Punishing children: Deviance and sanctions in children's popular entertainment

• In Event: Media and social construction of crime IV

Abstract

Storytelling is a large part of our collective identity as humanity; we are narrative beings who produce meaning about our own situatedness in the world through narratives. Stories are the central vehicle through which we are synchronized with the culture around us from an early age as part of our primary socialization. As children, we all learned to understand the world through stories. Since the advent of the moving image, a highly impressive medium has been available for our narratives. With the ubiquity of multimedia entertainment, children and their parents have unlimited access to a wide range of content.
In addition to the enduring fascination with crime, which also regularly plays a role in children's content - both as something negative (such as "Paw Patrol"), but also in a more ambivalent form (such as "Despicable Me", which is also about the "resocialization" of a criminal) - the question can also be asked from a criminology perspective: What do children actually learn about deviance and sanctions through the media? The structure of our narratives regularly leads to someone being punished in the course of the story in order to communicate justice. Since children's films regularly have a "happy ending", the antagonist must regularly find an adequate sanction, therefore different forms of punishment are ubiquitous in children’s movies.
This submission will explore the question of how the logic of sanctioning is portrayed in children's films. The main aim is to classify the inflicted punishment in the context of the respective narrative in order to clarify whether children's entertainment simply reproduces socially prevalent ideas and concepts of punishment or breaks with them. The submission does so by qualitatively analyzing the 30 most popular animated films of the last 30 years, as these are particularly free-form and at the same time powerful film formats.

Author

• Felix Butz, Humboldt-University Berlin