Moral Panics and the British Media – A look at some contemporary ‘Folk Devils’

Moral Panics and the British Media – A look at some contemporary ‘Folk Devils’
by Ian Marsh and Gaynor Melville

The term moral panic has been widely adopted both by the mass media and in everyday usage to refer to the exaggerated social reaction caused by the activities of particular groups and/or individuals. 


The review concludes that there are key elements to moral panics and that these panics are the result of real events and actual behaviour and cannot be dismissed as myths.

Essentially, a moral panic refers to an exaggerated reaction, from the media, the police or wider public, to the activities of particular social groups. These activities may well be relatively trivial but have been reported in a somewhat sensationalised form in the media; and such reporting and publicity has then led to an increase in general anxiety and concern about those activities. 

So a moral panic is an exaggerated response to a type of behaviour that is seen as a social problem – the term indicates an over-reaction on the part of the media and/or other social institutions. 

In terms of its theoretical stance, Cohen’s seminal study on moral panics was clearly based on the labelling or interactionist perspective – an approach with a strong focus on how society labels rule-breakers as belonging to particular deviant groups and how once a person or group is labeled, the actions they undertake are viewed and interpreted in terms of this label. 

Furthermore, this over-reaction magnifies the original area of concern. Indeed it leads to the social group (and, as a consequence, the behaviour and activities they engage in) being viewed by the wider society as ‘folk devils’ – another term coined by Cohen. 

In modern societies most information is received second hand, usually processed by the mass media and so subject to their definitions of what constitutes ‘news’ and how it is presented. And this information is also affected by the constraints which newspapers and broadcasters have to operate under – both commercial and political constraints. 

The media reaction to deviant behaviour can lead to a process of deviance amplification whereby media attention increases the isolation of the deviant group who are forced to continue and develop their deviant behaviour and so on. 

There is a danger that the notion of media panic can be applied somewhat indiscriminately to all sorts of quite transient examples of youthful behaviour and/or delinquency; and in our discussion we are keen to keep the focus on the social reaction as led by the mass media. Having said that, there have been many recent examples of youthful behaviour that could be considered as having produced a moral panic. 

Hooded jackets were particularly popularized in the 1970s as part of the hip hop music scene and as a result of being worn by Sylvester Stallone in the Rocky films. However it was not until the 1990s that the term ‘hoodies’ was generally used to describe these garments, when they became associated with emergence of what were termed ‘chavs’, young disaffected working class youths, in this country; and were spread by their use by young skateboarders. And it was not until 2005, that the press and public were referring to ‘hoody culture’. 

The banning of hoodies from the Bluewater shopping centre in 2005 excited a great deal of media interest and debate. It led to the ‘meaning’ of the hoodie being examined by journalists and academics. As Gareth McLean (2005) pointed out, although only a sweatshirt with a bit extra, the hooded top strikes fear into the heart on most people, ‘a lone figure behind us on the walk home – hood up, head down – and we quicken our step.. a group of hooded teenagers on the street and we’re tensing our shoulders, clenching our fists.’

The move was, though, welcomed by many, including the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, who saw it as an attempt to clamp down on anti-social and threatening behaviour. 

the moral panic over hoodies is almost a continuation of a previous panic over chavs – working class, white boys who had underachieved in school and who, in the face of a bleak future in terms of respectable employment, turn to anti-social, delinquent behaviour. 

The moral panic about hoodies was part of a wider concern about the anti-social behaviour of youths and, as with other panics, the reaction has been criticized by academics and those working in the criminal justice system as excessive. 

the rest of society resents and fears such groups, as Ainley puts it, the ‘respectable working middle class live in fear and loathing of the hooded, chav “underclass”’. Indeed it was this resentment and response that led to the banning of hoodies from the Bluewater centre; and it was a response not just from ‘respectable’ society but from other teenagers

However, in spite of the differing political comments around the reaction to hoodies, the media reporting of ‘hoody culture’ has been both hostile and scaremongering in line with the way the media has responded to other, previous moral panics. Even though and at the same time as exciting this hostile reaction, the hoodie is a widely popular item of clothing that is in the wardrobes of millions of people, and is sold in the millions by firms such as Nike, Adidas and Gap. 

Nonetheless, there are key elements apparent in any moral panic. As Cavanagh (2007) puts it, the moral panic reflects social anxieties and concerns about behaviour that is seen as some sort of moral threat. The concerns are then exaggerated in regard to both scale and frequency, they are symbolised in terms of them being a threat to traditional values and are emphasized by groups of ‘moral entrepreneurs’ who reframe the particular problem in terms of the solutions that they favour. 

the moral panic has become a regular aspect of media reporting of anti-social and criminal behaviour so that, ‘moral panics are a direct product of the mundane practices of journalists’. The essential point here is that public anxieties and concerns are only able to take on a public form through the media. 

And it is important to be aware that moral panics are not myths but are the result of actual behaviour and real events. So the analysis of moral panics, ‘is focused on the observation of distortion and exaggeration in presentation of this factual problem’. 


Furthermore, this over-reaction magnifies the original area of concern. Indeed it leads to the social group (and, as a consequence, the behaviour and activities they engage in) being viewed by the wider society as ‘folk devils’ – another term coined by Cohen.