal crimes. However, there are countries in the East of Europe such as Ukraine and Russia, where we have had evidence of teenagers committing crimes that could be considered to be ‘ten times’ more serious than those being committed by teenagers in the UK. “Three guys, one hammer[5]” was an incident that began in the summer of 2007 in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. The incident saw Igor Suprunyuck, Viktor Sayenko and Alexander Hanzha, otherwise known as “The Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs[6]” deciding that the best way to commemorate their loss of childhood, and welcome adulthood, was to kill 40 people with hammers, pipes and screwdrivers. Each murder was recorded on their phones and some were found on the internet after the arrest of the boys. Not only did these three teenage boys kill people (generally the elderly), they also were found to have murdered helpless animals, such as cats and dogs, taking photographs of the dead bodies once they were mutilated. This demonstrates the fact that the representation of teenagers is sometimes negative due to such monstrous events. Teenagers are clearly capable of committing crimes.


On the other hand, so are adults. The crimes that take place in Eastern European countries, which have obviously strongly affected the minds of adults and the news media, portraying teenagers as a negative thing, has created a moral panic about something that can be committed by anyone. If the cultivation theory was to be neglected, and the hypodermic needle model enforced, it can be argued that teenagers react to the offensive material that they are shown. But, who makes this offensive material for teenagers to copy? It is very clear that with the copy cat effect, teenagers are freely allowed to watch all sorts of movies and listen to all sorts of music, which in most occasions are not suitable for their age, and therefore get influenced by murder scenes or fighting scenes in films such as “Goodfellas”. Scorsese’s ‘Goodfellas’ released in 1990, is a gangster film where there is a lot of violence involved, scenes of people getting shot and others getting stabbed with gory scenes of blood splattering. Although it is a negative effect, these are the types of things that teenagers are deliberately attracted to. “Goodfellas” involve ideologies of a carefree, rich lifestyle that teenagers crave.
In the same way that films influence teenagers to behave in a negative manner, and as a consequence, become represented in a negative way, could be due to celebrities. “When a celebrity gets arrested, the media swarms in and is relentless in their coverage.[7]”Continuous coverage like this could lead to the copy cat effect. Teenagers are led to believe that they can get the kind of fame and the types of lifestyle that celebrities can get by following their example and getting arrested for it. An example of this is 50 Cent’s arrest in January 2003 when “police found a .25-caliber handgun and a .45-caliber pistol[8]” in his car. Police reports announced that “both weapons were loaded.[9]”


According to the media, other aspects that strongly influence crime in the UK and teenagers behaving badly are the facts that the UK is a multicultural society. Within London alone, one would assume that the percentage of people from different ethnic minorities is extremely high. However, it has been found that there is only a total of 37% of ethnic minorities living in Britain, which has a representation of being a home for people of all ethnic backgrounds. Even though this is the case, Britain has witnessed continuous conflict between people with different cultural backgrounds. Occasionally, such incidents have no connection to the idea of racism; however, different teenagers from different countries compete against each other as part of their daily lives. Such events may lead to physically fighting, stealing, selling illegal drugs and even prostitution. It also leads to gangs. “Researching gangs in the US shows that gang members often share common characteristics. They may be victims of child abuse; many have never seen a conflict settled without the use of violence; many are school drop-outs; they have inadequate family lives.”[10] This would of course cause more chaos, affecting crime rates, reputation and danger in London. Accordingly, the UK news media is somehow forced to broadcast news about teenagers and crime, as it is happening right there in front of them, but it always gets questioned whether the media overly stereotype them in a negative way, and possibly over exaggerate the primary information given to them, meaning that sometimes the UK news media are mentioning incidents that may not have happened or possibly happened differently. It has been said that “the fact is that the media have the power through selection and reinforcement to give us very influential portrayals of a whole range of groups, situations and ideas[11]”.


“Every time I go to the supermarket, I see another magazine cover saying there is something wrong with teens. A troubled teen that looked angry and dangerous. His eyes were cold and mean. The headline stated in bold, white letters, The Secret Life of Teens."[12] No matter what good an individual teenager does, the media continuously puts emphasis on the negative occurrences in order to sell more news – after all, “one of the categories that Galtung and Ruge suggested for news values was negativity – the idea that bad news is good news[13].”. When an event occurs, the media are likely to bring up past examples of a similar situation or event, which ensures that adults never forget the negative stereotyped representation of teenagers. Although more emphasis is allocated to occurrences such as political matters with a higher importance, the negative representation of teenagers is always continuously mentioned in the news until ‘something better’ comes along. But negative stereotypes do not only affect the way all adults will think of teenagers, but it will also affect what teenagers think of themselves.


Negative stereotypes not only affect how adults see teenagers, they also influence how teenagers see themselves and other teenagers. "An important issue is how adults treat me just because I'm a teenager. Sure there are bad ones out there but I'm not one of them. It doesn't just hurt but it's disrespectful when security figures follow me around like I'm some kind of loser or criminal." [14] The feeling that the rest of the world does not respect or understand you does little to encourage a positive sense of self-worth. Other minority groups in society, such as women, black people and even homosexuals have all experienced the effects of negative stereotyping and lack of positive images in the media. Therefore, to a certain extent, young adults/teenagers and other minority groups have some things in common.


Generally, the media has created a moral panic within the surrounding society about young people, where they only see teenagers as criminals. Male teenagers in hoodies, especially, have become stereotyped as anti-social criminals who enjoy spending time stealing, attacking people and street-hang-outs who have nothing better to do with their time apart from cause chaos. [15]"Gangs are often reported in the media as a modern issue, the number of teenage members of gangs has increased in many countries in the past 20 years." Although, to some extent the stereotype can be considered correct, like the majority of stereotypes it certainly is not true of all teenagers. It is clear that the media does not effectively show enough achievements in young people, and focus on the disturbances instead in order to sell more news. This could be seen to ‘breed’ more criminals as the media, as a controlling force in our everyday lives, may not listen to the thoughts or fall to the persuasion of teenagers. Knowing this, teenagers may assume that as they are going to be portrayed like this no matter what they do, and therefore find that they might as well be the ‘rowdy’ people that they are represented as rather than fight against this stereotype; they choose to conform to it as it seems to have become the hegemonic representation. However it is important that: “whatever way the media show images of youth it is important that young people themselves challenge stereotypes and question the representations they encounter[16].”

Word Count: 2080


[1] Stereotyping in the Movies (website)
[2] Representation on Youths (website)
[3] Kings, C. (2000). Page ***
[4] Oliver & Peter Braham (eds.) (1987) Page ***
[5] Three Guys, One Hammer (website)
[6] Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs Murder Guy with Hammer and Screwdriver (website)
[7] The Cult of Celebrity and its Effects on Society (website)
[8] Rapper 50 Cent Arrested (website)
[9] ibid
[10] Stones, R. (1998):
[11] Representation on Youths (website)
[12] The Media Distorts Teens (website)
[13] Rayner, P. Wall, P. Kruger, S. (2004) Page 254
[14] Youth Stereotypes News (website)
[15] Gifford, C. (2006) Page 43
[16] Representation on Youths (website)


Bibliography - Works Cited
Books.
Boyd-Barrett, Oliver & Peter Braham (eds.) (1987): Media, Knowledge & Power. London: Croom Helm
Gifford, Clive (2006): Gangs. London: Evans Brothers Limited
Kings, Chris Ed. (2000): Media Violence Alert. USA: Dream Catcher Press
Rayner, PhilipWall, Peter,Kruger, Stephen (2004): AS Media Studies: The Essential Introduction. London, Routledge.
Stones, Rosemary (1998): Gangs & Bullies. London: Evans Brothers Limited
Websites.
Representations of Youth taken from: http://www.mediaed.org.uk/posted_documents/repsyouth.html
The Cult of Celebrity and its Effects on Society taken from: http://www.helium.com/items/575643-the-cult-of-celebrity-and-its-effects-on-society
Rapper 50 Cent Arrested taken from:
Bibliography - Works Consulted
Books
Buckingham, D (ed), Reading Audiences, Manchester University Press, 1993
Donnellan, Craig (2003): The Media Issues. Great Britain: British Library Cataloguing.
McRobbie, , Feminism and Youth Culture, Macmillan, 1991
Murphy, G. Media Influence on the Socialisation of Teenage Girls in Curran, J, Smith, A, and
Wingate,P \(eds), Impacts and Influences, Metheun, 1987
Reah, Danuta (2001): The Language Of Newspapers. New York: Routledge
Websites.
Media studies: Representation taken from:
How has the representation of youth changed over time?
http://aarmanitvdrama.blogspot.com/2009/02/representation-of-british-youth.html

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