Moral Panics

Definition: moral panic; plural noun: moral panics

an instance of public anxiety or alarm in response to a problem regarded as threatening the moral standards of society. 

Moral panics are not to be confused with risk society disasters. Moral panics often have a target group or a culprit where as risk society disasters don't have a specific enemy, this makes them unstable and more difficult to identify or isolate.

When speaking of moral panic the obvious theory to include is the "Deviancy Amplification Spiral." This is the general process that occurs when an issue or incident insights a moral panic. 

 

The Deviancy Amplification Spiral. 

 The spiral illustrates how moral panics can emerge with very little cause especially once the media have become involved. This can lead to mass hysteria and outrage which causes more fear and often leads to the issues becoming worse not better. In societies in general we tend to hold our values very close and once these become threatened it can cause irrational thinking. 

 Once the Deviancy Amplification Spiral has been completed it can lead to a response from the legal system to appease the public. This could come in the form of extra policing focusing on the illicit problem or judges handing out harsher sentences or even politicians being pressured to pass new laws. All of this does more to convince the public that their fears were justified and the media continue to profit through covering not only the initial problem but any other story which has a tenuous link also.

Studies which can be linked to the spiral include:

 Jock Young http://cmc.sagepub.com/content/7/3/245.short
Stanley Cohen http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1111%2Fj.1468-2311.1967.tb00231.x

"Media appear to reflect reality but instead construct it"

-Stuart Hall 

An example of a  moral panic which could illustrate Hall's perspective is the London Riots of 2011, which if you were to simply look at the stories printed by the news papers was purely filled with young people. But the London School of Economics conducted a study and interviewed 270 rioters, the age range was from 13-57 and a third of the rioters interviewed said that they had never been criminally convicted or cautioned.

 BBC news footage of the London riots. 

According to Charles Krinsky moral panics are set in motion and carried out in the public sphere, this is seen now even more due to social networking websites, especially Facebook and Twitter which both played a large part in the London riots. Krinsky insists that public figures instill more fear into people rather than calm, an example of this could be news articles which exaggerate the initial problem which then increases anxiety. 

McRobbie and Thornton to theorists who have studied moral panics note how since the seventies both society and the media have become more fragmented and contradictory. No longer are moral panics allowed to gently fade away but now their completely followed by the media from beginning to end. But they also make the point that the media and it's views are not as diverse as society and although opinions are now common in articles they do not tend to show varied range and so induce moral panics and enforce a social view point.