A Robert Gordon University (RGU) academic explores the position of children in society in his newly published book.
James Morrison, a Reader in Journalism at RGU’s Aberdeen Business School, has based his book on his PhD thesis - which argues that Britain is locked in an ongoing panic about the position of children in society which frames them as, alternately, ‘victims’ and ‘threats’. His conclusions are the result of four years of research, involving textual analysis of press articles and comment threads, focus-groups of parents, grandparents and children, and interviews with newspaper journalists.
James’s book, entitled Familiar Strangers, Juvenile Panic and the British Press: The Decline of Social Trust, argues that the press is a key player in promoting the panic discourse – and that, in doing so, it is exploiting a deepening breakdown in social trust between individuals, families and communities for commercial gain. This crisis of trust is reflected in everything from the speeches and policy pronouncements of politicians to our own day-to-day conversations – in person and on social media.
James said: “The Jimmy Savile scandal and numerous other cases that hit the headlines in recent times – from historical accounts of the abuse of children in institutionalised care to the recent convictions of paedophiles in Rochdale and Rotherham – have rightly forced us to confront difficult questions about society’s past denials and the way some vulnerable juveniles are treated today. Yet, whenever cases like these come to light – undeniably horrible though they are – they have a tendency to dominate public debate to such an extent that they distort our perceptions of childhood and obliterate other, equally important and newsworthy, from the public agenda.
“My book argues that our collective obsession with viewing childhood as a state of innate vulnerability – or, in some cases, savagery – rather than celebrating all the positive aspects of childhood shows that Britain has become locked in an ongoing state of panic about the position of children in society.
“The fact that the most prominent narratives about children tend to focus on threats posed by what I call ‘familiar strangers’ – from suspicious-looking neighbours and people we pass in the street to the hooded youths hanging around outside our corner shops – underlines that the real problem here is a more wide-scale collapse in social trust. And we can see this crisis of trust symbolised in so many other popular narratives today – from news stories about benefit ‘scroungers’ to alarmist headlines about economic migrants.”
Familiar Strangers, Juvenile Panic and the British Press: The Decline of Social Trust is available in eBook now and hardback from Wednesday March 16 by visiting http://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137529947
James studied for his PhD in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2014 and is a Reader in Journalism at Aberdeen Business School, which involves publishing research, applying for research grants, delivering conference papers, supervising PhD, Masters and BA dissertation students, module leadership, lecturing, pastoral support and quality assurance.