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Moral panic
A moral panic is a public panic over an issue deemed to be a threat to, or shocking to, the sensibilities of "proper" society. This is often fanned by sensationalist selective reporting in the media and exaggerated accounts offered by "moral entrepreneur," a category that includes politicians on the make and activists in search of a cause. Moral panics can result in what is a real phenomenon being blown way out of proportion, or in what is not a real phenomenon in the first place being widely believed to be real. Moral panics often feature a caricatured or stereotypical "folk devil" on which the anxieties of the community are focused, as described by sociologist Stanley Cohen who coined the term in his study Folk Devils and Moral Panics, which examined media coverage of the mod and rocker riots in the 1960s.[1][2]
Where the moral panic involves a group whose members are conscious of their subordination, the denounced behavior may become "a symbol of opposition and rebellion."[3]
Contents |
[edit] Examples
Examples of things over which there were actual moral panics, or arguably could be called moral panics, organized by category:
[edit] Crime panics
- Gangs.
- Lesbian gangs - promoted by Bill O'Reilly, who later admitted the reports were "overstated.".
- Outlaw motorcycle clubs, especially in present-day Australia and off and on in the United States.
- Switchblades.
- Nunchucks.
- Juvenile delinquency.
- Skinheads.
- Hate groups.
- Terrorism when it takes the form of a Big Scary Threat.
- Black-on-white crime, especially rape.
- Identity theft.
- Anonymous.
- School shootings.
- Prostitution.
- Drugs.
- Marijuana, most notably during the era of social guidance films like Reefer Madness.
- Crack cocaine in the 1980s, claimed to be several times more addictive than regular cocaine (which turned out to be false).
- Underage drinking.
- Child abduction.
[edit] Media panics
- Backward masking in your rock & roll records.
- MP3s can be downloaded as digital drugs which gets kids high.[4] (See also I-Doser)
- Pokémon is a bad influence on the children — promotion of psychic abilities and evolution.
- The Harry Potter books — they promote witchcraft!
- Music piracy and file-sharing.
- The "video nasties", a set of movies banned in the United Kingdom for supposedly causing immoral behavior.
- Heavy metal promoting sex, drugs, and Satan.[5]
- Hip-hop turning people into violent, sex-crazed, misogynistic thugs — and, if African American, into black nationalists as well.
- Violence and sex in video games causing youth delinquency and violence.
- Dungeons and Dragons players summoning and worshiping demons and pagan gods.
- Comic books in the '50s. The hysterical claims of the book Seduction of the Innocent gave rise to the Comics Code Authority.
[edit] Political panics
- Communism, and "subversive activity" in general, during the Cold War.
- Ecoterrorism.
- The militia movement.
- Gay marriage, only a panic among the religious right.
- The New World Order and/or the Illuminati.
- White nationalism and the fear of Neo Nazism
- In the 19th century, fear of Freemasonry and other secret societies was enough to propel a minor political party, the Anti-Masonic Party.
- "They took err jerbs!" Anti-immigrant hysteria typically manifests in different forms throughout history, with the immigrants in question often inevitably assimilating and railing against the next wave of immigrants within fifty years.
- In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was the coming Catholic conquest of America, with Catholic immigrants acting as a fifth column in support of a Habsburg takeover of the United States.
- The Yellow Peril was big on the West Coast and in Australia around the same time as the above.
- During the Great Depression, there was panic in California over "Okies", impoverished Midwesterners fleeing the Dust Bowl, in a case of anti-immigrant rhetoric being turned against fellow Americans. The LAPD even attempted to close the state's borders with the rest of the country in a "Bum Blockade" in 1936.[6]
- The "reconquista", the idea that Latino Americans will support a coming Mexican invasion of the Southwestern US as revenge for the Mexican-American War.
- Eurabia in Europe.
- The influence of Jews in society.
- Feminism, among social conservatives.
- The ever-impending "Social Security crisis".
- POW-MIAs left behind in Vietnam.
- Voter fraud.
- Predictive programming
[edit] Medical panics
- Dangerous vaccines.
- Abortion and embryonic stem cell research, among the right.
- The Pro-life threat to Roe v. Wade, among the left.
- Everything causes cancer!
- Ebola will kill us all!
[edit] Religious panics
- Satanism in general.
- Satanic ritual abuse, particularly on Halloween.
- The Satanic Panic.
- Allegations that liberals want to ban the Bible .
- The War on Christmas.
- Islam is a big bad threat — bigger and badder, that is, than any other organized religion, and its creeping Sharia.
- Jews, again.
- The Pope, who is (allegedly) the Antichrist[7]and plotting world domination.
- The occasional apocalypse scare. There are usually a few minor ones every year and a major scare every few years.
- Atheism.
- Various small religious groups, commonly called cults.
[edit] Sexual panics
- Homosexuals are recruiting kids into their lifestyle
- In the 70's there was an even more frightening version, "Gay men are killing little boys". Every family TV show seemed to have a very special episode devoted to gay men trying to harm little boys.
- Child sexual abuse in general
- Child predators on the internet
- Sexualization of teenagers and adolescents (especially girls)
- Joycelyn Elders' comment about teaching teenagers that masturbation is acceptable.
- "Non-virgin clubs" in the early 1950s.[8]
- AIDS in the 1980s.
- Europe and Japan losing population because of their low birth rates (blamed on socialism, feminism, and abortion).
- Rainbow Parties, oral sex-themed get-togethers that almost certainly don't actually exist.
- "White slavery," the belief that girls are being abducted from middle America and sold into the sex trade.
- Snuff films, in which people are murdered on camera and the videos are sold on the black market, a phenomenon that probably doesn't exist outside of lurid fiction.
- "Crush" videos, the animal version of the above, which most certainly are known to exist.
Child predators on the internet, and child sexual abuse, are two examples of things which are real but the hysteria over them grew way out of proportion to the actual threat they posed.
[edit] Miscellaneous panics
- The Recovered Memory movement.
- Kony 2012.
- Hitchhiking. While it's common sense to be wary of hitchhikers because they indeed might be dangerous, a 1974 study by the California Highway Patrol found that hitchhikers were far more likely to be the victims of crime from those who picked them up or from passersby than they were to be the perpetrators of violence. (In fact, just standing on the shoulder of a roadway is more dangerous than driving in a car.)[9]
- Pit bulls.[10] [11]
"Satanic ritual abuse" and the "War on Christmas" are examples of things that probably never existed at all. For others, such as gangs, hate groups, outlaw motorcycle clubs, and a perceived epidemic of Satanism during the 1980s, the response to the moral panic often takes the form of law enforcement officials (fanned by activist groups drumming up moral panic over those groups' existence) treating them as criminal activity, which can then become a self-fulfilling prophecy or result in violations of their civil liberties in the name of combating something deemed a threat.
[edit] Things which are not moral panics
Some issues may actually be amoral in nature, but do cause a panic. In general these are worthy of attention. There are currently several pressing public issues which have led to needed public debate and action that include:
- Global warming
- Health dangers from trans fatty acids, obesity and cigarette smoking
- Overpopulation
- War
- Antibiotic resistant bacteria, or, "super-bugs" [12]
Environmental hazards like global warming are often written off as "alarmism" or "moral panics" by deniers in a bullshit use of the term in order to downplay the dangers posed by these hazards.
Issues like abortion, terrorism, drinking and driving, and child sexual abuse need not have become moral panics had the level of public discourse over them not descended into hysterics.
[edit] External links
- The 6 Most Insane Moral Panics in American History -- from Cracked.com
- The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Covers of The Past 40 Years -- from Reason.com
- Scared America: 8 Crises and Collective Panics of the 1970s -- from Flashbak.com
[edit] See also
- Harwoods and Harebreaks for examples of Moral Panic and Paranoia leading to really stupid decisions.
- Wolf hysteria, which shares many similar features to a Moral Panic
[edit] References
- ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20080704060550/http://www.filmeducation.org/filmlib/BFC.pdf
- ↑ Stanley Cohen. 1980. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockets. 2nd. New York: St. Martin's Press.
- ↑ Mark Fenemore. 2009. Sex, Thugs and Rock 'N' Roll: teenage Rebels in Cold-War East Germany. New York: Berghahn Books. p. 216.
- ↑ "Teens Today Are Getting High Off Their Computers"
- ↑ What Your Parents Think All Your Music Sounds Like
- ↑ "CALIFORNIA LEGENDS: The Bum Blockade — Stopping the Invasion of Depression Refugees."
- ↑ Actually he really is the anti-Christ but we need to turn down the rhetoric a bit.
- ↑ Morin, Relman."'Non-Virgin Club' New Aspect Off Teen-age Sex Misbehavior." Associated Press, 26 August 1951 (recovered 16 September 2014).
- ↑ [http://bernd.wechner.info/Hitchhiking/CHP/body.html "California Crimes And Accidents Associated With Hitchhiking"] -- text of 1974 CHP study
- ↑ http://www.oneonta.edu/academics/research/PDFs/LOTM10-Lowe.pdf
- ↑ http://peer.ccsd.cnrs.fr/docs/00/68/78/14/PDF/PEER_stage2_10.1007%252Fs10611-011-9293-6.pdf
- ↑ http://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/threat-report-2013/
