Abstract
Adopting the perspective of cultural criminology, this paper asserts that the century-old opposition between the adolescent/youth stage and adulthood is now being challenged by a late-modern capitalist culture functioning artificially to extend the former. Using examples from across the cultural script, the paper introduces the concept of ‘life stage dissolution’ (and its attendant bi-directional processes of ‘adultification’ and ‘infantilisation’) to suggest it is becoming more difficult for young people to differentiate and disassociate themselves from the generation immediately ahead of them, and indeed vice versa. The result is a sort of generational mulch where shared and interchangeable cultural experiences are now the norm. The second half of the paper provides some preliminary and deliberately provocative remarks about the implications of life stage dissolution for criminology and criminal justice. This will include an analysis of emerging processes that I have termed ‘pantomime justice’, a useful way of understanding how crime stories today often seem to unfold as a conjoined adult-child experience in contemporary society.
Keywords
[Pantomime] does not appeal to our fine perceptions of beauty or wit. Its sentiments are, of course, mostly ludicrous; it is invariably blatant and jingo in its patriotism; its humour has little subtlety. (Wilson, 1934)
Introduction
In the spirit of the original National Deviancy Conference, this paper is both a critique of capitalism and a call-to-arms for critical and cultural criminologists to address a nascent and under-researched area of study. Following the simple logic that, for capitalism to continue to function, it must either open up new markets or extend established ones, this paper takes as its starting point the rise of bespoke marketing and advertising campaigns aimed at undermining and eroding established stages of the life cycle in the search for corporate profit. The initial focal point of my critique is thus lifestyle advertising. 1 However, my argument quickly extends to include other examples of what I have described elsewhere as ‘life stage dissolution’ (Hayward, forthcoming) from across the Anglo-American cultural script. Finally, in an exploration and extrapolation of current trends, I offer for discussion some preliminary, and deliberately polemical, remarks about the potential impact of life stage dissolution on criminology and criminal justice—an emerging set of processes I have provocatively entitled ‘pantomime justice’. Whether it’s the growing criminalisation of thousands of American children as young as six for in-school offences such as misbehaving on the school bus (McGreal, 2012), or overblown concerns about so-called ‘corporate paedophilia’ (Rush and La Nauze, 2006), it is my assertion that criminologists need to start analysing the cultural conditions that spawn contemporary intergenerational confusion.
Before proceeding further, however, it is important to be clear about my particular position regarding the influence of lifestyle advertising (and increasingly interconnected media such as demographically targeted television programming and movies), not least because I am asking the reader to countenance the claim that these cultural forms are contributing to a growing uncertainty surrounding intergenerational relations. As we know, the ‘effects’ question surrounding advertising is an unanswerable one, not least because it is impossible to control for all the influences other than advertising to isolate advertising’s diverse effects. My position is best articulated by Schudson in a substantial book which ironically (given the intrinsic logic of this paper) argues that advertising is nowhere near as important or effective as its critics imagine.
Advertising is part of the establishment and reflection of a common symbolic culture. Advertising, whether or not it sells cars or chocolate, surrounds us and enters into us, so that when we speak we may speak in or with reference to the language of advertising and when we see we may see through schemata that advertising has made salient for us … it is a distinctive and central symbolic structure. And strictly as symbol, the power of advertising may be considerable. Advertising may shape our sense of values even under conditions where it does not greatly corrupt our buying habits. (Schudson, 1993: 210)
Expressed differently, advertising and marketing messages are an obvious symbolic resource that people might use to ascribe value to their experience of social life (Berger, 1972). This is not to suggest a simple determinism, or to venture any definitive or universal claims about advertising’s “influence” or “effect”. Rather, adverts and the popular cultural milieu that surrounds them become in Schudson’s words ‘molds for thought and feeling’ or ‘equipment for living’.
Inevitably this focus on the centrality of advertising forms in late-modern society chimes with cultural criminology’s more general interest in the way meaning and power are negotiated and displayed through the efflorescences of mass-produced visual imagery. Cultural criminologists conceptualise contemporary media culture as a series of loops and spirals, an ongoing process by which everyday life recreates itself in its own image (Ferrell, Hayward and Young, 2008). Consequently, we assert that any useful criminology of everyday life must be, if nothing else, culturally reflexive—that is, self-attuned to image, symbol and meaning as dimensions that define and redefine crime and its control. In this paper, I will undertake just such a culturally reflexive analysis of a looping and spiralling process alive within the late-modern mediascape—the dissolution of established life stages.
Life Stage Dissolution: An Introduction
Everybody grows old. Not everybody grows up! (tagline for the 2012 movie Young Adult)
Famously, in the study of human personality, the post-Freudian psychologist Erik Erikson asserted that a sense of identity develops over the lifespan as individuals pass through a sequence of ‘eight stages of psycho social development’ (Erikson, 1982). 2 Extending Freud’s classic account of childhood development into adolescence, adulthood and ultimately old age, Erikson posited that one’s identity develops over the lifespan in a fixed (epigenetic) sequence, each psychosocial stage emerging out of and building on the next.
In every stage, people face an interaction of opposing attitudes, which leads to a conflict, or psychosocial crisis. Resolution of the crisis produces an appropriate basic strength and enables a person to move on to the next stage. In addition, biological components lay a ground plan for each individual, but a multiplicity of historical, social, and physiological events shape ego identity. (Feist and Feist, 1998: 257, emphasis in original)
One of the key aspects of this quote, and of Erikson’s work generally, is the idea that personality development proceeds as a result of the inherently ‘oppositional attitudes’ that exist between each stage of the life cycle. Today, however, a cursory glance at the way young people and adults are frequently represented within the Anglo-American cultural script suggests that a sense of intergenerational opposition is fast diminishing. 3 To illustrate this point this section introduces the overlapping, bi-directional processes of ‘adultification’ and ‘infantilisation’ as evidence of how the century-old opposition between the adolescent/youth stage and adulthood is being challenged by a late-modern capitalist culture now functioning artificially to extend the former. 4 Put another way, it is becoming ever-more difficult for young people to differentiate and disassociate themselves from the generation immediately ahead of them, and indeed vice versa. The result is a sort of generational mulch where shared and interchangeable cultural experiences are now the norm.
This tendency is most apparent in marketing and advertising logics associated with contemporary lifestyle consumerism that seek to interpolate people in terms that appeal to their desire for ‘difference’ and ‘escape’. If historically the anthropologico-philosophical concept of human existence has been associated with the belief that individuals proceed through a series of distinct generational stages, today we exist in an age predicated on the primacy and constancy of youth, a global consumerist imperative that makes a mockery of the notion that life can be understood as a personal odyssey through a series of distinct processual stages. This thesis is most acutely articulated in Benjamin Barber’s recent monograph (2007) Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole. In a thoughtful passage worth quoting in full, Barber sets out his hypothesis:
A new cultural ethos is being forged that is intimately associated with global consumerism. Those responsible for manufacturing and merchandizing goods for the global market place, those who are actually researching, teaching, and practising marketing and advertising today, are aiming both to sell to a younger demographic [adultification] and to imbue older consumers with the tastes of the young [infantilization]. Marketers and merchandisers are self-consciously chasing a youthful commercial constituency sufficiently padded in its pocketbook to be a very attractive market, yet sufficiently uninformed in its tastes to be vulnerable to conscious corporate manipulation via advertising, marketing, and branding. At the same time, these avatars of consumer capitalism are seeking to encourage adult regression, hoping to rekindle in grown-ups the tastes and habits of children so that they can sell globally the… consumer goods for which there is no discernible ‘need market’ other than the one created by capitalism’s own frantic imperative to sell. (Barber, 2007: 7)
As this quote suggests, the economic imperative behind this ‘infantilist ethos’ is simple: in an overproducing capitalist market, First World consumers bereft of actual needs must be stimulated into further consumption: ‘Inducing them to remain childish and impetuous in their taste helps ensure that they will buy the global market goods designed for indolent and prosperous youth’ (Barber, 2007: 11). The result is new markets associated with what the semiotician Marcel Danesi calls the ‘forever young syndrome’:
because teen tastes change virtually overnight, instant obsolescence can be built into practically everything … Teen tastes have become the tastes of all because the economic system in which we live now requires this to be so, and it has thus joined forces with the media-entertainment oligarchy to promote its forever young philosophy on a daily basis. In a phrase, youth sells! (Danesi, 2003: ix)
Indeed it does: in the United States alone the ‘teen dollar’ was worth $155 billion in 2000 (with teens persuading their parents to part with an estimated further $100 billion); by 2004 the figure had risen to $169 billion, or roughly $91 per week for every US teen (Barber, 2007: 8).
At one level there is essentially nothing new here; just a continuation of the way consumer culture propagates and perpetuates imagined lifestyles. Thus, the marketing of ‘adulthood’ (especially sexuality) to kids, and of ‘childish pleasures’ to adults, are both based upon a shared logic, namely, the promise of escape from the normalised constraints imposed by the ‘mundane real’—for kids, the escape from being denied fully constituted access to the world of adult pleasures (sex, booze etc.), and for adults the escape from rational self-management in a flight to ‘play’ and ‘fun’ (Hayward, 2004). As such, both dynamics are effectively extensions of the well-worn logic of commodity fetishism—goods are enchanted with the capacity to magically offer resolutions to lived experiences of constraint (Williams, 1980).
However, at another level this does represent something of a step change. I refer here to the increasingly sophisticated architecture of marketing and advertising and the ever more intense targeting of demographic groups. The complex socio-psychodynamics of advertising have been much commented on (e.g. Botterill, MacRury and Richards, 2000), and thus need no elaboration here. Instead, I wish to stress the incredible intensification of contemporary advertising techniques. Today, as a consequence of the growth of Internet and viral advertising it is estimated that the average US teen is assailed by 3,000 advertisements per day; a staggering 10 million by age 18. Yet, it is not simply a question of bombardment. Research techniques such as ‘neuromarketing’ herald the onset of a brave new world of product placement and psyche manipulation. The key thing to recognise is that over the last decade this impressive advertising weaponry has deliberately trained its sights on eroding intergenerational barriers. Consider, for example, advertising constructs such as the ‘Midriff’ and the ‘Mook’ (Merchants of Cool, 2001). Familiar to advertising executives the world over, the ‘Midriff’ is all about aging (adultifying) pre-teenage girls prematurely. Female clichés have always moved product, but advertisers now use the nymphet ‘Midriff’ as a key advertising trope: the prematurely adult, openly sexual teen figure as a ‘new form of feminine empowerment’ – think Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus. Likewise, the ‘Mook’ is a fabricated ‘demographic profile’ and stalwart of focus-group proving grounds. Crude, loud, hedonistic, and unashamedly based on the concept of ‘arrested adolescence’, the ‘Mook’ has emerged as a ubiquitous figure in contemporary advertising, reflecting the cultural logic of TV shows like Jackass and The Dudesons, and the onscreen personas of movie stars like Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen. The ‘Mook’ is interesting because it is the embodiment of the process of ‘marketing to the inner child’ via the themes of play, fantasy and hedonism (Calcutt, 2000).
This regression to childhood, this ‘conscious abdication of adult responsibility’ in favour of fantasy and play, is extremely pronounced in contemporary advertising and marketing. US advertisers Becky Ebenkamp and Jeff Odiorne (2002), for example, describe the trend thus: ‘People in their twenties and thirties are clamoring for comfort in purchases and products, and sensory experiences that remind them of a happier, more innocent time—childhood.’ This fits with what little academic literature currently exists on infantilisation. Eric Konigsberg, for example, views infantilisation ‘as an antidote to the uncertainties of the day. Age regression is a protective shield’ (cited in Calcutt, 2000: 99). Hence major advertising campaigns unashamedly align their products with childhood nostalgia, while cartoon tropes are now a staple theme of adult campaigns, used to sell everything from caffeinated energy drinks (Red Bull) to banking services (Santander – Lego bricks; Barclays – adult bouncy castle; Lloyds/TSB – cartoon village). Recent mobile phone network commercials, for example, have utilised kites, crayons and giant ribbons (Orange—’Good things should never end’ campaign), teddy bears, nursery rhymes and toys (o2), singing cherries (3-Mobile), cartwheels and tumbling (T-Mobile), a dollhouse and the ‘spin the bottle’ game (Orange, Magic Numbers), and inflatable dolphins and balloon animals (Orange, ‘Pay as you Go’). The trend is even more pronounced in contemporary Anglo-American car advertising, where adults now happily purchase cars marketed to consumers half their age (see Table 1).
The ‘toyification’ of automobile advertising.
That infantilising tropes are now stock features of mass marketing is not open to question. However, as mentioned above, life stage dissolution is a bi-directional process. So, for example, while Barclaycard’s advertising campaigns have consistently utilised the ‘infantilist ethos’ in their commercials, 5 they also employ a second and related trope that I term ‘adultification’. In advertisements that depict clever children educating their parents about environmental issues and firing their parents for ‘errant’ behaviour such as working too hard (‘You’re fired’ advert), Barclaycard is mirroring a common trend within contemporary advertising/marketing: a role reversal that sees grown-ups positioned in subservient roles to children. Whether it’s the clever son outwitting his mother in the British Telecom ‘E.T.’ ads, or children generally tut-tutting at their parents’ stupidity in pretty much every family-based commercial on television, adult authority is continuously challenged by the rise of the precocious TV child. Even babies now assert themselves: speeding along busy highways (Hewlett Packard), roller-skating in Central Park (Evian), trading stocks and discussing portfolio options (a major US campaign for E-Trade investments) and wearing business suits and ordering subservient adults around in a corporate office (Triple Velvet toilet paper).
Importantly, infantilising and adultifying tropes are no longer limited to contemporary advertising. In Hollywood, movies such as Hall Pass (2011), Grown Ups (2010), Knocked Up (2007), Young Adult (2012), Step Brothers (2008), Old School (2003), Greenberg (2011), Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008), Wedding Crashers (2005), The Tao of Steve (2000), Grandma’s Boy (2006), You, Me, and Dupree (2006), Cyrus (2010), 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), Wild Hogs (2007), Failure to Launch (2006), Orange County (2002), Arthur (2011), School of Rock (2003), and Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2011), amount to a film subgenre predicated on the infantilist ethos. Likewise, while the ‘body swap’ movie has been around since the 1980s, a new generation of role reversal movies has re-emerged as a theme in the teen film market (e.g. Big Meg, Little Meg (2000), Freaky Friday (2003), 13 Going on 30 (2004) and 17 Again (2009)). Meanwhile in the UK, the adultification trend is apparent in numerous TV shows that actively play with (and reverse) childhood-adult roles. See for example, Are You Smarter Than a Ten-Year-Old?, What Do Kids Know?, Tarrant Lets the Kids Loose, Boys and Girls Alone, Junior Apprentice, Born to Shine, School of Comedy and, perhaps most unedifyingly, BBC3’s recent offering, Hotter Than My Daughter, in which mothers compete against their daughters in the fashion stakes. Not surprising, then, that in Beth Harpaz’s book 13 is the New 18… And Other Things My Children Taught Me While I Was Having a Nervous Breakdown Being Their Mother, the ‘joke’ is how the generation gap will have vanished by the time the author’s kids become teenagers. 6 However, in many ways it already has. From the ‘erosion of childhood’ associated with the medicalisation of childhood ‘disorders’, to the sexualisation of younger and younger girls (the so-called ‘Lil’ Britney effect’) (Durham, 2009; Tankard Reist, 2009), Anglo-American children are increasingly treated as the cultural equals of adults.
Likewise, the cultural fallout of infantilisation (or, as it is occasionally called, elongated childhood/adolescence) is all around us. From magazines like High Fructose and Clutter that specialise in adult toys and ‘artefacts for a second childhood’ to websites like Officeplayground.com, Millionaireplayboy.com and Kimandjason.gostorego.com (the latter the purveyors of a range of ‘Adulthood stinks’ products) that cater to the needs of ‘Kidults’, ‘Rejuveniles’ and other ‘kid-centric obsessives’. From the ‘toyification’ of new technology (Noxon, 2006: chapter 3), to the desire of young adults to extend their childhood through ‘instant nostalgia’, the ‘Skool disco’ craze, and other forms of ‘collapsed synchronic pastiche’ (de Zengotita, 2005). The triumph of the ‘inner child’ over the ‘inner adult’ is bringing about the demise of what Andrew Calcutt astutely calls ‘a viable sense of adult agency’. In other words, the established ‘adult paradigm’ is being eroded by a contemporary society unable to assert any positive images not associated with the ‘cult of youth’. 7
More worrying perhaps, this image of ‘lost boys and girls hanging out on the edge of adulthood’ has also imperceptibly crept into policy doctrine. In 1995 the US Society for Adolescent Medicine stated that its remit was to care for persons ‘aged 10–26’. By 2002 the upper age range had increased to 34. The MacArthur Foundation clearly agrees, declaring recently that ‘transitions to adulthood’ also end in the mid-thirties (Furedi, 2003). Likewise Pawluch (1996) has written at great length about the rise of the ‘New Pediatrics’, a process characterised by an expansion of paediatric services—especially non-clinical services—into fully fledged adulthood. And so an irony emerges: as kids hurtle at full speed towards adulthood, what awaits them when they arrive is something remarkably familiar.
But how have commentators sought to make sense of the interrelated processes of adultification and infantilisation? While sociologists have been slow to consider the premature aging of children and the increasing immaturity of adults, both themes have featured prominently in populist media commentary (Cohen 2010; Henig, 2010; Noxon, 2003; Samuelson, 2003; Sternbergh, 2006). Very often this commentary is couched in anxious, even occasionally morally outraged terms, as evidenced by the subtitle of Diane West’s book The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development is Bringing Down Western Civilization. Other times, it is underpinned by very specific (generational) concerns and anxieties. Much ink, for example, has been spilt on behalf of ‘baby boomers’ about the increasing economic burden of financially supporting ‘quarterlifers’, ‘thresholders’, ‘boomerang kids’, ‘parasite singles’ and other extended adolescents who either fail or refuse to leave the familial nest. Likewise, concerns have been expressed about the undue pressure exerted on young children—especially girls—to grow up faster (e.g. the recent furore surrounding the marketing of padded bikini tops to seven-year-old girls by the British retailer Primark). However, there also exists a more sanguine reading of such tendencies. In a 2010 cover story for the New York Times Magazine, Robin Marantz Henig talks wistfully about the benefits of ‘identity exploration’ and ‘self-focus’ that are emerging out of new demographic fashions like so-called ‘pre-adulthood’. 8 Frequently cited in these more positive accounts is the developmental psychologist Jeffrey Arnett’s notion of ‘emerging adulthood’ (2000, 2004; Arnett, Kloep, Hendry and Tanner, 2010), Arnett being one of very few academics actively seeking to engage with issues surrounding life stage dissolution.
According to Arnett, emerging adulthood is a new and distinct ‘life stage’ that applies to the years 18 to 29, a period which he suggests is ‘neither adolescence nor young adulthood but is theoretically and empirically distinct from both’ (Arnett, 2000: 469). Drawing on recent neuroscientific research which suggests that prefrontal cortex and cerebellum development (the part of the brain responsible for emotional control) continues well into the twenties—much later than was previously thought—Arnett and a growing band of other developmental psychologists aver the existence of an entirely new and distinct life stage. Arnett’s work, though, is no one-dimensional retreat into neurobiological reductionism. He also offers a culturally nuanced account of ‘the age period from the late teens to the late twenties’. Arnett’s skills as a writer and public intellectual have ensured that his work has found a receptive audience with many journalists, with emerging adulthood and cognate appellations such as ‘middle youth’ and ‘the Peter Pan syndrome’ proving a headline writer’s dream.
With few exceptions (see Koganzon, 2010, for a thoughtful critique) the media have uncritically accepted Arnett’s concept of emerging adulthood. This is problematic, for even if one leaves aside the not inconsiderable evolutionary leap of faith required to subscribe to the neuroscientific data underpinning emerging adulthood, a host of other problems exist that challenge Arnett’s work and certainly the subsequent media trumpeting of it. To start with, while youth studies scholars also agree that (for many) the transition to adulthood is now ‘fragmented and extended’ and characterised by ‘unpredictability, backwards steps and false starts’ (MacDonald, Shildrick, Webster and Simpson, 2005: 874; see also Du Bois-Reymond, 1998; Furlong, Cartmel, Biggart, Sweeting and West, 2003), they suggest this is largely a by-product of wider economic forces such as extended educational demands, labour market de-regulation, corporate restructuring, and changing income and employment patterns (Côté and Bynner, 2008)—a collective set of processes that create working conditions less ‘learning to labour’ and more ‘learning to leisure’!
By drawing attention to what has been described as ‘the long road to adulthood’, Arnett has identified something of considerable socio-cultural importance. However, by over-psychologising what are essentially socio-economic factors (Côté, 2009: 296) he is also guilty of a lack of sociological precision. Most fundamentally, and as this article has made clear, rather than the emergence of a distinct, universal new stage of the life cycle along the lines outlined by Arnett, what is actually occurring within Anglo-American society is the erosion (or, more accurately, the blurring) of established life stages. 9 For Arnett and his supporters in the media, this blurring (in the form of his emerging adulthood paradigm) offers the potential of a creative space for young adults to find themselves and shape the future direction of their lives—and for some this may indeed be the case. However, for many others, the intergenerational confusion brought about by adultification and infantilisation is likely to have seriously negative connotations and consequences. In the remainder of this article I will illustrate this point by looking at ongoing tendencies within the sphere of crime and punishment.
‘Pantomime Justice’: Some preliminary criminological reflections on life stage dissolution
In 2009 four-year-old Juliet Breitman and her friend were riding their bicycles on a Manhattan sidewalk. Despite parental supervision and the use of training wheels, Juliet veered off course and ran into 87-year-old Clare Menagh. As a result of the collision, Ms. Menagh suffered a fractured hip. She subsequently died three months later of unrelated causes. This was not the end of the story. Ms. Menagh, and later her son, acting as the executor of the estate, sued both the children and their mothers, arguing that all parties had been ‘negligent in the operation and control of their bicycles’. Given the intensely litigious climate of New York City, the lawsuit was not entirely unexpected. However, what is of interest here is the Judge’s Ruling. Weighing up the evidence, Justice Paul Wooten of the New York Supreme Court dismissed the claims of Juliet’s lawyer, James P. Tyrie, that the girl was ‘not engaged in an adult activity’ at the time of the incident. He likewise rejected the central pillar of Tyrie’s defence, i.e. that children under the age of four are presumed to be ‘incapable of negligence’. Instead Wooten concluded that, although the law presumes children under four cannot be negligent, Juliet was in fact three months shy of turning five when she hit Ms. Menagh. There was therefore ‘no bright line rule’. Juliet was old enough to be sued (Feuer, 2010). 10
Even though the Breitman case is clearly a civil and not a criminal matter, it nicely illustrates the central theme of this paper: the profound socio-cultural confusion about the nature of ‘traditional’ (generational) life stages within Anglo-American society. Indeed, with thousands of US teens awaiting trial held for months and even years in adult jails, and experimental New York courts now set aside for ‘adult juveniles’ where judges are forced to reconceptualise a parens patriae-style philosophy within the structure of a criminal court (Barrett, 2012), it is not difficult to recognise that legal confusion about what constitutes acceptable childhood and adult behaviour is also much in evidence within the criminal realm. 11 The second half of this paper looks into the criminological significance of this intergenerational blurring. Specifically, it offers for discussion three preliminary (and provocative) vignettes illustrating how ‘life stage dissolution’ is impacting on criminology and criminal justice policy. My ultimate goal is to kick-start thinking on a subject (or more accurately a series of socio-cultural tendencies) that so far has remained beyond the interest of criminologists.
The ‘At Risk’ Individual and the ‘Therapeutic State’: Life stage dissolution and the culture of victimhood
There are some advantages to those set in authority for crime victims to be induced into a mindset where there is external locus of control, just as there are advantages to be had for military and religious leaders to have compliant followers. External locus of control makes for passivity (Pease, 2008: 590).
With a few exceptions criminology has never successfully theorised emotional responses to crime and how these shape and influence government policy. This is especially true when one considers the emotions surrounding victimisation. This is a major oversight, especially when one considers how, over the last two decades, the culture of victimhood has emerged as a major (psycho)social phenomenon. In this section, I consider briefly how life stage dissolution is impacting on some of the emotive forces associated with victim culture.
Damon Albarn, the lead singer of the UK band Blur, famously declared that ‘If there’s going to be an epitaph for the nineties, it will be by the end, we all felt like victims’ (cited in Calcutt, 2000). This is no longer just a sound bite. As Charles Sykes points out in Nation of Victims, if you add up all the groups in the United States that consider themselves victims, their number adds up to almost 400 percent of the population. One of the consequences of this rise of victim—or occasionally ‘survivor’—culture is the extent to which individuals now actively perceive themselves as being ‘at risk’. Consider, for example, how many middle class parents react to unsubstantiated fears and anxieties by massively overcompensating in their child-rearing practices. Adolescents are no longer allowed to act as babysitters or undertake paper rounds; kids are driven to school and spend an increasing proportion of time on their own. Insulated from society, they become Über-relativists, solipsistic individuals cocooned in bedrooms with their Playstations and TVs. The similarities between the ‘at risk’ victim and the immature, infantilised adult are obvious. Calcutt again:
The victim and the child are the two leading cultural personalities in today’s society. They complement each other in that they are joined together by the common element of powerlessness. Abused and defenceless, the victim and the child are attractive personae in that they represent life beyond the discredited struggle for power between competing, self-interested adults. (2000: 236)
Put simply, the onset of a ‘victim culture’ has intensified the infantilised adult’s need for comfort, shelter and safety, something that, as we have seen, is already a major trope within contemporary marketing (the so-called ‘protective shield of childhood’). Accordingly, we now have a cultural personality common among young adults constituted out of a convergence of on the one hand, the childlike, immature young adult unwilling to transition into an adult world of rationality and responsibility, and on the other, the ‘at risk’ individual, unable to assert agency in the face of putative threats—whether in the form of the imminent arrival of bird flu or the pederast at the school gates. No surprise, then, that the bumped fist greeting/farewell popular among today’s youth is typically accompanied by the word ‘safe’—an admonishment to manage risk as you go about your business on the mean streets of suburbia!
Taking advantage of socio-cultural circumstances in which the infantilised victim is ascendant, politicians and policy-makers are now remoulding the relationship between individual and government through what one might describe as the rise of the ‘therapeutic state’. As lifestyles and identities become politicised, governments attempt to convert ‘collective grievances into personal problems amenable to therapeutic intervention’ (Lasch, 1979: 43). This shift from politics to the personal is one of the distinctive features of contemporary public life and ensures that questions surrounding the role of the victim within the criminal justice system are central to any form of ‘public criminology’. However, while debates continue to rage about the efficacy of restorative justice and its cognate practices, other transformations in the role of the victim are already under way as a direct result of the popular politics of victim culture. The most obvious manifestation of this tendency is the ‘victim impact statement’, a process that allows for the promulgation in various court settings of often highly emotive victim testimonies—including, in some circumstances, statements offered by family members (and even friends) of crime victims. Likewise, in the UK under New Labour, we saw the introduction in court of therapeutically trained ‘professional witnesses’. While this latter initiative was designed to protect vulnerable victims, legal commentators have expressed concern that surrogate testimony could threaten an open, adversarial court system, replacing it with one based around secrecy and victim protection. In both examples, it is conceivable that the ability of the victim to ‘tell their story’ could result in unwarranted variations in sentencing. More worrying still is the possibility that criminal proceedings could be influenced by high-profile victim campaigns/agendas, a point Pat O’Malley (2010: 16) makes when considering victim-driven legislation such as ‘Megan’s law’: ‘such laws … emerge from a groundswell of emotion, of fear and loathing, that is better understood in terms of the “popular” experiences, beliefs and expressions that do not appear in formal legal rationalities’.
Unsurprisingly, given the complementary nature of the passive victim and the infantilised adult, the state’s therapeutic credentials are even more apparent when it comes to the clamour for ‘children’s rights’—especially when voiced with regard to court proceedings. For instance, in the recent Old Bailey trial of two pre-teenage boys accused of raping of an eight-year-old girl we have a clear example of therapeutic professionals adulterating the criminal justice process in a bid to promote a children’s rights agenda and send what they consider to be a ‘clear message’ to the wider society. Furedi (2010) makes this point forcefully:
This showtrial is not just classic example of how not to treat children. It is also symbolic of the broader infantilization of English justice. The spectacle of the Old Bailey had nothing to do with a normal courtroom drama … this make-believe court scene was part of a ritual that criminalises children … and which incites eight-and 10-year olds to act out the role of ‘rape victim’ and ‘sexual predator’ for a watching adult audience. In their hearts, everyone involved in this mock-trial knew that everything about it was fake.
While children’s rights are prioritised, the rights associated with adulthood are under threat in any number of areas. For example, a series of muddled New Labour policies took aim at adulthood, and especially parenthood. The implementation of ‘parenting orders’, the degradation of the legal category of parental responsibility (Reece, 2009) and the rise of the social work concept of ‘safeguarding’ (Parton, 2006) all suggest that the state wishes the trained professional to stand in the stead of the parent. The UK has even witnessed the onset of so-called ‘child rearing lessons’—or, put another way, therapeutic programmes that teach parents what their forebears have managed to achieve for generations without any need of governmental instruction. However, the most striking example of the governmental crisis of faith in adults was the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act of 2006. The Act stipulated that any adult who works with children (or ‘vulnerable’ adults) must be entered into a database and subject to constant criminal records vetting via the Orwellian-sounding Independent Safeguarding Authority (or face a fine of up to £5,000). The result was twofold. First, over 9.5 million UK citizens were entered into an unwieldy and expensive computer database. Second, any parent helping out at their child’s nursery, sports club or school disco required a greater level of vetting than someone handling explosives!
In confident societies where adult autonomy still stands for something, such victim-led nonsense would be dismissed out of hand. But in an infantilised world where the category of victim—aided and abetted by the therapeutic state and its attendant counsellor battalions—has such social and legal currency, these policies seep into our culture almost without a murmur.
Life Stage Dissolution and the Crime-Media Nexus
Beyond pop culture, the infantilist ethos also dominates: dogmatic judgements of black and white … come to displace the nuanced complexities of adult morality. (Barber, 2007: 6–7)
Earlier we discussed the rise of the conjoined adult-child experience within today’s capitalist cultural script. This tendency, however, is not limited to advertising and movies. Today it is also apparent in aspects of the news media, and especially its treatment of crime stories. Consider, for example, one of the themes discussed above—contemporary victimhood. In her work on print media, Moira Peelo identifies ‘a stylised dialogue made up of a collection of authorial techniques that attempt to align the reader emotionally with victimhood’ (Peelo, 2006: 160). Evoking the concept of the ‘mediated witness’, Peelo argues that the goal is to get the receiver to ‘share closely [and intimately] in the story of the crime by identifying with the emotions of those who have been hurt’. Consider now how much more intense this process is within the competitive world of 24-hour rolling news (the extremely personal coverage of the Madeleine McCann abduction being an obvious example). According to the influential media critic Charlie Brooker, what is important in the sphere of 24-hour TV news is that a power reversal is under way between journalists and the public: ‘Instead of offering us a factual summary of events that we can then form an emotional opinion on, they [reporters] now ask us for an emotional opinion, and then incorporate it into their factual summary of events’ (Brooker, 2009). Consequently, the representation of ‘ideal’ victims on TV news frequently resembles a late-modern morality play, with high-profile victims quickly associated with larger themes and issues, and archetypal heroes and villains (pantomime characters?) pushed onto centre stage for us to ‘boo’ or ‘cheer’ at (Butler and Drakeford, 2008: 382). 12
To some extent, there’s nothing intrinsically new about this. The media has always thrown up one-dimensional archetypes. However, as a result of two processes, we are now seeing the slow demise of what one might call hard news and the rise of an infantilised soft news constituted from ‘churnalism’ (Davies, 2008), instant blog factoids, ‘hyperventilating news anchors’ and non-expert ‘hair trigger pundits’ (Rosenberg and Feldmen, 2008). The first process is the uncurbed rapidity of (crime) news gathering, which has resulted in a situation whereby the news cycle now moves faster than the news. Consequently, anything longer than a soundbite/meme is dismissed by tech-savvy audiences raised on digital instantaneity as a ponderous intrusion into their world of self-centred information gathering. For the grown-up kidults of late modernity, then, news stories deteriorate to the level of textspeak or Twitter feed—add a smiley or sad face to the story lest it be dismissed as ‘TLTR’/’TLDC’ (‘too long to read’/’too long don’t care’). This, of course, contributes to the second process: the erosion of complexity and the dumbing down of debate. Described by Michael Massing as the ‘Fox effect’, this is the distilling down of broadcast news to black-and-white issues stripped of all nuance and subtlety. Consider, for example, the deployment of a politics of fear in relation to the ‘war on terror’ (It is interesting to note that in her response to the 9/11 attacks, Susan Sontag (2001) stated the following: ‘The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public.’). In the post 9/11 news media, representations of terrorism unfold like a cautionary tale written for vulnerable children, as speculation about what could happen quickly morphs into news stories couched in terms of imminent danger. Whether it’s inaccurate stories about the detonation of ‘dirty bombs’, or panic-ridden stories about potential Al Qaeda attacks on plutonium stores at nuclear power stations, the representation of terrorism in the cultural script today is like a fantasy, a series of imagined leaps in logic that take us far from a world of rational analysis into a moribund world of worst-case scenario thinking. This is the land of Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown unknowns’, where ‘possibilistic’ rather than ‘probabilistic’ thinking triumphs. This so called ‘paradox of unknowability’ about terrorism creates within the public sphere pronounced narratives of fear (Lipschutz, 1999), feelings of powerlessness and what Ken Pease (2008) has described as ‘secondary victimization’. In other words, if ‘fear’ is operationalised ‘as the “official” emotion to be experienced’ the risk of ‘vicarious’ or ‘secondary’ victimisation increases, i.e. ‘The effects of a crime event are not limited to those directly suffering it. They extend to those distressed by … it’ (Pease, 2008: 598).
Such a backdrop has made it easy for UK and US governments to wage a proxy war against civil liberties. By legislating to curtail free speech and related rights to privacy, protest and assembly, western governments used the rubric of the ‘war on terror’ to ship fundamental democratic rights out the door via what Richard Ericson (2007) astutely called a systematic programme of ‘Laws against Law’. No wonder, Tony Blair chose to describe the ‘global threat’ of terrorism as ‘real and existential’. It not only played into the hands of a news media that resembles an emotive, interactive morality play, but it further exacerbated the prevailing sense of vulnerability, making it even easier to formulate and introduce further modes of pantomime justice.
The Infantilised Narcissist: Life stage dissolution and aetiology
With a few notable exceptions, social science has largely ignored the phenomenon of adult infantilisation. Theoretical criminology, however, can at least boast one significant study that has sought to explore the relationship between aggressive advertising, arrested adult development and the aetiology of predatory criminality. I refer here to Hall, Winlow and Ancrum’s book Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture (2008). Echoing Christopher Lasch on ‘consumption-oriented narcissism’, Hall et al.’s study turns around a series of ethnographic interviews with young urban criminals in the marginalised estates of post-industrial North-East England. Interestingly, the age profile of the young people interviewed by Hall et al. almost perfectly maps onto Arnett’s ‘emerging adulthood’ cohort. However, the ultimate assessment of their sample is a far cry from the positive journey of ‘self-focused exploration’ typically reported by Arnett and his adherents. The young criminals encountered by Hall et al. were ‘infantilized narcissists’ who had failed to transition into mature adulthood:
Our data revealed that for so many who are deeply absorbed in consumer culture, adulthood is now a continuation of narcissistic aspects of the infantile world, and as this simulated faux-adulthood is imposed on the child from an early age [via advertising], we are seeing the end of both traditional childhood and adulthood; distinct life-course stages that are now melding into a single differentiated consumerist form. (Hall et al., 2008: 201)
Drawing on the psychoanalytical writing of Jacques Lacan, Hall et al. assert that
The role of the brand as a primary ‘mirror of identification’ does not diminish as the child matures, but, in a weakened symbolic order whose ability to prohibit narcissism and encourage an alternative political relationship between the subject and reality has diminished, it becomes more potent and influential at important points in the construction of individual and group identities. (Hall et al., 2008: 96)
The upshot is a world in which hyper-consumption has made even family life ‘ridiculous’; a world where ‘young people grow up in the market not at home’ (Nightingale, 1993; Schor, 2006); where the wrong product/label irredeemably brands individuals as ‘losers’, ‘no-marks’, or ‘divies’. What is important here is not that advertising is criminogenic in any simplistic sense of direct correlation/causation; rather what is occurring in this specific social setting—although never explicitly articulated by Hall et al.—is a two-step process of infantilisation and adultification. Evidence, then, of the bi-directional processes in action. Consumerism as a cultural ethos propagating new emotional states, feelings and desires that are contributing to both the depreciation of mature adulthood (and the roles and responsibilities typically associated with that stage of people’s lives), and importantly the adultification of very young teenagers (in terms of lifestyle choices and activities involving sexual activity/drugs/criminality etc. that previously were the preserve of young adults). 13 Hall et al.’s concern is with theft and predatory criminality, but one could easily extend this line of thinking to include issues such as the so-called ‘crisis in parenting’ and its effect on youth crime, or related aetiological concerns about young people making adult decisions (or inversely, young adults acting like children).
Conclusion
This paper used examples from the Anglo-American cultural architecture to introduce a new theoretical concept: ‘life stage dissolution’. In an attempt to provoke further criminological analysis, it identified three ways in which the intergenerational confusion surrounding life stage dissolution is impacting on our discipline. Earlier in the article I discussed the psychodynamic theorist Erik Erikson, and I return to his work here by way of conclusion. Erikson asserted that if the transition from adolescence to adulthood was marked by an ‘identity crisis’ (his term) whereby people become too absorbed in themselves, too narcissistic, then the ‘generational cycle of productivity and creativity’ would no longer function. As much an anthropologist as a psychiatrist, Erikson used historical and cultural sources to make his case that, psychically, ‘each person is a product of his or her time’ as much as they are of their familial environment. By negating the fact that people today are the product of an infantilised capitalist culture that actively seeks to undermine the life cycle and complicate the transition into adulthood, society, it seems, may have some hard lessons to learn.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Majid Yar for his comments on an early draft and Avi Brisman for his ongoing contribution to my thinking about infantilization.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.