Between mid-1993 and mid-1995, the Malaysian media were awash with stories of abandoned babies, loafing ( lepak ) teenagers, and bohsia girls. It seemed that, suddenly, the country was facing "serious social and moral problems".

And this was happening, of course, at a time when Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's Wawasan 2020 was beginning to capture the imagination of the Malaysian public; a time when the youth of Malaysia were being earmarked as the soldiers who would make the wawasan a reality. It was happening too when a chief minister was being accused of having an affair with an underage girl.

In the wake of these "problems", various strategies and schemes, such as Rakan Muda and Karisma, were introduced to induce Malaysian youth to get involved in wholesome, pro-social activities, to prepare them for the nine challenges of the vision.

Then came the 1995 general elections. The BN had a landslide victory, after which these problems somehow, magically, disappeared from the pages of Malaysia's newspapers and from television news reports. If the media were to be believed, babies were no longer being abandoned, teenagers no longer loafing, and bohsia girls were totally rehabilitated.

Fast forward to May/June, 2000.

The BN, especially Umno, is licking its wounds after a bruising general elections. The Anwar Ibrahim saga is still unresolved. The Malay community is split, especially as a consequence of the Anwar saga.

PAS has become a beneficiary of this split and Umno leaders are trying desperately to regain much lost ground within the Malay community. Apart from discrediting PAS at every available opportunity, these leaders believe there is a need to, as it were, "out-Islam" PAS, especially by indicating how concerned they are for the moral welfare of the people, especially the young.

At this juncture, the social problems that had magically disappeared in 1995 suddenly resurface with a vengeance. It's as if the abandoned babies of the period had quickly grown up and come back for revenge, torching schools, stabbing other kids and generally creating a "national security problem".

As quickly, the mainstream media come to the fore, widely reporting this sudden increase in cases of juvenile delinquency. Hence, for example, tapes of lustful romps in the park become front-page news.

A "deviancy amplification spiral" is set in motion.

That is, media reports are then amplified by comments by dubious "experts", police statistics and various analyses claiming to shed more light on the "problem". What could indeed have been an isolated incident is now linked with other incidents by the media, indicating a trend, and a trend that, disturbingly, is growing, probably spreading nationwide.

Malaysian society, it would seem, is, yet again, on the verge of anarchy.

Indeed, this was the clear message of a TV3 news feature/special report, slotted in rather fortuitously, on Buletin Utama last Sunday. Interviews with pro-establishment academics were interspersed with footage of demonstrators.

Throughout the segment, we were all lectured that there is a need - especially for the young - to be well-mannered and to be cultured (beradab), failing which negara dan bangsa will collapse, especially in this era of - you guessed it - globalisation.

Predictably then, the loudest cries in the media now - as they were in the mid-1990s - are for greater control, greater discipline and for greater recourse to law and order. There is little effort to rationally assess these latest incidents as symptomatic of wider failures, such as the possibility of failures in the education system.

Instead, allegations are piled on allegations, assertions on assertions. Those in the mainstream media who really should know better simply report these allegations without providing an iota of evidence nor any follow-up based on serious investigation.

So when senior politicians allege that agents provocateur - implying oppositional political groups - are behind this recent spate of wilful destruction of public property, their serious, damning, uncorroborated allegations go unchallenged by the media.

A climate of "moral panics" - where a group of persons emerges and becomes defined as a threat to societal values and interests - is thus created, allowing for greater policing, legitimising greater recourse to draconian measures.

In this situation, just as in the earlier cases of lepak and bohsia, "common sense" and knee jerk responses take precedence over rational discussion and analyses and emotions are encouraged to run high.

Clearly, the high-handed actions of the authorities in addressing this "threat" of juvenile delinquency is nothing new. Even so, in this environment, the mainstream media need reminding that, political expediency notwithstanding, many of the kids caught in the present crossfire are innocent and don't deserve to be treated like common criminals.

These kids may have been stripped of much of their rights, but the mainstream media especially need to make it clear that there is nothing illegal, for example, in their going to discos and having a good time.

And they should not be unfairly labelled, harrassed or victimised in any way - by the authorities or by the media - for doing so.