Xmas Task 1 on "An investigation into the medias role in generating the ongoing moral panic in Britain surrounding knife crime"

The moral panic over knife crime

There are two major problems with the current debate about knife crime. The first is that national politicians are seeking to solve what ought to be a problem for the Metropolitan Police – a number of unconnected murders, mostly in London – and misrepresenting that problem in the process as an expression of general social breakdown.
The second is that a genuine and much wider moral malaise is being discussed and interpreted through the prism of this localised crime problem, distorting the nature of that malaise.
As members of the Institute of Ideas’ Education Forum recently noted, the high profile given to knives by politicians and the national media has led to politically-motivated campaigns in schools where knife crime is simply not a problem. This strategy risks having the perverse effect of normalising and glamorising the carrying of knives (”Everyone else has got one: where’s yours?”)
In a paper published by the Institute of Ideas in 2005, sociologist Stuart Waiton coined the term ˜amoral panic’ to describe situations in which the panic is less about a perceived threat to social mores than anxiety about the absence of any moral consensus to be threatened.
Characteristically, such panics give rise to awareness campaigns and authoritarian gimmicks like curfews, rather than any attempt to address hard moral questions, which indeed often have little to do with the particular issue in the news.
The willingness of the political class to see a localised problem with knife crime as emblematic of a “broken society”, and then to offer technical fixes, is testament to a failure of the moral imagination.
Today’s politicians may be unable to resist the temptation to bundle these two very different problems together. A real moral and political lead would mean leaving knife crime to the police, and offering a political vision capable of inspiring all of us rather than keeping the kids off the streets.