Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to examine why people talk about the “darkness of mind” of juveniles who have committed a heinous crime.
“Darkness of mind” is a phrase commonly used when discussing juvenile crime, which is said to be “the fourth wave” of juvenile delinquency in the post-war era. Juvenile crime was a major social problem from the latter half of the 1990s to the middle part of the 2000s. Although darkness of mind is said to be a subject that people should readily understand, in fact people did not understand, which indicates their unfulfilled desire to explore the minds of juveniles. This social condition is what Émile Durkheim (1897) called an anomie.
This paper, then, considers the social context in which people discussed the darkness of mind from the sociology of knowledge perspective aided by Durkheim's theory of anomie. In addition, this paper refers to newspapers and weekly magazine reports covering juvenile crime as reference material for consideration.
This paper is organized as follows: first, I outline Durkheim's anomie theory and present the hypothesis about the relationship between darkness of mind and anomie. Second, I analyze mass media reporting procedures concerning darkness of mind. Finally, I explain the reason why darkness of mind became the subject of people's anomic desire.
