The Influence of Modernity on Juvenile Delinquency

Abstract

The research background of this paper is based on the post-modern tide of juvenile delinquency, which aims to explore what factors affect the fluctuation of juvenile delinquency in the process of modernity. This will bring broader results and significance to research in this field. Some viewpoints elucidate the social changes and new challenges brought about by emerging forces as an independent variable in the process of modernization and provide possible viewpoints and explanations for the phenomenon for later researchers. This paper enumerates the replacement and iteration factors of mass media and subculture during the third wave of modernization, and further explains the relationship between juvenile crime rate and modernity from the perspectives of psychology, sociology, and culture. The research method of this paper is mainly literature analysis. It is concluded that modernity causes a rational crisis from the perspective of capitalist spirit, mass media gradually replace family education and information output, and sub-violence culture and network culture further lead to the increase of juvenile delinquency.

Introduction

Juvenile delinquency is increasingly recognised as a serious concern all over the world [1]. According to figures from the China Juvenile Delinquency Research Association, in recent years, juvenile delinquency has accounted for more than 70% of all criminal acts committed in China [2]. It can be seen that with the development of the times, there are more and more cases of juvenile delinquency. Therefore, many social researchers and crime researchers study the factors of juvenile delinquency, which has been done in this article. The problem studied in this article is what are the factors of modernity leading to the rise of the juvenile delinquency rate. In order to help explain and prevent juvenile delinquency, the current research focuses on the analysis of the impact of social factors, psychological factors and cultural factors on juvenile delinquency.

Juvenile offenders are divided into two categories. The first is recidivism, which refers to those who begin acting antisocial or aggressively as children and continue throughout adulthood. The second is restricted juvenile offenders. Although criminals who are restricted by teenagers generally stop engaging in criminal activities once they reach adulthood, they are more likely to suffer from mental health issues, drug addiction, and financial difficulties than youngsters who have never committed a crime [3].

The factors leading to juvenile delinquency are usually divided into three aspects - social, school and family factors [4]. Generally speaking, compared with adults, teenagers are placed under the control and supervision of more strict systems of family, school and society. Therefore, their behaviour is more easily perceived than adult behaviour. From the previous literature, what the analytical perspective does is to explain various motives of crime from the perspective of social principles, but the scope of explanation is not comprehensive. On this basis, criminal psychology has a relatively comprehensive development, such as the development theory of juvenile delinquency. But in the face of a changing social environment, correction and prevention of this has not been carefully evaluated, or because of empirical studies. The significance is to wake up people under the wave of modernization to how to change their attitude towards life and correctly view rapid and efficient life changes. Taking ‘juvenile delinquency, modernity, mass media, psychology and culture’ as keywords, this paper searches articles from 2000 to now on Google Scholar. Through screening, a total of eight articles are included in the analysis scope of this paper.

The Influence of Mass Media on Juvenile Delinquency

This article will analyze the factors of juvenile delinquency in three directions and summarize the eight pieces of literature found. The classification of the articles can be seen in Table 1.

The influence of social factors on teenagers’ criminal tendency mainly comes from mass media, such as TV programs, movies, magazines and other mass media [4]. Juvenile delinquency is usually sudden [2]. Because the juvenile’s criminal motive is often relatively simple, its purpose is single and arbitrary. Generally speaking, juvenile delinquency is less premeditated, without serious consideration and planning ahead of time. It is frequently induced and stimulated by certain situations, such as a rapid crime motivated by an emotional drive [2]. For example, on television, many scenes of violence and blood, as well as many scenes of crime, can have a negative impact on teenagers. After watching these violent scenes, children may imitate. According to a survey in Japan, many children involved in violence in schools watch TV programs for four hours a day [4]. In this case, by watching violent scenes for a long time, children gradually tend to become unreasonable about their behaviour. Normally, children with violent tendencies are more likely to watch violent movies, which forms a vicious circle. Therefore, the influence of mass communication on teenagers’ tendency to violence is strong.

Today, with the rapid development of science and technology, mass media has gradually replaced simple family education and school education, and become a new carrier of cultural communication [5]. In this case, the influence of mass media on juvenile delinquency is becoming more and more direct and in-depth. It is undeniable that mass media not only provide spiritual support and value orientation for adolescents but also have the functions of psychological satisfaction, behavioural adjustment and even emotional expression and stress release.

However, Tan argues that in the past, juvenile delinquency was dominated by theft, robbery, rape, and assault [5]. In recent years, many new types of crimes have emerged such as arson, drug trafficking, and other gang-related crimes with more destructive effects on society. Although mass media can have both positive and bad impacts on everyone, teenagers are particularly vulnerable to such materials since they are not fully developed in terms of influence [6]. As a result, there are two main reasons why teenagers cause social harm by watching violent videos. The first is because teenagers’ psychological development is not mature enough and they do not have the ability to distinguish right from wrong [2]. Therefore, it is easy to be affected by bad media. The second point is that the communication density and frequency of mass media play a decisive role in the communication effect [2]. In this case, teenagers often unconsciously watch violent and bloody pictures and are easy to imitate. Therefore, it is precisely because of teenagers’ poor ability to distinguish right from wrong and the rapid spread of mass media that leads to the rise of juvenile delinquency rate.

Modernity and Juvenile Delinquency at the Psychological Level

Sociologists believe that criminal behaviors are an individual’s response to adjusting environmental pressures. After The Third Wave, the juvenile crime rate begins to show a rising trend. In the second half of the 19th century, when capitalism developed, statistics show that juveniles accounted for 35%-40% of total crimes [7]. From the 1960s to 2019, juvenile court crimes in the United States almost doubled [8]. Under this background, this paper aims to explore the influence of the modernization wave on juvenile delinquency at the psychological level.

Media Development Under Modernization

Driven by innovative modern science and technology, modern factory and enterprise systems have developed rapidly. Media developed from oral communication to written letters. After the industrial revolution, the invention of the telegraph and telephone marked the beginning of rapid iteration and transformation in media forms. The camera, TV, fax, Internet and mobile phones updated the speed and efficiency of communication vehicles, making an updated cultural industry possible. After the Lumière brothers invented the film industry in 1895, the possibility of introducing a branch of the cultural industry was raised: audiovisual production.

Film greatly deepens the representativeness of information transmitted by the media. With the popularization of mobile phones and the Internet, the gap between media carriers, information transmission speed and the true thing is gradually eliminated, which makes the clearest and most concrete media popular among people.

Disenchantment and the Crisis of Reason

At the same time, the ‘disenchantment’ proposed by Max Weber interprets another significant feature in the process of modernization - rational crisis [9]. The spirit brought by capitalism entered the social level, and endless ‘rationalization’ appeared, which broke the mystery of various events in life, making people’s life into a clear world. People could no longer explain various accidents in life through mysterious phenomena. Science and rationalization eliminated the mysterious aspect of phenomena that in the past could be explained as sorcery and witchcraft, such as a solar eclipse or death. People in life can no longer interpret various events in a mysterious and ambiguous way, which leads to a greatly increased degree of inner pain and more common anxiety. ‘Disenchantment’ provides a two-way impulse: among social members, they long for ‘reenchantment’, that is, to escape from the pain they have to face in rational reality; for capital, ‘reenchantment’ has become a means to expand and attract capital.

Industrialization and Marketization of Violent Culture

With media as the technology and carrier base, capital has successfully developed a sophisticated antidote to this rational crisis society, namely various games, movies and TV series. It can be quickly spread to the world through electronic media, and it can relieve people’s painful rational thinking through content, allowing people to enter a fictional world for a short time. A few of them show bloody violence and anti-social plots, which greatly increase the space for people to release the beast and achieve an explosion in demand. Violence and bloodshed in art can be regarded as advanced expression techniques, but as information input to the brain, we cannot exclude the possibility that it is a criminal factor for minors whose world outlook has not developed.

Schiller explains the appeal of gruesome information like death and body parts: ‘The suffering of the good to us both with sharp pain, give us with great pleasure, the reason is that we saw this scene, to experience the power of a moral law was a victory, the experience is main wealth, we even can’t think of forgiving the evil, because all by this wickedness, can we get this experience. Harmony in the realm of freedom gives us more pleasure than all the contradictions of the natural world can cause us pain’ [10]. To an extent, this shows that human beings are dependent on and addicted to tragedy and dismemberment, or not repelled. In the context of rising demand, capital smelled the business opportunity through market signals, which enabled the cultural industry to earn a large amount of capital and wealth through projects, and gradually industrialized output appeared in this era of developed production factors.

Interpretation of Psychological Characteristics

Teenagers can be thought of as going through puberty, and from Adler’s point of view, adolescents are eager to prove their independence and equality as adults, emphasizing their masculinity or femininity. Or, as adolescents try to get attention, messages of violence become a window through which they can communicate this need [11]. Among the defense mechanisms proposed by Freud, the ‘imitation’ theory believes that people will come out of their inner insecurity and reduce their inner insecurity by imitating their favorite objects and people to learn their output [12]. This can lead to adolescents imitating their favorite violent images through psychological defense mechanisms, thus committing crimes motivated by insecurity. At the same time, the subconscious depression brought by ‘disenchantment’ can easily lead to the tendency of depression and harm to others.

The Influence of Modern Subculture on Juvenile Delinquency

Modern subculture has a great influence on juvenile delinquency. Different regions have different cultural deposits, which exist in various forms and are constantly updated, affecting the thoughts and behaviors of teenagers, and even inducing juvenile delinquency. These cultures that induce juvenile delinquency are mainly divided into three situations: bad family culture, sub-violence culture and network subculture.

Bad Family Culture

With the development of society, the family environment is not as simple as it used to be. Among the many reasons for juvenile delinquency, bad family culture is undoubtedly an important reason for juvenile delinquency directly or indirectly. Its impact has a lot to do with poor family relations [13]. According to the specific situation and characteristics of juvenile delinquency, bad cultural education in the family environment has a great impact on teenagers, especially the early education of children by parents. If the guidance of parents is incorrect, it will directly affect the formation of teenagers’ views, and teenagers may embark on the road of breaking the law and committing crime [13].

Sub-Violent Culture

Sub-violent culture mainly refers to violence and sexual violence. The progress of modern science and technology has made violence appear in more different forms, but it is mainly spread through books and videos. It plays a guiding role in the formation of juvenile delinquency psychology. It will quietly affect teenagers’ values and activate their criminal psychology [14]. To a certain extent, psychological control behavior, coupled with some external factors, is likely to lead to juvenile delinquency.

Bad Network Culture

In recent years, with the rapid development of network information technology, it has brought a variety of benefits to people, and bad network information has been expanding in different new forms. This bad network information is usually presented in the form of pictures, words and videos, which can be easily accessed by teenagers [13]. Teenagers are in the stage of development in terms of body, mind and knowledge. They have strong curiosity and freshness, lack discrimination and control, and lack awareness of new things. They are vulnerable to the influence of bad network culture and embark on the road of breaking the law and committing crimes [13].

Therefore, modern subculture has a great impact on juvenile delinquency. We hope that through the discussion of bad family culture, sub-violence culture and network subculture, we can avoid their bad cultural impact on the future of teenagers and create a cultural environment suitable for the healthy growth of teenagers.

Conclusion

This study on the impact of modernity on juvenile delinquency can make people more intuitively understand the causes of juvenile delinquency and better help teenagers stay away from crime from social, psychological, cultural and other aspects. This paper can make people clearly realize the great impact of modernity on juvenile delinquency. However, it is far from enough to analyse the impact of modernity on juvenile delinquency only from social, psychological and cultural factors. Other reasons also need people to continue to explore. In addition, with the continuous development of social science, more new scientific and technological products may appear in the future, which may induce juvenile delinquency. Finally, I hope that when other scholars study the impact of modernity on juvenile delinquency, they can pay more attention to some new technology products that may lead to juvenile delinquency. In the future, the research and development of new technology products may influence juvenile delinquency in ways that require further imagination and study.