![]()
Part One
Gender and the family
Edited by Viviene E. Cree
![]()
Introduction
Viviene E. Cree
To open each part of the book, we introduce the work of a key theorist within the âmoral panicâ genre. The work of Stanley Cohen has played a central part in the creation of ideas around moral panic and these, as will be shown, have developed over time. Many of Cohenâs ideas are reflected in the chapters in this and other parts of the book, while others have been taken forward in other writing in the field.
Stanley Cohen
Stanley Cohen (Stan) was born on 23 February 1942 in Johannesburg, South Africa and studied Sociology and Social Work at the University of Witwatersrand. He moved to the UK in 1963 with his wife, Ruth, where he worked as a psychiatric social worker and PhD student at the London School of Economics (LSE), studying social reactions to vandalism. Cohen was appointed to his first academic position in 1967, at the University of Durham, and in 1968, with Jock Young and others, he set up the first National Deviancy Conference, an initiative that was to challenge conventional ideas about crime and criminology for years to come. He moved to Essex University in 1972, where he became a professor in 1974. Stan and Ruth relocated to Israel in 1980; Stan was professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until 1994. He returned to the LSE in 1995, where, as Chair in Sociology, he helped to establish the Centre for the Study of Human Rights.
Stan Cohen is widely held to be one of the worldâs pre-eminent sociologists; that he began his career as a social worker makes absolute sense, given his lifelong concern for theory developed from practice, for making connections between the personal and the political, and his deep concern for human rights. Cohenâs first book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) was the book of his PhD study on the 1960s battles between mods and rockers. Here Cohen argued that the social reaction to the minor skirmishes between young people on the beaches in Clacton accelerated their bad behaviour and led to a widespread moral panic centred on young people. This book marked the beginning of the translation of the idea of moral panics from academic to everyday usage and, unsurprisingly, to a great deal of misuse of the concept too, as Cohen was acutely aware. He went on to write Psychological Survival (1972), with the sociologist Laurie Taylor, exploring the closed emotional world within the maximum security H-wing at Durham Prison. Prison Secrets (1976) followed. In this, he again focused on prison, this time introducing the idea of âdispersal of controlâ to describe the ways in which the state ever extends its reach into everyday life. Visions of Social Control (1985) took this idea further, pointing out that even seemingly benign interventions in the name of âcommunityâ can be subverted and become ever-stricter measures of social control. In 1988, he published a collection of essays entitled Against Criminology, in which he promoted a âscepticalâ sociology of crime, deviance and control, in opposition to the statistically oriented correctionalism that pervaded criminology at the time.
Cohenâs last book, States of Denial, Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (2001), is an astonishing book that brings together his personal experience (in South Africa and later in Israel) with his criminological knowledge and insights and his passionate belief in human rights. He begins the book in South Africa, in his childhood home. Here he asks: how was it that he, as a young child, knew and didnât know about the injustice experienced by the indigenous black people? He goes on to ask: how do we see and not see atrocities and suffering throughout the world? His call in the end is that we must not be bystanders â we must act. This is a powerful message for social work, a profession that is so thoroughly implicated in social control and yet one that has such potential to make a difference in the lives of those who are disadvantaged. It is also a powerful message for all humankind â that we each have responsibility to challenge oppression where we see it.
In a small way, this book series attempts to live up to the challenge set by Cohen. Each of the chapters that follows in this part engages critically with something that has been identified as a social problem, and tries to encourage new ways of thinking about it. Stan Cohen, in the last months of his life, was very interested in and supportive of our moral panic project. We can only hope that he would have welcomed the outcome.
Stanley Cohen died on 7 January 2013.
Content of Part One
The chapters in Part One all begin from the starting-point of an exploration of gender and the family, asking if and how the concept of moral panic has meaning for the ways in which we think about, and act towards, gender and the family today. This part, along with others in the volume, is an eclectic collection; people are writing from different disciplinary backgrounds and different countries, and they have different âtakesâ on moral panic theory. We have not tried to reconcile these differences; instead, readers are invited to make up their own minds or, rather, to ask their own questions in response to the questions posed by the authors. Not only are the chapters in this part a varied collection, but the part itself is, in important ways, incomplete â it cannot pretend, in so few chapters, to say everything that might be said about gender and the family today. There is, for example, no chapter about either men or fathers; this absence is one that we intend to address as our work progresses in the future. In spite of these cautionary words, Part One offers an exciting, and at times provocative, group of chapters that explore the connections between ideas of gender, class, âraceâ, youth and âthe familyâ, and highlights the importance of not taking things for granted and of questioning the very basis of our beliefs. The social issues identified here all have consequences, often negative ones, for individuals and for society; such is the power of power panics.
Chapter One, by Morena Tartari, tackles head on two social problems that have emerged in Italy in recent years (and, of course, are familiar throughout the world): child abuse and intimate-partner violence, or rather, âfemicideâ. In her chapter, Tartari argues that while these are legitimate subjects of concern, the social and political reaction to them has been disproportionate, leading to the passing of extremely harsh legislation against those deemed to be âperpetratorsâ such as âpaedophilesâ. What concerns her more, however, is the impact that these moral panics and the resultant increased anxiety have had on women and children. She asserts that women and children have increasingly been presented as weak and in need of protection, allowing the state to intervene in ever-stronger ways.
The next three chapters explore the intersections between ideas of femininity, motherhood, social class and âraceâ in three very different contexts: South Wales (Dawn Mannay, Chapter Two), New Zealand (Liz Beddoe, Chapter Three) and the North of England (Sally Brown, Chapter Four). Dawn Mannayâs chapter explores ârespectable and acceptable femininitiesâ as they are negotiated in a discourse of what she describes as a âpervasive discourse of lack, stigma and classed moral panicsâ. Her chapter builds from her own study of mothers and daughters in one of the most deprived communities in South Wales, one that, she argues, is illustrative of a âspatial folk devilâ that stigmatises all who grow up there. Nevertheless, strategies of resistance are evident in the womenâs lives, as demonstrated in the stories of Melanie and her daughter, Adele.
Liz Beddoeâs Chapter Three reflects similar themes, but this time examines them in the context of the media characterisation of âferal familiesâ in the UK and New Zealand. She begins with an account of the characterisation of poor families in the UK, seen in TV programmes such as Benefits Street, and government initiatives such as the Troubled Families Programme (discussed in Chapters Twelve and Fourteen). From here, she opens up the subject to consider the connections being made in this discourse of moral panic between poverty, welfare dependency, child abuse, family violence and Maori families in New Zealand. She argues that this moral panic is not accidental; it is, rather, part of a deliberate tactic to target the âunderclassâ.
In Chapter Four Sally Brown brings us back to the UK, this time to teenage parenting in the North of England. Here she examines the reality that while teenage pregnancy and motherhood figures have fallen in the UK, so concern for teenage pregnancy and motherhood has grown. The underlying assumption, she argues, is that the âwrong kindâ of women are becoming pregnant and having babies; teenage mothers are presented as âbadâ mothers who lack the necessary experience and parenting skills. Sallyâs research disputes this, and she concludes that the panic about teenage pregnancy and parenting is closely aligned to the panic about welfare âscroungersâ and the need to reduce the role of the welfare state.
Part One ends with a provocative contribution from Stuart Waiton, already a well-known figure in the body of literature on moral panics. He begins with the suggestion that as moral discourses in society have declined, so the panic about the family that we are currently experiencing in the UK might best be described as an âamoral panicâ. He then picks up the idea of âearly interventionâ, much loved in social work and social policy circles, and argues that by increasingly intervening early, the state extends its role and its power in ways that we have not begun to imagine. While the focus might, in theory, seem to be on families in poverty, the panic about parenting is generalised or normalised â we all become targets of intervention, and the autonomous self is diminished. This is a challenging place to end Part One, and the idea is picked up in the subsequent parts of the book.
References
Cohen, S. (1972) Folk devils and moral panics: The creation of the mods and rockers, London: MacGibbon and Kee Ltd.
Cohen, S. (1985) Visions of social control: Crime, punishment and classification, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Cohen, S. (1988) Against criminology, London: Transaction Publishers.
Cohen, S. (2001) States of denial: Knowing about atrocities and suffering, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Cohen, S. and Taylor, L. (1972) Psychological survival: Experience of long-term imprisonment, London: Pelican Books Ltd.
Cohen, S. and Taylor, L. (1976) Prison secrets, London: Pluto Press.
![]()
ONE
Women and children first: contemporary Italian moral panics and the role of the state
Morena Tartari
Introduction
This chapter interrogates moral panic through examination of the treatment of child abuse and femicide in Italy in recent years. The discussion builds on my own research in this field. I will argue that child abuse and intimate partner violence are social problems that have both generated moral panics in contemporary Italy. These issues are real phenomena and they must not be neglected or denied, but their severity may have been over-emphasised and over-represented within the public and media arenas, giving rise to peaks of public concern and anxiety that, in turn, have provoked reactions that can be seen as moral panics. As we will see, waves of concern about child abuse were apparent in the years 2006 to 2009; then a new kind of phenomenon emerged in 2012: âfemicideâ. This term and its menace spread through different arenas under the pressure of feminist movements, moral entrepreneurs and politicians, thus provoking widespread social alarm and calls for action.
The chapter discusses my research into the emergence of these concerns and panics, the role of moral entrepreneurs and the disproportionality of the reaction, as well as the consequent legislation and the role of the state in reinforcing the social concerns. In what follows, I first explain how we can understand these issues as moral panics and what makes them such; then I identify some of the key ingredients of these contemporary moral panics; lastly, I discuss how the state can be seen as a particular kind of definer with strong power and control over the legitimisation of social concerns. I begin, however, with a brief introduction to the methodological approach taken in my study.
The approach used in my study
The methodological approach of this study is based on a flexible form of grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) and the use of sensitising concepts (Blumer, 1969), stemming from the seminal work of Cohen (1972), Hall et al (1978), Beck (1992), Jenkins (1992), Goode and Ben-Yehuda (1994), Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995), Critcher (2003 and 2009) and Hier (2011). The corpus of data is constituted by national newspaper articles (from 1992 to 2013), TV programmes (2007 for the child abuse moral panic and 2012â13 for the femicide moral panic), 60 in-depth interviews with social actors involved in the emergence of panics, ethnographies of conferences and public events about child abuse and femicide, and journalism essays about these issues.
Child abuse and femicide as moral panics
Waves of heightened...
