Hoodies: New Paedophiles for Summer ’05

Hoodies: New Paedophiles for Summer ’05

In the Seventies Stuart Hall and some other social theorists produced an excellent study of the media’s role in generating convenient social panic (called Policing the Crisis.) Believe it or not, rather than paedophiles, car-jackers, motorway rapists or joy riders, the term making its UK debut was ‘muggers’. Mugging, the authors pointed out, was just a groovy new term for a very old crime. Theft involving personal assault had been around as long as civil society. The only novel thing was the term mugging, imported from the States.

Mugging certainly is a powerful word, so much it’s become the defining term for that type of crime. Just as a noise, it works well. It sounds a bit like slugging, possibly with a cosh, or maybe being smothered by having a mug pushed over your face, or perhaps a po. More than anything though, as the authors suggest, it’s favoured because it implies that the attacker considers the victim of the crime to be a mug. Such a depraved outlook is a useful media tool, even if it rarely is the case. It makes thieves all the more evil and incomprehensible, more frightening for sure. You can imagine them all gathering in snooker halls at the end of the day, to smoke cigars and laugh at how stupid we all are.

I was mugged at knifepoint on Copacabana beach, a revolting experience that returned in flashes for weeks, so I am no friend of such people. However, the seventeen year old who did it didn’t look very pleased with himself. He may have spent that evening doing coke, or he may have spent it with his mother and father in one of a million corrugated shacks on the hillside beyond the hotels, but I’ll bet he didn’t spend it laughing about me.

Like muggers, those labelled ‘hoodies’ dish out an archaic form of unpleasantness. I can’t say whether sadistic child-on-child violence is on the increase, but it’s always been there to some degree. There’s always a section of youth disturbed enough to enjoy gratuitous violence. Certainly was at my school and certainly still is. If it does vary in degree I’m sure economics has far more to do with it than jogging-tops. (My brother recalls that it was leather biker jackets that got you barred when he was a lad. Hell’s Angels, the lot of them.)

One might doubt the sincerity of the media at such times. You have to ask, if such blitzkriegs actually work, then isn’t it irresponsible for them ever to stop? Moreover, aren’t we risking countless other social evils by not concentrating on them just as intensely? What are the paedophiles getting up to now The Sun has taken its eye off their balls? Should we expect an increase in the number of sexual assaults upon children since the hoodie rode into media-land, on another pupil’s BMX? Without tabloid vigilance, and dedicated evening campaigns on the estate (against paediatricians and philatelists) it’s a wonder any of us still have our children. I’m surprised Jonathan King hasn’t caught them all and baked them in a big pie.

The chief concern here, as usual, is copy. Hoodies, like paedophiles, make great monsters for the media to write about, and sell. In both cases the added threat of spooky technology provides good plot seasoning. Like paedophiles, hoodies love their mobiles. The former use them to film trampoline users, the latter to film their beatings. In both cases the technology gives them a opportunity to savour their perversity, and even share it with others.

Although chilling, you have to wonder how often such things actually happen. You also have to wonder how much of this ugliness is disseminated and prompted by the campaigns themselves. It’s not unreasonable to imagine that a few Nelsons did think “Har!-Har!” when they watched that evening’s news, and dutifully took the memes down to their playground the next morning. That’s the risk of making a fetish out of something nasty. It appeals to fetishists.

And of course the knock-on from all this celebration of fear is more fearfulness. Boys in hooded tops. Another symbol for little old ladies to shrink away from. It’s also a great smokescreen issue as the truth about Iraq reaches exploding point. Anything to take our minds off that.