Since the 1990s, both politics and pop culture have been dominated by the twin motifs of the victim and the child. Calcutt traces the history of these motifs back to their origins in the counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s, and concludes that the counterculture, far from being liberating, has provided a ready-made verbal and visual language for today's victim culture and the authoritarian politics arising from it. This title discusses the erosion of adulthood as a pop cultural phenomenon that requires demystification and as a social problem which must be overcome.

Andrew Calcutt is Principal Lecturer in Journalism at the University of East London, UK.