ABSTRACT
Early in 1993, the British public was gripped by reports of the murder of a 2year-old child. Jamie Bulger had been abducted from a shopping mall near Liverpool and then horrifically killed by two 10-year-old boys. For weeks afterwards the press and TV featured analyses of the incident, made all the more gruesome as the actual moment of his abduction had been captured by video surveillance cameras. Yet attempts to explain the killing in terms of poverty and economic recession, or the erosion of leisure provision for young people, soon gave way to another, depressingly familiar, set of arguments. For it was the media that were responsible for the murder of Jamie Bulger. The simultaneous publication of Michael Medved’s bizarre attack on Hollywood morals (Medved, 1993), and the appearance of a number of films that were seen to have reached new peaks in screen violence (notably Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs), contributed to the development of a full-scale moral panic. Television executives were called to account, and new guidelines on TV violence were promised. TV talk shows featured teenage criminals only too ready to blame their misdemeanours on the media. And the British Board of Film Classification (the industry censorship body) hastily commissioned research into the viewing habits of young offenders.
