Moral Panics in Theory and Practice
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New Zealand is in the midst of a campaign to cut welfare spending, aligned to the ‘austerity’ discourse preoccupying many countries. Over the period 2011–14, two significant government projects were developed side by side: a programme of welfare reforms (Welfare Working Group, 2011) and a new programme of interventions aimed at reducing the incidence of child abuse (Ministry of Social Development (MSD), 2012b). The two projects emanated from the same arm of government, the MSD, but they were not linked in their everyday activities. Both projects have generated significant public interest and are imbued with ideological content.
Negative framing of the poor – alongside amplified expressions of class disgust – amid the on-going programme of welfare reform has been noted elsewhere (Tyler, 2013). Links between child maltreatment and welfare claimants are also common (Warner, 2013). An analysis of the media discourse on welfare families in New Zealand has found significant linking of family violence to poverty and ‘beneficiary’ or claimant status, most noticeable in examination of the commentary on ‘opinion pieces’ or columns. A battle of words rages between advocacy groups (Wynd, 2013) that research poverty in New Zealand and those who would link the issue of ‘welfare families’to child abuse and neglect.
This chapter explores the construction of a ‘feral families’ discourse in the New Zealand print media and considers whether this construction may constitute an example of the ‘folk devil’ so often manifest in a moral panic. Such families are characterised as being welfare dependent, prone to violence and predominantly Maori.
In all discussions of moral panics, the role of the media is germane.
The focus of this chapter is the transformation of the threat of paedophilia into a permanent focus of moral outrage. It explores the moral landscape that has turned the child predator into the principal target of moral enterprise. Through a discussion of the concept of a moral crusade it evaluates the impact of society’s obsessive preoccupation with the child predator.
The focus of this essay is the transformation of the threat of paedophilia into a permanent focus of moral outrage. It explores the moral landscape that has turned the child predator into the principal target of moral enterprise. Through a discussion of the concept of a moral crusade it evaluates the impact of society’s obsessive preoccupation with the child predator.
Paedophilia and the threat it represents to children has become a permanent feature of public concern and a regular theme of popular culture. The paedophile personifies evil in 21st-century society; the child predator possesses the stand-alone status of the embodiment of malevolence. But this unique personification of evil is not an isolated figure hovering on the margins of 21st-century society. Jimmy Savile, who died in 2011 and who has not been out of the news during the past two years, was dubbed the most ‘prolific’ paedophile in British history. What is unique about the activities of this alleged celebrity predator is the scale of his operation rather than his behaviour. Allegations against Savile effortlessly acquired the status of a cultural truth, since it is widely believed that, rather than rare, the abuse of children is a very common activity.
According to the cultural script of virtually every western society, child abusers are ubiquitous. This script invites the public to regard all strangers – particularly men – as potential child molesters. The concept of ‘stranger danger’ and the campaigns that promote it have as their explicit objective the educating of children to mistrust adults that they do not know.
This comments on all the contributions and goes on to observe that there is something deeply immoral in the promotion and maintenance of moral panics. The conclusion is that in order to move forward, we must claim an intellectual scepticism and give attention to the collateral damage that may be caused by inciting panic; we must also take responsibility to reclaim a moral, or certainly, an ethical dimension in how we respond to social concerns.
We live in a world that is increasingly characterised as full of risk, danger and threat. Every day a new social issue emerges to assail our sensibilities and consciences. Drawing on the popular Economic Social and Research Council (ESRC) seminar series, this book examines these social issues and anxieties, and the responses to them, through the concept of moral panic. Revisiting Moral Panics begins with a commentary by Charles Critcher followed by twenty four contributions from both well-known and up-and-coming researchers and practitioners that address panics ranging from those surrounding the 2011 English riots to fears over ‘feral families’ in New Zealand. There are four parts: Gender and the family; Moral Panics in our time?: Childhood and youth; The State, government and citizens; and Moral crusades, moral regulation and morality. Each part is rounded off with an Afterword from a practitioner that lends a critical comment. Revisiting Moral Panics is a stimulating and innovative overview of moral panic ideas. It also provides a masterclass in their applicability, or otherwise, to contemporary anxieties and concerns.
Commentators have long debated ‘the moral’ in ideas about moral panic, moral regulation and moral discourse. This byte teases out some of the fundamental moral questions that continue to perplex us, about life and death, good and evil, and sex and the body. With an appraisal of the work of one of the chief architects of moral panic ideas, Jock Young, it asks whether these ideas may help or hinder our understanding of these complex issues.
We live in a world that is increasingly characterised as full of risk, danger and threat. Every day a new social issue emerges to assail our sensibilities and consciences. Drawing on the popular Economic Social and Research Council (ESRC) seminar series, this book examines these social issues and anxieties, and the responses to them, through the concept of moral panic. Revisiting Moral Panics begins with a commentary by Charles Critcher followed by twenty four contributions from both well-known and up-and-coming researchers and practitioners that address panics ranging from those surrounding the 2011 English riots to fears over ‘feral families’ in New Zealand. There are four parts: Gender and the family; Moral Panics in our time?: Childhood and youth; The State, government and citizens; and Moral crusades, moral regulation and morality. Each part is rounded off with an Afterword from a practitioner that lends a critical comment. Revisiting Moral Panics is a stimulating and innovative overview of moral panic ideas. It also provides a masterclass in their applicability, or otherwise, to contemporary anxieties and concerns.
This chapter discusses the volatile social reaction to chavs. The term has become widely used to denigrate white working-class youths appropriating certain markers of taste. It is demonstrated that the chav is constructed through moralising discourses and practices, which have elements of a moral panic. Three elements characterising moralisation processes are identified: moral order, social control and ethical self-formation. Moreover, it is shown that the moralisation of chavs serves to construct class identities: chavs have been cast as a ‘non-respectable’, white working-class ‘folk devil’ against whom middle-class and ‘respectable’ working-class people distinguish and identify themselves as morally righteous.
They are the non-respectable working-classes: the dole-scroungers, petty criminals, football hooligans and teenage pram-pushers. (Lewis, 2004).
Since the early 2000s, the ‘chav’ has become a widely spread stereotype, well-institutionalised into British public and everyday discourse (le Grand, 2013). The term is tied to strong forms of hostility and moral-aesthetic distinction, and commonly applied to white working-class youths appropriating a certain style of appearance, including what is known as ‘streetwear’ clothing and jewellery. Drawing on an analysis of news media, websites and popular culture, this chapter discusses the social reaction to chavs and how it is bound up with the formation of class identities.
Following calls to extend the conceptual reach of moral panic analysis (Hier, 2002, 2008, 2011; Critcher, 2009, 2013; Hier et al, 2011; Hunt, 2011), I conceptualise moral panic as a strong and volatile type of social reaction rooted in long-term processes of moral regulation. Both moral panic and moral regulation are conceived as moralisation processes that entail the formation of moralising discourses that act upon the conduct of both self and other. Moralisation therefore involves a dialectical relationship between those actors who moralise certain issues and those who are the object of such moralising discourses and practices.
However, Critcher (2009) states that while moral panic discourses focus on constructing the ‘folk devil’ as a threat to the moral order and an object of social control measures, moral regulation projects typically involve processes of moral governance, or the reformation of ‘character’ or the adaptation of behaviour.
In this chapter, I explore the ways in which such dialectical processes of moralisation are tied to the formation of class identities, and to this end I draw on a multi-dimensional, relational notion of class informed by Bourdieu (1984 [1979], 1986, 1987).
Wales remains a complex and divided land in which a marginalised and demonised working class has come to characterise areas of Wales dominated by poverty and social exclusion. Drawing on research with mothers and their daughters in a marginalised Welsh locale, this chapter explores the ideology of national unity alongside the divisions of everyday life; and the ways in which respectable and acceptable working class femininities are negotiated against a pervasive discourse of lack, stigma and classed moral panics.