ABSTRACT
The concept of ‘risk’ is particularly relevant to the analysis of moral panics connected with the family. Politicians and media commentators have frequently created a signification spiral through moral discourses concerning episodes or trends that they portray as examples of immorality and violence due to family breakdown. A critic within the press, Polly Toynbee, wrote of the dangerous tendency in the 1990s for British politicians to attempt to ride to victory on a moral tide, ‘balanced on a wave of fear, surfing on a flood of moral panic’ (the Independent, 16 November 1996). She asked who would speak words of calm and common sense in the face of this ‘fin de siècle hysteria’:
It leaves the electorate in a turmoil of panic: society is out of control, the family done for, children are running wild, schools teach nothing, crime is rampant, respect is dead, the cult of instant gratification is rife. The very word ‘moral’ now belongs so firmly with the alarmists that it is virtually unusable by anyone else.
(Polly Toynbee, ‘Private tolerance and public panic’, the Independent, 16 November 1996)