ABSTRACT
Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yahuda (1994) produced an influential criteria-based approach for identifying moral panics, arguing that a moral panic should consist of five discernible elements: concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality, and volatility. The first of these elements refers to concrete manifestations of heightened public concern over an identifiable group or person whose behaviour is deemed a threat to the values and interests of mainstream society. This chapter examines the extent to which a rapid and considerable increase in the presence of migrant workers, following more liberal immigration policies in the mid-2000s, has caused widespread concern among Singaporeans over their effect on competition for jobs, wage levels, overcrowding of public transportation and other
amenities, and criminal and anti-social behaviour. This chapter also examines public concerns about more abstract matters such as the possible dilution of the young nation’s identity and character. Second, in a moral panic, there is a rise in the levels of hostility towards deviant groups, stylized as ‘folk devils’ and enemies of respectable society. This is often accomplished by amplifying their deviance through the use of negative stereotypes in the mass media. More recent work on moral panic has acknowledged how folk devils are not necessarily victims or disempowered minorities, particularly in the case of the ‘culture wars’. They can be quite capable of mobilizing against mainstream society, even using their deviant status as symbolic capital (for example, McRobbie and Thornton, 1995). Migrant workers in the Singapore context, however, are so powerless in this regard that the orthodox model of moral panic is still appropriate. This chapter will identify stereotypes of migrant workers in the media, assessing the extent to which they relate to latent and manifest hostility in Singapore society. Third, in a moral panic, there is a consensus on the reality, extent, and cause of the threat, not necessarily among all members of mainstream society, but certainly within a segment of that society. Consensus is often achieved through the concerted and mutually reinforcing efforts of politicians, religious leaders, producers of news, and civil society activists to unify public opinion against folk devils, usually by building and maintaining moral barricades that make a strong distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’, defending the former against the latter. In some cases, a moral panic is generated by political elites to serve political ends such as gaining power by rallying electoral support and obtaining the mandate to pass or amend laws and regulations. The surveillance and law enforcement functions of the state are also activated in a moral panic where folk devils are viewed through the lens of crime. The media often plays a significant role in amplifying and even initiating a moral panic. As commercial entities, media organizations have an incentive to boost their sales and raise advertising revenue by resorting to sensationalism, instigating a response and raising indignation by playing on prejudices and anxieties. At their disposal are highly suggestive and emotive stereotypes, themes, figures of speech, and storytelling techniques. Also at their disposal are willing experts and opinion leaders whose quotes may be elicited in support of the media’s diagnosis of the problem and recommendations for dealing with it. Critics of the model have pointed out how the media, in its diversity, does not always speak in a single voice. The media landscape in most advanced countries is too fragmented for this to happen, since it consists not only of the mainstream press and broadcasters but also niche media, micro-media, and new media in cyberspace (for example, McRobbie and Thornton, 1995). Following from this, folk devils often have their own effective media channels to defend themselves and advance their own interests. In Singapore, migrant workers do not have their own media. The mainstream media, strongly influenced by the state, has been mostly co-ordinated in the production of news, in large part through the dynamics of editorial gatekeeping
and journalistic self-censorship. This chapter examines the extent to which public consensus on the deviant character of migrant workers has been facilitated by Singapore’s mainstream media, as it filters and elicits the views of political and moral entrepreneurs. A Gramscian approach to hegemony highlights the complex, dynamic, and contested nature of such consensus, most fully developed in the influential work of Stuart Hall and his colleagues who analysed the rise to prominence in the early 1970s of young Afro-Caribbean ‘muggers’ in Britain as a moral panic (Hall et al., 1978). Goode and Ben-Yahuda (1994) described this work as an ‘elite-engineered model’ of the moral panic, where the elite class in capitalist society ‘orchestrates hegemony’ with the assistance and complicity of the political elite, its state instruments (including the police, courts, and legislature), and the mass media. According to this approach, folk devils and the threat they are believed to pose to mainstream society are part of an ideological mechanism that serves to secure hegemony by creating the conditions of consent within which elite interests are protected, the stability of the capitalist system secured, and the political dominance and culture of surveillance for ‘policing the crisis’ of capitalism legitimized. As Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton (1995) explained, Hall and his colleagues regarded moral panic as ‘an envoy for dominant ideology’, recognizing that ‘ideology is a suffusive social process, and that it is not a simple question of the distortion of truth, but rather that ideology is a force which works continuously through the mobilization of “common sense” ’. Further, this chapter will treat moral panic not only as an ideological servant of hegemonic consensus, but also as a symptom of social psychological repression of anxiety, frustration, shame, denial, and guilt arising from entrenched – and usually latent – practices of domination and exploitation, specifically of migrant workers. Stanley Cohen’s seminal work also emphasized the symptomatic character of moral panics and the way that folk devils are screens onto which society projects what it represses (for example, Garland, 2008: 18). This can account for the excessive, even obsessive, concern that ‘right-thinking’ people show for the objects of their disgust. Therefore, I will analyse the migrant worker folk devil in terms of the guilt-ridden dependency that Singaporeans have developed on their exploited labour in businesses and households, as well as the capacity of moral panics to foster mainstream unity and garner widespread consent for a surveillance society through which the crises of capitalism – specifically the consequences of maintaining an unsustainable economy of high growth and low productivity – may be effectively policed or at least obscured from public consciousness. The fourth element of a moral panic is the disproportionality between reality and reaction. Critics have pointed out conceptual and ethical problems in moral panic analysis that is unable to determine what a sober and unexaggerated social response should be and that insensitively belittles the moral concerns of society, unhinging itself from underlying problems that are left unaddressed (for example, Waddington, 1986; Garland, 2008). This chapter will not attempt to resolve this problem, but instead view moral panics in terms of sudden and unusual intensity of response rather than disproportionality.
