ABSTRACT
Widespread anxieties and public debates about rising crime rates and the transgressive behaviour of working-class youth have a long history in the UK. 1 They tend to erupt with particular intensity in periods of rapid cultural and social change such as the late 1960s and early 1970s; and, as moral panics scholars have shown, they very often focus on the presumed negative influence of the media, especially on young people. 2 There is a fear that continuous exposure to certain kinds of media products, in particular those representing violence, might lead to a negative change in attitudes, values and even behaviour on the part of the consumers of these products so that eventually they are more likely to become violent themselves. 3 Often such concerns focus on a particular media product (e.g., a film or a television programme), giving rise to claims that it inspired specific violent acts. Arguably, the most famous example for this in recent British history is the controversy surrounding Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film A Clockwork Orange which culminated in accusations that this movie was directly responsible for a number of copycat crimes. Indeed, this controversy was so prolonged and heated that, in 1976, when Warner Bros. prepared the film for an international rerelease, Kubrick asked the distributor not to show the film again in the UK; it was not legally available in this country until the year after the director's death in 1999. 4
