Here we are at the end of October: the bringer of spine chilling weather, exams around the corner, and (of course) candy. Yes, candy! Ah, such precious childhood Halloween memories come flooding back to mind. But aside from sugar-coated nostalgia in the making, it seems Halloween is also teaching children less than noble qualities.
While we may think that trick-or-treating is all fun and games, the media tells us there are deeper social consequences for these children than we care to think.
I noted this darker side of Halloween after consulting the ultimate bringer of knowledge, my trusty sidekick and companion, the Magic 8-ball that is the Yahoo search engine.
I searched for Halloween news reports from the past to see what I could find. To my surprise, practically every piece that popped up was either pertaining to juvenile delinquency or various mischievous doings: I discovered everything from theft and vandalism to poor little dogs being burned alive in Halloween bonfires.
Even the so-called “reputable” sources yielded articles linking Halloween to violence and spikes in “anti-social” behaviour. The BBC news article titled, “Zero tolerance of Halloween pranks” stated that “in the weeks preceding Halloween, calls to police regarding youths engaging in anti-social behaviour dramatically [increased], according to officers.”
So, after being brainwashed by this and many other similar articles, I immediately assumed that there was indeed an association between Halloween and crime. I decided to delve into this topic further in order to feed my curiosity. This was when I sought out professor Ron Gillis, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto who specializes in crime and deviance.
After much anticipation, I was finally able to get a hold of him and have a quick chat over a cup of tea. What I was expecting out of the interview was to have him reaffirm my ideas that Halloween is, in fact, related to all the horrible things that other news sources keep going on about. Well, I was in for a Halloween surprise.
“Part of what Halloween is, is a mischief thing” commented Gillis. “I think Halloween is largely fun.” While he acknowledged the darker Celtic and Druid roots of the day, the expert on deviance maintains that it is children’s joy that is now the hallmark of Halloween.
In response to the reports of illegal Halloween tricks, Gillis argued that “people go around stealing stuff all the time.” According to him, these news pieces were of the same mythology that warns us of razorblade-laced apples: “There’s hardly any record of this. It’s mainly a moral panic.” The frequency of the crime/Halloween articles, he says, is because “newscasts want to get you listening to the station or buy newspapers because it’s sensational, almost by definition, unusual.”
Gillis also expressed a concern that certain people (ahem, the media) were engaging in moral panic, limiting people from really having much fun. “What I worry about is [that] you can have little bits of negativity that cause people to overreact and say ‘oh, we can’t have this anymore!’ And you get rid of a lot of really neat stuff in doing that.” Holidays like New Year’s and Halloween are mostly just “a time for people to let off steam in a relatively harmless way.”
In other words, we’re just panicking over nothing. So, I’m just going to go out and have fun. I’ll be out there, in some corner, bingeing on a bag of delectable mini candy treats.
Gillis argued the worst thing that can happen to your kid on Halloween is getting a big cavity. So I say, bring on the cavities!
