What is a moral panic?

Posted on: 04/07/2023

This is an entry from Mark Walsh’s excellent Key Topics in Social Sciences, an A-Z introduction intended to support student nurses working on their sociology and psychology assignments.

Moral panic

A moral panic is an overreaction at a community or societal level towards a specific behaviour (e.g. glue-sniffing) or a group of people (e.g. gypsy travellers) that is seen as being symptomatic or representative of a wider social malaise or moral decline in society.

The concept of a moral panic emerged through the work of Stanley Cohen (1972). Cohen was interested in how deviant behaviour became amplified in society to the extent that it came to be viewed as a ‘social problem’. Cohen’s now famous study of youth cultures Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) was based on his observations of minor altercations in Clacton between youths belonging to so-called rival Mods and Rockers subcultures. Cohen found it difficult to understand how what he had witnessed came to be reported and understood as a ‘social problem’. He argued that ‘youth’ in general was scapegoated in exaggerated media reports about relatively minor incidents to the extent that a ‘labelling process’ occurred and led to deviancy amplification. Cohen’s concept of moral panic has been used to explore and explain how teenage pregnancy, community care of mentally ill people, dangerous dogs, ‘legal highs’ and ideas about immigrants and immigration have all been the focus of moral panic.

Cohen’s (1972) study showed how the labelling of a group of people as outsiders (‘folk devils’) amplifies perceptions of deviance and stokes concern about what may be happening to society. A scapegoated group – ‘youth’ in this case – effectively takes the blame for social changes, subcultural behaviour or changing social practices that are experienced as unsettling, unwanted and a threat to ‘moral values’ or public safety. Media exaggeration of the apparent ‘threat’ occurs through sensationalised reporting. This draws public attention to the issue, amplifying the level of ‘concern’. An increasingly alarmed public then demands ‘action’ from politicians, ‘the authorities’ and law enforcement agencies. Laws may be passed to ban the threat (raves, legal highs, a breed of ‘dangerous dog’), initiatives introduced to ‘tackle the problem’ (better sex education for teenagers, better after-care for people discharged from mental health units), or the attention of the media moves somewhere else.

The concept of moral panic is part of the interactionist approach within sociology. It focuses attention on the way interaction processes and ‘meaning’ can construct or make social realities. However, critics of this approach generally, and the concept of moral panic in particular, argue that there are aspects of reality, such as terrorism, child abuse and climate change, that we should be worried about regardless of how much the media exaggerate their threat. As such, they suggest that the concept of ‘moral panic’ is too vague to help us distinguish between a real and an exaggerated threat to society. Despite this, the concept remains useful as a way of understanding how certain groups become stigmatised, marginalised and labelled as ‘deviant’ because they threaten the established sense of social order and provoke demands for social control to be imposed on them.

Further reading

Cohen, S. (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: MacGibbon and Kee.