Sensationalist news about youth crime not backed by evidence, experts say

I'm a social science researcher working in a criminology field. If there's media discourse where politics is intersecting with some kind of sensationalised sense of moral panic then 99.99% of the time it's not backed by evidence.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

University of Queensland researcher Renee Zahnow says social media is making residents feel their suburb is becoming less safe.

But monthly figures from the Queensland Police Service show that over the past 20 years, crime rates have decreased for nearly all categories.

She said this led to growing calls for harsher penalties for youth offenders, even though there was no evidence it would actually reduce the long-term crime rate.

Dr Zahnow has been analysing community Facebook pages, where young people are being named, shamed and doxxed — when private or identifying information is published about a person — for supposed crimes.

University of Southern Queensland communications professor Andrew Hickey said young people had been turned into the proverbial "folk devil", who took the blame for society's ills.

Professor Hickey said some mainstream media publications were engaging in sensationalist reporting that contributed to the fear of young people.

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