Summary
The rise in the number of fatal stabbings in recent months has generated big headlines and heated political debate. Teenage knife crime is high on the national agenda. There is broad agreement that something has to change but not as much agreement about what that is. Should there be more police officers on the streets? more surrender bins? more use of stop and search? more weapons sweeps? tougher sentences? Do we need a knife crime ‘tsar’ to co-ordinate it all? What about the role of schools and youth clubs? But before we start writing policy prescriptions, let’s ask a more basic question: are we seeing a long-overdue response to a desperate and tragic situation, or a nation in the grip of full-blown moral panic? The phrase ‘moral panic’ - which was popularised by sociologist Stanley Cohen in his 1972 book about mods and rockers - is nearly always used pejoratively to denote an over-the-top expression of public anxiety about the lowering of moral standards. Yet it could be argued that a moral panic is like a whistling kettle - it’s a warning that things have come to the boil. Perhaps we shouldn’t speak of moral panics but of moral calls to action – opportunities to get money spent and policies reformed on important issues that are usually below the national radar. Or perhaps such societal soul-searchings are just spasms of empathy, emotional outbursts that take no account of long-term trends, get in the way of clear-eyed policy-making and divert resources from duller but worthier causes. Are moral panics good for society?
Producer: Dan Tierney
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a programme from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:04.8 | Good evening. Jaden Moody was the youngest victim of the upsurge in knife crime so far this year, |
| 0:10.1 | and his killing has been picked over endlessly by those arguing over its causes and what should be done about it. |
| 0:16.0 | He was 14 when he was knocked off a stolen moped in London's East End and stabbed repeatedly in the back. |
| 0:21.8 | His family said he wasn't involved in gangs or drugs, |
| 0:24.7 | but on his social media site he boasted of being a gunman and a drug mule |
| 0:28.3 | and waved bunches of £50 notes. |
| 0:31.2 | He was black. Black people are five times more likely to be both perpetrators |
| 0:35.8 | and victims of homicide. Cue the arguments about |
| 0:39.3 | inequality, prejudice and deprivation. He'd been excluded from school and had no father at home, |
| 0:45.9 | evidence for those who say we're handling troublesome kids badly and theorise on why they're troublesome |
| 0:51.2 | in the first place. Jaden was just one of dozens of victims, |
| 0:55.5 | many of whom didn't fit that pattern at all, |
| 0:57.6 | in what the shriller newspapers are calling |
| 0:59.4 | an epidemic of knife crime. |
| 1:01.7 | Chief constables say it's a national emergency |
| 1:03.7 | and call for more police, of course. |
| 1:05.7 | Politicians blame government cuts in social services. |
| 1:08.8 | Lobbyists press for money for their solutions, stamping down |
| 1:11.9 | or lifting up. There certainly has been a sharp increase in stabbings, but in a long-term pattern |
| 1:17.5 | of peaks and troughs that leads some to see what's happening as a moral panic. Is it? And what's |
| 1:23.3 | wrong with moral panics anyway? Maybe they're the whistling kettle that tells us something in society is starting to boil, a flash of empathy more likely than rational analysis to get |
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