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The term ‘moral panic’ can be defined as a ‘disproportional and hostile social reaction to a condition, person or group defined as a threat to societal values’. It is a term commonly associated with the media where stereotyping is represented and this leads to the demand for better social control and creating a reaction from the public eye, hence the term ‘panic’ (McLaughlin & Muncie, 2001). Hall et al. (1978) also analysed the idea of a ‘moral panic’ and suggested that when the reaction to a person or group is ‘out of proportion’ to the actual ‘threat’ and professionals in the area such as police and politicians also have a similar reaction and begin to voice solutions, rates of crime etc., in addition to the media representation of the so called ‘threat’ which becomes sensationalised and exaggerated, this is when it is appropriate to name the situation a moral panic. Cohen (1972) first looked at moral panics and stated that there are certain periods where society experiences moral panics and these could last for a lifetime or could be short-lived and forgotten. Cohen (1972) was one of the first to look at the term moral panic around Mods and Rockers in Britain and focused on the media coverage on these groups in the 1960s. The descriptions and the definitions the media used was the focus as it was the main outlet for society’s information. Cohen (1972) found that the media exaggerated statistics including the number of youths involved, the extent of the violence and the damage caused. Further distortion of events increased due to the sensational headlines and use of dramatic reporting. Cohen also found that the media used the word ‘mod’ to symbolise deviance and this symbolisation led to other events that may not have had anything to do with the current situation to be linked. Cohen continued on to describe the findings as having three common characteristics: diffusion, escalation and innovation. Diffusion is where situations in other places become associated with the original situation. Escalation is where there are demands for extreme measures to be carried out in order to minimise and exterminate the threat and innovation refers to the ‘increased powers’ for the police and courts to sort out the threat. Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994) also identified five key features that could describe moral panics: concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality and volatility. In other words, a situation or event occurs and sparks panic among society which leads to the person or particular social group involved being labelled as folk devils then this goes on to spur a reaction which is ‘broad and unified’ within society. This leads to the exaggeration of the situation and the potential threat it poses which is further multiplied by the media’s reporting which could spark the panic but could also eliminate it too. When it comes to street violence, youths are widely associated with this type of deviant behaviour. A recent ‘moral panic’ which was associated with youths and street violence was actually an item of clothing: the hoodie. During the 1990s, the term became associated with the sudden appearance of a subculture or group of people named ‘chavs’, young working class youths, in the UK. This led to the use of the term ‘hoodie culture’ used both by the media and public (Marsh & Meville, 2011). It is particularly in the UK that hoodies have been reacted to in such a negative way, so much so that the item of clothing has been banned in public places such as the Bluewater Shopping Centre in Kent. This banning of hoodies and other items of clothing which specifically could hide the face brought the ‘hoodie culture’ into the public’s awareness and this led to the raised concern of shoppers being weary of youths in such clothing (Marsh & Meville, 2011). The ban sparked public interest and debate and this led to the ‘meaning’ of hoodie being studied by journalists and individuals within education. McLean (2005) stated that hoodies stroked ‘fear into the heart of most people’ and Harrington (cited in McLean, 2005) on the subject of the Bluewater ban said that the ban ‘demonstrates a growing demonization’ on young people and there is an overreaction to any behaviour by these young people. This suggests that the concern over street violence involving youth can be seen as a moral panic because banning an item of clothing just because it is associated with such deviance due to the media representation of youths and what they happen to be wearing has been exaggerated which has meant that extreme measures would have to be taken to keep the public happy and enforce social control. The moral panic about hoodies according to Marsh and Meville (2011) was part of a wider concern about the anti-social behaviour of youths and, as with other panics, the reaction to this has been criticized by those within education and those working in the criminal justice system as exaggerated and unreasonable. More than 65% of people consider youth crime is rising and experts agree there can be a connection between antisocial behaviour and serious youth crime. However, statistically, youth offending is actually falling. The number of 10-to-17-year-olds convicted or cautioned for a crime fell from 143,600 to 105,700 between 1992 and 2002 which was a drop of almost 26% (Barkham, 2005). Despite the dramatic drop in recorded crime overall, concerns about the behaviour of young people remains high, suggesting that society does not consider factual statistics when worrying about crime rates. In other words, stories of youth crime and general crime overall are sensationalised by the media and their representations of youth and descriptions used such as ‘out of control teenage gangs’. Concerns over youth crime and street violence have been consistent throughout the years as shown by Cohen (1972) for his work on Mods and Rockers. The behaviour of young people since then has caused anger about moral decline and lack of social control. Crimes statistics show black youths, particularly young black males, commit a disproportionate amount of crime, however the media is known to sensationalise news stories and make vast exaggerations. In the early 70’s, an example of street violence that was first recorded as a ‘moral panic’ was mugging. Hall et al’s (1978) Policing the Crisis study demonstrates how the media shapes public views regarding a particular group in society. The 1970s moral panic surrounding muggings was blamed predominantly on young black men. For example, Arthur Hills was stabbed to death near Waterloo Station in London and this was one of the first crimes to be labelled as a mugging in the media. The stories in newspapers highly reported this type of crime as new and frightening. Professionals in the area such as police and judges were adamant that this was a huge threat to society. This even led to people thinking that the streets of Britain will become like those of New York or Chicago which had very high rates of street violence at the time (Hall, 1978). Hall criticised this form of reporting, stating that the panic and reaction towards these events were not understandable because in the past ‘footpads and garrotters’ had also committed violent crimes on the streets which were not labelled as muggings and therefore the idea of ‘mugging’ and ‘violent street crime’ was not new at all. Also the Home Secretary reported that ‘mugging’ was on a 129 per cent rise however Hall stated that there was no way to measure this because there was not an exact definition for this crime nor did a law apply to it. From Hall’s study on the statistics there was no evidence that violent crime was rising as fast in the time leading up to the panic. Using the nearest legal category to mugging which was ‘assault with intent to rob’, the official statistics showed a yearly rise of an average of 33.4 per cent between 1955 and 1965, but only a 14 per cent average annual increase from 1965 to 1972. This type of crime was growing more slowly as the time the panic took place then it had done so in previous decades. Another example of a moral panic which involves street violence is the emergence of girl gangs and stories about how they ‘roam the streets randomly attacking innocent victims’. This has been a recurring story in newspaper headlines and magazines in recent years. Whilst there may be some support for these claims, the stories are likely to be a distortion of the facts; this is shown by statistics on offending patterns. A recent self-report survey found that assaults committed by females are more likely to involve a victim they know already and the victim is more predominately male rather than female (Budd et al., 2005). There is little known knowledge about the actual nature and seriousness of girls’ violent offending. It may be that assault carried out by a female is more likely to be as a result of anger or an act of self-defence, or against a police officer when confronted perhaps during a drunken night out, or parents, family members, or members of the public are more likely to bring violent acts committed by females to the attention of the police. Outside the UK, there are other examples of moral panic and amplification by the media, for example slashing cases in Singapore. This involves Singaporean youth gang members who have recently have been reported in the media sparking fear among those living in Singapore (Palatino, 2010). The high documentation of these criminal acts is slightly exaggerated further by the mass media. These reports spark the public’s fear of being attack by youth gangs especially when high-profile cases such as the murder of Darren Ng at Downtown East was reported to occur in the evening between 5.30pm and 5.57pm which is a time period where school children would be on their way home. This further fuelled the anxiety felt by parents who were said to be already paranoid of their children making their own way to school. Moreover, there appeared to be very easy access to graphic and explicit pictures of the victim that were allowed to be released across both printed and online news outlets which sparked even more of a widespread panic of youth gang members being more brave to commit the crime again anytime during the day. Like in the UK, this ‘panic’ is slightly disproportional as updated statistics proves that crime rates in Singapore have been steadily decreasing. . The series of attacks triggered the search for explanations on the idea of the rising of gang violence. Society aimed to explain the nature of fights taking place and whether they were random or due to revenge and the focus was also on the structure of gangs. Following the Downtown East incident, many reports talked about youth gangs- how an action as small as staring can lead to violent fights, reports also talked about why youths joined these gangs. News reports of the extreme cases reminded readers about the significant attack at Downtown East that created further concerns over gang-related violence in Singapore. News reports of being arrest were frequent to remind the society of the strict laws and the consequences of such violent acts. Although there were no specific details mentioned, the report came with comments by Minister of Home Affairs, K. Shanmugam, to assure the public tough acts were taken to tackle youth gangs. Comments by public figures like Minister of MCYS also bring public attention to at-risk youths on the importance of increase community initiatives to prevent them from gang associations. The situation of the Singapore youth slashing highly supported Goode and Ben Yehuda’s (1994) features of moral panics. Black youth crime and the image of black youths in the media have generated considerable publicity in recent years. The recent fatal knife and gun crimes in London involving black youths were highlighted by the media which in turn produced a moral panic surrounding the issue. In recent years there has been quite a lot of media coverage involving black youths and crime. Particularly in 2006 and 2007 there was a spate of fatal stabbings and shootings amongst black youth. For example, the deaths of Kodjo Yenga and Adam Regis in March 2007. These two murders were of huge interest to the media as it was during a period where black youth crime in London was highlighted. Kodjo Yenga was stabbed in the heart just five days after being interviewed on television about knife crime and its prevalence. Just days after this murder, Adam Regis was stabbed to death on the streets of East London on his way home after meeting with friends. These are only two examples of black youth crime that made its way into the media in 2007. There had in fact been over twenty murders involving black youths in London alone in 2007 (Okoronkwo, 2008) It would be useful to gain an understanding of why black youth crime is such a huge issue and why it is highlighted so much in the media. News agendas and news values ultimately decide what is to be broadcasted and in what particular order. There are twelve news structures and news values that shape crime news (Jewkes, 2004). Under the news value threshold it is stated that in order for something to be deemed newsworthy it has to meet a certain level of significance. The media create moral panics according to their criteria of news values (Okorokwo, 2008). ‘Once a story has reached the required threshold it may have to meet further thresholds to stay on the agenda, the story is often kept alive due to the creation of new thresholds, some stories are used as fillers during quiet news periods and tend to be reported in waves, suggesting a widespread social problem rapidly approaching crisis point,’ (Jewkes, 2004, p.41). The media has been accused of sensationalising events surrounding violent black youth crime, attaching a level of drama making it newsworthy. This reporting of crime and deviance plays a vital role in shaping the public’s view of crime and its suspects. Eighty six percent of white homicide victims are killed by other whites, and most homicide victims know each other. In conclusion, it seems that concern over street violence can be seen as a moral panic because overall crime statistics show that crime is actually decreasing rather than decreasing. However, in order to earn good money and sell more, the media seem to exaggerate and sensationalise every lone even to make it seem like it happens every day even if it’s a rare occurrence. A good example to support this claim was the Lee Rigby murder. One lone horrible act of violence had the public up in a panic over fears they would be hacked in the street or murdered in a similar way even though the perpetrators were caught. This goes to show how much power the media really has in terms of social control.

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Moral Panic and Folk Devils

Mia Belle Frothingham

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BA with minors in Psychology and Biology, MRes University of Edinburgh

Mia Belle Frothingham is a Harvard University graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Sciences with minors in biology and psychology

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A moral panic refers to an intense feeling of fear, concern, or anger throughout a community in response to the perception that cultural values or interests are being threatened by a specific group, known as folk devils. Moral panics are characterized by an exaggeration of the actual threat posed by the perceived folk devil.

Moral panic is a widespread fear and often an irrational threat to society’s values, interests, and safety.

Typically, a moral panic is perpetuated by the news media, most times engaged by politicians, and can result in increased social control.

Key Takeaways

Moral panic is a situation in which media reporting has created a folk devil of a particular social group, and the public demands the authorities that something be done about it.
This expression of concern is described as a moral panic because it is based on an outraged sense of offense to public standards of behavior. However, the information which prompts it is often limited and inaccurate.
Folk devils refer to a group whose common interest or activity has become stigmatized by society and becomes the target for adverse comments and behavior.

The criminological and sociological concept known as moral panic offers valuable insight into why and how powerful social agents like the media create public concern.

Professional TV Camera Standing in Live News Studio with Anchor seen in Small Display. Unfocused TV Broadcasting Channel with Presenter, Newscaster Talking. Mock-up Television Channel Newsroom Set

Stanley Cohen’s Theory

Stanley Cohen is a late South African criminologist who was influenced by Becker and the labeling theory .

He developed and popularized the term and stated that moral panic occurs when “a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.” (Cohen, 1972, p. 1).

He clarified that while the issues addressed and identified were real, the claims made exaggerated the harm’s seriousness or inevitability.

Cohen used an example to explain by mentioning the story of two youth subcultures: the “mods” and the “rockers” who initially existed peacefully side by side.

Both groups were the first two youth subcultures in consumer society and were mainly concerned with style, music, and having fun.

To summarize what happened, one holiday weekend, both the mods and rockers had a party where minor acts of vandalism occurred between the groups.

This led to the news media arriving at the next party involving the mods and rockers, ready to report any disturbances. Once again, minor vandalism happened, and the media published highly exaggerated reports of the extent of violence between the two groups.

This generated public concern and the police responded by policing future parties involving the mods and rockers, resulting in more arrests for non-violent deviant behavior.

Hence, the mods and rockers came to see themselves as enemies, and all of this was fueled by exaggeration published by the media.

Cohen’s work illustrated how these kinds of reactions influence the formation and enforcement of the law, social policy, and societal perceptions of threats, especially those posed by youth groups.

Since its development, the moral panic concept has been applied to many social problems, including youth gangs and school violence.

Characteristics of Moral Panic

Central to the moral panic concept, there is an argument that public fear or concern over a social problem is mutually beneficial to state officials, law enforcement authorities, politicians, and the news media.

There is an apparent symbiotic relationship between the news media and state officials in that law enforcement and politicians need communication channels to distribute their stories and rhetoric, and the media is constantly looking for compelling news content to attract a big audience, also attracting advertisers.

Therefore, moral panics arise when exaggerated and distorted mass media campaigns are used to create fear, reinforce stereotypes, and add tension to preexisting divisions based on race/ethnicity and social class.

Let’s go over the three distinguishing characteristics moral panics have:

There is focused attention on the behavior (real or imagined) of certain groups or individuals transformed into what Cohen refers to as “folk devils” by the mass media. We see this when the media strips these “folk devils” of all favorable characteristics and exclusively applies negative ones to create an evil persona we simply cannot get behind. There is a gap between the concern over a situation and the objective threat it poses. Usually, the objective threat is far less than popularly perceived due to how authorities present it. There is a great deal of fluctuation over time in the level of concern of a condition or situation. The typical pattern starts with discovering the threat, followed by a fast rise, then the peak of public crisis, which then subsequently and abruptly subsides. Public hysteria often results in the passing of legislation that is very vindictive, unnecessary, and serves to justify the agendas of those in power and authority.

Social Actors of Moral Panic

Moral panics don’t just occur spontaneously. Instead, they result from complex dynamics and interplay among several social actors. As initially explained by Cohen, there are five social actors involved in moral panic. Let’s go over them.

Folk Devils

As we previously touched upon, in the lexicon of moral panic scholars, folk devils are individuals who are socially alleged or defined to be responsible for bringing a threat to society.

Unlike other malicious characters, folk devils are entirely evil and are stripped from anything positive or anything that could possibly contribute to their likeability. They are simply the embodiment of a “bad guy” and are deemed the antagonists in a moral panic drama.

Rule or Law Enforcers

The police, prosecutors, or the military are crucial to a moral panic as they are deemed to enforce and uphold the codes of conduct and the official laws of the country or state.

These agents of the government are expected to detect, apprehend, and punish the so-called folk devils. Law enforcers have a strong obligation as they have sworn duty and moral responsibility to protect society from folk devils when they are present.

Furthermore, law enforcers must work to maintain and justify their positions in society – a moral panic can offer law enforcers respect and purpose by ridding folk devils that allegedly threaten the well-being of society.

As we know, the media is compelling in the creation and continuity of a moral panic. Usually, news media coverage of particular events involving labeled folk devils is greatly exaggerated or distorted.

The coverage brought by the news emphasizes folk devils and makes them appear much more of a threat to society than they genuinely are. Therefore, journalistic hyperbole regarding folk devils is heightened public concern and anxiety, leading to moral panic.

Moreover, two critical media practices contribute to moral panic, which include priming and framing. Priming is when exposure to one stimulus impacts how a person responds to a subsequent, relevant stimulus. Framing refers to how an issue is given to the public or the specific angle in which the media presents it.

It involves calling attention to certain aspects of a problem while ignoring or obscuring other elements. In other words, framing gives perspective meaning to an issue.

Based on research, the news media relies on frames to determine what events to cover and how to portray them. Just as photographers line up a shot, the journalist’s line of news frame affects the story. Additionally, the choice of frame is influenced by prior news frames, history, ideology, power, and authority of news sources.

Therefore, news frames are even negotiated phenomena rather than being based solely on objective situations. More importantly, an audience will react very differently to an issue or story depending on how it is framed by the news – as we all know.

Priming, on the other hand, is a psychological process where the news emphasizes a specific issue to increase the salience of the matter publicly and activate previously acquired information about the case from people’s memories.

The priming technique explains how the news frame is used in a certain story to trigger an individual’s subconscious and preexisting attitudes, prejudices, and beliefs regarding the presented issue.

Politicians

Again, politicians are vital actors in the moral panic drama. As elected officials operate in the stage of public opinion, they must present themselves as the protectors or heroes of the moral high ground in society.

Hand in hand with law enforcers, politicians have a sworn duty and moral obligation to protect the community from alleged folk devils if and when they arise.

Politicians often arouse moral panic by joining the media and law enforcers in an ethical campaign against the evil bad guys – the folk devils.

An example would be President Ronald Reagan in the late 1980s, where he defined the folk devils as cocaine dealers and precipitated a moral panic over the evils of crack cocaine and the alleged threats of the present sins.

There is no doubt that the public is the most crucial factor in the creation of moral panic. Public agitation, concern, and anxiety over the identified folk devils is the key element of moral panic.

The happening of moral panic only exists to the extent of a public outcry over the dooming, alleged threat posed by the folk devils.

Moreover, the success of politicians, the media, and law enforcers in accelerating and maintaining a moral panic is ultimately contingent upon how successfully they arouse and fuel concern, outrage, and anxiety toward the folk devils among the public.

Examples of Moral Panics

During 2020 we all experienced a situation where public fears greatly exceeded the threat that was posed to society – the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since the virus, illness, and spread happened so suddenly, the information from the experts was not disseminated fast enough to reach the community at the right time.

And because of this lack of knowledge and abundance of misinformation, there were exaggerated media headlines that fueled the health-related fears and phobias circulating around, still today.

This public fear, and those responsible for creating and promoting it, is an important topic of discussion, especially amidst the pandemic.

Another aspect of moral panic can be centered around marginalized people in society due to race or ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, class, or religion (e.g., the LGBT+ community.)

Therefore, moral panic can draw on known stereotypes and reinforce them while exacerbating the actual and perceived divisions and differences between communities and people.

Moral panic is recognized in the sociology of deviance and crime as well as being related to the labeling theory of deviance.

Technology Moral Panics

Moral Panic over Social Media
Moral Panic over Cyber Crime
Moral Panic over Computer Game Violence

To summarize the moral panic, let’s skim through the stages again:

Something or someone is identified and defined as a threat to society and/or social norms as well as the interests of the community or society at large. The so-called “folk devils.”
The media and community members depict the threat in simplistic yet symbolic ways that are promptly recognizable to the greater public.
Extensive public concern is excited by the way the news media portrays the symbolic depiction of the threat.
With new laws or policies, the authorities and policymakers respond to the threat, be it real or perceived.
In the final stage, moral panic and the following actions of those in power lead to a cultural or official change in society.

Cannon, W. B. (1915). Bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear, and rage. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Kirby, Stephanie. “Fight Flight Freeze: How to Recognize It and What to Do …” Edited by Aaron Horn, Betterhelp, https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/trauma/fight-flight-freeze-how-to-recognize-it-and-what-to-do-when-it-happens/.

Schauer, M., & Elbert, T. (2010). Dissociation following traumatic stress. Journal of Psychology, 218, 109-127.

What Happens During Fight or Flight Response. (2019, December 09). Retrieved from https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-happens-to-your-body-during-the-fight-or-flight-response/

Article contents

Moral panics.

Chas Critcher Chas Critcher Department of Media and Communications, Sheffield Hallam University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.155
Published online: 29 March 2017

The concept of moral panic was first developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s, principally by Stan Cohen, initially for the purpose of analyzing the definition of and social reaction to youth subcultures as a social problem. Cohen provided a “processual” model of how any new social problem would develop: who would promote it and why, whose support they would need for their definition to take hold, and the often-crucial role played by the mass media and institutions of social control. In the early 1990s, Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda produced an “attributional” model that placed more emphasis on strict definition than cultural processes. The two models have subsequently been applied to a range of putative social problems which now can be recognized as falling into five principal clusters: street crime, drug and alcohol consumption, immigration, child abuse (including pedophilia), and media technologies. Most studies have been conducted in Anglophone and European countries, but gradually, the concept is increasing its geographical reach. As a consequence, we now know a good deal about how and why social problems come to be constructed as moral panics in democratic societies.

This approach has nevertheless been criticized for its casual use of language, denial of agency to those promoting and supporting moral panics, and an oversimplified and outdated view of mass media, among other things. As proponents and opponents of moral panic analysis continue to debate the essentials, the theoretical context has shifted dramatically. Moral panic has an uncertain relationship to many recent developments in sociological and criminological thought. It threatens to be overwhelmed or sidelined by new insights from theories of moral regulation or risk, conceptualizations of the culture of fear, or the social psychology of collective emotion. Yet as an interdisciplinary project, it continues, despite its many flaws, to demand sustained attention from analysts of social problem construction.

Culture of fear
moral panic
moral regulation
politics of emotion
social problem construction

Introduction

The concept of moral panic can be found in several disciplines: sociology, media studies, and cultural studies, as well as criminology. It often polarizes opinion. An early review of the concept, influential in its resuscitation, has an unequivocal conclusion. According to Thompson ( 1998 ), p. 142), “It deserves to be recognized for what it truly is: a key sociological concept.” Yet more recently has come another, slightly despairing, view (Jewkes, 2015 , p. 103), to wit:

[I]t is difficult to explain why criminology—and its related fields—continue to place the moral panic thesis at the heart of studies of deviance and disorder when both sociology and media studies have more or less ignored it for decades.

Such reservations have not prevented the notion of moral panic spreading beyond academe into debates about social problems in society at large. So it is important to define exactly what this concept entails. A handy definition of moral panic is provided by the Online Dictionary of the Social Sciences , produced by Canada’s Open University:

Suggests a panic or overreaction to forms of deviance or wrong doing believed to be threats to the moral order. Moral panics are usually framed by the media and led by community leaders or groups intent on changing laws or practices. Sociologists are less interested in the validity of the claims made during moral panics than they are in the dynamics of social change and the organizational strategies of moral entrepreneurs. Moral panics gather converts because they touch on people’s fears and because they also use specific events or problems as symbols of what many feel to represent “all that is wrong with the nation”. (Drislane & Parkinson, 2016 )

This seems as good a place as any to start. This article 1 fills in the details about what moral panics entail, which topics or events they focus on, the agents strategic to their construction, and how they attract support from the public at large. The first section outlines the central tenets of the two main models of moral panics. The second section reviews what our accumulated knowledge of moral panics tells us about how and why they work. The third section details six substantial points of criticism leveled against moral panic analysis and the responses by their defenders. The fourth section explains the concept of moral regulation as a continuous societal process in which moral panics are sudden eruptions. The fifth section widens the focus of the discussion to identify those characteristics—risk consciousness, pervasive fear, and the politics of emotion—which may predispose late modern societies to increased levels and intensities of moral panics. Finally, the conclusion offers a further comment on the nomadic disciplinarily of this concept.

Original Models

Cohen’s processual model.

Stan Cohen published Moral Panics in paperback in 1973 . Based on his PhD thesis, it analyzed how British society reacted to seaside confrontations between members of two youth subcultures, mods and rockers, in the early 1960s. Cohen was interested how labeling deviants could amplify deviance, damage the identities of the labeled individuals, and invite them to embrace deviant identities and behavior. Cohen set out to test these ideas on mods and rockers but ended up in a rather different place. He had discovered a pattern of construction and reaction with wider purchase than mods and rockers—the moral panic (Cohen, 1973 , 2002 , p. 9):

Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible. Sometimes the object of the panic is quite novel and at other times it is something which has been in existence long enough, but suddenly appears in the limelight. Sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten, except in folk-lore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way the society conceives itself.

Cohen stressed that these stages overlap. Progression through them can be thwarted or diverted. That is why it has been called a “processual model” of moral panics (Critcher, 2003 , p. 13).

Cohen’s model is often mistakenly thought to focus mainly on mass media. However, he cast his net wider than that. He identified in moral panics four key agents: mass media, moral entrepreneurs, the control culture, and the public. The media are particularly important in the early (inventory) stage of social reaction, producing “processed or coded images” of deviance and the deviants (Cohen, 1973 , 2002 , pp. 44–48). Three processes are involved. The first is exaggeration and distortion of who did or said what; the second is prediction , the dire consequences of failure to act; and the third is symbolization , which in this case means that the word mod or rocker signified a threat. The media installed mods and rockers as folk devils, and newsmaking practices specified who was disrupting the social order. They employed “inferential structures” to explain what the behavior was like, who perpetrated it, and why it happened (what Cohen called “orientations,” “images,” and “causation”). They were primed for panic.

The second group was moral entrepreneurs , referring to individuals and groups who target deviant behavior. Cohen spent time and effort understanding their worldviews and actions. The third group, the societal control culture , comprised those with institutional power: the police and the courts and local and national politicians. They were made aware of—“sensitized” to—the nature and extent of the problem. Concern was passed up the chain of command to the national level, where draconian control measures (innovation) were instituted. The fourth group, the public (acting as witnesses), had to decide who and what to believe. Cohen discussed the mods and rockers problem with individuals and groups, finding that they initially mistrusted media messages, yet ultimately believed them.

The complex interplay between these four groups defined the problem, its remedies, and the proposed solution (normally, a change in the law or its enforcement). Mods and rockers provoked a strengthening of one law (about drugs) and the introduction of a new one (about criminal damage). However, especially as the threat was largely mythical, such laws were more ritualistic than effective.

Laws confirm a primary function of moral panics: the reaffirmation of society’s moral boundaries. Cohen ( 1973 , p. 197) argued that the “affluent society” of the 1960s disconcerted traditionalists, fearful that the young were rejecting adult ideals: “the response was as much to what they stood for as what they did.” Future moral panics seemed inevitable. The pace of social change and the persistence of social inequality generate tensions that find an outlet in the identification and vilification of new kinds of deviant behavior. Cohen’s work was predictive. Six years later, Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, and Roberts ( 1978 ) argued that a moral panic about “mugging” validated Cohen’s predictions. A distinctively American take on moral panics appeared 16 years later, as discussed next.

Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s Attributional Model

In 1994 , Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda published Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance , with a second edition in 2009 . Their approach, known as social constructionism , challenged the basic assumption that sociology could define, measure, explain, and ameliorate social problems. On such issues as crime, mental retardation, and homosexuality, definition and measurement foundered.

Reviewing empirical studies in the constructionist tradition, Goode and Ben-Yehuda ( 2009 , p. 37) arrived at five defining “elements or criteria” of a moral panic.

Any moral panic involves a “heightened level of concern over the behaviour of a certain group or category” (Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 2009 , p. 37) and its consequences. Indices of concern include opinion polls, media coverage, and lobbying activity.

Moral panics exhibit “an increased level of hostility ” toward the deviants, who are “collectively designated as the enemy, or an enemy, of respectable society.” Their behavior is seen as “harmful or threatening” to the values and interests of society, “or at least a sizeable segment” of it (Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 2009 , p. 38, emphasis in original). Constructing such folk devils is integral to moral panics.

In a moral panic, “there must be at least a certain minimal measure of consensus” across society as a whole, or at least “designated segments” of it, that “the threat is real, serious and caused by the wrongdoing group members and their behaviour” (Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 2009 , p. 38). Consensus can be challenged by organized opposition—“counter claimsmakers.”

Disproportionality

Fundamentally, “the concept of moral panic rests on disproportion” (Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 2009 , p. 41, emphasis in original). It is evident where “public concern is in excess of what is appropriate if concern were directly proportional to objective harm” (Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 2009 , p. 40). Statistics are exaggerated or fabricated. The existence of other equally or more harmful activities is denied.

Panics are by their nature fleeting, subsiding as quickly as they erupt. The same issue may recur, but individual panics cannot be sustained for long. This has been called an “attributional model” of moral panics (Critcher, 2003 , p. 25) because it identifies essential characteristics. Central to this model is claims making about the problem: who makes claims, how, and why. Such claims are frequently made by social movements, who perceive and seek remedies for problematic behavior. Movements protest and demonstrate, appeal to public opinion, and gain access to the media. They may behave irresponsibly: exaggerating the threat, polarizing opinion, and vilifying opponents. Other authoritative organizations may collude with them, such as religious groups, professional associations, and the police. More often, the media, occasionally active in moral panics, are more often conduits for others’ claims making.

Goode and Ben-Yehuda assessed three competing explanations of moral panics. First, the grass-roots model identifies the source of panic as widespread anxieties about real or imagined threats. In the second explanation, the elite-engineered model , an elite group, manipulates a panic over an issue that they know to be exaggerated in order to divert attention from their own inability or unwillingness to solve social problems. Third, interest group theory argues that “the middle rungs of power and status” are where moral issues are most acutely felt. Goode and Ben-Yehuda suggested that elites are marginal. The combined forces of grass-roots feeling and middle class agitation lie behind the most effective panics. The wider explanation, however, lies in the nature of collective behavior (Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 2009 , pp. 51–72).

The consequences of moral panics are twofold: institutional legacy and normative transformation. Institutionalization involves establishing new laws, agencies, or professions. Normative transformations alter ideas about the acceptability of behavior, thus redrawing society’s moral boundaries. The missing children controversy of the 1980s is an oft-cited American example of moral panic (Best, 1990 ) despite the skepticism about the concept expressed by one of the leading writers on the topic (Best, 2013 ).

Comparing the Two Models

Comparing the processual model of Cohen with the attributional model of Goode and Ben-Yehuda reveals three basic similarities and three significant differences. The first similarity is their shared view that moral panics are an extreme form of more general processes by which social problems are constructed in public arenas. The second similarity is that they both observe that moral panics are recurrent features of modern society that have identifiable consequences on the law and state institutions. The third similarity is the perceived sociological function of moral panics as reaffirming the core values of society.

On the other hand, the first difference lies in how they assess the role of the media. In the processual version, the media are strategic in the formation of moral panics. They may be the prime movers or endorse others already campaigning, but they are always actively involved. In the attributional model, despite their greater prominence in Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s second edition ( 2009 , pp. 88–108), the media play a much more passive role. They provide an arena where different versions can compete.

The second difference is their conception of the most important agents in moral panics. In the processual model, state agencies, politicians, and legislators do not merely react to moral panics, but rather are frequently complicit in their construction. The attributional model places much more emphasis on the strategies adopted by claimsmakers. Their ability to galvanize public opinion about their case is crucial.

The third difference involves how to conceptualize the language of moral panics. In the attributional model, the emphasis is on the rhetoric of claims making (i.e., how campaigners adopt particular styles of argument). The processual model emphasizes moral panics as activating ideological discourses, such as those around law and order.

These differences are not insuperable. In an underrated effort, Klocke and Muschert ( 2010 ) created a composite model capitalizing on the strengths of the original theories. For a new research project, this might be a more useful tool than settling for just one of the original theories and thus omitting the insights of the other. Still, even in their present form, moral panic models have revealed a good deal about the topics that they have highlighted.

Accumulated Knowledge

Five topic clusters.

Moral panics have been studied extensively over the last 40 years. The accumulated findings will be reviewed here in the context of five clusters of topics: child abuse, drugs and alcohol, immigration, media technologies, and street crime. Cohen ( 2002 , p. xv) has a slightly different list of seven clusters. For each of these clusters, we know quite a lot about how moral panics operate and the impact that they have.

Child abuse . We know that exceptional cases of physical or sexual abuse become drivers of child protection policy, regardless of their typicality or alternative evidence from social work agencies. The original construction of the pedophile as the dangerous stranger was subsequently modified by revelations about pedophiles in the priesthood and among celebrities. But their presence in and around the family is still rarely acknowledged. Organizations apparently dedicated to saving children have their own self-serving agendas, while the media and public are highly susceptible to images of innocent children being damaged or corrupted (Jenkins, 1992 ; Kitzinger, 2004 ; Krinsky, 2008 ; Warner, 2015 ).

Drugs and alcohol . We know that consciousness-changing substances used for pleasure are a constant target for legal action because they allegedly jeopardize either the health of those who enjoy them or general law and order on the streets. Laws governing the sale, possession, or consumption of such substances are tightened continuously but can be enforced only selectively to avoid criminalizing broad swathes of primarily young people. A huge and permanent disjunction exists between the policies and prognostications of police, politicians, and the media and the views and practices of young people as a whole. Drug advice agencies find their expertise consistently undervalued (Parker, Aldridge, & Measham, 1998 ; Jenkins, 1999 ).The most recent examples include methamphetamine (Linneman, 2010 ; Omori, 2013 ), mephedrone (Collins, 2013 ; Alexandrescu, 2014 ), and novel psychoactive (“designer”) drugs (Miller et al., 2015 ).

Immigration . We know that a serial moral panic is likely to recur whenever people migrate to another location to live alongside the indigenous population, especially if the immigrants are of a different color. Accusations against these newcomers are invariably that they bring alien cultures and refuse to integrate with the mainstream culture; that they make excessive demands on welfare, education, and housing systems; and that they are excessively involved in crime. These negative assumptions occur in very different contexts, ranging from resistance to refugees from war in the Middle East in Britain or the European Union to American hostility to migrant labor from Mexico. Antipathy to migrants is routinely reproduced by the popular press, is confirmed by politicians of all shades, and has reinvigorated the extreme right in Europe (Welch, 2002 ; Kubrin, Zatz, & Martinez, 2012 ; Philo, Briant, & Donald, 2013 ).

Media technologies . We know that advent of any new medium of communication produces disquiet among guardians of childhood and culture. They fear that it will encourage children to seek pleasure in narratives of little intrinsic merit that proffer dangerous role models of violent or otherwise antisocial behavior. Children enter a fantasy or virtual world where they can act out roles and emotions that were otherwise prohibited. Such fears are often based on ignorance about the medium’s actual capacities or usage. Moralizing organizations, often religiously motivated, commonly advocate censorship that the media industry resists, while parents remain concerned but lack coherent control strategies (Barker & Petley, 1997 ; Livingstone, 2002 ). Cyberbullying (Milosevic, 2015 ) and sexting (Draper, 2012 ) are recent manifestations of this type of development.

Street crime . Interpersonal crime has always been a central concern of modern mass media. Coverage expands dramatically if new types or patterns of crime emerge, especially involving increased violence or the use of weapons. This sustains the belief that crime is out of control, so fear of being randomly attacked on the street by violent young men is prevalent in modern cosmopolitan societies, even among those least likely to become victims. This pattern prevails for such crimes as mugging and knife- or gun-related crime. Social causes, in the deprived structural position and limited cultural options of inner-city youth, are occasionally recognized, but the solutions are repressive: more vigorous policing and longer sentences for the actual or potential use of violence (Chambliss, 1995 ; Jewkes, 2015 ).

These five groupings are by no means exhaustive. Others could easily be added. Panics about welfare dependents exist, but they may be better analyzed as an ideologically motivated and increasingly successful attack upon the basis of the modern welfare state. Reaction to inner-city riots could be seen as moral panics but may simply represent what the state has always done when confronted with insurrection: come down immediately with the full force of the law, without preamble or apology.

Modern terrorism, one product of Islamic fundamentalism, is in a league of its own. An explicitly political type of deviance, it is an international confrontation that goes way beyond the confines of the nation-state, indivisible from the Western view of, and actions toward, the Muslim world. An initial view might be that the moral panic concept seems ill equipped to deal with its global nature, but it has nevertheless been occasionally applied. Early on, Rothe and Muzzatti ( 2004 ) employed both models to demonstrate that terrorism fitted them exactly. Walsh ( 2016 ) argued that terrorism remains a moral panic, if an exceptional one, since terrorists as folk devils deliberately provoke overreaction. Other analysts advocate substantial changes to the models to make them applicable (Morgan & Poynting, 2012 ; Shafir & Scairer, 2013 ). They may be stretching a point, however.

Other topics with the potential for a moral panic never develop. Both Levi ( 2009 ), for white-collar crime, and Jenkins ( 2009 ), for Internet child pornography, have explored how complex issues, that are not routinely visible and difficult to detect and featuring perpetrators who are not instantly recognizable, fail to attract the attention of moral entrepreneurs, the media, or enforcement agencies, except on rare and fleeting occasions. Domestic and sexual violence against women is another category that fails to spark a moral panic. What is absent from moral panics may be as significant as what is present in them. We now know a great deal about the latter.

Generalizations

On the basis of the research to date, we can make some reasonably robust empirical generalizations about moral panics, as follows:

In capitalist democracies, moral panics appear to be endemic; it is not a question of whether, but when, the next one will appear.

The relationship between an alleged problem and its actual occurrence or significance ranges from almost total fabrication through exaggeration of a relatively minor problem to systematic distortion of a major one.

The media play a crucial role in moral panics, but there are important differences between types of media: local and national, press and television, or upmarket and downmarket.

Moral panics can easily be exploited by party politicians.

Threats to children or from youth heighten emotional tension in moral panics.

Factors identified as causing the decline of a moral panic include:

Its displacement by other more novel and dramatic problems, especially in the media;

Its apparent or symbolic resolution by legal and related measures;

A decline in the symptoms of the problem as a result of social control initiatives;

The emergence of counterclaims that challenge or discredit the originators of the moral panic.

The knowledge accumulated by the numerous studies of moral panics has also confirmed the following basic features of the models as recurrent:

The strategic roles occupied by identifiable groupings: pressure groups, accredited professionals, mass media, and politicians.

The nature of the institutional legacies that they leave behind, especially changes in the law, though often symbolic.

The distorting effect of panics on the quality of public debate about social problems.

Their apparent function, in times of rapid or unsettling social change, of reaffirming the basic moral values of society.

Qualifications

Three features vary considerably across moral panics. The first is the status of the folk devil. Three of our five clusters have a clear folk devil, in their purest forms—pedophile, illegal immigrant, and mugger. But in the two others, the problem is an object, such as an Ecstasy pill or a computer game. Moral panics do not require a clear-cut folk devil, although they may be more effective when they have one.

The second is an apparent variability in the level and intensity of public (as opposed to elite) engagement. Threats from immigration, child abuse, and street crime seem to provoke collective emotional recognition, unlike those from new media technologies or recreational drugs. The reasons for this, such as the visibility of the deviance, require further investigation.

The third is the role of notorious cases with exceptional symbolic power, often with children or teenagers as victims. Variously conceptualized as “key events” (Kepplinger & Habermeier, 1995 ), “signal crimes” (Innes, 2003 ), or “scandals” (Butler & Drakeford, 2005 ), they attract media coverage, political response, and public opinion. These are not necessarily the triggers for the panic, which can create its own cases. Heightened sensitivity to an issue can transform an otherwise routine event into an emblematic one. Visual images of victims, especially if they are children, can become culturally iconic.

Both recurrent and variable features may be found in moral panics at different times and in different places. This point is discussed in the next sections.

Moral Panics in Time and Space

More and more information about the geography and history of moral panics has gradually emerged. Studies originally emanated from Anglophone countries (the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom), with supplements from Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden). This is now changing. Moral panic analysis has gained a foothold in Central and Eastern Europe, South America, and the Far East. Krinsky ( 2013a ), for example, includes contributions from Brazil, Argentine, Poland, and Japan. A scholar of Japan (Toivonen, 2013 , p. 265) notes that

though most of the relevant literature focuses on Europe and North America, non-Western societies with modern media apparatuses are similarly susceptible to episodes of moral panic.

Social problems and their associated moral panics may be exported from Western societies, especially the United States (Best & Furedi, 2001 ). We can now recognize national variations in sociological characteristics crucial to moral panics. Systems of politics, media, religion, and law enforcement may appear similar in principle but differ in practice. It remains true that moral panics everywhere emerge from the interactions of the five Ps: press, politics, pressure groups, police, and public. But such systems vary across nations, with other variables appearing, such as the hegemony of organized religion over moral issues.

As the geographical perspective on moral panics widens, so does the historical one. Hostility to those perceived as deviant is intrinsic to the histories of Jewish and Romany people. The greatest moral panic of all time, the pursuit of witches, happened in Europe in the Middle Ages. A study of a later appearance of the phenomenon among the earliest settlers in the United States greatly influenced moral panic pioneers (Erikson, 1966 ). Moral panics can now be identified in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Lemmings & Walker, 2009 ).

Such studies indicate that moral panics beyond religious or ethnic persecution are largely a product of modernity. Preconditions for moral panics include a formally free press, a government willing to respond to popular pressure, campaigners able and willing to organize to bring about legal change, and an elite belief that social stability depends upon the maintenance of a secular moral order. These conditions did not exist in England or the United States before the late eighteenth century and do not exist today in many societies. Moral panics cannot occur in closed societies. An impervious political system may create its own scapegoats but will not permit, nor respond to, independent agitation against moral evils. Societies ceasing to be totalitarian, as in Eastern Europe, are likely to start producing moral panics. They are, paradoxically, a product of culturally open societies.

We are progressing toward “a comparative sociology of moral panic that makes comparisons within one society and also between societies” (Cohen, 2002 , p. xxii). Appreciating the geographical breadth and historical depth of moral panic analysis assumes that the enterprise remains worthwhile. This is, however, a far from universal assumption. Its principles and practices continue to be challenged.

Critiques of Moral Panic Models

Reservations about moral panic analysis are many and varied. Some are based on a single case study, such as LSD (Cornwell & Linders, 2002 ) or AIDS (Miller & Kitzinger, 1988 ). Others discuss clusters of panics, such as those concerning crime (Jewkes, 2015 ). At a different level are those that consider the presuppositions and internal consistencies of the models as totalities (Garland, 2008 ). The debate is further confused by the fact that the target of criticism is usually only one of the two main models, and what applies to one may or may not apply to the other. Because it has the most influence in Britain, the debate is more intense there than anywhere else.

There are more complex maps of the past and present of moral panic analysis than can be considered here. Hier ( 2011a ) divides analysts into three camps: the conventional, the skeptical, and the revisionist. Krinsky ( 2013b ) perceives two waves of moral panic development, early and late. Rohloff, Hughes, Petley, and Critcher ( 2013 ) outline fundamental conceptual issues and contemporary debates. The approach here is more akin to that of David, Rohloff, Petley, and Hughes ( 2011 ), who enumerated the basic issues at stake. They are here divided (and thus fragmented) into six main lines of criticism: loose terminology, disproportionality, outdatedness, rigidity, political partisanship, and assumed media effects.

Loose Terminology

Critics argue that using the term and constructing a boundary around “moral” tends to prevent links to apparently similar issues, such as health or food scares. The definition of which issues are or are not “moral” is bound to be subjective and is always fluid because almost any issue can be moralized. Likewise, the term panic raises the objection that it imputes irrationality to people who may be genuinely and logically concerned. It pits the rational analyst against the irrational participants. “It is never very clear who is doing the panicking. Is it the media, the government, the public, or who?” (Miller & Kitzinger, 1988 , p. 216).

The logical basis of moral panic analysis is also questioned. Goode and Ben-Yehuda ( 2009 ) assert that moral panic analysis rests fundamentally on the ability to demonstrate that a response to a perceived social evil has been or is disproportionate. This implies that we are in a position to know what a proportionate response would be. For that to happen, we need to have detailed knowledge about the real dimensions of the problem. Critics say that often, such data are unreliable or unknowable. Even if they are known, who is to say what is a “proportionate” response to, say, the rape and murder of a child? Disproportionality does not work, but without it, there are no grounds to decide what is or is not a moral panic. The principal difficulty about a moral panic lies in

establishing the comparison between the scale of the problem and the scale of response to it … Conceptually the notion of a moral panic lacks any criteria of proportionality without which it is impossible to determine whether concern about any … problem is justified or not. (Waddington, 1986 , p. 246)

Outdatedness

A different set of criticisms stems from the datedness of Cohen’s model. Produced 40 years ago, it reflected the British political system, cultural assumptions, and media structure of that time. Each of these has become much more fluid. The advent of new and social media in particular has changed the locus of definitional power so that many more voices are heard than was previously the case. Those in power can no longer be confident that their definitions of issues will prevail:

The proliferation and fragmentation of mass, niche and micro-media and the multiplicity of voices, which compete and contest the meaning of the issues subject to “moral panic,” suggest that both the original and revised models are outdated insofar as they could not possibly take account of the labyrinthine web of determining relations which now exist between social groups and the media, “reality” and representation. (McRobbie & Thornton, 1995 , p. 561)

The model itself is alleged to be mechanistic. “The most serious flaw of the concept of moral panic … is its lack of agency” (Miller & Kitzinger, 1988 , p. 216). The panic follows a prescribed script that robs those involved of any agency and the issue itself of any specificity. The model is rigid; that is, it does not permit variations in processes or outcomes. If cases depart from the anticipated sequence, the model founders and cannot explain such deviations. It is thus a self-fulfilling prophecy. Only those events that approximate to the model are recognized as moral panics.

Political Partisanship

For some, moral panic too readily becomes a term of political abuse. It is a way of discrediting conservative claimsmakers. Liberal or radical campaigns on social issues are not accused of mounting moral panics. This sleight of hand disguises essentially political judgments as intellectual ones. “Moral panic is an invidious label” that is “driven largely by unstated ideological assumptions” (Best, 2013 , pp. 42–43).

Assumed Media Effects

In addition, there are allegations that this approach assumes that the public necessarily believes what the media transmit. This invalidates independence of judgment and experience—the idea that people may have a good foundation for their beliefs other than learning them from the media. Moral panic scholars “presuppose that in finding consensus on certain issues, audiences are gullible and that they privilege mediated knowledge over direct experience” (Jewkes, 2015 , p. 100). There is a built-in resistance to investigating media audiences empirically (Miller & Kitzinger, 1988 ).

Proposed Revisions

The critiques given in the previous sections are a formidable array, sufficient for some to advocate abolishing the approach altogether or limiting its application to a narrow range of cases. Best ( 2013 ) argued that the term moral panic should be strictly confined to media-led campaigns against perceived deviance among young people. McRobbie and Thornton ( 1995 , p. 572) argued more than 20 years ago that “the model of moral panic is urgently in need of updating precisely because of its success.” They explained why it should be done, but not how to do it. Garland ( 2008 ) wished to retain the essentials but advocated conceptual refinement. Hier ( 2002 ) sought to recharacterize moral panic as a special instance of a wider process of moral regulation. Ungar ( 2001 ) argued that in a risk society, new kinds of anxiety, especially about possible environmental catastrophes, displace traditional moral panics. In a much-neglected critique, Watney ( 1998 ) insisted that by concentrating on discrete episodes, moral panic analysis inherently fails to grasp the more continuous and profound ideological struggle over representation.

Counterarguments

Defenders of the models, including Cohen ( 2002 ), Goode and Ben-Yehuda ( 2011 ), and Critcher ( 2003 ), have responded to these criticisms. They admit that the terminology is not wholly satisfactory, but they contend that it is better than any alternatives. There are social problems that directly involve questions around basic societal norms—“the expression of outrage at the violation of a given absolute value” (Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 2011 , p. 21)—in a way that is demonstrably not the case for other categories of problems, such as health concerns or food scares. Cohen ( 2002 ) concedes that panic is a problematic term because of “its connotation with irrationality and being out of control” (p. xxvii) but insists that it “still makes sense as an extended metaphor” (p. xxvi), and that similarities remain in terms of psychological mechanisms with urban myths and natural disasters. The concept of panic may seem to overstate the case, but it remains appropriate to indicate how, at the height of social reaction, collective emotion overwhelms individual reason.

Disproportionality is probably the most contested judgment inherent in moral panic models. The originators remain adamant that usually such claims can be assessed for proportionality. As Cohen ( 2002 , p. xxviii) puts it, using the example of myths about asylum seekers, “the core empirical claims within each narrative can usually be reached by the most rudimentary social science methodology.” Goode and Ben-Yehuda ( 2009 ) argue, more elaborately, that disproportionality is evident when any one of five conditions is met: (a) that statistical claims are demonstrably false; (b) the putative problem is nonexistent; (c) absurd rumors flourish; (d) some problems are emphasized at the expense of similar, but more significant, ones; and (e) media and related attention increases despite no change in the rate of behavior.

Being outdated is more applicable to Cohen’s work from the 1970s than to Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s later and then revised model. Neither model tackles how the rise of the Internet and digital technologies, especially social media, has altered communication patterns during moral panics. While undeniable in principle, the practical effects of digital communication on moral panics have yet to be empirically proven. In some instances, social media have merely intensified the level of vitriol directed at identified deviants. In other examples, such as designer drugs, the Internet was the vehicle for spreading knowledge about and access to them. It was also possible to correct inaccuracies in the mainstream media’s reporting of supposedly drug-related deaths (Forsyth, 2012 ). But when legal action was taken, consumers had no voice.

The charge of rigidity is denied by defenders of the models. Cohen explicitly concedes that a potential moral panic may be stalled or sidetracked. Goode and Ben-Yehuda make a consistent and careful distinction between plentiful moral crusades and much rarer moral panics. The full-blown moral panic follows a predictable path and demonstrates consistent characteristics, but there are many claims making activities that never assume the status of moral panics.

The allegation of political partisanship—that conservative groups, but not liberal or radical ones, are castigated for seeking to create creating moral panics—cannot apply to Goode and Ben-Yehuda, who have explicitly derided moral panics that have been supported by radicals: pornography, snuff movies, school shootings, and (in retrospect, perhaps unwisely) sexual abuse by Catholic priests. Moral panic analysis does not automatically exonerate so-called progressive groupings who make controversial claims. Sex trafficking could be an example where those with the best of intentions are prone to exaggerate the existence of the problem because its nature is so vile (Weitzer, 2007 ; Cree et al., 2012 ). Cohen ( 2002 , p. xxxi) conceded that “the criticism that ‘moral panic’ is a value-laden concept, a mere political epithet, demands more complicated attention than it receives.” Nevertheless, since moral panics function to defend the existing moral order, they will be favored by conservatives and viewed skeptically by liberals.

The final point of criticism is that moral panic analysis assumes a gullible public. The reply is that it is difficult for the public to resist media messages. Goode and Ben Yehuda argued that opinion polls continuously demonstrate that the media and the claims makers they validate do set the public agenda. Cohen, whose original work explored the many ambiguities and inconsistencies in audience interpretations of media messages, never assumed that the audience was gullible, although it was inevitably media dependent.

The points at issue are substantial and complex; they have been simplified here for clarity. Some issues are amenable to empirical evidence from studies that have either discovered inconsistencies in the models or concluded that the essentials of the models can be verified. Other issues are more abstract, concerning how we conceive the nature of social processes or even knowledge itself. If nothing else, moral panic analysis has helped stimulate debate about the social construction of social problems, which is lively and ongoing. But the original models can no longer be freestanding—they need to be connected to other cognate strands in contemporary social science. One angle is to ask a simple question: What, if anything, are moral panics extreme manifestations of? One answer is moral regulation, discussed next.

Moral Panics and Moral Regulation

The concept of moral regulation holds that open societies conduct a continuous dialogue about the boundaries of morally acceptable behavior and how to regulate what is regarded as unacceptable. In principle, this can mean that activities once regarded as unacceptable are legitimated, such as homosexual relationships. In practice, though, the boundaries are continuously redrawn to cope with new kinds of moral impropriety, such as the misuse of social media.

Alan Hunt ( 1999 ) analyzed 19th-century movements for moral regulation in the United Kingdom and United States. He found moral regulation to be aimed at such traditionally immoral activities as sex, drinking, and gambling. He emphasized how organized advocates of regulation, who were usually middle class and often female, adopted common strategies. They identified and defined an immoral activity, specified who was involved in it, developed propaganda tactics, and demanded legislative action. These are essentially the same ploys that claimsmakers use today, despite huge changes in the social, economic, and political contexts. Hunt, however, expressly distanced himself from the moral panic concept.

By contrast, Sean Hier ( 2002 , 2008 ) wanted to retain a version of moral panic within the framework of moral regulation as a constant struggle over the process of moralization: that is, who or what should be made morally accountable. He endorsed major criticisms of established moral panic analysis, including its reliance on cognitive, behavioral, and normative measures of the gap between the reality of the problem and its social construction. Disproportionality cannot be evaluated without any reliable “indication of what constitutes a realistic level of concern, anxiety or alarm” (Hier, 2008 , p. 178).

Drawing on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, Hier sees moral regulation as invariably requiring ethical self-formation of both would-be regulator and regulated: “projects of moral regulation reveal as much about the identity of those who seek to regulate as they do about those who come to serve as the object of regulation” (Hier, 2002 , p. 328). There is no inherent limit on the scope of moral regulation: “moralization can manifest itself empirically in any number of forms” (Hier, 2008 , p. 172).

Moral panics and moral regulation share two characteristics. Each involves one set of people seeking to act on the conduct of others. In both, the regulators confirm their own identities even as they try to alter others’ behavior. But the differences are significant. First, moral panics do not need any “character reformation of moral deviants” (Hier, 2002 , p. 329), but only direct and coercive intervention. Second, moral panics differentiate innocent victims from culpable perpetrators more clearly than moral regulation does. They appeal to a moral economy of harm: the idea that some are injured by the activities of others. A moral panic is a temporary rupture when the routine process of moral regulation fails: “the volatile local manifestation of what can otherwise be understood as the global project of moral regulation ” (Hier, 2002 , p. 329, emphases in original).

Hier includes in moral regulation a wide variety of issues, including “public surveillance, crime and disorder, child allergies, bullying, teen violence amongst females,” “hockey parents,” and “myriad health concerns” ( 2008 , p. 186); “criminality, health risk, sexual deviance and general perceptions of public/personal safety” ( 2002 , p. 331); the “detention of asylum seekers” or “public health scandals” ( 2008 , p. 172); and “commercially financed athletic center advertisements” or “publicly funded anti- smoking campaigns” ( 2008 , p. 180).

Critcher ( 2009 ) objects to such a liberal extension of the scope of moralization. Following Cohen ( 2002 ), he holds that there is a boundary on moral panic topics. Food safety issues, like bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) or E.coli, are excluded because the moral issues remain distinct from the political ones. In moral panics, blame is not a matter of technical or managerial inefficiency, but rather a serious moral failing. There is a difference between being corrupt and being incompetent. Critcher proposes instead assessing the construction of social problems on three criteria: moral order, the degree of perceived threat to basic values; social control, the extent to which there is identified a viable solution; and governmentality, how far moral regulation of others is represented as requiring ethical formation of the self. He constructs a typology where issues (and hence the likelihood of them transmuting into a moral panic) rate high, medium, or low for each criterion.

Hier ( 2011c ) subsequently accuses Critcher of “relying on a set of normative assumptions about moral order, social control, and ethical self-regulation” (p. 525) and misunderstanding Hier’s project to identify the “political and moral articulation of risk, harm, and personal responsibility” (p. 539). Meanwhile, Hunt returns to his critique of moral panic models, arguing that they are limiting and limited. Moral regulation is “better able to handle the difficult and complex entanglements associated with the problematization of risks and harms” (Hunt, 2011 , p. 66). A journey down the moral regulation route may sooner or later involve jettisoning moral panic. In the same article, Hunt insists that “it is crucial that attention be focused on ‘social anxiety’” (p. 67). Assessing explanations of who panics and why is our next consideration. Three possibilities are risk society theory, the culture of fear, and the politics of emotion.

Moral Panics in Social Context: Risk, Fear, and Emotion

As Carrabine ( 2008 , p. 162) has noted about moral panics, “all of the recent attempts to update the concept are drawn, in one way or another, to the risk society thesis.” It is not hard to see why. At a very basic level, moral panics embody a sense of risk. Most obvious is the case of children at risk of abuse. But the sense of risk is palpable elsewhere as well: the risk of becoming a victim of crime; the risks posed to the indigenous way of life by the presence of immigrants; the risks to personal health and public order from alcohol or drug abuse; and the risks to the well-being of children and young people from their immersion in new media. These are clearly different types and degrees of risk, but all indicate vulnerability and the need for protection. “The global scope of the risk society, its self-reflective quality and its pervasiveness create a new backdrop for standard moral panics” (Cohen, 2002 , p. xxv).

It is a more elaborate enterprise to connect the particular concerns of moral panic analysis with the more global perspective of risk theory. This body of work associated with Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens—to which Lupton ( 2013 ) remains an essential guide—argued that modern Western societies had become extremely risk conscious. Lupton ( 2013 , p. 17) summarized their overall view as follows:

[T]he contemporary obsession with the concept of risk has its roots in the changes inherent in the transformation of societies from pre-modern to modern and then to late modern.

While there are real differences between risk society perspectives, everyone agrees that

(1) risk has become an increasingly pervasive concept of human existence in Western societies; (2) risk is a central aspect of human subjectivity; (3) risk is seen as something that can be managed through human intervention; and (4) risk is associated with notions of choice, responsibility and blame. (Lupton, 2013 , p. 37)

Risk operates across both everyday personal life and the bigger issues of politics and public life. An enhanced consciousness of risk, therefore, might explain why late modern societies seem to experience a greater number and intensity of moral panics. However, such a connection has yet to be made. Two factors may be important. One is that risk theory is appropriated by comparatively narrow specialisms. So analysts are interested in what risk theory says to or about child abuse, crime, drug taking, new media technology, or immigration. Few seem interested in how the risk society is likely to construct social problems as a totality. The second factor is that in some areas—crime, drug taking, and, less clearly, child abuse—risk theory has been usurped by the governmentality approach. This utterly ignores moral panic analysis and subsumes risk within its overarching theory. So early attempts to combine risk and governmentality theory in analyzing the policing of crime, such as that by Ericson and Haggerty ( 1997 ), have faded away. Ironically, governmentality rules.

Risk theory has actually been used to mount an attack on conventional moral panic analysis. Ungar ( 2001 , p. 274) asked the question being explored here: “How will the rise of such risk society issues affect the occurrence and development of moral panics?” His answer was that the established concept is no longer relevant in the risk society. The assumptions made by moral panic analysts about which are the most salient issues, who are the most significant actors, and what are the most likely outcomes are all inappropriate for the more unpredictable, contested, and fluid course of problem identification and management in the risk society.

Those moral panic scholars who had high hopes of risk society have had them dashed. Perhaps a better alternative is a different effort to pinpoint contemporary society’s predisposition to panic—theories about a culture of fear, discussed next.

The Culture of Fear

The major works focusing on the topics and dynamics of fear are Furedi ( 1997 ), Glassner ( 1999 ), Altheide ( 2002 ), and Bauman ( 2007 ). The clearest definition of the culture of fear comes from Altheide ( 2002 , p. 2):

[T]he pervasive communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are central features of the effective environment or the physical and symbolic environment as people define and experience it in everyday life.

Each author specifies different causes for the culture of fear, but all identify the essential paradox—that Western societies, apparently more secure than any before, have produced a pervasive culture of fear, qualitatively different from anything which preceded it: more pervasive, more free-floating. It is realized most powerfully in traditional mass media (sometimes entertainment but mainly news), as well as in other public discourse. The culture of fear systematically misrecognizes social problems, producing a distorted and disproportionate response. A major consequence is hostility toward those defined as deviants. A secondary effect is to foster distrust of others, especially strangers.

The argument is in many ways persuasive. It explains a predisposition to collective overreaction to and panic about perceived threats. It includes an account of why those who objectively have least to fear subjectively experience that fear the most. It shares some deficiencies with risk theory. The geographical scope is vague, failing to explain which countries do or do not share a culture of fear. There are difficult historical questions about when and why this culture grew. Its ontological status is dubious: Do we all live out fear on a daily basis, or is it a pervasive concern of political and cultural institutions that only occasionally impinges on the private sphere? A neglected idea from disaster research is to explore how panic develops among elites (Clarke & Chess, 2008 ) who may have more to fear than most.

In a rare critique of the thesis, Pain ( 2010 ) has emphasized its lack of empirical evidence of fear among the general population. Using data from polls following terrorist attacks in major capitals, she showed that fear is not the main emotional reaction; that when it occurs, it is at a low level; that it declines with time and distance; that it is consistently greater in the United States than elsewhere; and that fear is most evident among marginal groups, either within the majority community or among ethnic minorities. She concludes that “much of the empirical evidence tells a different story from recent high-profile texts on the geopolitics of fear” (Pain, 2010 , p. 228). Pain emphasizes that emotional reactions are more nuanced, varied, and situationally dependent than blanket profiles of whole cultures can accommodate.

The Politics of Emotion

Just beneath the surface of moral panic analysis, and sometimes briefly on the surface, is a bubble waiting to burst: “the formation of a moral panic is a thing of energy and emotion rather than a simple mistake in rationality and information” (Young, 2011 , p. 255). It is present in the original studies, as Cohen chooses the term panic and cites disaster research and Goode and Ben-Yehuda emphasize hostility and volatility as dimensions of collective behavior. Emotional salience explains why some moral panics (mugging, pedophilia, immigration) galvanize the general public, while others (recreational drug consumption, misuse of social media) do not. Emotional vulnerability is implicit in the risk society thesis (if thinly disguised as ontological insecurity), but explicit in the culture of fear, where whole societies are taken to be in a permanent state of emotional alert. More recently, Hunt ( 2011 , p. 54) has argued for the need to take more seriously the “experiential intractability” of “social anxiety,” which emerges when societies undergo rapid cultural change.

Young ( 2009 ) activated the idea of “ressentiment,” a reservoir of moral outrage seeking targets for its negative emotions. This derives from traditional sociological analysis of system strain whenever the moral equation of effort and reward becomes imbalanced. This produces, especially among the aspiring middle classes, a degree of status frustration that finds emotional expression in hostility toward those perceived as deviant. Yet, like the risk society and the culture of fear, this is all so much fine argument, with little tangible proof.

Walby and Spencer ( 2011 ) are critical of assumptions that the emotional mood of the public can be inferred from media coverage or political pronouncements. Required instead is (p. 104)

empirically investigating what emotions do, how emotions align certain communities against others, and how emotions move people towards certain (sometimes violent) actions against others whose actions pose alleged harms.

Studying the construction of child abuse in Britain, Warner ( 2015 ) has argued for understanding “emotional politics.” Child abuse in particular (but potentially any moral panic) seems to trigger moral intensity: “to make judgements requires a sense of what is right and wrong and such moral evaluations are shaped by how we feel about the issue” (Warner, 2015 , p. 11, emphasis in original). Anger and contempt, outrage, and disgust are common reactions to stories about abused children. Feelings of shame give rise to a need to blame somebody for the events (Warner, 2015 , p. 6):

While emotions are generally thought of as being experienced by individuals and often being brief and episodic, the emotions that are politically important are experienced collectively and embedded in political institutions; they are also enduring rather than short-lived.

Politicians, the media, and official inquiries articulate moral judgments, inviting the public to share their emotions. Despite differences in welfare systems, Warner finds similar types of emotional politics around child abuse in Australasia, the Netherlands, Sweden, and New York in the United States, as well as Britain. Emotional blame is directed in different combinations at the underclass, women, and ethnic minorities. Emotion is socially structured.

A sociology of emotions might also take advantage of insights from social psychology about how groups construct and maintain boundaries with other groups. Pearce and Charman ( 2011 ) utilized two social psychological models. Social identity theory seeks to explain the significance and dynamics of defining in-groups and out-groups. The theory of social representations examines how people construct common sense categorizations of other people and their behavior. Their study analyzed discourse in both the media and focus-group discussions about asylum seekers in Britain. They discovered a consistent congruence between media and public discourses. Asylum seekers were perceived as economically, culturally, and physically threatening, especially as their inflow was uncontrollable. Boundaries between “us” and “them” were not completely rigid, but there were strict conditions governing flexibility. The project was not designed to explore the specifics of emotional response but resentment, hostility and metaphorical imagery (inevitably of floods) were all very evident. Overall the approach revealed “the potential for social psychological theory to extend the explanatory value of moral panic” (Pearce & Charman, 2011 , p. 309).

Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries

This article has outlined and explained the original moral panic models. It summarized what cumulative research has indicated as empirical generalizations about moral panics. The many and varied criticisms of moral panic models were explored, as were the rejoinders from their supporters. Subsequently, the discussion explored the debate about whether or how to rethink moral panics as exceptional moments in an ongoing process of moral regulation. The focus then shifted to the broader societal context where, in different ways, theories about the risk society and the culture of fear sought to account for the apparently increasing prevalence of moral panics. Finally, it looked at approaches that explored the social psychological dimensions of expressing collective emotions and constructing group identities.

There has not been the opportunity in this text to consider the academic status of moral panic analysis. The moral panic concept does not belong to any larger theory of the social formation. That is why it can be and has been appropriated by very different kinds of theory—by symbolic interactionism (Cohen, 2002 ) and collective behavior (Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 2009 ) in the original studies, and then by Marxism (Hall et al., 1978 ) and even occasionally by feminism (Gelsthorpe, 2005 ). Moral panic analysis may be best understood as what Robert Merton ( 1967 , p. 39) called “middle range theory”:

Middle range theory is principally used in sociology to guide empirical inquiry. It is intermediate to general theories of social system which are too remote from particular classes of social behaviour, organization and change to account for what is observed and to those detailed orderly descriptions of particulars that are not generalized at all. Middle-range theory involves, abstractions, of course, but they are close enough to observed data to be incorporated in propositions that permit empirical testing. Middle-range theories deal with delimited aspects of social phenomena, as is indicated by their labels.

Realizing the full potential of moral panic analysis as middle range theory may require a properly interdisciplinary approach. It involves movement across disciplinary boundaries, such as those between sociology and psychology or policy and media studies. It also needs a comparative framework across space and time. While no single moral panic study can possibly be expected to incorporate all these disciplinary perspectives, that seems to be the direction in which the field of moral panics as a whole ought to go. Only time will tell.

Media Influences and Public Perception of the Moral Panic Essay

Moral panic in media occurs when there is a situation or certain type of behavior displayed that is highly concerning, leading to the public, political, and mass media pressuring authorities or some other entity to intervene. Moral panic typically has 5 key characteristics, which are concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality, and volatility (Messick & Aranda, 2020). Effectively, due to perception and societal values, certain actions are regarded as extremely wrong, creating a disproportionate public outcry, pressure, and panic. However, moral panic situations as portrayed by media often lack full context, in-depth details, or full investigative reports – focusing on sensationalism.

Due to several high-profile cases recently of police misconduct or excessive use of force, there is grave concern surrounding police practices, and the need for reform is evident. While these concerns are legitimate and should be publicized to create public and policy pressure on the police, there is also a detrimental effect. The media chasing after headlines now presents the police as an institution that is wholly incompetent, aggressive and disregards human life. Sensationalism seeks to present every law enforcement misstep as evidence of deep-rooted racism, corruption, or other negative aspects. The media attempts to generate outrage to drive moral panic, which benefits them first and foremost due to increased viewership. However, as a result, the moral panic generates a highly detrimental public perception of police and undermines trust in law enforcement institutions. People may be reluctant to involve the police in critical incidents where they are needed. Meanwhile, in other cases, there may be harassment of police and either violent encounters or unnecessary barriers preventing officers from doing their jobs (Graziano, 2019).

As mentioned, even though there are numerous cases of police misconduct and abuse, in the grand scheme of law enforcement in the US, these represent less than a percent of officers involved. However, the attention and perception of police stem from these cases alone. Unarguably, the media must report on police misconduct, but it holds a certain responsibility. Currently, the status quo is challenging because of media framing; no matter what, it seems that in many controversial situations, the police are scapegoated no matter what is done (Nilsson & Enander, 2019). That is because the mainstream media strongly influences public perception and sometimes actions, such as protests and civil unrest. The media has the responsibility to avoid sensationalism and present the truth objectively, with all known facts. By inciting moral panic to benefit its views, it compromises the very element of public safety due to the negative consequences outlined above. The media also has some responsibility to present the situation to the public in a light that is truthful, meaning not exaggerating details and avoiding portraying a whole department or force as immoral. Finally, just as negative aspects should be reported, so should the positive, highlighting the various good that police officers do for communities. This allows for balanced coverage and helps to avoid the bias necessary for journalistic integrity.

When dealing with media, police leaders can be as transparent as possible within the aspects of the law. Leaders should engage in conducting internal investigations as well as cooperate with any external investigations of potential incidents. Leaders should admit mistakes when they are made and demonstrate areas of possible growth. To mitigate moral panic, leaders can provide greater information, including audio and footage from body cameras, to demonstrate the full context of any situation or encounter. Measures such as body cams, periodic protocol reviews, and consistent training for officers that seek to prevent police misconduct are some actions that can be taken and presented to the public, including before any incident happens. Therefore, if a situation of moral panic occurs, there is evidence that attempts were made at reform, and it is potentially the actions of one officer compromising.

Graziano, L. M. (2019). News media and perceptions of police: a state-of-the-art-review . Policing: An International Journal, 42 (2), 209–225. Web.

Messick, K. J., & Aranda, B. E. (2020). The role of moral reasoning & personality in explaining lyrical preferences. PLOS ONE, 15 (1), e0228057. Web.

Nilsson, S., & Enander, A. (2019). “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t”: Media frames of responsibility and accountability in handling a wildfire. Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 28 (1), 69-82. Web.

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The Impact of Technology Development on the Adolescence Psychology
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Free Essay About Moral Panic

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Topic: Drinking , Youth , Alcohol , Morality , Ethics , Behavior , Teenagers , Alcoholism

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Introduction

In the recent past, the trend in human social behavior and temperament has been a critical determining factor of the course of many global systems. The influence of human social behavior to the global systems is unlimited. Elements of social behavior have an effect to the world economy, consumer preferences, politics, religion, education, health, nutrition and a myriad of other utterly significant global structures. The media plays a critical role in engineering the moral response to a given event . The perception and understanding of global social systems is currently greatly dependent on the output of the media. One social element that is of great importance to molding the world’s systems is moral panic. An example of a social element whose understanding and perception has been greatly influenced by moral panic is underage drinking. The public concern about underage drinking is purely moral panic. Moral panic is defined as a process that results to an entity, a practice, a condition or a behavior becomes branded as an intimidation, a threat and a deviation to the social values and securities . This unfair branding is projected after false, exaggerated and biased labeling. The behaviors are universally branded as discordant based on their non-compliance to the known and accepted social grading parameters . The victimized themes and entities are subject to blind social stereotyping by the mass media. These public perceptions are engineered by individuals such as religious leaders, political leaders, popular celebrities and media personalities of influence. These entities are socially accepted and endorsed as moral gatekeepers . Their opinion on the matters of interest in their jurisdiction is treated with respect and seriousness. Most people regard their opinion as the final and socially sound judgment . The moral values gatekeepers hold the rein to social inclination and royalty. When any issue arises and social confusion on the moral standing of the issue exists, these social gatekeepers come into play. They analyze any emergent issue with respect to the effect of the issue to their interests . A diagnosis and ways of dealing or coping with the issue is generated by these social moral guardians. This opinion is mostly propagated by the mass media and made into popular opinion. The media is also used as a tool to hush any dissenting voices that may exist in the society. The effect of the moral panic is usually the disappearance of a social behavior, discrediting of the behavior by the general public, anger, anxiety, fear or the disappearance of the behavior from the face of the earth . The use of moral panic by the moral guardians to protect their interests is rampant today. Most of these selfish people use their influence and the power of the mass media to sway the public voice, the economy and religious values to their preference . Any emergent behavior or issue that is seen as a threat to their moral standing is attacked and labeled as a moral disgrace. Many revolutionary ideas and entities fall victims of moral panic by receiving negative publicity and become unable to rise against the tides of popular culture. They are therefore dismissed or labeled as moral poison hence they receive unwarranted public attention and concern .

Concern about Underage Drinking As a Moral Panic

Underage drinking has been a great concern to the administration as a potential risk to the security, law and order . There have also been unlimited public concerns on the effects of the drinking trends to the health of the partakers. Underage drinking is particularly a concern in the urban areas where most of the young men and women start drinking at a young age. Underage drinking in this case refers to the consumption of alcoholic products by people of age less than eighteen years . In some jurisdictions, underage drinking refers to the use of alcoholic products by people under the age of twenty one years . The moral panic and immense public concern on underage drinking has been propagated mostly by the mass media, the religious institutions and the biased opinions in the academic realm. The issue of underage drinking has been partly exaggerated and misrepresented . The public attention and concern that has been accorded to underage drinking can be attributed to the failure of those involved to differentiate excessive drinking from the regular forms of responsible drinking patterns . Alcohol forms part of the global day to day life. Countless malls, shops and supermarkets are endorsed by the legal system to sell alcohol. This in turn creates a lot of revenue to the global economy . Almost half of the global alcohol consumption is by the young people. Most young people drink as a way of indulging in the leisure space in the society and to spend their free time . They also drink as a way of meeting new social acquaintances and extending their social networks. The drinking patterns in the young people are such that most of the drinking activities are during the weekends with friends rather than during the week alone .

Underage Drinking and Antisocial Behavior

One of the main concerns about underage drinking is the antisocial behavior that is associated with alcohol use. There is social moral panic propagated by the mass media about how the young people behave in public when intoxicated with alcohol. Most of the young people allegedly drink in groups . Therefore the magnitude of the antisocial behavior and rowdiness is magnified. The moral panic is as a concern of the alleged risks that the drunken young people pose to others around them. There is massive coverage and attention in the media concerning the young people drinking patterns. Most weekend newspaper editions are always splashed with headlines outlining the involvement of the young people in binge drinking . Most media accounts report the drinking behavior of the young people to have gone out of hand. As a result of this negative media portrayal, the public regards underage drinking as a social problem and this causes social panic . However, the effect of alcohol to the behavior of a drunken person is essentially not dependent on the age of the subject. Scientific findings show that alcohol drinking has the effect of reducing the inhibitions of a person when sober. This means that they are more relaxed and they can engage in activities that they could otherwise not be involved in if they were sober. Still, it is important to note that the reduction in inhibition is present across all age groups. The only factor that influences the extent of reduction in inhibition is the level of intoxication. Therefore, the behavior of a person under the influence of alcohol will be uniform across all ages for particular levels of intoxication . There are reports of older people being involved in bar brawls following an episode of binge drinking. In addition to this there have been cases of sexual harassment, rape and destruction of property by older people under the influence of alcohol . Domestic violence, misconduct at the workplace and public indecency are also common with older people who are drunk. However there is less media attention accorded to such cases compared to the coverage given to cases of misconduct of the young people. In many cases, the antisocial behavior of the older people is associated with emotional instability and rarely to alcohol intoxication. Young people also engage in antisocial behavior as a result of emotional instability and parental neglect . Therefore the antisocial behavior in young people cannot always be attributed to underage drinking only. However, young people always take the blame and this elicits unwarranted concern in the general public. The antisocial behavior becomes synonymous with underage drinking and this misrepresents the young people who drink responsibly and with moderation .

Underage Drinking and Health Problems

Underage drinking is purported to cause health complications to young people. These include alcohol related brain damage that causes learning and memory functions of the young person. Alcohol also causes liver diseases like liver cirrhosis and gall stones . Alcohol drinking might also cause dependency in the young people. In addition to this, in the presence of other emotional conditions such as stress and depression, alcohol use can aggravate to suicide. Other health complications that are associated with alcohol use are mouth cancer and gastrointestinal tract complications . Scientific findings show that these health complications are real especially following long periods of alcohol use . However, one fact that is clear is that the health complications that result from alcohol use exist across all age groups. This falsifies the notion that is propagated by the media and a portion of the academic community to cause moral panic that alleges that these health problems are caused by underage drinking . What is more surprising is that some of these problems, for example, liver cirrhosis are exclusively associated with prolonged alcohol use over the life of a person. This shows that they can rarely be a consequence of underage drinking and the whoopla is merely meant to cause moral panic . The idea that underage drinking causes illness was meant by the administrators and the religious leaders to curb underage drinking . The allegation that underage drinking is responsible for health complications instilled fear and gave the issue of underage drinking a lot of unwarranted attention and public concern. The idea propagated here is that there is a normal way to undertake drinking and any deviation and non-conformance to it causes illnesses and heath complications . This is misleading because scientific evidence shows that the health complications arising from alcohol us affect people of all ages. As a matter of fact, this affects any efforts by the public health department to sensitize the public on the health effects of alcohol. This is because the public perception is that only underage drinking causes health complications. This shows that the public concern about underage drinking is merely a moral panic orchestrated by a few moral guardians .

Underage Drinking and High Risk Sex Behavior

Underage drinking is linked with high risk sexual behavior. In the United States of America only, most new HIV infections are among the young people as a result of the high risk sexual behavior . This includes having multiple sexual partners and having unprotected sex. This causes cases of unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections. Most of the marketing strategies used by the alcoholic products manufacturers the association of alcohol use with sexual prowess and success . However, the synonymous association of underage drinking risky sexual behavior is erroneous. It is orchestrated to cause moral panic by giving underage drinking unwarranted public concern. Not all young people who drink alcoholic products engage in risky sexual behaviors. A majority of young people are responsible and they respond positively to reasonable guidance. In addition to this, risky sexual behavior is not exclusive to young people only . Married men have been reported to engage in risky sexual behaviors with multiple sexual partners when under the intoxication of alcohol. Older people have also been reported in cases of rape, pedophilia and prostitution both when sober and when under the influence of alcohol . This shows that projection of underage drinking as the sole cause of risky sexual behavior is misrepresenting and false. It is projected by the popular mass media and religious leaders to cause moral panic by giving underage drinking unwarranted public concern .

This paper concludes that the issue of underage drinking has been falsely represented by the mainstream mass media, the political administration and the religious leadership. The propaganda is projected to portray underage drinking as non-conformance to the existing social order and accepted morals. Underage drinking is portrayed as an activity in which the young people cannot be responsible in. All evils that are caused by different factors are all attributed to drinking. Complications and behaviors which are not exclusively due to underage drinking are falsely attributed to underage drinking ignoring their real root cause. As a result of the false representation by the media, the government agencies and religious leaders cause a lot of public concern and attention. Therefore, underage drinking is simply moral panic.

Reference List

Alcohol Concern, 2004. Young people’s drinking. Factsheet 1. Alcohol Concern, pp.3-12. Altheide, D.L., 2009. Moral panic: From sociological concept to public discourse. Crime, Media, Culture, V(i), pp.1-22. Brian K., P.K., 1997. Drinking with Design: Alcopops, Alcohol and Youth. pp.27-30. Christine Griffin, W.M.A.B.-H.L.W., 2008. Binge Dinking as Calcolated Hedonism. International Journal of Drugs Policy, I(1), pp.1-30. Harnett, T.H.K., 2000. Alcohol in transition: towards a model of young men’s drinking styles. Journal of Youth Studies, III(1), pp.60-79. Johanna D., B.P.D..M.P.H..R.I.B.P.D..M.P.H.., 2008. Prevention of Underage Drinking. Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, pp.1-21. Krinsky, C., 2005. Introduction: The Moral Panic Concept. Ashgate Companion to REsearch, I(3), pp.1-14. M. Holt, C.T., 2008. Pleasure and drugs. International Journal of Drugs Policy, X(5), pp.359-66.

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Ms. Vasilyuk is the author of the novel “Your Presence Is Mandatory.” She wrote from San Francisco.

In January 2022, I was planning a summer trip to Ukraine and Russia for my 4-year-old son and me.

I spent half of my childhood in Ukraine and half in Russia before moving to the United States when I was a teenager. When I became a parent, my one, obsessive goal — as a mother raising a child in America with a man who spoke only English — was to teach my son Russian. It wasn’t about his future résumé; it was because Russian forms such a deep-rooted part of my immigrant identity that I couldn’t imagine talking to my child in another language.

I spoke to him exclusively in Russian and found him a Russian-language day care. For three years, his Russian was better than his English. But when he turned 4 and made English-speaking friends, it started to slip. He started inserting English words in otherwise Russian sentences and talking to himself in English while playing alone.

Then, after a Christmas break with his American grandma, he spoke to me in English. I panicked. I decided he needed a full immersion as soon as possible.

A visit to Ukraine and Russia would allow him to see that his mother’s native language wasn’t a quirk of hers but something normal for millions of people. I told him he’d eat piroshki , see the circus and finally meet his cousins in Kyiv and Moscow.

One month later, Russian forces poured into Ukraine.

I did not immediately tell my son a war had started. I believe in telling children the truth, but I couldn’t even explain to myself why one of my homelands was invading the other, why my cousins in Kyiv were hiding in bomb shelters, why my cousins in Moscow were fleeing the country. Maybe I’d tell him once I had a better grasp of what was happening or, better yet, when it was over. I was certain that it wouldn’t — couldn’t — last long.

For two days, I called family in Ukraine in the early morning, before he woke up, and reserved my tears for nights. On the third day, we were hiking in a park when two American women approached and asked what language we were speaking. When I said, “Russian,” their faces contorted, and one of them said, “Oops,” as if they’d caught me doing something wrong.

If I’d been on my own, I might have said that the Russian language, spoken by many in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics where Russian was mandated, is not an indicator of political or moral affiliation with the actions of Vladimir Putin. But I wasn’t on my own, and I didn’t want my son to see his mother having to defend herself. We hurried on down the hill. When he asked me why that lady had said “Oops,” I said I had no idea.

Afterward, I grew self-conscious at stores and playgrounds and tried not to speak Russian to him too loudly.

One of Mr. Putin’s bogus reasons for the invasion was to protect Russian speakers in Ukraine, even though many Russian speakers — like my family — had felt perfectly safe in their bilingual country. As tanks rolled toward Kyiv, I thought about the effort and resources I’d expended teaching my son a language that was being used as an excuse for violence. I’d entangled him in a mess that he did not have to be a part of.

Many people in Ukraine vowed to stop speaking Russian, but that didn’t feel like the right solution for us. I decided to carry on as we were and say nothing about the war until and unless he asked.

I read articles by psychologists that recommended never lying to your children, even about distressing events; they cautioned that it’s important to dole out the truth in a limited, age-appropriate manner. I found an article that said to “ask yourself whether you are lying to benefit your kids or lying more to benefit yourself.” I had a hard time separating the two. I knew that compared with my relatives in Russia and Ukraine, I was lucky to have the choice to lie at all.

I’ve read reports of parents in war zones going to extreme lengths to hide the brutality of war from their children, even as they live it. Part of me thinks that this merciful lying is a biological instinct, that it’s somehow better for the survival of the species to allow our children to believe the world is better than it is.

But it can also be cultural. Soviet history, for example, contains a lot of private grief under a gilded collective exterior. My grandfather was a prisoner of war in World War II. He hid it from us his whole life because in the twisted moral code of the Soviet Union, P.O.W.s were considered almost traitors . My family learned of his secret only after his death, when we discovered a confession letter in which he begged the K.G.B. not to tell us because he didn’t want to traumatize us with his shame. I never really understood that until Russia invaded.

As the war dragged on, the summer of our planned trip came and went. My son didn’t notice, and I thanked his child brain’s nebulous sense of time for sparing me the need to explain. That November, he turned 5. I increased his dose of Russian-language cartoons and started to teach him to read in Russian.

Then one day he came home from day care and asked, “Mama, is there a war in Ukraine?”

A mix of panic and relief washed over me. We went to the world map on the wall of his bedroom, designed by a friend from Kyiv. I showed him the outline of Ukraine, with its little cartoons of borscht and onion-domed churches. I said something about tanks, about how terrible war was. He nodded silently. I kept it limited and age-appropriate. I also omitted a crucial piece: He did not ask me who started the war, and I didn’t tell him. I could not bring myself to volunteer that it was Russia.

A few months later, I saw my son make a beeline for a Russian-speaking family on the beach. When I caught up, they were asking him — and then me — where we were from. Their tone was urgent, insistent. They needed to know we weren’t from Russia; they had recently arrived in the United States from Kherson, Ukraine. As soon as I heard “Kherson,” I sent my son off to play. Their son was just a few years older, and he seemed to be traumatized, alternating between staring into space and angry outbursts at his grandma. I listened to how the family had survived a brutal six-month Russian occupation and watched my son play in the distance.

Let his little brain know about suffering. But not about Russia’s betrayal. Not yet.

Sasha Vasilyuk is the author of the novel “ Your Presence Is Mandatory .”

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Moral Panic Concept
Moral panic can be traced back to 1960s in the works of Cohen who studied the role of the media in the mod and rocker riots (Cohen, 2011). There are various categories of moral panics such as religious, political, medical, media, crime, and sexual moral panics. Each of these categories has specific examples of moral panics.
'Moral panic'
The term 'moral panic' can be defined as a 'disproportional and hostile social reaction to a condition, person or group defined as a threat to societal values'. It is a term commonly associated with the media where stereotyping is represented and this leads to the demand for better social control and creating a reaction from the public ...
Moral Panic and Folk Devils
A moral panic refers to an intense feeling of fear, concern, or anger throughout a community in response to the perception that cultural values or interests are being threatened by a specific group, known as folk devils. Moral panics are characterized by an exaggeration of the actual threat posed by the perceived folk devil.
Moral Panics
Summary. The concept of moral panic was first developed in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s, principally by Stan Cohen, initially for the purpose of analyzing the definition of and social reaction to youth subcultures as a social problem. Cohen provided a "processual" model of how any new social problem would develop: who would promote ...
On the concept of moral panic
Welch, M. (2007) `Moral Panic, Denial, and Human Rights: Scanning the Spectrum from Overreaction to Underreaction', in D. Downes, P. Rock, C. Chinkin and C. Gearty (eds) Crime, Social Control and Human Rights: From Moral Panics to States of Denial. Essays in Honour of Stanley Cohen, pp. 92-105. Cullompton : Willan.
Moral Panic Essay
According to Goode and Ben-Yehuda, moral panic has the following necessary indicators: 1. Concern - (different from fear) over the imagined threat (and those associated with. Free Essay: Moral Panic Moral panic is a widely used and often misinterpreted concept in social sciences. The term was invented by the British sociologist...
Youth Cultures and Moral Panic
Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics: Penny Gaffs to Gangsta-Rap. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press. This essay, "Youth Cultures and Moral Panic" is published exclusively on IvyPanda's free essay examples database. You can use it for research and reference purposes to write your own paper.
Conclusion Moral panics and beyond
The range and quality of the chapters in this volume evinces the richness and, we would suggest, continuing relevance of moral panic as a conceptual tool applied across a range of contemporary social problems. In this concluding chapter, we identify some key messages emerging from the book's contributors and, at the same time, take forward ...
Moral Panic: The Legacy of Stan Cohen and Stuart Hall
Cohen Stan, 1974, 'Criminology and the Sociology of Deviance in Britain: A recent history and current report', in Deviance and Social Control, eds Rock P, McIntosh M, Tavistock, London. Google Scholar. Cohen Stan, 1980, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The creation of the mods and rockers, Martin Robertson, Oxford. 2nd edn First published 1972.
Mental Health Patients and Moral Panic
Mental Health Patients and Moral Panic Essay. The problem researched in the proposed study is the question of misrepresentation of mentally ill people in public view, particularly in the aftermath of mass shootings. The problem is evidenced by the prevailing public and media discourse that is typically centered around the mental health of the ...
Do Not Panic. It's Just a Moral Panic.
A moral panic is the pervasive belief that some great wickedness is threatening society and must be stopped. Calling something a moral panic is a way to argue that people's fears or concerns are ...
Moral panic
Witch-hunting is a historical example of mass behavior potentially fueled by moral panic. 1555 German print.. A moral panic is a widespread feeling of fear that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society. It is "the process of arousing social concern over an issue", usually perpetuated by moral entrepreneurs and mass media coverage, and ...
Social media and moral panics: Assessing the effects of technological
Answering calls for deeper consideration of the relationship between moral panics and emergent media systems, ... Conclusion. As an account of reaction and social problems construction, moral panic theory has traditionally emphasized the mass media's role in sculpting collective knowledge, arbitrating between the real and represented, and ...
Analyzing The Moral Panic Of Media Media Essay
Thompson (1998) describes 5 key elements in a moral panic. It is something or someone who is defined as a threat to values and interests; the threat is depicted in an easily recognisable form by the media, with use of aspects such as Exaggeration, distortion, prediction and symbolisation. This then causes a rapid build up of public concern.
Moral panic
moral panic, phrase used in sociology to describe an artificially created panic or scare.Researchers, often influenced by critical conflict-oriented Marxist themes, have demonstrated that moral entrepreneurs have demonized "dangerous groups" to serve their own religious, political, economic, social, cultural, and legal interests. Although the aims, forms, dynamics, and outcomes of moral ...
Moral Decline And Moral Panic Free Essay Example
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Stan Cohen Moral Panic. Quick essay on moral panics effects
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Media Influences and Public Perception of the Moral Panic Essay
Moral panic in media occurs when there is a situation or certain type of behavior displayed that is highly concerning, leading to the public, political, and mass media pressuring authorities or some other entity to intervene. Moral panic typically has 5 key characteristics, which are concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality, and ...
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Essay On Moral Panic. 949 Words4 Pages. The Media and The Manufacture of Deviance. 800 words, Assessment Weighting 30%. Briefly define the concept of 'moral panic'. Cohen argues the concept of moral panic is a person or group that becomes defined as a threat to society to a person's social value and their interests.
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Conclusion. This paper concludes that the issue of underage drinking has been falsely represented by the mainstream mass media, the political administration and the religious leadership. The propaganda is projected to portray underage drinking as non-conformance to the existing social order and accepted morals. ... "Free Essay About Moral Panic ...
I Hid the War in Ukraine From My Son
My grandfather was a prisoner of war in World War II. He hid it from us his whole life because in the twisted moral code of the Soviet Union, P.O.W.s were considered almost traitors. My family ...

Essay: 'Moral panic'

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