How to explain a suicide

Abstract

This polemic explores a newspaper article about youth justice. It suggests that a dominant discourse holds a powerful hegemony over large parts of the British media through which young people generally, and those in trouble with the law, in particular, are demonized. When events take place which threaten to disrupt that discourse, strenuous journalistic efforts have to be made to counteract that disruption and to reaffirm established understandings, however flawed those understandings might be. This article anatomizes that process in operation and in relation to a particular event – the suicide, in 2004, of Adam Rickwood, the youngest child ever to take his own life while in the care and custody of the modern British penal system.