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CMCXXX10.1177/1741659011417600Hughes et al.Crime Media Culture

Editorial

Foreword: Moral panics in the

contemporary world

Crime Media Culture

7(3) 211214
The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/1741659011417600
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Jason Hughes,1 Amanda Rohloff,1 Matthew David1

and Julian Petley1

The papers in this special issue stem from the c onference Moral Panics in the Contemporary
World, held at Brunel University in December 2010 nearly 40 years since the landmark publication of Stan Cohens Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) and Jock Youngs The Drugtakers (1971)
and The role of the police as amplifiers of deviancy, negotiators of reality and translators of fantasy (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 developed and continues to develop, and how relevant and useful it remains to the analysis and understanding 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; the
academic 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 Lundstrm.
The conference began with an opening address from Brunel Universitys 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 individualized 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 transgression 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 redrawing of limits on behaviour, with moral panics a means simultaneously to secure and redefine the
Brunel University, UK
Email: jason.hughes@brunel.ac.uk

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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 Jenkss address, Stan Cohen and Jock Young also reflected
upon 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 corrective 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 developed 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 simultaneously 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 Critchers 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 scholars differing aims for
moral panic research.

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Critchers 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 mainstream
contemporary 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 producer 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
Charmans A social psychological approach to understanding moral panic and Ragnar Lundstrms
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), Lundstrm 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 highly
influential 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 conference). Applying the concept to such examples further stretches and extends its reach, while simultaneously 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 different
in 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 journalists and the processes by which moral panics are understood to be launched.
While, as a number of papers convincingly demonstrated, major economic and political interests 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 journalism 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 concepts utility, elegance and grasp on a
particular aspect of social reality, while simultaneously allowing for the concepts 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 stretching the concept so much that it becomes, ultimately, a catch-all term which encapsulates everything 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 Hiers 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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