Moral Panics in the Contemporary World

Julian Petley, Chas Critcher, Jason Hughes, Amanda Rohloff

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781623564056
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Moral Panics in the Contemporary World represents the best current theoretical and empirical work on the topic, taken from the international conference on moral panics held at Brunel University. The range of contributors, from established scholars to emerging ones in the field, and from a working journalist as well, helps to cover a wide range of moral panics, both old and new, and extend the geographical scope of moral panic analysis to previously underrepresented areas.
Designed from the outset to comprise a coherent and integrated set of viewpoints which share a common engagement with critically exploring moral panics in the contemporary world, it contains case studies instantly recognisable and familiar to a student readership (drugs, alcohol, sexual abuse and racism). The collection brings a fresh approach to analysis and argument by testing and extending the concept of moral panic and analyzing a range of topics and geographical contexts, accurately reflecting the state-of-the-art moral panics research today.

1

Moral Panics in the Contemporary World: Enduring Controversies and Future Directions

Amanda Rohloff, Jason Hughes, Julian Petley and Chas Critcher

This book seeks to explore the enduring significance of the concept of moral panic. It does so reviewing conceptual and empirical extensions to this analytical frame via a range of contemporary examples. In this introduction we commence with a consideration of the development of the concept, including a brief review of some of the key debates that have surrounded its usage and application. We then move on to some of the defining issues and challenges that arguably must be addressed in order for moral panic research to retain its analytical utility in relation to a rapidly changing social and cultural landscape. At the end of this broader exposition of the concept, we shall introduce the chapters of the volume, and consider how each seeks to take forward some of the core debates within the field.

The first notable use of the term ‘moral panic’ can be traced back to the 1964 publication of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (McLuhan [1964] 2007: 89).¹ The term was taken up and developed into a fully fledged concept principally by Stan Cohen and Jock Young in the research they undertook for their PhDs in the late 1960s, later to underpin a series of publications in the 1970s. Young’s (1971b) chapter entitled ‘The Role of Police as Amplifiers of Deviancy, Negotiators of Reality and Translators of Fantasy’; his (1971a) book The Drugtakers; and Cohen’s (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics stand out as landmark publications in the development of the concept.

The period during which these seminal studies were undertaken was a time of rapid social change, growing bohemianism, and a burgeoning climate of challenge to the opinions of ‘parents, politicians, journalists, opinion leaders, magistrates’, and others in positions of power (Young 2011: 246). This broader questioning of authority was reflected in a number of what were then becoming increasingly influential approaches to sociology. From the United States, particularly in the work of scholars such as Howard Becker, Edwin Lemert, Kai Erikson and others, came the influence of symbolic interactionism, and the related developments of the social reaction perspective and labelling theory. In the United Kingdom, core facets of these approaches were reworked by a new generation of researchers in criminology and sociology, some of whom combined and synthesized these with critical/conflict-based frameworks based centrally around various manifestations of Marxism – approaches which later came to be known as the ‘new criminology’ and ‘new left realism’ (in turn, offshoots of ‘critical criminology’).

This new wave of criminology spurred the creation of the National Deviancy Conference – a series of symposia commencing at the University of York in 1968 and recurring throughout the 1970s. The conference series proved to be highly influential, leading to the development of several further key publications. These included Images of Deviance (Cohen 1971); Politics and Deviance: Papers from the National Deviancy Conference (Taylor and Taylor 1973); Contemporary Social Problems in Britain (Bailey and Young 1973); Capitalism and the Rule of Law: From Deviancy Theory to Marxism (Fine et al. 1979); and Permissiveness and Control (National Deviancy Conference 1980). The progenitors of this new criminology shared to varying degrees several core understandings of the relations between the media, the state, moral entrepreneurs, agents of social control, the general public, and those labelled ‘deviant’. The influence of labelling theory in particular appears to have been pivotal. For example, a focus upon the mobilization of moral discourses; the significance of moral entrepreneurs and the ‘moral majority’; and a consideration of the nexus between morality, media representations and social power, all figure prominently in this early work. More particularly, the engagement with how social reactions are constitutive of social categories which, in turn, feed back to that which is categorized – a process that Merton famously called the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ – is an older analytical motif that found new modalities of expression under the guise of moral panic analysis. Similarly, it is arguable that Becker’s ([1963] 1991) examination of the emergence and impact of the Marijuana Tax Act as a defining moral campaign is in many ways an early forerunner of a ‘classic’ moral panic analysis.

Defining concerns

The concept of moral panic, and the new deviancy theory more generally, involved a focus on particular types and examples of deviance (and social reactions to these) that came to be regarded as paradigmatic exemplars. These concerns, again, reflected the wider social changes that were occurring at the time – a broader generational critique of ‘the Establishment’: ‘The conflict between the Establishment and the new youth culture seemed to be gathering pace, the reactions quite disproportional to the offences and the number of police and of newspaper columns exhibiting something of a panic about the morality of “today’s youth”’ (Young 2011: 246).

To this extent, moral panic analysis inherited from symbolic interactionism and labelling theory an in-built critique of positivist criminology, shifting the focus from the ‘causes’ of deviance to reactions to and representations of it. As Young describes it, the combination of labelling and sub-cultural theory ‘gave meaning to deviancy, in contrast to positivism which took meaning away’. Thus the approach regarded ‘the reaction against crime and deviance as a cultural product, not simply a technical problem of social control and the deviant act itself as a cultural product, an attempt by groups of actors to solve the social problems which confronted them’ (Young 2011: 247). Such a notion is nowhere better illustrated than in the ‘deviancy amplification spiral’, where media reporting, and the reactions of moral entrepreneurs and agents of social control, collectively serve to distort and otherwise amplify the perceived deviance which is the object of their outrage – exacerbating the social problem they were in part defining and in this sense producing and reproducing the very behaviour about which they were so exercised in the first place.

Reflecting on the origins of the concept of moral panic, Young (2011: 247) observes:

For me the saga of the trial [of two of the Rolling Stones, on drugs charges, in 1967] and the everyday experience of the prejudice engendered by long hair and exotic clothes, by the paranoia of the impending raid and the knowledge of police planting of drugs, fabrication of evidence and other malpractices set off a train of thought that gave vitality to the idea of the moral panic as a moral conflict between authority and subculture which was of a cultural nature and could not be reduced to humanitarian interventions on the level of protecting the weak and vulnerable or simple punitive moves to deter the wicked.

Here we clearly see the emergence, at least in the case of Young, of a more or less consciously defined political agenda to expose the malpractices of authority, and, in so doing, to liberate the victims of Establishment prejudices (in this case, anyone who looks like a stereotypical ‘hippie’ or ‘druggie’); an agenda that undergirds much of his moral panic analysis, as well as the analyses of those it has influenced.

By contrast, Cohen’s focus has characteristically centred not just on exposing the ideological underpinnings of social reactions to deviance, and of competing social spheres of perception – the differences between those of, say, mods and rockers, the police, bystanders, reporters and so forth – but also on identifying how reactions are deflected onto objects that are not, so to speak, the ‘real’ problem. Drawing upon his more recent work on the sociology of denial, Cohen explains how this concern in his work relates explicitly to a fundamental commitment to human rights, suggesting that in determining whether there is an over-reaction or an under-reaction to a given phenomenon: ‘Only with a prior commitment to “external” goals such as social justice, human rights or equality can we evaluate any one moral panic or judge it as more specious than another’ (Cohen 2002: xxviii). Thus, for Cohen, the central purpose of the moral panic concept is to expose inappropriate social reactions in the sense of being disproportionate, tendentious and displaced (see Cohen 2002: xxxi). As Garland (2008: 15) has expressed it, ‘Moral panic targets are not randomly selected: they are cultural scapegoats whose deviant conduct appals onlookers so powerfully precisely because it relates to personal fears and unconscious wishes . . . The achievement of the best moral panic analyses is to render these involvements and anxieties conscious and intelligible and to show how they contributed to the outcry in question’.

In the 1960s and 1970s researchers such as Cohen and Young (among a rapidly increasing number of others) were ‘often culturally closer to deviants than to their controllers’, and as such ‘saw criminal law as a misplaced form of repression, at least as it applied to the soft deviance of drug taking and sub-cultural style’ (Garland 2008: 19). Moral panic research began, then, with a focus on particular types of reactions to particular types of actions – those activities, groups and behaviours which the Establishment found objectionable and tried its best to suppress, but with which the researchers conversely personally identified (e.g. youth subcultures and marijuana smoking). These kinds of deviance were generally relatively at a low level, more typically being examples of ‘delinquency’ than archetypal criminal behaviour as such. Moral panic research thus tended to take place in the wider context of moral reaction against an increase in what established opinion referred to disapprovingly as ‘permissiveness’ (Thompson 2011: viii).² Conversely, the idea that there could be a moral panic regarding a phenomenon about which a researcher was personally concerned – a ‘good’ moral panic, to use Cohen’s later (2002) term – was, until very recently, largely neglected.

Why moral?

The concept of moral panic was, therefore, very much a product of its time. Just as a ‘moral majority’ was understood to be reacting to an increasingly ‘permissive’ society, so too researchers were reacting to these particular reactors. As Garland (2008) observes, it was not until Stuart Hall and colleagues applied the concept to a serious crime – street robbery, re-termed ‘mugging’ – that it came to be more intensely critiqued. While the disproportionality of moral outrage and condemnation could be relatively easily demonstrated in relation to the kinds of cases and examples that were the mainstay of the first moral panic studies, later applications such as this raised more fundamental questions regarding the applicability and utility of the concept. In this connection, Waddington (1986: 258) argued:

Without some clear criteria of proportionality, the description of publicly expressed concern, anxiety or alarm as a ‘moral panic’ is no more than a value judgment. It simply says that the person using the term does not believe that the particular problem is sufficiently serious to warrant these expressions of concern or actions designed to remedy the problem . . . it is a polemical rather than an analytical concept. It seems virtually inconceivable that concern about racial attacks, rape, or police misconduct would be described as a ‘moral panic’. This is because the term has derogatory connotations: it implies that official media concern is merely a ‘moral panic’ without substance or justification. If official reaction to crime and deviance is to be analysed adequately perhaps it is time to abandon such value-laden terminology.

Waddington’s now much-cited arguments stimulated considerable debate, though many of the points he raised remain moot. At the very least, since Waddington first wrote these words, the concept has been empirically extended to an ever-widening range of examples. Indeed, there are now numerous moral panic analyses of reactions to incidences of rape, child abuse, paedophilia and a range of other ‘sex panics’. That said, Waddington’s more general argument nonetheless serves to raise some pertinent concerns; it draws attention to the unspoken and to a degree assumed politico-intellectual stance that has been effectively ‘baked into’ moral panic research – a stance which even Cohen himself has now attempted to review via his discussion of ‘good’ moral panics.³

It is significant that Cohen sought to correct, or at the very least expose to scrutiny, a normative tendency inherent in moral panic analysis through recourse to the term ‘good’ – a term which itself is highly value-laden, and shot-through with ‘moral’ connotations. Cohen no doubt did so quite self-consciously in order to highlight head-on, so to speak, the fundamental, yet largely unexamined, question once posed by Becker (1967), namely: ‘Whose side are we on?’ (Cohen 2011). As we have already suggested, the terms ‘moral’ and ‘panic’ are not simply concept descriptors, they are also a kind of short-hand for a partly unspoken cultural politics of moral panic analysis. The assumed politico-intellectual position of early moral panic research was, admittedly to over-simplify, one in which ‘we’ researchers were seeking to highlight the inappropriateness of ‘their’ morally outraged reactions to the activities and behaviours of ‘our’ generation. The term ‘moral’ was thus employed not so much to invoke a philosophically discrete ‘moral’ category, but as a by-word for a pervasive conservative ‘moral’ outrage mobilized in relation to particular social causes. It was thus, in certain respects, a pejorative term as much as a technical one: a short-hand for unenlightened, reactionary viewpoints which, under the banner of morality, were promoted as an insidious smokescreen for dominant ideological interests. In this way, ‘we’ might deem a generalized social reaction of a kind that ‘we’ consider to be politically or ideologically reprehensible to be a ‘moral panic’, while another equally acute social reaction to a particular problem – and here climate change might serve as a guiding example⁴ – ‘we’ might regard as an ‘appropriate response’, or perhaps even a response which is insufficiently urgent in that ‘they’ are not panicking enough (e.g. see Cohen 2011; Rohloff 2011a; Ungar 2011). Indeed, Cohen’s idea that there might be ‘good’ moral panics involves the notion that researchers might in fact encourage ‘moral panics about mass atrocities and political suffering’ by facilitating the conditions under which successful moral panics of the past have flourished – ‘exaggeration, sensitization, symbolization, prediction, etc.’ – in order to overcome passivity, indifference and ‘strategies of denial’ which prevent a full recognition of ‘human cruelty and suffering’ (2002: xxxiii). However, this raises the question as to whether moral entrepreneurs involved in (what Cohen and others might call) ‘bad’ moral panics in the 1960s and 1970s viewed their own moral campaigns as ‘good’ campaigns to direct attention towards those social problems which they felt were not receiving sufficient attention. The key point, then, is that notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ vary according to political standpoint in that there was, and remains, a sharp demarcation between ‘their’ idea of ‘good’ – that of influential moral entrepreneurs – and ‘ours’, the assumed stance of moral panic researchers. As such, while Cohen’s introduction of the term ‘good’ moral panic may help researchers move beyond a simplified understanding of panics as being merely

negative developments, at the same time it serves to reinforce a normative stance towards moral panic studies, whereby certain issues are considered to be worthy of concern while others are not.

More recently, a number of researchers have sought to jettison altogether the underlying cultural politics of moral panic theory as part of a shift involving the re-working of moral panic analysis into sociological approaches to moral regulation (Hunt 1999, 2003, 2011; Hier 2008, 2011; Critcher 2008, 2009) and, following Elias ([1939] 2012), civilizing processes (e.g. Rohloff and Wright 2010; Rohloff 2011a). As Hunt (2011) observes, the sociology of moral panics and the sociology of moral regulation have followed, until recently, different trajectories of development, some aspects of which, he suggests, present serious obstacles to any simple or straightforward integration of these analytical traditions. Nonetheless, it is through a focus on moral regulation that we might explore how it is that certain social issues become transmuted into moral issues – how a particular group might be able to shift from saying ‘we don’t like that’ or ‘we disapprove of that’, to saying ‘that’s bad’, ‘that’s wrong’ or ‘they’re evil’, usually leading to ‘it/they should be stopped’. It is through this process of moral transmutation that a particular stance on an issue comes to be increasingly firmly established as purely a moral one: by posing questions about risks only as moral questions, all arguments other than those that are moralistic become effectively closed off (Hunt 2003). Moralization makes statements less easily contestable, with the ultimate result that the interests and opinions of particular groups can eventually become transformed into apparently immutable facts, unassailable positions and incontestable standpoints. In the case of moral panics, then, processes of moralization that might otherwise be inherently contestable become rapidly crystallized into explicit moral causes that are effectively employed to preclude and obstruct all legitimate forms of contestation (for an example of this in relation to discourses about welfare see Lundström [2011]).

Moralization processes ran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1 Moral Panics in the Contemporary World: Enduring Controversies and Future Directions  Amanda Rohloff, Jason Hughes, Julian Petley and Chas Critcher
• Part 1 Rethinking Moral Panics
• Part 2 Lifestyle, Risk and Health
• Part 3 Crime and Deviance
• Part 4 Immigration, War and Terror
• Author Index
• Subject Index