The Ashgate Research Companion to Moral Panics

Charles Krinsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409408116
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317042426
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Ashgate Research Companion to Moral Panics offers a comprehensive assemblage of cutting-edge critical and theoretical perspectives on the concept of moral panic. All chapters represent original research by many of the most influential theorists and researchers now working in the area of moral panic, including Nachman Ben-Yehuda and Erich Goode, Joel Best, Chas Critcher, Mary deYoung, Alan Hunt, Toby Miller, Willem Schinkel, Kenneth Thompson, Sheldon Ungar, and Grazyna Zajdow. Chapters come from a range of disciplines, including media studies, literary studies, history, legal studies, and sociology, with significant new elaborations on the concept of moral panic (and its future), informed and powerful critiques, and detailed empirical studies from several continents. A clear and comprehensive survey of a concept that is increasingly influential in a number of disciplines as well as in popular culture, this collection of the latest research in the field addresses themes including the evolution of the moral panic concept, sex panics, media panics, moral panics over children and youth, and the future of the moral panic concept.

PART I
THE EVOLUTION OF THE MORAL PANIC CONCEPT

Overview of Part I

As interest in the topic has continued to grow, some of the path-breaking sociologists who first devised the moral panics model have re-entered the scholarly debates over the concept in order to clarify their original intentions. For example, Jock Young, whose essay, “The Role of the Police as Amplifiers of Deviancy, Negotiators of Reality and Translators of Fantasy: Some Consequences of Our Present System of Drug Control as Seen in Notting Hill” (1971), includes the earliest use of the term “moral panic” by a sociologist in print, recently recalled that he and other young British academics involved with the “new deviancy theory” of the 1960s and 1970s saw themselves as advocates of a radically innovative sociological perspective:

The first level of advocacy was, thus, the appreciation and defemce of subculture; the second was to question the nature of social reaction. This corresponded to the rule of symmetry: that, in order to explain deviant behaviour, it was necessary to explain action and reaction and then, of course, subsequently, the impact of reaction upon action. As such, it invoked a notion of subcultures in collision and the necessity of a ‘fully social theory’ of deviance to explain both, say, the subcultures of youth and those of control, whether the police, journalists, lawyers, etc. But there was, as we have seen, a third level of advocacy, and that concerned the impact of social reaction, namely that secondary deviance was often more severe than primary deviance, secondary harm more of a problem than primary harm. This was the basis of the critique of the whole process of criminalization, of prison as producing the criminal just as the mental hospital constructed madness and treatment clinics produced addicts and alcoholics, etc. Irrationality was, therefore, shifted from the supposedly wanton youth or mindless drugtaker to the agents of control themselves, for the actions of authority through the process of deviancy amplification only made things worse.

In reaction against sociologists of deviance who, it seemed to them, treated criminality and deviance as readily classifiable behaviors or tendencies, Young and other new deviancy theorists advocated a wholesale critique of the social processes of criminalization and of the ascription of deviance. According to Young, the advocacy pursued by new deviancy theorists found expression in three crucial, interrelated concepts about society and deviance or, as Young puts it, expressed itself on three levels. First, rather than seeing mainstream society as a largely non-ideological configuration from which deviant groups diverge, new deviancy theorists saw both mainstream society and deviants as two distinct groups or subcultures, each with its own norms and deviations, that, in conflict with one another, mutually produce categorizations of normativity and deviance. Second, and tied to this viewpoint, instead of accepting deviance as a deviation from social norms to which mainstream society then reacts, new deviancy theorists asserted that both mainstream society and deviant groups act and react in relation to each other. Third, new deviancy theorists recognized no defining distinctions between primary deviance, that is, deviance from social norms, and secondary deviance, that is, further deviance produced as a result of being treated as deviant. They asserted, instead, that all deviance involves reacting to ascriptions of deviance (though acknowledging that being treated as deviant often amplifies deviance).

Young remembers that the various levels of advocacy pursued by new deviancy theorists coalesced in producing the moral panic concept. He relates that the new deviancy theorists’ formulation of the moral panics model was inspired by the notion of moral indignation as advanced by Danish sociologist Svend Ranulf in the 1930s and elaborated upon by American criminologist Albert K. Cohen in the 1960s. Young (2009: 10) recounts,

Albert Cohen conceived of moral indignation as what would now be described as a form of ‘othering’—a process both of threat to identity and of confirmation. Further, that such a moral disturbance had an intensity of emotion, that it was a function both of attraction and repulsion. It was out of such an analysis of moral indignation (supplemented of course with notions of the moral entrepreneur ...), and moral passage ... that the concept of moral panic arose. Indeed, if moral indignation depicts the chronic condition of moral disturbance, moral panic is its acute form.

A variation on Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1996: 22, emphasis in original) conceptualization of “ressentiment” (put simply, profound hostility displaced onto a scapegoat), moral indignation constitutes a discomfort or disquiet experienced by those who adhere to social norms concerning others’ deviance from those standards. To Albert K. Cohen’s (and before Cohen, Svend Ranulf’s) notion of moral indignation, Young adds the insight that it constitutes an ongoing condition that may find episodic expression in moral panics Or, to use Young’s (2009: 7) own words, “The folk devils conjured up out of moral indignation and prejudice are actually constructed by the forces of social control.”

In “Whose Side Were We On? The Undeclared Politics of Moral Panic Theory” (2011), Stanley Cohen, whose Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (the first edition of which was published in 1972) remains the most widely influential work on the topic, responds to those critics (religious studies scholar Philip Jenkins among them) who aver that, assumedly because of their leftist social perspectives, he and indeed most researchers chose to analyze repressive moral panics (such as those over drugtaking, mods and rockers, or mugging) that obscured the actual causes of social problems and extended social control over outsiders, strategically ignoring any moral panics that might, in contrast, benefit society. Cohen (2011: 238) writes,

But can anyone on ‘our side’ find a good, positive or approved moral panic? Jenkins, one of the few students of moral panic who explicitly poses the question, is also one of the few who stubbornly stands outside the liberal consensus. He repeats the familiar charge that moral panic theory ensures (by circular logic) that its claims to objectivity will always sound bogus or exaggerated: ‘Whoever heard of a legitimate panic or of well-founded hysteria?’ ... Cases are still chosen, he claims, because of their suitability for debunking by liberals. Moral panic is another term of political correctness (a poor argument as there have in fact been numerous moral panics around child abuse).

Cohen retorts that he and other new deviancy theorists wrote of moral panics that denied the causes of social problems and maintained the status quo because that was how such episodes occurred in the 1970s. He adds that by the 2000s, many potentially beneficial moral panics over corporate crime, crimes of the state, and environmental crimes were taking place, furnishing a detailed and enumerated summary of the many differences between moral panics of the 1970s and those of the twenty-first century:

New forms and features of moral panics are already emerging—trying to adapt in evolutionary-like style to the new conditions of postmodernity. Here are a few; their final shape is not yet clear.

1. It is easier for us (sociological critics of moral panics) to identify with the kind of moral entrepreneurs behind new panics than with traditional entrepreneurs. We are closer to them in social class, education and ideology. Moreover we are more likely to agree with them about the distinction between moral panic (the problem is taken too seriously) and denial (the problem is not taken seriously enough).
2. The alliances between political forces are now more plastic and flexible. Panics about ‘genuine’ victims (of natural disasters, for example) generate more consensus than uncertain, or even ‘unworthy’, victims such as the homeless.
3. Traditional moral panics are elite engineered. The new panics may not be entirely populist, but do give more space to social movements, identity politics and victims.
4. Theoretically there can be ‘negative’ moral panics (the traditional ones that criminologists so readily detect, expose and criticize) but also ‘positive’ ones where we approve the values beyond the ‘panic’ but not the label itself. It sounds considerably more sensible to talk of an ‘approved crusade’ than an ‘approved panic’. But this would lose precisely the particular connotation of ‘panic’ that one wants to retain!
5. The dominant tone of new panics is no longer non-interventionist. Indeed, more intervention is the (literally) observable index of success, in particular the construction of more laws, rules, contracts and regulations. The social bases of the new criminalizers ... is surely of interest—either (1) they are post-liberals who come from a decriminalizing generation—private morality is not the business of the state, net-widening leads to the hidden extension of state power, and so on, or (2) they are part of the new right—they are against state power that takes the form of regulation over health, welfare, disease risk, protection, ‘hate’ and the environment, but private morality (sexuality, abortion, lifestyles) should become even more the business of the state. They also have few problems with the extension of the correctional system.
6. Certain new moral panics can be understood as ‘anti-denial’ movements. The message is that the denial—cover-up, evasion, normalization, turning a blind eye, tolerance, and so on—of certain social conditions, events and behaviours is morally wrong and politically irrational. Acknowledgement becomes the slogan. The previously denied realities must now be brought to public attention, their dangers exposed, their immorality denounced. (Cohen 2011: 240–41)

Cohen details the many differences between current and past moral panics, contending, for example, that those who act as moral entrepreneurs are now more easily identified with by sociologists, episodes are less often elite engineered than in the past, the political alliances that support moral panics are more flexible and changing than those of the 1970s, and in some cases the victims identified in moral panics, such as survivors of natural disasters, more readily generate consensus (or, in other words, are less often chosen for political purposes). Pointedly, at the same time that he isolates apparently objective distinctions between new and older moral panics, he both questions the assertion that he and other new deviancy theorists were overly subjective in their analyses of moral panics and casts doubt on the notion that later researchers such as Jenkins can claim substantially greater objectivity. For instance, in comparing victims of natural disasters with the homeless, he implies that while some victims at the center of current moral panics may be seen as ideologically neutral, others are certainly not. Additionally, in employing such terms as “post-liberals” and “new right,” Cohen emphasizes that later moral panic researchers are no more apolitical than the new deviancy theorists whom they oppose.

The Evolution of the Moral Panic Concept

Like Jock Young and Stanley Cohen in the works discussed above, the authors collected in part one of The Ashgate Research Companion to Moral Panics take backward glances at the moral panics model in order to increase its usefulness for current researchers. In chapter one, “The Genealogy and Trajectory of the Moral Panic Concept,” Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda look at the political inspiration for the moral panics model. They contend that as the structure of society has changed, so has the concept. They trace its genealogy back to the young British sociologists of the National Deviancy Conference and the cultural ferment of the 1960s.

Chapter two, Toby Miller’s “Tracking Moral Panic as a Concept,” traces the development of the moral panic concept once it left college and university campuses. In Miller’s view, as academics’ power to determine its meaning diminished, the notion of moral panic took on a life of its own. Miller concludes that paying attention to the meanings that moral panic has accrued in popular culture may enable us to make it a useful tool in effecting progress in the United States.

Chapter three, “Assemblages of Moral Politics: Yesterday and Today,” by Alan Hunt, identifies moral panics as intense, usually short-lived elements of ongoing moral regulation projects. Noting that such episodes do not always have a clear moral aspect, Hunt suggests that moral regulation comprises assemblages of diverse elements whose composition varies over time and where no single component determines the overall trajectory.

In chapter four, “The Problems with Moral Panic: The Concept’s Limitations,” Joel Best recommends that while some of its originators continue to defend the concept, contemporary researchers might be better advised to assess its problems clearly. As his endeavor in this direction, Best (like Goode and Ben-Yehuda) tracks the evolution of the moral panics model as far back as the National Deviancy Conference.

References

Cohen, S. 2011. Whose side were we on? The undeclared politics of moral panic theory. Crime, Media, Culture, 7(3), 237–43.

Cohen, S. 2002 (1972, 1980). Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. 3rd Edition. London: Routledge.

Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., and Roberts, B. 1978. Policing the Crisis:

Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Critical Social Studies. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Jenkins, P. 2009. Failure to launch: why do some social issues fail to detonate moral panics? British Journal of Criminology, 49(1), 35–47.

Nietzsche, F. 1996 (1887), On the Genealogy of Morals, translated by D. Smith. Oxford World’s Classics. New York: Oxford University Press. Originally published as Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift. Leipzig: C.G. Naumann.

Young, J. 2009. Moral panic: its origins in resistance, ressentiment and the translation of fantasy. British Journal of Criminology, 49(1), 4–16.

1

The Genealogy and Trajectory of the Moral Panic Concept

Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda*

The Ten Commandments notwithstanding, no ideas drop fully formed from the heavens; all concepts, theories, and principles grow from the ground up, out of the rich soil of context, culture, communication, and human contact. The moral panic is no exception. Exaggerated or misplaced accusations of believed moral wrongdoing, the persecution of innocent parties, and the fear, suspicion, or concern that certain individuals, groups, or categories threaten a community’s or a society’s well-being, way of life, and moral order stretch back to the dawn of humanity. But it was not until the early 1970s that academics identified, conceptualized, and named the phenomenon of widespread concern over a nonexistent or minor moral threat in the form of a sociological concept.

In 1964, a series of scuffles broke out in Clacton, a small resort town on England’s east coast, between two youth factions, the mods (or modernists) and the rockers (delinquent rock and rollers). The damage totaled only a bit more than £500 (perhaps four times that in today’s currency). But the police, unaccustomed to such rowdy vandalistic behavior, arrested nearly a hundred youths and the media reported these disturbances, and similar conflicts in other seaside resort towns, in sensationalistic, outraged stories bearing headlines such as “‘Wild Ones’ Invade Seaside—97 Arrests,” and “Wild Ones ‘Beat Up’ Margate” (see illustrations 1.1, 1.2). These and comparable headlines and reports designated members of youth gangs as deviants, the “other,” the enemy—in Stanley Cohen’s term, a collective folk devil. To put an end to delinquent behaviors such as occurred at Clacton and elsewhere, members of Parliament called for stiffer penalties for “hooliganism” and other youth offenses and the House of Commons introduced and debated bills designed to address the problem of rowdy young people. In 1965, Cohen, then a graduate student at the London School of Economics (LSE), was struck by the “fundamentally inappropriate” reaction of the police, the media, and legislators to these minor incidents and decided to study this intriguing discrepancy (2002: 172).

Illustration 1.1 Daily Mirror, “‘Wild Ones’ Invade Seaside—97 Arrests,” March 30, 1964

Illustration 1.2 Daily Mirror, “Wild Ones ‘Beat Up’ Margate,” May 18, 1964

Between 1967 and 1969, Jock Young, another LSE graduate student and a friend of Cohen, while engaging in a participant observation study of marijuana use among bohemian residents of Notting Hill, a community in London, was struck by the stereotypes the police held of drug users, the moral indignation officers felt and expressed toward these young mi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Moral Panic Concept
• Part I The Evolution of the Moral Panic Concept
• Part II Sex Panics
• Part III Media Panics
• Part IV Moral Panics Over Children and Youth
• Part V Moral Panics and Governance
• Part VI The Future of the Moral Panic Concept
• Appendix I Alternative Thematizations for Classroom Use and Course Reading Lists
•  Appendix II Moral Panic: A Bibliography
• Index