Why Moral Panics Don\'t Exist

The Moral Panic Thesis
Train of Thought
Prevalence
Roots

Interpretivism

Symbolic Interactionism

Social Constructionism

Logic

From 'Conservative' social morality…

…through perception of deviance, mediated representation…

…and ensuing public reaction…

…to overblown but politically impactful 'Panic' and deviance amplification.


"[With] each passing decade, the number of academic and mass media mentions, attacks by critics attempting to dismount it, and books and articles bearing the phrase in their titles continues to grow"

(Goode & Ben-Yehuda, 2014: 23)



"Uncritical… [and] ritualistic reproduction"

(Jewkes, 2004: 76)

What 'Moral Order'?
(Thompson & Williams, 2014: ix; see also Hall, 2012a)
'A Problem With Morality'

Absence of "changing… moral regulation" (Jewkes, 2004: 77)

Social Ontology

Strong and Rigid Morality or…

…'liberation of the individual' (see Heath & Potter, 2005; Žižek, 2006)

Moral Panics & Moral Order

Criminology as frontier of moral condemnation (Thompson & Williams, 2014)

Dismissal over Explanation (Hall, 2012b; Horsley, 2014)







"Rather than chart the history of public anxieties… the moral panic paradigm reflects and reveals the fears of the mythmakers, telling us far more about the academic construction of reality than the social construction of social problems"
Why Moral Panics Don't Exist

Dr Mark Horsley,

University of Cumbria
The Absence of 'Panic'
(Winlow & Hall, 2013: 81)
The 'Problem of Risk' (Jewkes, 2004)

The Liquidation of the Social (Winlow & Hall, 2013)

Power/Authority (Arendt, 1963)

Roll of Corporate Media

Sensationalism & misrepresentation (Curran & Seaton, 2009)

Soothing Concern - 'Scandal & Reform Narrative' (Reiner, 2010)

Panic or Anxiety?

Real Problems, Real Harms (Fisher, 2008; Hall & Winlow, 2015) BUT…

…Nihilism (Diken, 2008); Disaffection (Stiegler, 2012) and 'Objectless Anxiety' (Hall, 2012b; Horsley, 2015)



The cynicism and pragmatism of post-ideological politicians spoke to disaffected voting populations who believed that he very best that can be hoped for… is a democratic administration that will improve the individual's life chances somewhat, and defend the people against the manifold terrors and threats that appear to typify post-modern cultural life.
Arendt, H (1963) Eichmann in Jerusalem New York, NY: Viking Press
Curran, J & Jean Seaton (2009) Power Without Responsibility: Press, Broadcasting and the Internet in Britain (7th Edn) London: Routledge
Diken, B (2008) Nihilism London: Routledge
Fisher, M (2008) Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative Winchester: Zero Books
Goode, E & Nachman Ben-Yehuda (2014) 'The Genealogy and Trajectory of the Moral Panic Concept' in Charles Krinsky (Ed) The Ashgate Research Companion to Moral Panics Farnham: Ashgate pp. 23-37
Hall, S. (2012a) 'Don't Look Up, Don't Look Down: Liberal criminology's fear of the supreme and the subterranean', Crime, Media, Culture: Special Issue: York Deviancy Conference 2011, 8(2): 197-212
Hall, S (2012b) Theorizing Crime and Deviance: A New Approach London: Sage
Hall, S & Simon Winlow (2015) Revitalising Criminological Theory: Towards a New Ultra Realism London: Routledge
Heath, J & Andrew Potter (2005) The Rebel Sell London: Capstone
Horsley, M (2014) 'The 'Death of Deviance' and the Stagnation of Twentieth Century Criminology' in Michael Dellwing, Joe Kotarba and Nathan Pino. (Eds) The Death and Resurrection of Deviance: Current Research and Ideas. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan
Horsley, M (2015) The Dark Side of Prosperity: Late Capitalism's Culture of Indebtedness. Farnham: Ashgate
Jewkes, Y (2004) Media & Crime London: Sage
Reiner, R (2010) The Politics of the Police (4th Edn) Oxford: OUP
Stiegler, B (2012) Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals Cambridge: Polity
Sutton, M (2012) 'The British Moral Panic Creation Myth is Bust' Available at: https://www.bestthinking.com/articles/science/social_sciences/sociology/the-british-moral-panic-creation-myth-is-bust (Accessed: 12 June 2015)
Thompson, B & Andy Williams (2014) The Myth of Moral Panics: Sex, Snuff & Satan London: Routledge
Winlow, S & Steve Hall (2013) Rethinking Social Exclusion: The End of the Social?
Žižek, S (2006) The Parallax View Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

References
If the Moral Panic thesis…

…comes out of an outmoded Understanding of Social Ontology…

…that neglects to account for the pronounced social transformations of the last half century…

…and, on that basis, makes a series of distinctly problematic claims…

…regarding the nature of power/authority, the role of the mass media and the prevalence of 'panic' (as opposed to apolitical anxiety and generalized disaffection)…

…to what extent does it provide us with a worthwhile analytical paradigm?

Conclusion – An Unreal Thesis?



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In this context, I'd like to end the paper by posing the following question…
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The second major problem with moral panic to which we turn our attention begins with the observation that the thesis, indeed the 'critical criminology' tradition as a whole, often fails to acknowledge the crucial distinction between 'power' and 'authority'. The former denotes a kind of hereditary, unassailable and undemocratic domination while the latter is more the inverse. The dissolution of collective social morality in favour of individualism and a 'culture of enjoyment' over the last half century has culminated to some extent in an erosion of authority to the extent that even the state appears to be reticent about its regulatory capacities, particularly in economic circles. This reluctance has resulted in a proliferation of social exclusion in inner city locales that once relied on industrial and public sector employment and a proletarianisation of the middle classes increasingly suffering the long working hours and poor pay common to what was the 'working class'. This comes hand in hand with real 'risks' – the proliferation of economic acquisitive crime – and the crime consciousness that is largely a product of media saturation.

While corporate media do unarguably sensationalise and misrepresent crime not to mention many other things, the story isn't quite as simple as over-representation and inflation. Rather, they play a substantial role in quieting anxiety and soothing concern by overplaying the criminal justice system's capacity to deal with criminality and minimize harm. Crime stories come wrapped up with a denouement in which the police are making enquiries/arresting suspects, new forms of crime are swiftly met with discussion of possible interventions and planned legislation and even standout terrorist incidents come with Prime Ministerial promises of 'full spectrum response' far in excess of actual capacity to counter global, inherently unpredictable forms of criminality. It is not as if this disposition remains unswervingly complementary but even when it is critical of criminal justice institutions it arguably reflects Reiner's (2010) analysis of the relationship between the police and the media characterised by a 'scandal and reform narrative'. In other words, by presenting crime and deviance in such a way as to reassure disaffected populations that the experts are on the case.

In this context, the moral panic thesis also fails to distinguish between 'panic' and the much looser, more ephemeral concept of anxiety. In any case 'panic' with its extreme connotations and intimation of intolerable hardship functions as a rather inadequate description of a society characterised, if current social theory is to be believed, by forms of passivity, nihilism, disaffection and what Hall (2012b) calls 'objectless anxiety'. With the sheer variety of social problems afflicting our society – austerity fetishism, unaccountable financial institutions, growing social divides, the dissolution and privatisation of social institutions, the return of the extreme right across Europe and the proliferation of all manner of harms – it is difficult to avoid the assertion that an extreme, 'panic'-infused reaction might be entirely reasonable but what we get instead is passivity and disinterest. In much the same vein, there are a suite problems of criminal justice – terrorism and paedophilia, for instance – that arguably require a far more sophisticated explanatory response than 'it's all just a moral panic'.
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One of the major problems with the ongoing use of the moral panic thesis is, as Jewkes (2004) notes, that it continues to rely on an understanding of moral order adopted wholesale from 1960s counter-culturalism to the extent that much moral panic theory bears only very partially reflects current social structures. In short, the moral panic thesis relies on conflict between an overbearing conservative morality with a fair amount of control over what people see and hear and the ability to singularly influence the beliefs and values of a substantial majority of the population most of whom consequently subscribe to an outmoded, traditionalist yet strong and rigid conservative morality that seeks to prohibit a suit of personal freedoms in order to maintain allegiance to a mystified past.

While this might, possibly have withstood scrutiny during the middle decades of the twentieth century it bears little resemblance to current social order and political power, which pointedly concerns itself with the liberation of the individual and with the cultural and economic freedoms that entails. Late modern capitalism circulates capital by engaging with subject populations first and foremost in their primary role as consumers, it enchants, it solicits, it constantly reminds us of how much better our lives could be if we could throw off the shackles of expectation and responsibility and engage fully with aspirations and desires. Unsurprisingly, that doesn't really involve – within reason – anything along the lines of a symbolic cultural prohibition that might limit the individual in the service of 'traditionalism'.

The relationship between the moral panics, its internal understanding of moral order and the thesis' prominence within criminology instead comes out of our discipline's position at the frontier of of moral condemnation more than most of the social sciences and so finds itself repeatedly placed in a position from which it could stray too far from interpretivism into demonization and pathologisation. In this way, criminological theory is openly structured by a dualistic fear of barbarism. The barbarism of order that could come out of too close a relationship with the state and its repressive apparatus and, conversely, the barbarism of disorder associated with the working class mob and its manipulation into the victimization of 'deviant' Others (see Hall, 2012a; Thompson & Williams, 2014). In this way moral panic theory arguably reflects the internal concerns of late twentieth century academic liberalism preoccupied with the excesses of the state (the holocaust, stalinism etc) than any attempt to actually explain the origins of social problems. In this way, the moral panic thesis insistence on crime and deviance as an outcome over-emphasis in political and media discourse – the frequent assertion that public concern around a particular instance of perceived deviation – is all just a moral panic – arguably amounts to a tendency to dismiss social problems rather than try to explain and understand real harms affecting real people's lives.
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If we leave Sutton's (2013) assertion that the origins of the moral panic thesis can be found within early Victorian social discourse to one side, the thesis roots are often traced back to a set of sociological ideas that began life during the 1920s and 30s centred on growing allegiance, on the heels of the Chicago School, to interpretivist and 'appreciative' understandings of the social world. The basic idea was that the essential nature of the world and of social structure always remained tantalisingly out of reach even for the most determined researchers so the best way of approaching any such research was to concentrate on the thoughts (interpretations) of people living in whatever situation was under scrutiny. With the aid of Mead's symbolic interactionism this developed into an analysis of how social groups assign meaning to ideas and 'labels' including 'criminal' and 'deviant' and the discursive processes by which these labels get applied to some groups and not others (this is the essence of labeling theory). In the context of 1960s counterculturalism these ideas then developed further into a kind of hardline social constructionism in which, as Becker (1962) put it, deviance is a consequence of the application of labels, which then push otherwise reasonable people into further deviance by reducing their life chances.

In the moral panic thesis these ideas have given criminology one of its most prominent analytical paradigms with an internal logic that affects the discipline on a much wider basis than the work overtly labeled 'moral panic' – these ideas are also deeply characteristic of the wider 'critical criminology' tradition and of certain quarters of 'cultural criminology'. The MP thesis begins with a series of assumptions on the nature of social morality and social order, specifically with the idea that society is dominated by an overarching, one-note conservatism that seeks to limit the freedoms available to individuals in favour of 'traditionism' and nostalgia. It argues that this conservatism is singularly dominant within political and media circles to the extent that it effectively controls national discourse. When this power black perceives deviance amongst subordinate groups – often young people – it seeks to portray them as a threat to the existing (conservative) social order and, though media representation, encourages the general public into a call for censorious intervention, which then further excludes the 'deviant' group leading to a process of deviance amplification.

This is one of the most prominent analytical concepts to grace criminology. It tends to be picked up very quickly by students, features with great regularity in most of the major journals, gets applied to every new problem that comes to the attention of the criminal justice system and, according to Goode & Ben-Yehuda's analysis on citation indexes features within a substantial and growing portion of criminological publication. Yet, as Jewkes (2004) notes, most of this commentary is almost entirely uncritical and tends to accept moral panic theory at face value despite a number of rather troublesome problems with the current usage of Cohen's thesis. It's to a couple of these that we now turn our attention.
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Introduce paper

Purpose: To offer a critical re-examination of one of criminology's most prominent analytical paradigms drawing on existing critiques from within and without criminology in order to build them into a more fulsome of the ongoing use of Cohen's work to offer insight into the workings of the criminal justice system, the nature of power and authority and the forces driving/exacerbating criminality.

It will first offer a short review of the MP thesis highlighting root concepts and major assertions building toward a comment on its current prevalence and usage within the discipline. It will then turn its attention to the internal conditions of the moral panic thesis with the aim of exploring the possibility that it might not adequately reflect contemporary social reality.


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