著者

杉山 和明

出版者

地理科学学会

雑誌

地理科学 (ISSN:02864886)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.57, no.2, pp.73-89, 2002-04-28

被引用文献数

3

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The purpose of this paper is to explain how the myth of new `harmful' environments for juveniles was constructed through discourses of local newspapers and how related practices were regulated spatially by the juvenile protection ordinance. In particular, this paper focuses on social problems concerning the regulation of Telephone Dating Services in Toyama Prefecture, Japan during 1993-1998. Around 1993, the residents gradually begun to center .their concern around the location of Telephone Dating Services in urban spaces because they resulted in harmful influences on juveniles. Dating services have different businesses styles, but their main purpose is to mediate between men and women using telecommunications. Schoolgirls who use such services, especially high school girls 15-18 years old, actively meet unknown men. The local daily newspapers reported these incidents often and these incidents have increasingly become the focus of local police. Since residents have made these claims, it has become necessary for local government to protect juveniles from such harmful environments. Neighborhood residents thought that keeping juveniles away from such environments and abolishing these harmful influences were necessary. Most of the institutional responses from neighborhood watch groups have included attempts to prevent girls from suffering sexual abuses committed by vicious men. To put it simply, it was merely the result of stereotyped discourses in the coverage of local newspapers that revitalized the movement to exclude these kinds of the services in urban spaces. The police department has integrated many groups related to rural society into movements to purify such environments and many neighborhoods have signed petitions to regulate such services in order to create a place that was constituted by subjects and spaces that were considered unpolluted. Therefore the regulation was enforced more quickly in Toyama Prefecture than nationally.