Moral Panics in Theory and Practice

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I remember first coming across Cohen’s ground-breaking work on moral panics when I was an undergraduate sociology student; featuring evocative accounts of leather-clad rockers clashing with sharp-suited soul aficionados on the beaches of Brighton, Cohen analysed the process by which certain groups came to be deemed as threats to the social order by the media and establishment figures, and how public attitudes were manipulated to generate a groundswell of intolerance. It was irresistible stuff for the younger, left-lurching, Che Guevara-worshipping incarnation of myself. Yet, during my post-graduate training to become a social worker, and the several years I have spent working in the criminal justice system and children’s services, it is not a body of work that I have ever returned to. When I read the contributions in this volume, which focus on the complex relationship between moral panics, the state and the profession of social work, I realise how many of the ideas and issues presented here speak to my day-to-day experience of being a front-line practitioner.

As the Introduction to this byte acknowledges, the concept of the state is somewhat nebulous and notoriously difficult to nail down. Unsurprisingly, many different sociologists have wrestled with the subject. One of the most influential was Weber (1994 [1919]), who sought to explain how the nature of the state has evolved throughout history. He suggested that the success of early forms of social organisation hinged on the charismatic influence of certain leaders. Feudal monarchies would later invoke the power of tradition and custom to maintain their subjects’ loyalty.

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Endings are commonplace within life and work and yet can often be neglected among the demands of front-line social work practice. There can be pressure to close cases once acute risks have been addressed. A difficult meeting or phone call is still on your mind in the evening or over the weekend. Ideally, an ending supports the transition between one state and another and often this is best achieved when it is prepared for in advance. While reading this book, you may have been thinking of your own work and asking yourself what difference an understanding of moral panics might make to your research, study or practice. Within this afterword, I hope to help in this transition from theory to practice by identifying what I feel are some of the key themes addressed by the contributors and discussing their relevance to the current context of social work policy and practice.

I am employed as a social worker in a local authority Children and Families practice team in Scotland and have previous experience of youth work and residential childcare. My current role encompasses child protection, children in need, looked after and accommodated children, and adoption and permanency work. This places my perspective within a specific context. Scotland has its own legal system and distinctive Children's Hearing System (see Hothersall, 2014). However, many of the issues facing social workers in Scotland have much in common with other child welfare systems in Anglophone countries (Lonne et al, 2009).

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‘Panic’ is a theme I am familiar with in my work with women who regularly experience extremely distressing situations. It is a natural response to fear, and one that can be managed. Panic of itself is, arguably, morally neutral; how panic is fuelled, steered and exploited is not. Woven through the discussion in this chapter is an interest in moving toward a productive understanding of the function of ‘moral panic’, in order that it might create stimulus for positive change rather than being steered towards the imperative to cling to problematic norms. This interest underpins the discussion of themes derived from the chapters in this part: the constitution of ‘the deviant other’ and the discharge of moral responsibility. I then consider the Scottish Government’s policy on violence against women, Equally Safe (Scottish Government, 2014a), to explore how such themes become operationalised in the context of my practice as a criminal justice social worker in a ‘women’s’ service.

Each of the chapters in this byte has illuminated a view of the ‘undesirable other’ as a prerequisite for ‘moral panic’. Furedi’s Chapter One focused on the contemporary ‘other’, ‘the paedophile’; Benson and Charsley, and Clark, in Chapters Three and Four, respectively, highlighted the ‘othering’ of those who are perceived as ‘not like us’ for reasons of cultural difference. These three are, arguably, the most emotive of panics discussed, as they portray clearly recognisible human actors who become readily stereotyped as a homogeneous group. Grumett’s discussion of animal welfare in Chapter Two is another emotive topic, as those believed to mistreat animals readily become associated with other immoral practices.

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I am an independent social work practitioner and commentator with a particular interest in the interface between research, policy and practice. In 2014 I was appointed as Chair of the Policy, Ethics and Human Rights Committee of the British Association of Social Workers and look forward to contributing to the promotion of ethical practice and the continuing development of professional opinion and policy. Moral panics that influence social work and social workers are clearly well within the scope of this committee and the contributions on family and gender in this byte are of great relevance to future discussion and work. In this afterword, I have chosen to reflect particularly on the issues of widening definitions of abuse and harm, and grounds for interference and regulation of private and family life, which are raised particularly by the contributions by Tartari (Chapter One) and Waiton (Chapter Five). These chapters both describe the ways that moral panics have allowed the greater encroachment of government into private and intimate relationships. Family life has, they argue, been gripped by a succession of moral panics about everything from satanic or ritual abuse to rioting youth. Waiton goes as far as to assert that the family is ‘a new site for amoral elite anxieties’. Gender relations are currently at the heart of a number of contemporary scandals, often played out as criminal trials of historical events. Tartari explores the ways in which child abuse and gender panics have the apparently paradoxical effect of over-emphasising the vulnerability of women and children and the villainy of men, to the advantage of opportunistic politicians.

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In 2008, I suggested that the concept ‘moral panic’ was, in many respects, past its ‘sell-by’ date; the idea of amoral panic was offered as an alternative (Waiton, 2008). My analysis was based on the following observations:

  • the use of morality is declining as a framework for panics

  • the importance of amoral categories like ‘risk’ and ‘safety’ as central tenets of panics is growing

  • individuals are engaged with as diminished subjects

  • old ‘moral’ institutions are undermined rather than shored up by these panics

  • ‘panics’ are normalised and institutionalised.

In this chapter, I will take this argument further by examining the transformation that has been taking place in ‘The Family’, an institution once central to moral panic theorising, associated with moral values and understood and defended as something that was ‘at the heart of society’ (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 1994, p 8). I pose the question: to what extent is the ‘future of the nuclear family’ the basis for panics today (Cohen, 2011, p xxii)? In particular, I look at the way the idea of the ‘autonomous family’ has all but disappeared from government and policy discussions of the family, and conclude by suggesting that we need to understand the rise and rise of ‘early intervention’ policies and initiatives as an illustration of the amoral panic that has developed around the family in the 21st century.

The opening sentence of the UK government’s document Next Steps for Early Learning and Child Care, published in 2009, reads: ‘Everyone agrees that the first few months and years are the most important in a child’s life.

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Much of the discourse on contemporary ‘moral panics’ has evolved within the fields of social work and social policy, with obvious examples including child abuse, urban crime, youth culture and immigration. In this chapter, however, a moral panic will be considered centring on the welfare of animals slaughtered for meat according to the requirements of Islam and Judaism.

On 17 February 2014, the Danish government banned the slaughter of farm animals without pre-stunning. Denmark thus joined Sweden, Latvia and Poland, the three other European states in which non-stun slaughter is already prohibited (Ferrari and Bottoni, 2010; Anon, 2012). The ban was controversial because some Muslim and many Jewish authorities regard the absence of stunning prior to slaughter as a requirement for the meat to be halal or kosher (which means ‘permissible’) under Islamic and Jewish law. The resulting public debate differed markedly between countries. In Denmark, it centred on whether the prohibition was compatible with the right of Muslims and Jews to religious freedoms. In practice the ban changed nothing, as no non-stun slaughter had in fact taken place there for a decade. Since the last abattoir licensed to perform it closed in 2004, those of the country’s 220,000 Muslims and 8,000 Jews who have wished to consume halal or kosher meat produced without stunning have imported it. Some commentators suggested that the ban, which was obviously associated with animal welfare, was introduced to appease the outrage surrounding the slaughter of a giraffe eight days earlier at Copenhagen Zoo and the public feeding of its carcase to the lion pack.

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This chapter interrogates a phenomenon that, although not a new issue, has captured the public’s attention in recent years. The controversy about assisted dying is concerned with whether or in what circumstances it is right for someone to assist another person in committing suicide or otherwise hastening the process of dying. Physician-assisted suicide (PAS) refers to assistance by healthcare professionals. Assisted dying has been a constant in medical ethics. The Hippocratic Oath of the ancient Greeks, for example, required ethical doctors not to ‘give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan’ (North, 2002). The Oath came to be seen as a general interdiction against assisting patients or others who wished to use medical expertise to die.

After anaesthetics were developed during the 19th century, some doctors advocated using them to relieve pain in the dying phase of life, debates about the ethics of euthanasia raged and there were attempts at legislation (Emanuel, 1994). During the first part of the 20th century, the issue was raised again, in particular by the rise of eugenics and mental hygiene movements, culminating in the rejection of such ideas after the experience of widespread mortality in two world wars, the implementation of eugenic policies by the Nazi regime and the Holocaust.

The illegality and moral unacceptability of assisted dying is therefore clearly the ‘established’ position in many societies, although this established moral settlement has been challenged by ‘right to die’ groups and individual campaigners, partly because of public opinion.

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A condition, episode, person or group of persons 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 diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to. (Cohen, 1972, p 9)

As well as providing an enduring and invaluable analytical tool for understanding the politics of control and the manufacture of social order, in this definition of a moral panic Cohen also inadvertently captured almost exactly how working in child protection has felt for the last 30 years. The majority of the children's workforce would recognise the sense of threat; the over-simplifications; the moral outrage; the endless and seemingly futile attempts to ‘never let this happen again’ and the many, many ways in which countless experts have pointed out how the job might be better done.

This chapter will argue that by applying Cohen's analysis to the social practice of child protection, particularly to those cases that achieve the status of a national ‘scandal’, we can learn far more about the politics of welfare and the state's relationship to troubled and troublesome families than we can ever learn about how to look after vulnerable children. In particular, it will explore how iconic child deaths can be used to construct a ‘condition, episode, person or group of persons … defined as a threat to societal values and interests’ – the idea at the core of what is implied by Cohen's formulation of a moral panic.

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Childhood and youth have often been the targets of moral panic rhetoric. This Byte explores a series of pressing concerns about young people: child abuse, child pornography, child sexual exploitation, child trafficking and the concept of childhood. With an appraisal of the work of the influential thinker, Geoffrey Pearson, who wrote on deviance and young people, it draws attention to the moralising within these discourses and asks how we might do things differently.

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This chapter will argue that we are currently experiencing a moral panic around children accessing internet pornography. This issue will be introduced within the context of society’s views of young people, echoing previous moral panics about the influence of popular media on children. The chapter will then go on to consider what evidence (if any) exists for the extent of the problem of young people accessing and being influenced by internet pornography. This will be followed by scrutiny of ‘moral entrepreneurs’, that is, academics and others who are likely to benefit or prosper from internet regulation and the groups and communities who may be collateral damage in the ‘war on porn’. Finally, the chapter will evaluate the chances of internet porn initiatives succeeding in their stated aims and the wider implications for society and its relationship with the ‘wired worlds’ of the internet.

On the weekend of 9 and 10 November 2013, the colour supplements of both The Times and the Sunday Times featured stories about concerns regarding what children do online. The Times cover featured a posed shot of a schoolgirl alone in darkened room, her face lit by only her mobile phone, her slightly chilling (or was it fearful?) gaze fixed on the reader. This photograph illustrates well the current moral panic around children and the internet. Children are simultaneously understood to be innocent, yet capable of being corrupted; in control of bewildering technology, yet somehow vulnerable to its dark side; networked to the world, yet also alone and vulnerable.

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