Moral Panic And Its Effects On Society

On October 7, 1994 in Beckton, London, England, while Daniel Handley was working on his bicycle, he was approached by two men in a Peugeot 405, who claimed to be lost and sought direction from Daniel on their map. Meanwhile, their fantasy was to abduct a young fair haired, pre-teen buy and sexually abuse him and kill him to hide their crime. With the map placed in the back seat of their car, as Daniel leaned in to look at it, he was pushed into the car and they drove off. At their flat, both men sexually abused him while the other videoed the activity. Then, Daniel was taken to a layby by Hungerford in Berkshire and strangled to death with a rope. His body was dumped in a shallow grave near Bristol and found in March 1995. This paper is to look at why child kidnapping and abuse happened and still happens to this day. To also look at “what kind of person would take pleasure from raping and killing a ten-year-old boy?”

Perpetrators of sex crimes committed against children often start by gaining the trust of potential victims and the adults in their lives’ by using a tactic called “grooming.” The purpose of this memo is to give the court a baseline understanding of what sex offender victim grooming is, its purpose, and techniques. Because of the extensive amount of research and information on this topic, this paper does not detail all of the grooming techniques used by child sex offenders to groom potential victims.

36). They also characterized moral panics using the following five features: “Concern”, “Hostility”, “Consensus”, “Disproportionality”, and “Volatility”, which typically occur sequentially. Moral panic itself is defined by Cohen as when “a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests” (Burns and Crawford, 1999, p. 148). The subject and duration of a moral panic varies. It may be new or it can be something that has existed for a while but only for a certain time is it seen to be problematic. It can suddenly appear then quickly disappear or it may produce noticeable differences in law or in society (Burns and Crawford, 1999, p. 148). It can be proven both, the Burns and Crawford article entitled “School Shootings, the Media and Public Fear: Ingredients for a Moral Panic,” and the Brezina and Phipps article entitled “False News Reports, Folk Devils and the Role of Public Officials: Notes on the Social Construction of Law and Order in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.” fully demonstrate the social reaction to the event they are describing meets the definition of a “moral panic” according to the definition by Cohen (Burns and Crawford, 1999, p. 148) and Goode and Ben-Yehuda’s five features (Steeves and Milford,

Sarah’s Law is an improvement of the U.S. version and modifying the flaws in that law to make the U.K. law extremely more effective and reinforcing the objective of the scheme to protect the children (NSPCC, 2017). As reported by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), the official statistics indicated that around 1 in 20 children in the U.K. have been subjected to sexual abuse; and the Home Office in 2007 discovered that around 75% of the victims knew their offenders. Therefore, the scheme needs to be open about the facts and figures surrounding this particular type of offence in order to make the public more aware and educated of the risks. What is more, the possible situations that these offences that takes place in (Penny, 2014). However, the biggest problem resulting with statistics is that most cases are not reported or disclosed. Majority of the sexual abuse are not reported, prosecuted or detected, and the vast majority of the children do not tell anyone about their encounter of sexual abuse. In addition, this particular crime is generally witnessed amongst the abuser and the victim (NSPCC, 2017; Radford et al., 2011: p. 8).

Since the early-2010s, debate around the sexualisation of children has instigated much social alarm. A number of media articles (Cameron 2010; Critchley 2009; Doherty 2011; Kermond 2012, Jones & Cuneo 2009; Snow 2013; Tuohy 2012) have depicted the sexualisation of children as a prevailing social matter which accentuate concepts represented in moral panic discourse. In everyday practices of reporting public and social events, moral panic frequently becomes elicited by society’s mass mediated exaggeration of certain social events. What becomes apparent from Critcher’s work (2003), is how understandings of public incidents become portrayed as concerning through socially constructed and distorted notions of panic which become widely adopted views. As Cohen (1972) suggests, moral panic becomes a state of panic through the encouragement of important social agents which believe that an ideological perspective is threatened or endangered by a particular view. Thereby to accentuate these notions using moral panic discourse, this essay will investigate whether representations of sexualised children constitute a moral panic contrived by mediated distortions or is truly a concerning societal issue through an analysis of the processual and attributional model (Critcher 2003). Drawing on both discursive models of moral panic will allow a thorough investigation of the catalysts for moral panic involving the sexualisation of children. This paper will demonstrate how moral panic discourse

Of the many problems faced by children and adolescents, few provoke such moral outrage as childhood sexual abuse. Many times, as on the television show “To Catch a Predator”, such abuse can be inflicted by strangers who may gradually become familiar with the child online. Sadly, however, often times the perpetrator of sexual abuse on children is someone much more familiar to the child- someone the child may even love.

Mass hysteria is a phenomenon that transmits collective allusions of threats through a population in society as a result of rumors and fear. The Crucible by Arthur Miller accurately portrays mass hysteria that took place during the Salem witch trials of 1692. People were accused based on revenge or other malicious motives and to make the situation worse, nothing about the trials was logical. After a few people were accused, fear set into the town and everyone was viewed as a witch until proven innocent. Mass hysteria not only happened during the Salem witch trials, but right after the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001 as well. Mass hysteria ties into both the accusations made in The Crucible and the islamophobia that set in after 9/11.

In the article, “Moral Panics: Culture, Politics, and Social Construction” by Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, the authors explore the meanings behind moral panics, what contributing factors ignite the panics, who or what may be the cause of moral panics and so forth all while with providing interesting examples. They also propose five criterias that goes into defining moral panics which are; concern, hostility, consensus, dispositionality and volatility. Concern is regarding a measurable or manifested heightened level of

A moral panic can be defined as the common characteristics of social problems that suddenly emerge, cause problems for

Michael Tonry in his book “Thinking About Crime” brings up the subject of moral panics (pg 86). A moral panic as defined by Stuart Hall is as follows

As mentioned earlier Stanley Cohen (1972) is one of prominent sociologists that devised the term ‘moral panic’. He defined the concept as ‘A sporadic episode which, as it occurs, subject’s society to bouts of moral panic, or in other terms, worries about the values and principles which society upholds which may be in jeopardy’ (Cohen, 1987; 9). The term ‘moral panic’ was introduced by Stanley Cohen (1972) in his book entitled ‘Folk Devils and Moral Panics’.

A moral panic is the public’s response to problems that seem threatening to the society. Moral panics are used by the media, however people are likely to panic out of proportion due the way it is upheld.

Challenge: Select and describe a “moral panic” against a perceived deviance. Analyse the role of the “moral entrepreneur” and “folk devil” in your selected case. Finally, explicate what it demonstrates about individuals and their socialization. (Length: 2 000 words)

Certain groups of young people have been labelled by the media as deviant. This has been done through an exacerbation in the way they are represented which causes moral alarm and fear amongst the public as their reactions have been shaped by the media. Moral panic can cause changes in the public opinions, protocols and even legislation. Media labelling results in media amplification which is the process whereby over exaggeration by the media causes more people to join in and create more criminal activity. This over exaggeration of certain stories leads to the glamorisation of criminal activity to basically impress others to do the exact same thing. Stanley Cohens uses the term “Folk Devils” which refers to the negative stereotypes that are

Moral panics usually take place at the time of significant changes in society, when there is a great fear of loss of control. In these times "collective consciousness" needs to be reinforced so that society can locate new boundaries. Other examples of moral panics are over witchcrafts, satanic rituals, drugs, handguns, teenage pregnancy, TV violence, Internet and so on. According to Goode and Ben-Yehuda, moral panic has the following necessary indicators: 1. Concern - (different from fear) over the imagined threat (and those associated with