ABSTRACT
Moral panic is such a well-established term, both in academic and everyday vocabulary, that it is surprising to recall it has only become widely used since the work of Stan Cohen in the early 1970s on youth subcultures. Since then the term has been regularly used in the media to refer to all sorts of anti-social and/or criminal behaviours. Essentially, a moral panic refers to an exaggerated reaction, from the media, the police or wider public, to the activities of particular social groups. These activities may well be relatively trivial but have been reported in a somewhat sensationalized form in the media; and such reporting and publicity has then led to an increase in general anxiety and concern about those activities. So a moral panic is an exaggerated response to a type of behaviour that is seen as a social problem – the term indicates an over-reaction on the part of themedia and/or other social institutions. Furthermore, this over-reaction magnifies the original area of concern. Indeed, it leads to the social group (and, as a consequence, the behaviour and activities they engage in) being viewed by the wider society as ‘folk devils’ – another term coined by Cohen. Indeed, Cohen’s book on the mods and rockers of the 1960s was titled Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers and therefore, as Newburn (2007) puts it, has ‘the distinction of containing two terms, folk devils and moral panics, which have subsequently entered popular terminology’.
