Tag: panic

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The new media violence moral panic

images-1The medical and mental health communities are now famous for their unsophisticated condemnations of media violence–often quickly assuming the link to real world crime and mayhem based on observations of small children or from uncritically accepting spurious research.

Now the American Academy of Pediatrics is back on the warpath again, spurred on by recent mass shootings, as reported in the Los Angeles Times

“When the first “Die Hard” and “Terminator” movies landed in theaters in the 1980s, both were rated R. But their sequels arrived with PG-13 marks — even though the level of violence had actually escalated.

“Critics have blasted Hollywood’s movie ratings for years, claiming that the Motion Picture Assn. of America takes a prudish view of sex and foul language but a very liberal one when it comes to mayhem and bloodshed.

“A new report provides strong evidence for that critique, concluding that gunplay has tripled within PG-13 films since 1985, the first full year the rating was used. Last year, PG-13 films were actually more violent than films rated R.”We were absolutely stunned,” said Brad Bushman of Ohio State University, co-author of the report published Mondayin Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “The MPAA website clearly says that R-rated films contain more violence. But PG-13 films now contain significantly more violence than R-rated films.”  Continue reading “The new media violence moral panic”

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Taking on the “gay panic” defense

The nation’s largest legal organization, meeting in San Francisco, will consider Monday whether to urge lawmakers to clamp down on the “gay panic” defense, in which murder defendants claim they were provoked by a victim’s homosexual advances.

As California has discovered, however, it’s a hard issue to define and even harder to address.

A resolution before the American Bar Association calls for the federal and state governments to prohibit such defenses in noncapital murder cases – or, as a more moderate option, to require antibias jury instructions modeled after a California law enacted after the notorious East Bay slaying of a transgender teenager.

“There’s still plenty of bias out there,” said Stephen Saltzburg, a George Washington University law professor who will present a resolution against “gay panic” defenses to the ABA’s policymaking House of Delegates.

But California’s example raises questions about whether such measures are effective.

In 2002, 17-year-old Gwen Araujo of Newark was choked and beaten to death by two men who said they became enraged when they learned that the person with whom they had just had sexual relations was born male. As one defense lawyer, Michael Thorman, put it, the killing could be traced to Araujo’s “deception and betrayal” of Thorman’s unsuspecting client.

An Alameda County jury deadlocked on first-degree murder charges against the two men in 2004. A second jury convicted them in 2005 of second-degree murder, with sentences of 15 years to life, while rejecting hate-crimes charges.

In response, the Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006 enacted the Gwen Araujo Justice for Victims Act, the first law of its kind in the nation. It requires juries in such cases to be instructed that they should not be influenced by the sexual orientation or gender identity of either the victim or the defendant.

Gay rights advocates praised the new law as a possible breakthrough. But it didn’t seem to have much impact in its first known courtroom test.

That case arose from the February 2008 slaying of Larry King, a gay 15-year-old junior high school student in the Ventura County town of Oxnard. A day after King asked 14-year-old classmate Brandon McInerney to be his valentine and called out “Love you, baby” in a hallway, McInerney pulled a pistol out of his backpack in a classroom and shot King in the back of the head.

 

More at: http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Law-group-to-take-up-gay-panic-defense-4722191.php

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This time, the right kind of moral panic

At last we may be entering what sociologists call a “moral panic” over guns. While the term may sound ominous, moral panics historically have been behind may progressive (and conservative) social changes.

According to Stanley Cohen, author of Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) and credited as creator of the term, a moral panic occurs when ” condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests”.Those who start the panic when they fear a threat to prevailing social or cultural values are known by researchers as moral entrepreneurs, while people who supposedly threaten the social order have been described as “folk devils.” Continue reading “This time, the right kind of moral panic”