Yvonne Jewkes observes that the murder of the three-year-old James Bulger by two ten-year-old boys was a threshold for British news media, when “the notion of childhood innocence gave way to themes of childhood horror and evil”[i] There is no threshold as such in Turkey’s media comparable to the Bulger case, but the demonisation of children living or working on the streets, and specifically the example of “paint thinner addicts” served a similar purpose. Children living on the streets who inhaled toxic materials as psychoactive drugs were labelled as “paint thinner addicts,” and presented as a source of terror. Interestingly, this derogatory term was not as commonly used in the media as one might assume, but its impact was more powerful than its prevalence.
There are not many examples of articles that specifically used the term in relation to crime; a search in Milliyet database reveals that there was only one violent crime committed by young adults (and not children) while under the influence of these substances in the 1990s.[ii] On the other hand, there were plenty of articles which referred to children addicted to toxic substances as “paint thinner addicts,” both in tragic human interest stories or in children’s health reports. By using the same label in both crime reports, and other news stories about children living on the streets, the newspapers established a symbolic link between those children and crime. Thus, through their misrepresentations, all children living on the streets were stigmatised as merciless evil beings, and the horror attached to their images was engraved in the collective conscious.
Moreover, a link with crime was not a prerequisite to demonise disadvantaged children; in some cases their mere visibility was more than enough. Many articles did not see beggars, poor children struggling to get to the front of queues at in-kind relief organisations, and children living or working on the streets as victims of social insecurity, but as signifiers of degeneration and spectres of unsafety for the rest of the population. This attitude is best exemplified by Türkiye’s depiction of child beggars. In the late 1990s, the newspaper participated in a media frenzy over beggars on city streets who “exploited people’s compassion.” In these articles, the children were either dehumanised, described as instruments, machines, even “robots” used by their families for “emotional blackmail.” In other examples, they were called tricksters and exploiters who masked their lies behind their innocent faces in order to exploit upright citizens’ conscience to get more than they deserve[iii].
To understand the news media’s explicit hostility to these children, we should take into account two observations. The first of these is offered by Loïc Wacquant in Punishing the Poor. Wacquant interprets the last three decades as a transition from the welfare state to the penal state. He then elaborates this statement by asserting that this new type of government finds its legitimacy not in providing social security, but in inciting the sense of insecurity.[iv] A signifier of this transition was the media’s increased emphasis on safety. Symbols that provoked the sense of unsafety were the staple of this approach. The horrifying image of the delinquent, feral child threatening upright citizens became one of those symbols. The change of lexicon in accordance to the child on the streets becomes especially evident in a parallel reading of articles from the 1970s and 1990s on the same subject. In the examples from the 1970s, the articles about “stray children” were examples of social commentary, and instead of blaming the children, journalists concentrated on analysing the social backdrop of the problem. It is significant to note that the very same theme was completely reversed in perspective in the two decades that followed, and these children came to be seen as the sole carriers of the blame.
The second observation is articulated by both Zygmunt Bauman and Richard Sennett from quite different perspectives, but both thinkers reach similar conclusions in their interpretation of the issue in terms of redundancy. According to Bauman, capitalist society in its most recent form has created masses that are redundant to the system. He calls these masses “human waste.”[v] In a similar reflection, Richard Sennett observes that the very population Bauman called “human waste,” that is the poor, the unemployed, and other losers of the system, constituted a “spectre of uselessness” that alarmed the rest of the population, who felt in danger of becoming redundant.[vi] Thus, the images of these children served two ends at the same time. First, they became symbols of insecurity, and second, they became alarming spectres of redundancy. These factors influenced their portrayal by the news media, and the apparent disturbance caused by their images was frantically covered with vile and aggressive expressions.
*Excerpt from my unpublished PhD Thesis. Cut the Kids in Half: New Urban Childhoods in Turkey Through the Lens of the Mainstream Media, 1977-1997. Supervisor: Prof. Ayşe Buğra. Istanbul: Bogazici University, 2015.
[i] Yvonne Jewkes, Construction of Crime News, p.58.
[ii] “Tinerci cinayeti,” (Thinner addict kills) Milliyet, 24 June 1994.
[iii] Veysi Gezer, “Çocuklarını dilencilere kiralıyorlar” (They are renting their children to beggars) Türkiye, 30 January 1992; Ercan Seki, “Küçük Ceylan işbaşında” (Little Ceylan in action) Türkiye, 11 January 1992; Utku Sağılır “Dilenci annenin dilenci çocuğu” (The beggar son of a beggar mother) Türkiye, 8 January 1992; Selahattin Tercan, “İstanbul’a dilenci akını” Türkiye, 16 January 1997; Sadık Kahraman, “Dilenci operasyonu,” Türkiye, 21 February 1997; Nuri Yılmaz, Dündar Batık,“Dilenci aldatıyor,” Türkiye, 20 November 1997.
[iv] Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor.(Durham, London: Duke University Press, 1999).
[v] Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Oxford : Polity, 2004).
[vi] Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2006).
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