ABSTRACT
It is widely acknowledged that this is the age of the moral panic (Thompson 1998: 1).
INTRODUCTION
The term ‘moral panic’, first used by Jock Young (1971) and immortalised by Stanley Cohen (1972), today has almost 300,000 ‘hits’ on the internet referring to it and has become both an established concept within the social sciences as well as a popularly used form of condemnation of irrational anxieties and issues within society. One of the books in a Routledge series of ‘Key Ideas’, written by Kenneth Thompson in 1998, is dedicated to Moral Panics, and it is from this book that the above quote is taken. Ours, it appears, is an age of moral panic. Chas Critcher (co-author of Policing the Crisis [Hall et al. 1978], another book famed for its explanation of moral panics), writing in Moral Panics and the Media, also believes that ‘moral panics are around us all the time’ (Critcher 2006: 3). Critcher notes that interest in moral panic analysis, after a lull in the late 1970s, was reawakened in both the United States and the UK by the issues of child abuse and AIDS.
