ABSTRACT
In 1964, a series of scuffles broke out in Clacton, a small resort town on England’s east coast, between two youth factions, the mods (or modernists) and the rockers (delinquent rock and rollers). The damage totaled only a bit more than £500 (perhaps four times that in today’s currency). But the police, unaccustomed to such rowdy vandalistic behavior, arrested nearly a hundred youths and the media reported these disturbances, and similar conflicts in other seaside resort towns, in sensationalistic, outraged stories bearing headlines such as “‘Wild Ones’ Invade Seaside-97 Arrests,” and “Wild Ones ‘Beat Up’ Margate” (see illustrations 1.1, 1.2). These and comparable headlines and reports designated members of youth gangs as deviants, the “other,” the enemy-in Stanley Cohen’s term, a collective folk devil. To put an end to delinquent behaviors such as occurred at Clacton and elsewhere, members of Parliament called for stiffer penalties for “hooliganism” and other youth offenses and the House of Commons introduced and debated bills designed to address the problem of rowdy young people. In 1965, Cohen, then a graduate student at the London School of Economics (LSE), was struck by the “fundamentally inappropriate” reaction of the police, the media, and legislators to these minor incidents and decided to study this intriguing discrepancy (2002: 172).
