Childhood and Youth

Description

Childhood and youth have often been the targets of moral panic rhetoric. This Byte explores a series of pressing concerns about young people: child abuse, child pornography, child sexual exploitation, child trafficking and the concept of childhood. With an appraisal of the work of the influential thinker, Geoffrey Pearson, who wrote on deviance and young people, it draws attention to the moralising within these discourses and asks how we might do things differently.

Gary Clapton is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland and was formerly a children and families practitioner in Edinburgh and London. He has written widely on the subject of moral panics.