Moral Panic

What is a moral Panic?:

It was Stanley Cohen 1987 who first came up with the term moral panics. He defined it as a condition, episode, person or group who become defined as a threat to societal values and interests due to their representation within the media e.g.) mods & rockers. Cohen also points out that the media sometimes stylises these episodes amplifying the nature of the facts and consequently turning them into a national issue thus making them worse than they needed to be as they could of been contained at a local level. A quote shows this factor well which is about "making a mountain out of molehill"

Cohen's study originated from his interest in the youth culture and its perceived potential threat to social order. Throughout each era, a group has emerged who fits the criteria that Cohen has labelled as being turned into a moral panic or a threat, such as Skinheads, Hells Angels etc. They all become associated with negative aspects usually violence, which in turn also provoke public reaction usually calling for a police presence within the community of where the event took place.

Moral panic examples include the following:

-football hooliganism
-drug abuse
-vandalism
-video nasties
-aids
-knife crime

There are various ways in which these moral panics/issues are dealt with. Generally they pass as quickly as they came and are long forgotten when the media begins to write about other news as the moral panic isn't published no more thus sparking less interest in the subject and making it less of an issue. However some moral panic last for years even sparking riots such as aids which was labelled as the gay plague resulting in insults t homosexual public.

An Example of a Moral Panic:

An example of a moral panic would be the torture and murder of James Bulger whick took place in the early 1990 causing a moral panic known as the paedophile scare. It is not hard to see why people were so upset over this case and why newspapers covered the story aggressively resulting in a panic. As many commentators tried to state that the murder of James Bulger was a gruesome act which was somehow characteristic in modern British society, despite the fact that various figures show that such child murders being killed by other children are extremely rare.

However children have in the past killed other children yet what is different about this case is the media input which resulted in national reactions to the event. For example Mary Bell who was eleven at the time killed two toddlers in 1968 but instead of covering it the media chose to ignore it, which in turn resulted in public rejection of it as a cause for panic due to low coverage of the incident.

The media used the case of James Bulger to symbolise all that was wrong with Britain with one paper quoting ‘it’s an evil world and we need strict rules’ about the two boys who killed James. Explanations for why the crime took place weren’t discussed within the media instead they chose to focus on the difference between innocence and evil. Even a moral message was brought out from the Guardian newspaper which said and I quote “we are all guilty, and we must make sure it never happens again”

This shows that the cultural hegemony model has been used by the media to make the viewers/readers/public take on their believes and ideologies thus resulting in various rules to be carried out and other regulations to be announced. Now that the media had highlighted and presented to the public so many issues of moral and societal concern no one said anything in opposition to a series of solutions that were mainly produced by the government.

This included:

• The installation of more surveillance cameras as they had been vital in showing who the kidnappers were.
• Banning of violent films as the belief was that the video Child’s Play III which the boys watched was believed to have been the reason that they carried outt the attack by mimicking a scene from the film.

This moral panic raised concern that children are now more at risk from child killers in and paedophiles. The press remained constant with this topic even discussing other paedophilia cases with the Guardian saying that police services ignored the scale of the cases and that they were getting bigger each year. The Home Office estimated at the time that up to 110,000 people in Britain had been convicted of sex offences against children and outlines a chronology of the worst offences

Some of these include:

• August 1993: The abduction, rape and manslaughter of 14 year old Jason Swift by Robert Oliver.
• March 1996: Arrest of Roger Saint, a foster father who had served on Clwyd County Council’s adoption panel.
• August 1996: Marc Dutroux arrested by Belgian police.
• July 1997: Brendan Smyth, a Catholic priest convicted of indecent assaults on 20 children.
• August 1997: Public schoolmaster Adrian Stark- committed suicide after being charged with child pornography offences.