Moral Panic

The concept of moral panic has been a core element in the work of many sociologists of deviance, and criminologists, especially those from the interactionist (viewing the world as one of subjective realities) and conflict (seeing the world as an objective reality) schools, for at least the last quarter of the twentieth century. Like many other criminological concepts, it has a rich and multifaceted history. Most scholars point to British criminologist Stanley Cohen (b. 1942) as the founder of the concept of moral panic. First published in 1972, Cohen's book Folk Devils and Moral Panics was an outgrowth of work done while he was a doctoral student at the University of London between 1964 and 1967, and the first place that the concept of moral panic was fully developed. He defines a moral panic as

Cohen's work focused on the reactions of the media, agents of social control, and the general public to relatively minor clashes between youth subcultures (the Mods and the Rockers) in England, and the ways in which these reactions influenced the formation and enforcement of law and social policy, as well as societal conceptions of the youth culture-delinquency nexus. While many subsequent scholars have similarly applied the concept to youth subcultures (punks, skin-heads, goths, ravers, etc.), others have gone beyond the original focus to apply it to more generalized and adult manifestations of deviant and criminal behavior (soccer hooligans, motorcycle gangs, Satanists, pedophiles, serial killers, etc.). The concept of moral panic continued to grow in importance in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, spurring considerable theoretical [Page 1077]development, particularly the resurgence of critical criminology (which views law enforcement in a framework of class, gender, and racial inequities) and the emergence of cultural criminology (which studies crime and deviance through the commonalities among cultural and criminal practices).