Moral panic

• 1. Introduction

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  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. In 1981, a six-year-old boy named Adam Walsh was abducted, murdered, and beheaded in the United States. His murder took over nationwide news and set off a chain reaction: new laws for missing children, a generation of parents rearranging every detail of their children's lives. According to criminologist Richard Moran, the Walsh case "created a nation of petrified kids and paranoid parents." What happened next followed a pattern scholars had been mapping for decades. Who decides when a threat is real? Who decides when it is exaggerated? And what happens to ordinary people caught in the middle when fear becomes its own engine?

• 2. Stanley Cohen and the Folk Devil

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  Stanley Cohen introduced the phrase "moral panic" in a PhD thesis completed between 1967 and 1969. That thesis became the basis for his 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics. Cohen set out to test a fairly specific hypothesis about two British youth subcultures of the 1960s and 1970s: the Mods and the Rockers. He went looking for something narrow and came back with something much larger. Cohen discovered what he called a pattern of construction and reaction with a foothold far beyond any single conflict between teenagers at the seaside.

  Cohen argued that although Mods and Rockers did engage in street fighting in the mid-1960s, they were no different from the evening brawls between ordinary youth throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, both at seaside resorts and after football games. The public reaction, he found, was wildly disproportionate. In a moral panic, Cohen said, "the untypical is made typical."

  From his study, Cohen drew the concept of the "folk devil": a person or group labelled as outside the central core values of society and as posing a threat to society itself. He also named the "moral entrepreneur": someone who starts the panic after fearing a threat to prevailing social or cultural values. He identified five sequential stages in the construction of a moral panic, beginning with an event or group being perceived as a threat, then moving through media amplification, public anxiety, gatekeepers responding with laws or policies, and finally the panic fading or leaving lasting changes behind. Cohen acknowledged the word panic itself connotes irrationality, but he maintained it was a suitable term when used as an extended metaphor.

• 3. Four Agents, One Machine

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  Cohen identified four key agents in any moral panic, drawn from his study of the Mod and Rocker conflict: the mass media, moral entrepreneurs, the culture of social control, and the public. Each plays a distinct role, and together they form something more powerful than any single part.

  The media function primarily in the early stage of social reaction. Cohen described three processes the media use: exaggeration and distortion of events, prediction of dire consequences if nothing is done, and symbolization, where a person or object comes to stand in for an entire threat. Cohen stated that the mass media is the primary source of the public's knowledge about deviance and social problems. Scholar Christian Joppke noted that shifts in public attention "can trigger the decline of movements and fuel the rise of others."

  Moral entrepreneurs are individuals and groups who target deviant behavior and keep the alarm alive. The culture of social control includes those with institutional power: the police, the courts, local and national politicians. Concern is passed up their chain of command until control measures are instituted at the national level. In the Mod and Rocker case, the public initially distrusted media messages, but ultimately believed them. That arc from skepticism to belief is itself a feature of the mechanism, not a flaw in it.

  Media studies professor Kirsten Drotner described the recurring pattern around new technologies this way: every time a new mass medium enters the social scene, it spurs public debates on social and cultural norms, debates that can shift into what she called "a media panic." Recent examples she pointed to include cyberbullying and sexting.

• 4. Competing Models

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  In their 1994 book Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance, Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda challenged the assumption that sociology can straightforwardly define, measure, and explain social problems. They proposed an "attributional" model built around five defining elements: concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality, and volatility.

  Disproportionality sits at the center of their framework. Goode and Ben-Yehuda wrote that "the concept of moral panic rests on disproportion" and that statistics are commonly exaggerated or fabricated. Their fifth criterion, volatility, explains why panics tend to disappear as quickly as they appeared: public interest wanes, or the news cycle shifts to another narrative.

  Goode and Ben-Yehuda also examined three competing explanations for why panics arise. The grass-roots model identifies widespread anxieties about real or imagined threats as the source. The elite-engineered model describes an elite group that induces panic over an issue they know to be exaggerated, in order to move public attention away from their own failures to solve social problems. The interest group theory suggests that moral issues are most significantly felt at "the middle rungs of power and status," not at the top or the bottom.

  British criminologist Jock Young brought the concept into his participant observation study of drug use in Porthmadog, Wales, between 1967 and 1969. Marxist sociologist Stuart Hall and his colleagues applied Cohen's definition in Policing the Crisis, published in 1978, examining public reaction to mugging. Hall argued that crime statistics are often manipulated for political and economic purposes and that moral panics can be ignited to create public support for the need to "police the crisis."

• 5. A Century of Panics

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  The 1856 presidential election saw the Know-Nothing Party win 21.5% of the vote after a moral panic over Irish Catholic immigration that dated back to the 1840s. The party's quick decline as public concern faded became, for later scholars, a textbook illustration of volatility.

  During the years 1919 to 1920, and again from the late 1940s to the 1950s, the United States experienced a moral panic over communism. Senator Joseph McCarthy exploited Americans' fears and Congress' desire to hold onto re-election to rise to prominence, often accusing those who opposed him of being communists themselves. He began with little influence or respect within the Senate.

  In the United States during the 1950s, substantial limits were placed on comic book content, especially in the horror and crime genres. Psychologist Fredric Wertham argued in his book Seduction of the Innocent that comics were a major source of juvenile delinquency. Congressional hearings followed, organizations promoted book burnings, and Wertham's work led to the creation of the Comics Code, which drastically limited what content could be published. Many comics publishers and illustrators were forced to leave the profession entirely. The Comics Code was gradually loosened before being abolished in 2011.

  A 1950 article in Women's Home Companion titled "The Toy That Kills" sparked controversy over switchblades. Films including Rebel Without a Cause (1955), 12 Angry Men (1957), and the Broadway musical West Side Story in 1957 intensified the fixation. State laws restricting switchblade possession spread across legislatures, and many restrictions worldwide date back to that period.

  In the 1980s, inaccurate data about sex offender recidivism rates was published. The public came to believe that sex offenders had a particularly high recidivism rate, which drove the creation of sex offender registries. Later information revealed that sex offenders, including child sex offenders, have a low recidivism rate. The abduction and murder of 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling in 1989, the rape and murder of seven-year-old Megan Kanka in 1994, and the rape and murder of nine-year-old Jessica Lunsford in 2005 all contributed to the expansion of sex offender laws.

• 6. Music, Games, and New Media

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  Blues was one of the first music genres labeled "the devil's music," mainly due to a perception that it incited violence. In the early 20th century, the blues was considered disreputable, especially as white audiences began listening during the 1920s. Jazz followed as another early receiver of the label; urban middle-class African Americans shared some of the concern, believing jazz's improvised rhythms were promoting promiscuity.

  Calls to regulate violence in video games stretch back nearly as far as the industry itself, with Death Race cited as a notable early example. In the 1990s, improvements in video game technology allowed for more lifelike depictions of violence in games such as Mortal Kombat and Doom. According to researcher Christopher Ferguson, sensationalist media reports and the scientific community unintentionally worked together in "promoting an unreasonable fear of violent video games."

  Public concern reached a high point following the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. Videos were found of the perpetrators, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, talking about violent games like Doom and drawing comparisons between their intended acts and aspects of those games. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association that legally restricting sales of violent video games to minors would be unconstitutional and deemed the research presented in favour of regulation "unpersuasive."

  A moral panic around MySpace, then the largest social networking site globally, ran mostly from 2005 to 2009. Founded in 2003, the site had a minimum registration age of 14 at the height of the panic. The US government attempted to introduce the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006. The panic faded by 2010 largely because visitors shifted to Facebook, which was then considered "safer."

• 7. Challenges to the Theory

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  Paul Joosse has argued that classic moral panic theory, though it styled itself as part of a "sceptical revolution," actually resembles Emile Durkheim's depiction of how the collective conscience is strengthened through its reactions to deviance. In his analysis of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential victory, Joosse argued that charismatic moral entrepreneurs can deride folk devils in the traditional sense while avoiding the conservative moral recapitulation the classic theory predicts.

  In 1995, writing about a series of murders by juveniles in the UK, including that of two-year-old James Bulger by two 10-year-old boys and that of 70-year-old Edna Phillips by two 17-year-old girls, sociologist Colin Hay pointed out that the folk devil was ambiguous in such cases. Child perpetrators would normally be thought of as innocent, not as threats.

  Also in 1995, Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton argued that the time had come to revise every stage in the process of constructing a moral panic. Their case was that mass media had changed so significantly since the concept emerged that "folk devils" are no longer simply marginalized; they are supported and defended by media as well as castigated by it.

  British criminologist Steve Hall, writing in 2012, went further and suggested that the term moral panic is a fundamental category error. Hall argued that while some crimes are sensationalized, the ability of the state and the criminal justice system to protect the public is also overstated in the general crime-and-control narrative. Public concern, in his view, is whipped up only for the purpose of being soothed, which produces not panic but its opposite: comfort and complacency. Sociologists Thompson and Williams (2013) pushed the critique further still, arguing that the concept of moral panic is itself a product of irrational middle-class fear of the imagined working-class "mob," with moral panic theorists and the liberal press demonizing peaceful protesters just as irrationally as tabloids demonized the subjects of those protests.