Moral Panics

by

Gary Clapton

• LAST MODIFIED: 12 January 2022
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791231-0245

Introduction

Who would have thought that scuffles between teenagers on the southeast coast of England on a cold April weekend in 1964 would have produced the notion of moral panic? Originating as a concept used to understand the reaction to the behavior of these teenagers, moral panic is one of the few sociological ideas that has entered common parlance. The reaction was considerable in relation to the degree of harm or damage. However, local and national media picked up on the events and alarm expressed by civic leaders and local business groups and made hay with headlines decrying the behavior and announcing the arrival of riot police to relieve what was described as a besieged town. More headlines further contributed to a spiral of reaction, and the issues were raised in the Houses of Parliament. The police and judiciary were urged to “crack down.” In the climate of a much-distorted view of events and behavior, overlong and custodial sentences were handed out for petty offenses such as vandalism. The participants in the moral panics include “folk devils” (the English teenagers), an influential and exaggerating media, local interest and pressure groups (civic and business leaders, religious leaders, and those who make “claims” as to expertise on the perceived problem), local and national politicians, the police, and judges. An important feature of moral panics is the “reaching beyond” the immediate problem with claims that there are society-wide implications; in the case of the teenagers in 1964, their deviant conduct was claimed to be symptomatic of general decline in morals. A moral panic is distinguished from general social anxieties and specific moral crusades when there is first a heightened concern over behavior of a group and the consequences this poses for wider society. There must be a division between “them,” the folk devils, and “us,” the responsible and law-abiding citizens. There must be consensus within society, or at least considerable segments of it, that the threat proposed is very serious. Additionally, the threat, damage, costs, and figures proposed by claims-makers are wildly exaggerated and do not coincide with an objective reality. Finally, moral panics are volatile. They typically explode, reach a pitch, and subside. Classic moral panics can also result in illiberal laws. As we will see, children and young people, and childhood, have regularly been the sites of moral panics.

General Overview

Cohen 1972, Stanley Cohen’s account of the reaction to youth behavior on the English coasts in 1964, was not the first to deploy the term “moral panic.” In his warning of the reach of “electric media,” the author of McLuhan 1967 hoped that the discussion could take place without getting into “moral panic.” The identification of “moral entrepreneurs” in labeling individuals as deviants from social and moral norms by Becker 1963 also provided a base for Cohen to build upon. There are two canonical contributions to the vast amount of literature on moral panics. Firstly, Cohen’s oft-cited definition of a moral panic describes how an episode or group of persons can come to be seen as a threat to societal values and portrayed as such in stereotypical fashion by the media, resulting in turn in moral outrage from editorial writers, prominent interest and pressure groups, and politicians bolstered by experts that will dutifully confirm the danger. Sometimes the panic subsides but at other times there may be more serious repercussions, such as the emergence of regressive laws and policies. Cohen 1980 takes pains to point out that assessing societal alarms through the lens of moral panic theory is not to suggest that there is nothing to be concerned about, but rather that the degree and intensity of the reaction to the event or behavior of the persons involved are inappropriate. Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994 provides the second most influential contribution to the literature. The authors outline five indicators of a moral panic. Volatility—a panic can appear and subside suddenly; hostility—in an eruption of media concern, “folk devils” are identified and cast as enemies of society. There must also be measurable and considerable public concern. There also must be consensus, a broad social and political unanimity that the grounds for concern are significant and action must be taken. Finally, they note the disproportionality of a moral panic in which the reaction and measures to the problem are exaggerated and out of proportion to the magnitude of the threat posed. Other key contributions are Hall, et al. 1978, a work on street crime that showed how social and political forces lined up against designated folk devils—“muggers”; Young 2009 and Young 2011, whose author has regularly intervened in the development of moral panic thinking; and Critcher 2017, which has developed our understandings of the moral dimension of moral panics.

• Becker, Howard S. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: The Free Press, 1963.

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  Outsiders is one of the first books on labeling theory and its application to studies of deviance and is a key starting point for Cohen’s thinking about how the Mods and Rockers’ behavior in 1964 was demonized.

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• Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1972.

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  The founding document. A skillfully written good read. Never out of print and well-thumbed even after fifty years.

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• Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. 2d ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980.

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  With new lengthy introduction responding to reaction to first edition, especially countering claims that moral panic theory serves to diminish or dismiss legitimate worries.

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• Cohen, Stanley, and Jock Young. The Manufacture of News: Social Problems, Deviance and the Mass Media. London: Constable, 1973.

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  An edited collaboration by two of the founding fathers of moral panic thinking that brings together early thinking on the role of the media.

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• Critcher, Charles. “Moral Panics.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

  DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.155Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Highly readable “state-of-play” summary of moral panic supporters, doubters, and agnostics that offers further thoughts on the moral regulation dimension of moral panics.

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• Goode, Erich, and Nachman Ben-Yehuda. Moral Panic: The Social Construction of Deviance. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.

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  Highly significant in the development of moral panic thinking in the identification of the constituent elements of a moral panic.

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• Hall, Stuart, Charles Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. London: Macmillan, 1978.

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  Sometimes criticized for being overly conspiratorial in its depiction of how political and social elites may instigate a moral panic, in this case over the alleged activities of youth street gangs (“muggers”). Nevertheless a classic example of a case study of social anxieties using a moral panic lens.

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• McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. London: Sphere, 1967.

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  “The medium is the message,” foundational work on understanding the media as distinct from what the media tells us.

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• Young, Jock. “Moral Panic: Its Origins in Resistance, Ressentiment and the Translation of Fantasy into Reality.” British Journal of Criminology 49 (2009): 4–16.

  DOI: 10.1093/bjc/azn074Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  A critique of uses of the moral panic concept and a reformulation of the notions of moral disturbance, disproportionality, displacement, and volatility.

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• Young, Jock. “Moral Panic and the Transgressive Other.” Crime Media and Culture 7.3 (2011): 245–258.

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  Argues that moral panics can be viewed as a “dramatic form of othering” that is an acute manifestation of the moral indignation chronic in our society. “The searchlight of panic and ressentiment scours the social structure for cases of faux injustice and springboards of moral outrage” (p. 256).

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General Application

How can we understand periodic outbreaks of anxieties that combine social opprobrium and moral disapproval on the basis of a perception that the designated problem is of national and political importance? What are the examples of a moral panic? Some major anxieties (or “scares”) do not qualify on the basis that a folk devil is hard to perceive, or they lack the moralizing dimension lent by claims-makers and crusaders with, according to Goode and Ben Yehuda 2011, their expressions of outrage over the violation of values. Health and food scares such as avian flu’s transmissibility or the extent of salmonella in eggs are nearly always impossible to categorize as moral panics. Such scares may be worrying and or well-founded, but they lack the perception of threat to societal values and the campaigns of moral entrepreneurs to defend these. Aside from Childhood, Children, and Young People, most of the time, it seems, moral panics have involved the behavior of the poor and disenfranchised, examples of which can be found in Critcher 2008, Beddoe 2016, and Mellon 2016. The AIDS panic in the 1980s is one exception. Here, Holland, et al. 1990 noted that, abetted by various religious crusaders, the media played a central role in the perception of AIDS as a threat to societal values and turned a life-threatening disease into a “gay plague.” The moral panic “lens” has been a regular and illuminating feature in the literature on AIDS panics (Watney 1997, Morton and Aroney 2016). One other exception to the moral panic focus on the poor is that of the issue of obesity, about which Campos, et al. 2006 notes an exponential increase in mass media attention to obesity, which has elements of a “moral panic” about it. Yet even here it is the poor and minorities that have become the target for alarming metaphors such as “time bomb.” Viewed through a moral panic lens, alarms over childhood obesity categorize parents as neglectful and folk devils and serve to direct attention away from poor nutrition and health caused by poverty.

• Beddoe, Liz. “Making a Moral Panic: ‘Feral Families’, Family Violence and Welfare Reforms in New Zealand. Doing the Work of the State.” In Revisiting Moral Panics. Edited by Viviene E. Cree, Gary Clapton, and Mark Smith, 29–38. Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2016.

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  Focuses on how Maori children are subject to overzealous child protection attention and injects a much-needed international dimension to the moral panic discussion.

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• Campos, Paul, Saguy Abigail, Paul Ernsberger, Eric Oliver, and Glenn Gaesser. “The Epidemiology of Overweight and Obesity: Public Health Crisis or Moral Panic?” International Journal of Epidemiology 35 (2006): 55–60.

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  Concentrates on claims-making in relation to anxieties over growing levels of obesity, including concerns over overweight children during which neglectful parents may seen as folk devils.

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  • Medline

• Critcher, Charles. “Moral Panics Analysis: Past, Present and Future.” Sociology Compass 2.4 (2008): 1127–1144.

  DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2008.00122.xSave Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Cogent summary of the then criticisms, reservations, and views of detractors using exemplars including the 1980s US case of missing children.

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• Goode, Eric, and Nathan Ben-Yehuda. “Grounding and Defending the Sociology of Moral Panic.” In Moral Panic and the Politics of Anxiety. Edited by Sean Hier, 20–36. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011.

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  Another defense of moral panic theory by two of the most eminent writers. Argues that the flexibility of the concept enables a fuller explanation of volatile episodes of claims-making activity.

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• Holland, Janet, Caroline Ramazanoglu, and Sue Scott. “AIDS: From Panic Stations to Power Relations Sociological Perspectives and Problems.” Sociology 24.3 (1990): 499–518.

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  A well-crafted case study in the application of a moral panic lens, this time relating to one of the proof positives of the value of this method of identifying and analyzing a major societal panic.

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• Mellon, Margaret. “When Panic Meets Practice.” In Revisiting Moral Panics. Edited by Viviene E. Cree, Gary Clapton, and Mark Smith, 59–66. Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2016.

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  Childhood and children are the focus in this paper on the moral entrepreneurs that make up an influential section of the child welfare and protection industry.

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• Morton, Tom, and Eurydice Aroney. “Journalism, Moral Panic and the Public Interest.” Journalism Practice 10.1 (2016): 18–34.

  DOI: 10.1080/17512786.2015.1006935Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Takes the case of Sharleen Spiteri, an HIV-positive “sex worker” who publicly admitted that she sometimes had unprotected sex with clients, and her subsequent forcible detention for fifteen years, and examines the role of journalists and politicians.

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• Watney, Simon. Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media. 3d ed. London: Cassell, 1997.

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  Deals at length with the participation of the media and government in creating an atmosphere of panic over AIDS. Points to the British government’s self-declared “forceful” new propaganda campaign “to alert the public to the risks of AIDS,” with advertisements spelling out the word “AIDS” in seasonal gift wrapping paper, together with the accompanying question: “How many people will get it for Christmas?” (p. 134).

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Doubts, Debates, and Developments

Critcher 2009 suggests that when combined with ideas about moral regulation, moral panic analysis can aspire to be Merton’s “middle-range theory”: a set of concepts for empirical inquiry. Whether a moral panic approach is this, a lens, or as Clapton, et al. 2013 uses it, simply a method of organizing skepticism and problematizing relating to an emergent anxiety, there is a considerable catalogue of debate. The literature features challenges debunking the concept as academically unsound. The author of Waddington 1986 claimed that “moral panic” was a polemical rather than an analytical concept. He also questioned how a social anxiety can be measured as proportionate or not, as do Garland 2008 and Lashmar 2013. Stanley Cohen’s rejoinder, Cohen 2002, argues that rudimentary social science methodology could establish the core empirical claims of moral panic theory. McRobbie and Thornton 1995 argued that greater democratization and spread of alternative media made panics harder to take off. Falkof 2020 has countered that the massively pluralistic nature of the digital landscape has meant that updated moral panic theory is in fact more rather than less necessary. The argument by the author of Ungar 2001, that because we live in a time already characterized by risk and anxiety, moral panics have much less capacity to emerge, has also been the subject of lengthy debate. He argues that we no longer live in a “top-down” world in which a passive populace may be manipulated by the media and other influencers. This together with his notion of risk society means that the role of claims-makers can be exaggerated while the effect of real-world events and an agitated public understated. In response, Hier 2008 asserts that in an age of risk society, more moral panics rather than fewer should be expected. Hier 2011 has gone on to organize the debates into three categories: Conventional works show how various social problems qualify as moral panics. Skeptical analyses dismiss the explanatory power of moral panic by arguing that putative concerns are proportional and rational responses to empirically verifiable threats. And revisionists support the concept but seek to rethink it by retaining many of the defining components of conventional analyses alongside building in, for example, more nuanced notions of the interface between moral panics, moral indignation, and moral regulation.

• Clapton, Gary, Vivienne E. Cree, and Mark Smith. “Moral Panics and Social Work: Towards a Sceptical View of UK Child Protection.” Critical Social Policy 33.2 (2013): 197–217.

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  A cogent professional discipline-based analysis of the part played by claims-makers and panics.

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• Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. 3d ed. London: Routledge, 2002.

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  Begins with lengthy preface that answers critics, for example those that argue that there might be such a thing as a “good” panic, for instance regarding child abuse.

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• Critcher, Charles. “‘Widening the Focus’: Moral Panics as Moral Regulation.” British Journal of Criminology 49.1 (2009): 17–34.

  DOI: 10.1093/bjc/azn040Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Continues the author’s development of the part played by panics in introducing and influencing moral regulation.

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• Falkof, Nicky. “On Moral Panic: Some Directions for Further Development.” Critical Sociology 46.2 (2020): 225–239.

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  A more recent contribution defending the idea of moral panic but suggesting it needs updating with a welcome focus on broadening the concept to the Global South.

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• Garland, David. “On the Concept of Moral Panic.” Crime, Media, Culture 4.1 (2008): 9–30.

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  Refers to panics over childhood obesity and pedophiles. Contrasts views of moral panics and “risk society” reactions and concludes there might little difference except in the scale of the perceived issue and the moral attitude that is brought to bear.

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• Hier, Sean. “Thinking beyond Moral Panic: Risk, Responsibility, and the Politics of Moralization.” Theoretical Criminology 12.2 (2008): 173–190.

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  Responds to some of the key critiques of moral panics, e.g., McRobbie and Thornton 1995, and further develops the importance of moralization in the commencement and progress of a moral panic.

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• Hier, Sean. “Introduction: Bringing Moral Panic Studies into Focus.” In Moral Panic and the Politics of Anxiety. Edited by Sean Hier, 1–16. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011.

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  Sets the context for a varied collection of perspectives from satanic child abuse scares to teenage binge drinking, broadening moral panic thinking to include industrial risk and national security.

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• Lashmar, Paul. “Journalist, Folk Devil?” In Moral Panics in the Contemporary World. Edited by Julian Petley, Charles Critcher, Jason Hughes, and Amanda Rohloff, 51–72. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

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  Repeats the worry first expressed by Jenkins in “Failure to Launch: Why Do Some Social Issues Fail to Detonate Moral Panics?” (British Journal of Criminology 49.1 [2009]: 35–47) that there are some issues over which we do not moral panic enough, such as child abuse.

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• McRobbie, Angela, and Sarah L. Thornton. “Rethinking ‘Moral Panic’ for Multi-Mediated Social Worlds.” British Journal of Sociology 46.4 (1995): 559–574.

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  Hugely influential in the debate about the relevance of moral panic theory. Argues that media influence and access have become less concentrated in the hands of the powerful and therefore moral panics are more difficult to initiate. Folk devils have found a media voice, and commercial interests have discovered that the thrill of a moral panic might be a selling point, especially for the young.

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• Ungar, Sheldon. “Moral Panic versus the Risk Society: The Implications of the Changing Sites of Social Anxiety.” British Journal of Sociology 52.2 (2001): 271–291.

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  Another pivotal point in the debates, this article argues that our age of almost permanent anxiety blunts the possibility of the emergence and impact of moral panics.

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• Waddington, Peter. “Mugging as a Moral Panic: A Question of Proportion.” British Journal of Sociology 37.2 (1986): 245–259.

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  An earlier doubter that questioned how a key component of moral panics, disproportionality, could be objectively measured.

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Childhood, Children, and Young People

Moral panics have either been about the behavior of children and young people—such as “reefer madness” in the 1930s in the United States, glue-sniffing in the 1980s in the United Kingdom, and, for example, early-21st-century sexual behavior worries (Draper 2012 on “sexting” between young people provides an example)—or have involved children and young people and their parents, day carers, and teachers as in the cases of alleged satanic abuse, alarms over obesity, inappropriate viewing and gaming habits, or appropriate/inappropriate touching during teaching and coaching (Piper 2014). Thus, children and young people have either been victims of folk devils or cast as folk devils. Best 1990, a work on the alleged abduction of children, is a textbook example of how a moral panic lens can dissect an alarm and challenge claims, in this case of the widespread capture of children off the streets by strangers. The numbers of abductions were shown to be wildly inflated once children were removed from or not returned home by a nonresident parent and temporary walk-outs by teenagers were discounted. Best made a central point in moral panic writing. It is not that there is nothing to be worried about. Children can be victims of stranger abduction. But a moral panic lens shows that the reaction is out of all proportion to the actual numbers involved or the extent of the claimed problem. Declarations and alarms by moral entrepreneurs (in which the phrase “it’s just the tip of the iceberg” often appears)—in this case as to the overwhelming numbers of pedophiles loose in society—were shown to be without evidence. Yet the result was the emergence of a climate of hypervigilance, leading parents to encourage children to spend most of their free time either at home or in activities organized by adults (Mathews and Limb 1999). This is childhood as adversely affected by folk devils in the shape of pedophiles. On the other hand, teenagers have been regularly characterized as folk devils from the 1964 Mods and Rockers, in the ecstasy panics of the 1980s, the violent video gamers of the 1990s, and the early-21st-century goths. There are few collections and books dedicated to moral panics and childhood. Three stand out: the edited collection Krinsky 2008; the social work–themed work Cree, et al. 2016, which has a separate section on childhood; and the most comprehensive to date, the edited collection Tsaliki and Chronaki 2020a.

• Best, Joel. Threatened Children: Rhetoric and Concern about Child Victims. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

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  As outlined above, though moral panics do not feature in this book, this examination of the alarm over what was claimed to be the abduction of children shows the work of claims-makers and moral entrepreneurs, and the media, in the creation and fanning of panic.

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• Cree, Viviene E., Gary Clapton, and Mark Smith, eds. Revisiting Moral Panics. Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2016.

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  A diverse collection of essays, the majority of which examine the usefulness of applying a moral panic lens to childhood and the family.

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• Draper, Nora. “Is Your Teen at Risk? Discourses of Adolescent Texting in United States Television News.” Journal of Children and Media 6.2 (2012): 221–236.

  DOI: 10.1080/17482798.2011.587147Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  A representative example of building on a moral panic framework to explore anxieties relating to the peer-to-peer social media behavior of young people; develops the notion of a media panic as distinct from a moral panic.

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• Krinsky, Charles, ed. Moral Panics over Contemporary Children and Youth. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008.

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  One of the first collections dedicated to panics relating to children and young people and childhood and commendable for its examples from beyond the anglophone world.

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• Mathews, Hugh, and Melanie Limb. “Defining an Agenda for the Geography of Children: Review and Prospect.” Progress in Human Geography 23.1 (1999): 61–90.

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  Though not concerned with moral panics, this paper shows the detrimental effects of the consequences of moral panics when “stranger danger” is elevated to a permanent and widespread threat to children (and childhood) and parents and adults respond with over-vigilance.

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• Piper, Heather. “Touch, Fear, and Child Protection: Immoral Panic and Immoral Crusade.” Power and Education 6.3 (2014): 229–240.

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  A focused study of the effects of fear and suspicion of adults such as teachers and sports coaches.

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• Tsaliki, Liza, and Despina Chronaki. Discourses of Anxiety over Childhood and Youth across Cultures. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020a.

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  Another commendable addition to the literature, especially because of its wider geographical and international focus.

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• Tsaliki, Liza, and Despina Chronaki. “Introduction: Anxiety over Childhood and Youth across Cultures.” In Discourses of Anxiety over Childhood and Youth across Cultures. Edited by Liza Tsaliki and Despina Chronaki, 1–26. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020b.

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  Thorough scene-setting opening piece that skillfully contextualizes modern thinking on the continued usefulness of a moral panic theory and frameworks.

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