ABSTRACT
A panic about what was happening to British youth in the 1960s was the occasion for the first sociological analysis of a moral panic (S.Cohen 1972) and this is significant for a number of reasons: first, because concerns about the moral condition of youth have been the object of periodic episodes of moral panic and so they may enable us to pinpoint a major and recurrent source of social anxiety about risk; second, because the moral panic about Mods and Rockers in 1960s Britain provides a good example of the signification spiral by which the interaction of claims-makers, moral entrepreneurs and the mass media results in the establishment of a discourse in which certain groups are demonized as the source of moral decline; third, at least one of the moral panics about youth—that over muggings in the 1970s—has been the subject of the most intense debate between defenders and critics of the concept of moral panic.
