The Cannibal on Bus 1170

Crime and Deviance:

In 2008, Vincent Li murdered and then cannibalised 22 year old Tim McLean on a Greyhound Bus heading for Winnipeg.

And the shock waves ran through Canadian society.

But when Li was subsequently found unfit to face trail and later released, shock turned to outrage and triggered a social media moral panic.

This film looks at the social reaction to Tim McLean’s murder and how Canadian sociologist Heidi Rimke  challenged the conventional sociological model of how moral panics are generated:  50 years on from “Mods” and “Rockers”, in a world filled with social media, are moral panics now more likely to created from below than from above?