How does your media product represent particular social groups?

In our project, young males from urban backgrounds are represented negatively as our project has moderate violence. This is just a lenient situation as to what happens in certain areas in Manchester every day. Young males around the age of 15 – 19 living in these areas, whether they are black or white, tend to get themselves into a lot of trouble for different reasons. We’ve incorporated this into our project as we don’t know why the main character is tied up. Stereotypically, groups of more than 3 males from these areas are known as a gang, however, we’ve defeated this object by having only 2 people featuring in our piece, showing that not only ‘gangs’ are the reason why areas, as such, have these representations.

Ethnic groups are usually one of the main focuses when people look at crime rates. Unfortunately, young black males are known for being involved in a lot of organised crime. As a slight relevance, I have done some research and I found out that almost 61% of young males in prison are black. Referring back to our project, we saw this figure, and we decided that having Jermaine as the aggressor in the situation could use negative representations against black people. So we decided to use Kieran as the aggressor even though he is very much less intimidating than Jermaine. This could also add humour to our piece because it brings on questions such as, how come Jermaine is so scared of him? Or, how come Jermaine just doesn’t fight back? This also leaves mystery behind what kind of reputation Kieran has.

Some projects also represent particular groups such as the mentally ill or the homeless. In this project, we haven’t really thought about any characters being mentally ill or homeless for that matter however, people who act out of the ordinary, for example Kieran, usually have parents that are mentally ill, alcohol abusers or broken homes etc. We could say that Kieran feels the need to do these type of things because he has experienced the same or even worse. Moreover, figures show that 5 out of 8 young males in these areas don’t have male figures at home. More shockingly, 2 out of the 8 have never had any contact with their biological fathers. We also opted against Jermaine as the aggressor as we wanted to play with our stereotypes, black people are commonly tied up in crime, although in this, ironically the black person is tied up but not committing the crime.