ABSTRACT
The starting-point for this chapter is the central place occupied by the theory of the moral panic in sociology. Indeed if ‘radical sociology’ has made one major contribution to the kind of popular social analysis found in much of the quality press and on television, it is with the concepts of ‘moral panic’, ‘deviance amplification’ and social control. The moral panic is now a term regularly used by journalists. It has become a standard interview question to put to conservative politicians: are they not whipping up a moral panic as a means of laying the foundations for punitive legislation, or else as a foil to deflect attention away from other more pressing economic issues?
