The author attempts to use the concept of moral panic and its latest update to analyze public reactions to police ascertainment of three young boys, accused of killing more than 40 cats in Tržič and its surroundings in 2000. The discourse analysis is used to interpret journalistic articles, TV programsand expert statements. The article is based on constructivist paradigm, which sees delinquency as a social, historical and cultural construct, as a specific meaning, established in a specific time and place in an interlude of discursive practices, ideological positions and institutional regulation. For this reason, the author analyses statements, texts and images,and not behavior, and at the same time he avoids any analysis of people, who were in that particular case defined as deviant. The author emphasizes the role of mass media, interest groups and broader cultural systems of meaning in creating moral panic, claiming at the same time that moral panic regarding the youth behavior function as a symptom of broader moral, cultural and ideological confrontations between various discourses and regulatory practices. Moral panic can in this way re-define or re-evaluate social norms about youth upbringing and enable a creation or a new rise of power discourses, which assign greater importance to those social values that justify strict social control over youth socialization.
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