Moving beyond deficit media figurations of young people: troubling the contemporary ‘youth crime crisis’

Abstract

It is common for the media to cast young people as dangerous and delinquent, particularly when those young people derive from marginalized backgrounds. Moral panics are fuelled and sustained by the media in their role as agents of moral indignation. Additionally, the media represent a powerful source of moral regulation, often working against the interests of young people. In this paper, a recent media focus on the ‘youth crime crisis’ in Queensland, Australia is examined to consider potential ways in which public discourse might move beyond deficit tropes to develop more nuanced and productive conceptualizations of youth. We draw on emergent theorizations of the ‘figurations’ that define the ways in which ‘youth’ is understood in public discourse to consider how mediated social imaginaries work to produce representations of young people and frame possibilities for thinking about their place in contemporary society.