Moral Panic

Moral Panic

Moral panic is a widely used and often misinterpreted concept in

social sciences. The term was invented by the British sociologist

Stanley Cohen the late sixties. Cohen defined moral panic as a form of

collective behaviour during which: "A condition, episode, person or

group emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and

interests; its nature is presented in a stylised and stereotypical

fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors,

bishops, politicians and other right thinking people; socially

accredited experts pronounce their diagnosis and solutions; ways of

coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then

disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes visible " (Cohen

1972: 9). Cohen was using this term for a phenomenon in Great Britain

in his book Folk Devils and Moral Panics primarily about the rockers

who vandalised in a small town in the early 60'.

American scholars quickly adopted, used (and often overused) this

term. Goode and Ben-Yehuda presented and analysed various moral panics

through history and tried to search for common indicators. According

to their definition "A moral panic is characterised by the feeling,

held by a substantial number of the members of a given society, that

evil-doers pose a threat to the society and to the moral order as a

consequence of their behaviour and, therefore, "something should be

done" about them and their behaviour." (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994:31).

The more known moral panic in history is the witchcraft of the

fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the more recent moral panic

according to Goode and Ben-Yehuda is ...

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...aws and creating court cases. It is passing with "solving"

the problem, with forcing the non-existing boundaries between those

who enjoy looking pornographic pictures and those who do not. It

stopped our work on the question of pornography, on questioning the

need of pornography, on questioning our relation to sexuality. Indeed

it increased the feeling of shame and guilt about pornography, and

paved the road for the next moral panic.

Bibliography

Cohen, S. (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics, London: MacGibbon and

Kee

Goode, E. and Ben-Yehuda, N. (1994) Moral Panics: The Social

Construction of Deviance, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell

Horsfield, P. (1997) Media International Australia No. 85, November

Rimm, M.(1995) Marketing pornography on the information superhighway.

Georgetown Law Journal, 83, 1849-1934.