Folk devils serve as personifications of evil during times of moral panic. To date, however, few studies have addressed why some but not all deviant youths acquire folk devil status. Drawing on a combined cultural-historical criminology approach, this paper analyses the pop cultural representations which surrounded the Teddy Boys and Mods (British-oriented youth subcultures that emerged in the Irish Republic in 1954 and 1962 respectively). Both subcultures attracted a hostile societal response in mid-twentieth century Ireland, specifically as a result of their association with delinquency and immorality, and generally as a result of the wider societal changes they symbolised. This hostility, however, was not evenly dispersed. The paper argues that while Teds crossed the threshold from deviant to folk devil because of use of animalistic and epidemiological discourses by the press, Mods remained as ‘ordinary decent deviants’ due to mobilisation and extensive commodification. Analysis of these largely forgotten youth subcultures emphasises the need for greater analytical acuity to surround constructions of the folk devil across time and space.

Law does not stop in times of war. Rather, it often goes into overdrive, with new conflicts to be regulated and decided, and special provisions brought in as a result of the war effort. Yet, as war results in existential threats, all sorts of actors, the state, the military, other organisations, and individuals, may deviate from the normal paths of law. Transgressions can take particularly gruesome forms. In particular, wars come with war crimes (Ann Ching). The horrors of war may wash away legal scruples, compassion with strangers and basic humanity. The enormity of war’s consequences has since ancient times found expression in popular culture.
Popular culture forms a major source of information for people on all sorts of areas: including on crime and law, and war. The paper deals with ways in which law-breaking in war is portrayed in films and film-like television. Sometimes, crimes are an aside in a conventional war film which otherwise concentrates on battles and how wars form the character of combatants. In other films, committing war crimes and their aftermath is central and introduces the true character of main figures or distorts it into something they would not have become in normal times. In those stories, the execution of defenceless prisoners and civilians forms a main topic. A strong critical tradition depicts the ordinary soldiers as victims of scheming generals and political intrigue. Court martials add their own level of horror to the inherent trauma of war; they are powerfully depicted. Influential products of popular culture can be a vehicle of political propaganda and pre-existing tales are manipulated.

What is the relationship between conspiracy theories and crime? To answer this question, this paper will examine how the increasing number of conspiracist sub-cultures in the United Kingdom understand, and sometimes justify criminal acts by their own members. Conspiracist crime has dramatically increased in this past decade of transition as conspiracy theories have moved from the fringes to the political mainstream, yet we currently lack an understanding of how conspiracist sub-cultures conceptualise crime. This paper will consider the potential relationship between conspiracy theories and crime through presenting data drawn from online British conspiracist sub-cultures across a variety of social media platforms such as Twitter/X, Instagram, and Telegram. From analysing these sources, this paper will argue that conspiracy theorists articulate a type of popular criminology which seeks to explain, understand, and sometimes justify criminality through a master-narrative of what I call the “conspiratorial other.” These narratives blame crime and other social ills on an external alien force which has invaded society and then suggests the only means of rectifying this problem is for this “other” to be purged. In my analysis, I then highlight the way these narratives eerily accord with more dominant neo-liberal forms of criminology previously identified by theorists such as David Garland and Jock Young. This may suggest that rather than representing a new or deviant form of criminological thought conspiracy criminology could instead be conceptualised as a radicalisation or degradation of previous trends in the politics of crime and punishment put under strain by the disorder of this time of global, cultural, and political transition. The paper then concludes by outlining potential future directions for research in this area along with highlighting the need for a critical criminological engagement with conspiracy cultures as they continue to grow and intrude into normal political life.

There are particular cases of child homicide perpetrated by other children or young people which have garnered vast levels of public interest and infamy. Two British cases from the late twentieth century that have been studied in earnest by criminologists are the manslaughter of two young boys by Mary Bell in Newcastle in 1968 and, most prominently, the 1993 murder of James Bulger in Bootle. The reaction to these crimes has led scholars to assert that peer-perpetrated child homicide can greatly affect the way a society views children and childhood: the Bulger case in particular has been held up as a moment of extreme anxiety in Britain, as evidence of national deterioration. However, studies examining these cases have most often lacked in-depth comparison to other instances of peer-perpetrated homicide. This paper seeks to expand our understanding of how a broad range of child homicides by other children and young people aged under 18 were represented throughout the late twentieth century, with an emphasis on how these were communicated to local communities.

This paper is based upon a wide survey of newspaper articles about child homicide cases published in local Glasgow papers and UK national newspapers between 1960 and 1984. It will demonstrate that most cases received very limited publicity and debate, and that there were myriad public ‘explanations’ of instances where children killed other children - most of which were a far cry from the ‘evil’ or Othering characterisation associated with Bulger or Bell. We will examine the role that age, gender and the relationship between perpetrator(s) and victim(s) played in the construction of their public narrative, and consider the significance of such representations during these decades of shifting concerns and perceptions about the nature of childhood, violence, victimhood and the role of the family in Britain.