Moral panic

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A moral panic is a mass movement based on the false or exaggerated perception that some cultural behavior or group of people, frequently a minority group or a subculture, is dangerously deviant and poses a menace to society. It has also been more broadly defined as an "episode, condition, person or group of persons" that has in recent times been "defined as a threat to societal values and interests." <ref>* Cohen, Stanley. Folk devils and moral panics. London: Mac Gibbon and Kee, 1972. ISBN 0415267129 p. 9</ref>

These panics are generally fuelled by media coverage of social issues, although semi-spontaneous moral panics do occur. Mass hysteria can be an element in these movements, but moral panic is different from mass hysteria in that a moral panic is specifically framed in terms of morality and is usually expressed as outrage rather than unadulterated fear. Moral panics (as defined by Cohen) revolve around a perceived threat to a value or norm held by a society normally stimulated by glorification within the mass media or 'folk legend' within societies. Panics have a number of outcomes, the most poigant being the certification to the players within the panic that what they are doing appears to warrant observation by mass media and therefore may push them further into the activities that lead to the original feeling of moral panic.

Contents 1 Origins 2 Examples 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

Origins

The term was coined by Stanley Cohen in 1972 to describe media coverage of Mods and Rockers in the United Kingdom in the 1960s. A factor in moral panic is the deviancy amplification spiral, the phenomenon defined by media critics as an increasing cycle of reporting on a category of antisocial behavior or other undesirable events.

While the term moral panic is relatively recent, many social scientists point to the Middletown studies, first conducted in 1925, as containing the first in-depth study of this phenomenon. In these studies, researchers found that community and religious leaders in an American town condemned then-new technology such as the radio and automobile for promoting immoral behavior. For example, a pastor interviewed in this study referred to the automobile as a "house of prostitution on wheels," and condemned this new invention for giving citizens a way of driving out of town when they should be attending church.

In the Middletown studies, the moral indignation held by community leaders in 1925 appears absurd to modern readers, and leads to the implication that every generation falls prey to unfounded (and unneeded) bouts of moral panic. For example, sociologist Robert Putnam, in his book Bowling Alone, argued that the 1950s was the pinnacle of social capital and community in American life, and that since that era, society has been going bad. However, the chronology of the two studies does not support that conclusion.

Examples

Examples of moral panics inspired by real or imagined phenomena include:

• Comic books as a source of deviancy in the 1950s
• Communism - see McCarthyism in the 1950s
• Day care sex abuse in the 1980s
• The Columbine High School massacre has led many schools into over-reacting against imagined deviance among their pupils, under the guise of "zero tolerance"
• Mods and Rockers caused moral outrage in Britain in the 1960s
• Pedophilia, Child sexual abuse - fear of "molesters" makes for sensational news - an ongoing tabloid newspaper campaign in the UK resulted in the assault and persecution of a paediatrician by an angry mob (which had confused the two words) in August 2000, and in 2005 a man in Manchester, England was lynched after being mistakenly accused of child molestation. [1]
• Child pornography, especially on the Internet, in the 1990s and 2000s.
• Rock 'n' Roll music and its violent or sexual lyrics
• Satanic ritual abuse
• Violence in video games
• Witchcraft
• White slavery
• Homosexuality - Homophobia
• Same-sex marriage
• Transphobia - Transphobia
• The internet, and more recently, MySpace- Sexual predators looking for children <ref>http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5182960</ref>

See also

• Category: Moral panics
• Culture of fear
• Folk devil
• Mass hysteria
• Scapegoat
• Missing white woman syndrome
• Media hype
• Bird Flu
• Penis panic

References

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External links

• 'Moral Panic' and moral language in the media
• Another paper on moral panics
• Course notes on moral panics
• References to 'moral panic' in the British media This site-specific Google search returns references to moral panic at the BBC News website and those of respected British newspapers giving an interesting view of the subject.
• Rockers
• The war on Iraq as a moral panic
• Islam and Moral Panic
• Moral panic over moral panics
• Article on the Myspace moral panicsv:Moralpanik

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