 |
| An illustration used in an 18th-century pamphlet on Lancashire witches. |
What are moral panics?
At times, societies (or sectors of them) are gripped by moral panics.
At its most fundamental level, a moral panic deals with “a struggle for cultural representations”.
A folk devil – to which the negative characteristics that are responsible for the threat to social stability belong – is identified; likewise, suitable victims are.
A series of responses to moral panic is constituted: “tougher or renewed rules, more intense public hostility and condemnation, more laws, longer sentences, more police, more arrests, and more prison cells”.
It’s important to note that “some of the agents responsible for the moral panic genuinely believe their rhetoric concerning the locus of the problem or threat”.
Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s theory of moral panics predicts that in societies with a high level of social stress moral panics will be more prominent.
Some conditions are required for a moral panic to be instantiated: a social concern must be present, there must be an increased level of hostility toward the folk devils, a consensus about the wrongdoings of the folk devils must be reached, there must be a disproportion between the actual and imagined nefarious effect of the folk devils, and finally moral panics are inherently volatile, i.e. they vary in intensity over time and they cannot be sustained for long periods.
Disproportion between actual and perceived danger manifests itself through exaggerated or fabricated figures, unsubstantiated rumors of harm and discursive changes over time without a corresponding change in the seriousness of the issue.
Theories of moral panics
There are competing models regarding the nature and structure of moral panics: the grassroots model, the interest-group model and the elite-engineered model (the Marxist theory concerning moral panics is one example of this).
According to the grassroots model, moral panics usually generate with the general public and they cannot be fabricated by politicians and/or the media; they deal with irrational fears that are shared throughout the community (one extemporaneous example is the fear of nuclear disasters).
The elite-engineered model proposes that moral panics are orchestrated by socio-political elites in order to divert the attention away from more pressing issues (which are connected to the hegemony of the elite). Communal irrational fear is necessary but not sufficient for moral panics, according to this model. Media and other organs (maybe involuntarily) reproduce the dominant position concerning a certain issue, that is, the position of the elite. Goode and Ben-Yehuda argue that this model cannot be valid in the age of information.
The interest-group model sees moral enterpreneurs (cfr. Becker 1991) and middle-level interest groups such as Christians, police forces or feminists as responsible for the propagation of moral panics.
Goode and Ben-Yehuda propose to consider the first and the third model as complementary: the general public must have some latent irrational fear which can be “addressed, articulated and given an outlet” by the operations of certain organizations.
Critics of the concept have argued either that disproportionality is impossible to assess or that, since at least some threats are real, that one cannot talk of a “moral panic”. One can reply that disproportionality manifests itself through the criteria underlined before and that the fact that a threat is real does not imply that the response to it cannot be disproportional.
The role of the media
The media are means for communicating to masses (such as TV channels, books, newspapers and online magazines). Mass communications entail a transmission device that conveys the message from sender to receiver.
Face-to-face communication tends to be two-way interaction, but usually mass media entail one-way communication (i.e. they’re not very interactive).
Mass media tend to have particular niches in which their messages are popular; the “publishability” of a given message is always contextualized to a given niche. There are also sets of rules that determine whether a message can be conveyed or not (supermarket tabloids will be less stringent than highly regarded newspapers).
According to some theories of the media, from media decentralization it follows that it’s harder to generate a society-wide moral panic nowadays, since the system of media outlets has its own “porosity” and can contain in itself some “contestation”.
Sensationalism is inherent in the media because stories about unusual events (such as violent crimes, etc.) are by definition more newsworthy than stories about normal occurrences. By overrepresentating dramatic events in their outlets, mass media exaggerate their importance.
Media exaggeration and its preoccupation with a folk devil (partly) constitute moral panics; at the same time, media coverage provides a vehicle for moral panics to be spread throughout society.
Deviance, morality and criminal law
Deviance is “a violation of a society’s or a group’s norms or rules that calls forth censure, condemnation, or a punishment for the violator”.
Deviance is culturally relative insofar it depends upon a given group’s normative make-up (e.g. mixed-sex dancing is sanctioned in certain cultures but not in others).
For sociologists, “deviance” is a descriptive term and not a prescriptive one (i.e. a behavior can be considered deviant even if it’s not morally wrong).
Social deviance refers to the sets of behaviors that are condemned throughout the whole society, while situational deviance is connected to behaviors that are contextually condemned (such as watching pornography in radical feminist circles or being gay in a mainstream Christian environment). An effective approach would consider all kinds of deviance to be situational, in a certain sense, because context matters in determining the degree of censure, condemnation and punishment that a behavior causes.
Moral panics deal with the sudden construction of a deviant category of people – “the key ingredient in the emergence of a moral panic is the creation or intensification of hostility toward and denunciation of a particular group, category, or cast of characters”.
In primitive, pre-agrarian, small-scale societies normative violations (i.e. deviant behavior) are tackled through face-to-face confrontations and it is almost impossible for an individual to oppose the “moral center” of the society, also because they depend upon the other members for survival. In complex, agrarian/industrial societies, contrarily, it is necessary the introduction of formal modalities of social control (such as the law, the police, psychiatrists, etc.) in order to avoid the deviant behavior’s threat to social stability – “the legal order becomes necessary when community solidarity breaks down and society is broken up into competing and conflicting factions and interests”.
According to the protectionist approach to deviance, criminal law is the by-product of a given society’s moral thinking (i.e. the criminalization of certain behaviors is grounded in what individuals think to be morally wrong).
The social constructionist approach argues instead that criminal law is a peculiarly political phenomenon, that is, it reflects certain social groups’ moral views and it’s a form of legitimation of them; criminal law is therefore a site of struggle and contestation between political rivals.
Moral panics deal with the attempts to criminalize certain behaviors previously constructed as deviant.
Collective behaviors related to moral panics
“Collective behavior is defined as behavior that is relatively spontaneous, volatile, evanescent, emergent, extrainstitutional, and short-lived”.
Rumors are both a process and a product concerned with unsubstantiated information; they thrive on subjective fear, anxiety, lack of reliable news concerning a certain topic.
Rumors belong to the structure of a moral panic: they fuel moral panics and they’re fueled by them.
Social delusions are another form of collective behavior related to moral panics. They involve a mistaken belief concerning a certain group, heightened emotion and mass mobilization (such as in the case of rallies, protests, marches, petitions to politicians, etc.).
Social movements consist of “organized efforts by a substantial number of people to change, or to resist change in, some major aspect of society”.
Social movements need an objective condition which is contested, a subjective feeling that the condition must be changed or preserved and an organization through which the condition can be changed or preserved.
According to Goode, “movements attempt to define their cause as ‘politically correct’, and opposition to their program – or even simple inaction – as politically incorrect, almost unthinkable” (think of anti-abortionists using the rhetoric of baby-killing against who has abortions).
“Exaggeration is a great deal more effective as a movement strategy than the complex task of literal, point-for-point truth-telling”.
Social movements represent one manifestation of the moral panic, one means by which the panic is expressed.
Social problems and moral panics
There are two approaches to the topic of social problems: the objectivist and the social constructionist ones.
According to the objectivist approach, social problems are conditions that are harmful to a society.
According to the constructionist approach, social problems exist only insofar as members of the society consider a certain condition to be harmful – i.e. social problems are necessarily related to an observer.
The fact that there are “year-to-year or decade-by-decade fluctuations in how seriously the public regards certain social conditions” gives support to the idea social problems are constructed.
While pure constructionists argue that even the “objective harm” caused by a social problem cannot be established, contextual constructionists believe that it can be determined whether a given social problem is actually one (i.e. actual harm and concern can be confronted).
Social problems have a lot in common with moral panics, but they do not entail the presence of a folk devil and they’re not as volatile as moral panics.
Moral panics are marked by a disproportionate concern over certain social problems.
Moral panics and the witch craze
Sometime during the 15th century, society’s conceptualization of magic became an evil force that created, rather than solved, social problems.
The shift in conceptualization was linked to the dissemination of atrocity tales (i.e. stories in which the folk devils commit acts that go against the fundamental values of the culture they belong to).
The folk devils of the witch craze were predominantly women (coming from all social classes, married or not, etc.).
A number of observers have noted that the witch-hunts were conducted in their most intense form in regions in which the Catholic Church was weakest and most threatened.
The legal machinery of the Inquisition became obsolete when all the heretical groups that populated Western Europe were dismantled or marginalized; it had to find a new aim, namely witchcraft.
According to Goode and Ben-Yehuda, at the time of the witch craze “there was confusion about the moral boundaries of society and the cognitive map of the world”, and this created a sense of impending doom.
The inquisitors formed their demonological theories in the early years of the scientific revolution.
The explosion of witch craze is linked to the loss of power and influence of the Church during the Renaissance.
Witches represented the only deviants who were thought to attack the very core of the social system through an anti-religion.
“The existential crisis of individuals – expressed in terms of anomie, alienation, estrangement, powerlessness and anxiety – created a fertile soil in which the Dominican mythology could prevail”.
Changes in the economy, demography, and the structure of the family, specifically changes in the role of women, the incidence of prostitution and infanticide, and the use of contraception formed a salient complex of problems that seemed to arouse strong feelings.
The witch craze ended when its cost became too high, when foreign armies from the north invaded the land, and when the distinct judicial category of witchcraft disappeared from the trials.
“The persecution of witches was a failure: it had failed to restore the crumbling medieval order”.
The crusade against pornography
Goode and Ben-Yehuda want to consider why the moral panic propagated by feminists concerning pornography failed to achieve large-scale diffusion.
The anti-porn movement contributed to construct a moral panic since its concern for the dangers of pornography was not proportionate to the real harm the latter posed (the coercion experienced among porn actresses is very low, and pornography probably doesn’t cause violence against women).
One characteristic typical of moral panics can be found in the anti-porn crusade: the creation of urban legends such as the story according to which women were really brutalized and killed in snuff movies.
Nonetheless, the fact that people rushed to watch Snuff (1975) – advertised as if an actress had really been killed during the shooting – implicitly reveals that our society is somewhat sexist.
The anti-porn activists argued that porn is/is caused by/causes violence against women. The first claim is not empirical and therefore, according to the authors, its truth-value cannot be assessed; the second, as it’s been said above, is false; the third is false too, since differences in the number of rapes between states in which porn was banned and the others, or where consumption was low and the others, were not detected. Moreover, the extreme spread of pornography in the Internet era should have been characterized by a concurrent raise in the number of rapes and murders, but this simply didn’t happen.
The anti-porn crusade represents something of a negative case of moral panic, since it failed to gain support from the media and the public. Why so? Goode and Ben-Yehuda argue that factors such as “the massive increases in the availability of porn and no concomitant increases in crimes against women” caused the anti-porn crusade to “virtually vaporize”.
