Moral Panics

In Siberia, Russians distribute a newsletter accusing Jews of kidnapping Christian children, blood-letting them to perform the Passover Seder, and tossing their victims' bodies onto garbage dumps. In Australia, politicians and the media allege that immigrants are fomenting a crime wave and call for restrictions on the migration of new residents from Asia. Everywhere that videogames have become popular, parents and the media contend that their producers and distributors corrupt the young, causing them to engage in delinquent behavior. How do we make sense of such episodes? Some observers dismiss such outbreaks of irrational fears as trivial and [Page 450]exotic marginalia, social and historical delusions of little or no sociological significance. Others argue that these accusations, allegations, charges, claims, and expressions of concern share a common thread: All embody the moral panic.

A moral panic is an outbreak of moral concern about the menace from an agent of corruption—a designated “folk devil”—whose imputed threat is out of proportion to its actual danger or potential harm. Such concerns are not always entirely bogus, since the named threats may be genuine, but the claims of impending or ongoing injury are substantially exaggerated regarding the seriousness, extent, typicality, or inevitability of the specified harm or danger. Empirically assessed, the concerns stirred up by ritual murder, immigration, and videogames are out of proportion to their objective threat. For such episodes, the society (or a sector of the society) overreacts to a seeming danger in its midst. There is, in other words, a delusional aspect to the moral panic. Any time a substantial number of people make a false claim of harm, or raise an exaggerated alarm, about a threat posed by a supposed deviant—a category of people who, presumably, menace the society's culture, way of life, and central values—we have a moral panic on our hands. And such concerns signal significant social and cultural rifts or insecurities to which sociologists should pay close attention. The moral panic is perhaps the most influential and widely disseminated concept devised in the 20th century by a sociologist.

In the collective behavior literature, researchers and scholars are careful to point out that what they refer to as a “panic” does not necessarily or usually imply irrational, self-destructive headlong flight away from an imaginary or trivial threat. The term panic is used by the moral panic literature as a metaphor; it borrows from but does not rigidly apply this stereotype drawn from the disaster literature. There is a major and obvious difference between the threat from a disaster and that from the moral panic: In a disaster, the threat tends to be immediate, physical, and genuine. In the moral panic, the threat is usually more slow moving, largely symbolic and cultural, and, more than occasionally, nonexistent.

Historically, the first analyses that specifically named the concept “moral panic” were conducted in the early 1970s by the sociologists Jock Young, who conducted a study of the exaggerated fear of drug use in England, and Stanley Cohen, who analyzed the public's attitudes toward “mods” and “rockers,” two youth groups who inflicted relatively minor acts of vandalism on an English seaside town. At the time, Young and Cohen were left-wing, recent PhDs from the London School of Economics; they noticed the inappropriate and exaggerated attention paid to and concern expressed by key actors in the drama of designating folk devils and their threat. How do we know we have a moral panic when we see one? We know this when social actors express exaggerated concern about or become unduly riled up about a supposed threat by a designated wrongdoer or “folk devil.”

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