Moral panic
A moral panic is a widespread feeling of fear, often an irrational one, that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society.[1][2][3] It is "the process of arousing social concern over an issue",[4] usually perpetuated by moral entrepreneurs and mass media coverage, and exacerbated by politicians and lawmakers.[1][4] Moral panic can give rise to new laws aimed at controlling the community.[5]
For the album, see Moral Panic (album).
Stanley Cohen, who developed the term, states that moral panic happens when "a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests".[6] While the issues identified may be real, the claims "exaggerate the seriousness, extent, typicality and/or inevitability of harm".[7] Moral panics are now studied in sociology and criminology, media studies, and cultural studies.[2][8]
Examples of moral panic include the belief in widespread abduction of children by predatory pedophiles;[9][10][11] belief in ritual abuse of women and children by Satanic cults;[12] and concerns over the effects of music lyrics.[13] Some moral panics can become embedded in standard political discourse,[2] which include concepts such as the "Red Scare"[14] and terrorism.[15]
It differs from mass hysteria, which is closer to a psychological illness rather than a sociological phenomenon.[16]
Author
- 1972 (1st ed., MacGibbon and Kee)
- 1980 (2nd ed., Basil Blackwood)
- 2002 (3rd ed., Routledge)
The concept of "moral panic" has also been linked to certain assumptions about the mass media.[7] In recent times, the mass media have become important players in the dissemination of moral indignation, even when they do not appear to be consciously engaged in sensationalism or in muckraking. Simply reporting a subset of factual statements without contextual nuance can be enough to generate concern, anxiety, or panic.[7]
Cohen stated that the mass media is the primary source of the public's knowledge about deviance and social problems. He further argued that moral panic gives rise to the folk devil by labelling actions and people.[7] Christian Joppke, furthers the importance of media as he notes, shifts in public attention "can trigger the decline of movements and fuel the rise of others."[30]
According to Cohen, the media appear in any or all three roles in moral panic dramas:[7]
In their 1994 book Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance,[12] Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda take a social constructionist approach to moral panics, challenging the assumption that sociology is able to define, measure, explain, and ameliorate social problems.[8]
Reviewing empirical studies in the social constructionist perspective, Goode and Ben-Yehuda produced an "attributional" model that identifies essential characteristics and placed more emphasis on strict definition than cultural processes.[3][8][12] They arrived at five defining "elements", or "criteria", of a moral panic:[31]
Goode and Ben-Yehuda also examined three competing explanations of moral panics:[8][34]
Similarly, writing about the Blue Whale Challenge and the Momo Challenge as examples of moral panics, Benjamin Radford listed themes that he commonly observed in modern versions of these phenomena:[35]
Criticism of moral panic as an explanation[edit]
Paul Joosse has argued that while classic moral panic theory styled itself as being part of the "sceptical revolution" that sought to critique structural functionalism, it is actually very similar to Émile Durkheim's depiction of how the collective conscience is strengthened through its reactions to deviance (in Cohen's case, for example, "right-thinkers" use folk devils to strengthen societal orthodoxies). In his analysis of Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 United States presidential election, Joosse reimagined moral panic in Weberian terms, showing how charismatic moral entrepreneurs can at once deride folk devils in the traditional sense while avoiding the conservative moral recapitulation that classic moral panic theory predicts.[117] Another criticism is that of disproportionality: there is no way to measure what a proportionate reaction should be to a specific action.[118]
Writing in 1995 about the moral panic that arose in the UK after a series of murders by juveniles, chiefly that of two-year-old James Bulger by two 10-year-old boys but also including that of 70-year-old Edna Phillips by two 17-year-old girls, the sociologist Colin Hay pointed out that the folk devil was ambiguous in such cases; the child perpetrators would normally be thought of as innocent.[119]
In 1995, Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton argued "that it is now time that every stage in the process of constructing a moral panic, as well as the social relations which support it, should be revised". Their argument is that mass media has changed since the concept of moral panic emerged so "that 'folk devils' are less marginalized than they once were", and that "folk devils" are not only castigated by mass media but supported and defended by it as well. They also suggest that the "points of social control" that moral panics used to rest on "have undergone some degree of shift, if not transformation".[120]
British criminologist Yvonne Jewkes (2004) has also raised issue with the term "morality", how it is accepted unproblematically in the concept of "moral panic" and how most research into moral panics fails to approach the term critically but instead accepts it at face value.[41] Jewkes goes on to argue that the thesis and the way it has been used fails to distinguish between crimes that quite rightly offend human morality, and thus elicit a justifiable reaction, and those that demonise minorities. The public are not sufficiently gullible to keep accepting the latter and consequently allow themselves to be manipulated by the media and the government.[41]
Another British criminologist, Steve Hall (2012), goes a step further to suggest that the term "moral panic" is a fundamental category error. Hall argues that although some crimes are sensationalized by the media, in the general structure of the crime/control narrative the ability of the existing state and criminal justice system to protect the public is also overstated. Public concern is whipped up only for the purpose of being soothed, which produces not panic but the opposite, comfort and complacency.[121]
Echoing another point Hall makes, sociologists Thompson and Williams (2013) argue that the concept of "moral panic" is not a rational response to the phenomenon of social reaction, but itself a product of the irrational middle-class fear of the imagined working-class "mob". Using as an example a peaceful and lawful protest staged by local mothers against the re-housing of sex-offenders on their estate, Thompson and Williams argue that the sensationalist demonization of the protesters by moral panic theorists and the liberal press was just as irrational as the demonization of the sex offenders by the protesters and the tabloid press.[122]
Many sociologists and criminologists (Ungar, Hier, Rohloff) have revised Cohen's original framework. The revisions are compatible with the way in which Cohen theorizes panics in the third Introduction to Folk Devils and Moral Panics.[123]
