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Crime Media Culture7(3) 211–214

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Foreword: Moral panics in thecontemporary world

Jason Hughes,1 Amanda Rohloff,1 Matthew David1

and Julian Petley1

The papers in this special issue stem from the conference ‘Moral Panics in the Contemporary

World’, held at Brunel University in December 2010 – nearly 40 years since the landmark publica-

tion of Stan Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) and Jock Young’s The Drugtakers (1971)and ‘The role of the police as amplifiers of deviancy, negotiators of reality and translators of fan-

tasy’ (1971).

Over 150 international delegates from a variety of disciplines came together to discuss the

continuing relevance of the concept of moral panic to analysing a range of contemporary

phenomena. The aim of the conference was to explore and evaluate how the concept has devel-

oped and continues to develop, and how relevant and useful it remains to the analysis and under-

standing of current fears, risks, social problems and controversies. Speakers from the plenary

sessions included the key progenitors of the moral panic concept, Stan Cohen and Jock Young,

and current central figures in moral panic (re)conceptualizing, Chas Critcher and Sean Hier; theacademic Catharine Lumby and the journalist James Oliver offered their reflections on being

involved and implicated in specific moral panics. This issue includes: papers featuring four of the

six speakers from the plenary sessions; a paper authored by Chris Jenks, who gave the opening

address at the conference; and two papers from the thematic strands, the first by Julia M. Pearce

and Elizabeth Charman, the second by Ragnar Lundström.

The conference began with an opening address from Brunel University’s Vice-Chancellor and

Professor of Sociology, Chris Jenks. In his paper here, ‘The context of an emergent and enduring

concept’, Jenks traces the genesis of the concept of moral panic against the backdrop of the social

and intellectual upheaval that accompanied its development. He then goes on to explore some of

the subsequent developments since its initial formulation, in particular how the possibilities for

breaking free of moral constraints have, in contemporary culture, become increasingly individual-

ized and privatized – a process which has accompanied a more general shift in which questions of

liminality and transgression have effectively moved to centre stage. Jenks discusses how transgres-

sion can be understood as at once a component of, and a counterpoint to, moral panics. He

shows how transgressive behaviour is intimately tied up with the continual drawing and redraw-

ing of limits on behaviour, with moral panics a means simultaneously to secure and redefine the

1 Brunel University, UK

Email: [email protected]

417600CMCXXX10.1177/17416590114176 00Hugheset al.Crime Media Culture

Editorial

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contours and patterns of order, albeit temporarily. Transgressive behaviour, Jenks argues, can be

seen as a force of both cultural production and reproduction – one which prevents stasis through

the breaking of rules, while simultaneously reaffirming the rules through marking the limits to the

collective order.

In the plenary session that followed Jenks’s address, Stan Cohen and Jock Young also reflectedupon the origins of the concept, and explored in different ways how the idea of moral panic might

relate to current issues. In his paper here, ‘Whose side were we on? The undeclared politics of

moral panic theory’, Cohen further elaborates on the links between two of his seminal areas of

research – moral panic and denial. Cohen explores the notion of ‘good’ moral panics as a correc-

tive to the tendency within moral panic studies towards the denial of social problems. He proposes

that advocating ‘good’ moral panics as a heuristic device may prove able to broaden the focus of

moral panic studies. Is it the case, for example, that there are some social problems about which

there is actually insufficient moral concern and panic? Might moral panics be mobilized to combat

the major social issues of our time? Are the social problems about which moral panics are devel-

oped necessarily exaggerated, overblown, or even ‘invented’? Changes within the media, in the

range of voices gaining access and of new lobbies pressing to be heard, make Cohen optimistic

about the chances for more progressive panics in the future, even as more traditional folk devils

continue to be reinvented for our times. Such questions set the agenda for many of the themes

discussed throughout the conference as a whole.

In ‘Moral Panics and the Transgressive Other’, Young goes on to discuss the contribution that

the sociological imagination has made to the sociology of deviance, to criminology, and to moral

panic theory. He recounts how the new deviancy theory utilized the sociological imagination to

give meaning back to ‘deviants’, by arguing for symmetry in research – where both the deviance

and the reactors to deviance are examined. Young explores the relation between the social

dynamics and the psychodynamics occurring during panics from the 1960s. He argues that such

panics tapped into the core values and social structures of the time, where the shift from discipline

and deferred gratification towards a more impulsive world brought with it initial resentment

towards those whose lives were characterized by increasing levels of short-term hedonism and

impulsivity. Young compares this with the impact that the current financial crisis may have, or is

having, on moral panics – a situation in which the middle classes become increasingly fearful of

failing to maintain their social status. In this sense, he suggests, feelings of resentment are being

directed both ‘upwards’ (towards banks and bankers) and ‘downwards’ (towards the lower

classes). For Young, then, moral panics are characterized by a ‘rational irrationality’: they ‘work’because they ‘hit the sore spot’, at once tapping into anxieties about social transition, and simul-

taneously attempting to stymie cultural change. Another perverse rationality arises from the

possibility that ‘respectable fears’ that were initially disproportionate may well have encouraged

the creation of threats that are now only too real.

For the second plenary session, in response to Chas Critcher’s recent (2009) paper in the British

Journal of Criminology , Sean Hier delivered a defence and elaboration of his own conceptualizing

of moral panic as a form of moral regulation.1 A dialogue between Hier and Critcher developed

during the question-and-answer session, where it became apparent that some of their differences

in linking moral panic with moral regulation were influenced by each scholar’s differing aims formoral panic research.




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Critcher’s paper, ‘For a political economy of moral panics’, focuses on the political economy of

drinking in relation to the themes of moral panic and moral regulation. For Critcher, recent fears

over ‘booze Britain’ – in a manner similar to the hostility expressed towards bankers – never

achieved the status of a moral panic because such targets are too deeply woven into the fabric of

economic power. While a more general culture of fear is said by some to pervade the mainstreamcontemporary media, its object is ever changing and, as such, the frame becomes more important

than the focus.

In the final plenary session, Catharine Lumby and James Oliver each discussed their own

involvement with the media during the course of specific moral panics. Journalist and BBC pro-

ducer James Oliver gave a highly reflexive account of his experiences from the ‘inside’, so to speak,

in relation to his work as producer of a Panorama documentary on the ‘Baby P’ case – a case

which subsequently attracted a huge amount of media attention and became the catalyst for a

more general ensuing panic about social decline and ‘broken Britain’.

As both a researcher in the field, and as someone who became embroiled in the fallout from a

specific moral campaign about child sexualization, Catharine Lumby, along with her co-author

Nina Funnell, in ‘Between heat and light: The opportunity in moral panics’, reflects on the way

academics can successfully intervene during the formation of moral panics. She illustrates how an

academic can frame their arguments in such a way that they connect with, yet also redirect, the

political and emotional ‘common ground’ more often occupied as anti-intellectual ‘common

sense’ by moral campaigners and the news media.

Two particularly noteworthy papers from the thematic strands were Julia Pearce and Elizabeth

Charman’s ‘A social psychological approach to understanding moral panic’ and Ragnar Lundström’s

‘Between the exceptional and the ordinary: A model for the comparative analysis of moral panics

and moral regulation’. Employing theories from social psychology, Pearce and Charman use social

representation and social identity theories to explore the example of press coverage of asylum

seekers in the United Kingdom, focusing in particular upon ‘British’ receptivity towards discourses

on asylum seekers, and upon the impact of moral panic processes on the groups in question. In

an effort to clarify further the relationship between moral panic and moral regulation (a common

theme throughout the conference), Lundström undertakes a comparative discursive analysis of

benefit fraud as reported in British and Swedish newspapers.

The four thematic strands covered by the conference were: Lifestyle, Risk, and Health;

Re-Theorizing Moral Panic; Crime and Deviance; and Immigration, War, and Terror. A central

theme to emerge from the conference as a whole was the idea that moral panic, while a highlyinfluential and longstanding idea, is now in need of further revision and development. Papers at

the conference sometimes implicitly, and in some cases explicitly, highlighted how the concept is

tied in key respects to the empirical cases from the 1960s and 1970s around which it was first

developed. Since its original formulation and articulation, the notion of moral panic has been

applied to a growing range of examples: from terrorism to climate change, and from swine flu to

austerity and the economic crisis (to name but a few of the specific topics covered at the confer-

ence). Applying the concept to such examples further stretches and extends its reach, while simul-

taneously provoking questions about the limits of its utility in enhancing our understanding of the

new cases to which it has been extended. Of course, the social conditions of today are differentin a number of important respects from those of the 1960s and 1970s. Such differences extend


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to changes in the media itself, and include, for example, the increasing reflexivity of certain forms

of journalism. Some of the professional journalists in attendance at the conference had, indeed,

studied the work of Cohen and Young as part of their degree programmes. They, conversely,

invited academics to question their own assumptions about the practices of professional journal-

ists and the processes by which moral panics are understood to be launched.While, as a number of papers convincingly demonstrated, major economic and political inter-

ests still hold enormous sway over the organization and production of news, the advent of new

media, in particular the development of Web 2.0 technologies, the ascendancy of ‘citizen journal-

ism’ and the increasing importance of lay footage and lay reporting in the production of news, all

point towards an increasingly complex picture of the relationship between the producers and

consumers of news. Thus, it is increasingly important that moral panic studies take account not

only of the processes that occur within specific moral panic episodes, but also the broader social

developments which extend beyond these processes – developments which have an important

bearing on how moral panics unfold today. In this way, work on moral panics will not stand still.

The challenge for scholars in the field is to retain the concept’s utility, elegance and grasp on a

particular aspect of social reality, while simultaneously allowing for the concept’s development,

extension and revision in empirical and theoretical dialogue within a rapidly changing social and

cultural landscape. Future researchers must seek to steer a course between, on the one hand,

developing unreflective, ‘orthodox’ accounts of moral panic which merely reproduce aspects of a

concept that, accordingly, risks becoming outmoded, and on the other, overextending or stretch-

ing the concept so much that it becomes, ultimately, a catch-all term which encapsulates every-

thing and nothing about the inter-relationship between the media, social problems, social policy

and public opinion in the contemporary world.

Note 1 The full version of Sean Hier’s conference paper, ‘Tightening the focus: Moral panic, moral regulation and

liberal government’, was published in the British Journal of Sociology , Volume 62, Issue 3, pages 523-541,

September 2011.


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