Moral Panics in Theory and Practice

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The issue of child trafficking came to prominence in the early part of the 21st century as international migrations of children became more visible in the UK, attracting the attention of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), politicians and the national news media. The trafficking of children is not a new phenomenon; in the late 19th century campaigners were successful in lobbying for an increase in the age of consent, partially as a result of the media exposé of the ‘white slave trade’ orchestrated by the newspaper editor William Stead (Bristow, 1978). The phenomenon of child trafficking has also been previously characterised as a moral panic (Goode and Ben- Yehuda, 1994; Cree et al, 2012). Moral panic writings go some way towards explaining the conditions that provide fertile ground for the amplification of risk that is embedded in media representations and policy discourses associated with child trafficking. This chapter will illustrate how the issue of child trafficking continues to be defined, drawing on a model developed from the literary genre of melodrama. The chapter discusses the features of a moral-panic perspective that are relevant to understanding the construction of child trafficking.

Moral-panics thinking was originally used to explain the crisis in policing of young people (Cohen, 1972) and has been applied to many social issues in the intervening period (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994; Critcher, 2003). Thompson (1998) identifies a number of common features of a moral panic: there is a campaign or a crusade over a period of time; the issues appeal to those who are concerned in some way about social breakdown; there is a lack of clarity in moral guidelines; politicians and the media are found to be at the head of public debates; and, finally, the real causes of the problems that give rise to a moral panic remain unaddressed.

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This chapter explores the ways in which late nineteenth century campaigning organisations publicised the issue of child trafficking. Continuities can be identified in the way the issue of child trafficking was discussed in the media then, and, as is the case today, with reports of ‘trafficking’ that tend to adopt sensationalist exaggerated tones. Previously melodramatic themes were evidenced in the social purity campaigning activities, serialised style and pseudo-factual story-telling to convey to an unsuspecting public the tragic situations of victims, through emotional appeals and righteous indignation. Similar tactics are characteristic of contemporary child trafficking policy and media discourses.

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This chapter concerns two social issues and their related contemporary moral panics in Italy: child abuse and femicide. Beginning from a national press analysis, the emergence of these panics, the disproportionality of the reaction and the role of the State in reinforcing the social concerns, are described and discussed.

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This chapter interrogates moral panic through examination of the treatment of child abuse and femicide in Italy in recent years. The discussion builds on my own research in this field. I will argue that child abuse and intimate partner violence are social problems that have both generated moral panics in contemporary Italy. These issues are real phenomena and they must not be neglected or denied, but their severity may have been over-emphasised and over-represented within the public and media arenas, giving rise to peaks of public concern and anxiety that, in turn, have provoked reactions that can be seen as moral panics. As we will see, waves of concern about child abuse were apparent in the years 2006 to 2009; then a new kind of phenomenon emerged in 2012: ‘femicide’. This term and its menace spread through different arenas under the pressure of feminist movements, moral entrepreneurs and politicians, thus provoking widespread social alarm and calls for action.

The chapter discusses my research into the emergence of these concerns and panics, the role of moral entrepreneurs and the disproportionality of the reaction, as well as the consequent legislation and the role of the state in reinforcing the social concerns. In what follows, I first explain how we can understand these issues as moral panics and what makes them such; then I identify some of the key ingredients of these contemporary moral panics; lastly, I discuss how the state can be seen as a particular kind of definer with strong power and control over the legitimisation of social concerns.

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Whereas concerns in previous decades related to the unmarried status of the mother, it is now the age of the mother that is more likely to be highlighted. However, the moral overtones of the language about parenting have not gone away. One frequently used example of the ‘undeserving’ is the stereotypical single teenage mother, getting pregnant in order to get a council flat, at the expense of ‘hard-working’ families. This chapter discusses the sense of moral panic about scroungers, linked with pervasive stereotypes of teen parents and the ideological assumptions that early childbearing stems from poor individual choices and lifestyles.

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In many Western countries where teenage pregnancy rates are considered by policy makers and others to be too high, such as the UK, USA and Canada, governments have made concerted efforts to reduce teenage pregnancies (for example, Social Exclusion Unit, 1999), while a considerable body of research into the lived experiences of teenage parents has built up (for example, Kirkman et al, 2001; Geronimus, 2003; Whitley and Kirmayer, 2008). In earlier decades, becoming pregnant as a teenager was most likely to be seen as a moral problem due to the mother-to-be being unmarried, and that was often swiftly solved by marriage to the young father-to-be. In more recent years, the ‘problem’ has been relabelled as a social one, mainly as part of a discourse about social exclusion, and in health terms, as a discourse about risks to both mother and child.

However, despite this shift to regarding teenage pregnancy and parenting as social and health problems, the moral overtones have not gone away, and, it could be argued, have resurfaced in recent years. For example, when the Conservative leader David Cameron harangued the UK parliament at Prime Minister’s Question Time in 2008 about the death of Peter Connelly, he did so on the (false) premise that Peter’s mother was a teenage mother; this was, as he presented it, all the evidence that was needed of her guilt. Since then, a sense of moral panic about welfare benefit scroungers has been promulgated by the UK’s Coalition government as part of its austerity agenda, and young parents have been positioned, implicitly and indeed explicitly, among the ranks of the scroungers.

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