Moral Panics - Research

"According to Cohen, society is often subject to such instances and periods of moral panic; an occurrence which is characterised by ‘stylized and stereotypical’ representation by the mass media, and a tendency for those ‘in power’ (politicians, bishops, editors and so on) to man the ‘moral barricades’ and pronounce judgement."
(Moral Panics, Lesley Sands P1)



"As Goode and Ben-Yehuda explain, the ‘folk devil’ is a ‘deviant’: someone engaged in wrongdoing and whose actions are considered harmful to society. They are deemed selfish and evil and thus substantial steps must be taken to ‘neutralize’ their actions, in order to allow a return to ‘normality’ (Goode & Ben-Yehuda 1994: 29). Finally in the ‘drama’ of the moral panic is the development of the ‘disaster mentality’ which has strong parallels with steps taken ‘before, during, and after a natural disaster’. These include ‘predictions of impending doom’, overreactions, the ‘institutionalization of threat’, rumour, false alarms and at times mass delusion (Cohen 1972: 144-8 in Goode & Ben-Yehuda 1994: 29)."
(Moral Panics, Lesley Sands P1)(Cohen 1972: 144-8 in Goode & Ben-Yehuda 1994: 29)



"Moral panics then, are those processes whereby members of a society and culture become 'morally sensitized' to the challenges and menaces posed to 'their' accepted values and ways of life, by the activities of groups defined as deviant. The process underscores the importance of the mass media in providing, maintaining and 'policing' the available frameworks and definitions of deviance, which structure both public awareness of, and attitudes towards, social problems."(Key Concepts in Communication (O'Sullivan, Fiske et al 1983)



"Moral panic analysis is ultimately based on the view that social science has as one of its core functions an ability to assess the claims made about the status of a social problem or deviant group. This is never easy and always challenging but should not be abandoned”.
 (Critcher, 2008: 1141). 

"Panics are not like fads, trivial in nature and inconsequential in their impact; they do not come and go, vanishing, as it were, without a trace. Even those that seem to end without impact often leave informal traces that prepare us for later panics. A close examination of the impact of panics forces us to take a more long-range view of things, to look at panics as social process rather than as separate, discrete, time-bound events. Moral panics are a crucial element of the fabric of social change. They are not marginal, exotic, trivial phenomena, but one key by which we can unlock the mysteries of social life 
(Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994: 229). 

"Cases where the moral outrage appears driven by conservative or reactionary forces....[where] the point [of research] was to expose social reaction not just as over-reaction...[but also as] tendentious (that is, slanted in a particular ideological direction) and...as misplaced or displaced (that is, aimed – whether deliberately or thoughtlessly – at a target which was not the ‘real’ problem)
(Cohen, 2002: xxxi) 

"

• Moral panics occur when the media turn a reasonably ordinary event and present it as extraordinary.
  
• The media, in particular, set in motion a deviance amplification spiral, through which the subjects of the panic are viewed as a source of moral decline and social disintegration.
  
• Moral panics clarify the moral boundaries of the society in which they occur.
  
• Moral panics occur during periods of rapid social change and anxiety.
  
• Young people are the usual target of moral panics, their behaviour is ‘regarded
  as a barometer to test the health or sickness of as society"
  (Jewkes, 2004, p 67) 
  
  
  

"The media, then—in a sense—can create social problems, they can present them dramatically and overwhelmingly, and, most important, they can do it suddenly. The media can very quickly and effectively fan public indignation and engineer what one might call ’a moral panic’ about a certain type of deviancy." 
(Young, 1971b, P37) 

"When the official reaction to a person, groups of persons or series of events is out of all proportion to the actual threat offered, when ‘experts’, in the form of police chiefs, the judiciary, politicians, and editors perceive the threat in all but identical terms, and appear to talk ‘with one voice’ of rates, diagnoses, prognoses and solutions, when the media representations universally stress ‘sudden and dramatic’ increases (in numbers involved or events) and ‘novelty’, above and beyond that which a sober, realistic appraisal could sustain, then we believe it is appropriate to speak of the beginnings of a moral panic."

(Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, P16)

"As we have seen throughout this book, moral panics make up an extremely diverse collection of events. We do not find that they go through specific, predetermined stages, with a beginning, a middle, and a predictable end. ... Their locus may be society-wide, or local and regional; more specifically, and broad, society-wide panic may be evident in all or nearly all communities nationally, or may or may not explode in certain specific locales, or alternatively, a panic may be extremely brief, lasting as little as a month or two .... Or they may be more long term and run their course only after several years. Some of the longer panics may represent the temporally limited portion of a much longer-range concern."
(Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 2009, 226)

"In the 1980s, however, the focus of sociologists turned to the rise of the New Right economic policies and ideology, involving economic deregulation coupled with cultural and moral re-regulation. The concept of moral panic seemed less relevant because it appeared to focus on episodic and discrete events, giving too much attention to symptoms rather than focusing directly on political-economic developments and their relationship to ideological trends. Other sociologists dispensed with the concept because it seemed to involve subjecting ‘representations’ to the judgement of the ‘real’, rather than concentrating on the operations of representational systems in their own right.
(Kenneth Thomson, Moral Panics, P140)