Today’s moral panic

the enemy within

There’s a new scourge in our society. Not only are we under constant threat from terrorists, asylum cheats and bogus chavs, honest citizens are now being oppressed by tops with hoods on them.

chav scum

A bit of background for those with more sense than to pay attention to this crap: Bluewater, “the leading shopping and leisure destination in Europe” apparently (i.e. a sort of immense mall thing with a golf course) recognises that its customers are scared of teenagers and thus bans clothes that teenagers like to wear, which of course causes a potential problem given that shops there sell hoodies, but hey. (They also banned baseball caps and swearing.)

New Labour, searching for more credible scare targets after the whole Iraq debacle, and already with a promise to “bring back a proper sense of respect in our schools, in our communities, in our towns, in our villages”, leap on board. The Prime Minister has come out saying that this is a great thing. The Deputy Prime Minister, a delicate flower no stranger to street violence, tells us how he came face to face with a gang of happy slappers in hoodies “about a couple of week… on the motorway about a couple of week, um, about a couple… a year ago” (Indie). And the tabloids are of course doing their thing:

THEY are the uniform of thugs and muggers and the sight of youths kitted out in them strikes fear in law-abiding citizens.

They’ve got evidence of course:

This week a 13-year-old girl was raped in bushes at Solihull. One of her two attackers wore a hooded top.
And two hooded thugs were among a gang who beat up a a boy of 15 with a wooden stake in Nuneaton, Warks.

And I bet the ones who weren’t wearing hoodies were wearing baseball caps, too.

Readers from North America, where hoodies as far as I’m aware are considered to be, er, tops with hoods on them (being outside in winter in Philly was made liveable by a combination of hoodie, hat and jacket, though they do reduce your peripheral vision a bit) might be a bit surprised by this. It’s just the same old bullshit though, it’s not anything unusually stupid.

There’s always some sort of justification trotted out – in this case, even though Bluewater said fairly explicitly they were banning hoodies because people were ‘intimidated’ by them, the refrain is that they’re only worn to hide their thieving faces from CCTV. I wasn’t aware that we all had a duty to present ourselves for identification at all times, but quite apart from that this is clearly nonsense – if that’s your problem you just ban people wearing them in shops, as already happens with motorcycle helmets and other face-obscuring items.

I can’t bring myself to go into a proper rant about this because it happens all the time, people scared of the yoof/the poor/the poor yoof, demonisation, media feedback getting them even more scared, some stupid bandwagon legislation and then bing it’s all forgotten suddenly when something else comes along to be scared of, and twenty years later everyone says “can’t believe they got so wound up about that back then, they must have been mad, but look at $signifier we have now, that’s totally different, the government should do something”. Burberry, gold chains, repetitive beats, trenchcoats, Doom, gangsta rap, Black Sabbath, expensive trainers, piercings, blah blah blah. It passes the time I suppose, in-between worrying about house prices and having affairs.

Bit miserable if you’re on the sharp end of it.