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Instead, the sceptics, and Falkof, places the plasma gang within the larger problem of crime in South Africa instead of a specialised, mythical entity. The myths of white genocide propagated by white Afrikaaner groups pitching themselves as a minority rights group in South Africa frames white Afrikaaner farmers as victims, a victimhood that deliberately ignores or obscures black death. In other words, white groups like AfriForum's use of the narrative of white genocide is about 'entrenching white property rights and securing white economic power rather than about countering genocide' (p. 63). As Falkof points out, of course, there is no white genocide in South Africa, in fact, most white South Africans live more privileged and more secured lives than the black majority that lives in poverty and is at much higher risk of experiencing crime. [Extracted from the article]

Through archival research and an intersectional thematic analysis, this paper examines three key episodes of early-2000s sensation To Catch a Predator and situates them within crime media and journalism literature. The paper analyzes themes of journalistic integrity and the subjugation of women and girls by a television program that claimed to use the former to stop the latter. Based on the analysis, To Catch a Predator engages in forensic journalism as demonstrated by the treatment of women and girls as bait, claims of ownership over women and girls' bodies, lack of nuance in reporting, and the liberties taken in their journalistic practices. Ultimately, this paper shows how To Catch a Predator acts as a spectacle of vigilantism, by creating the child pornography it claims to fight and by glorifying punishment, contributing to the ongoing moral panic around child exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses Bourdieusian field theory to examine how journalistic practices contributed to a multi-mediated moral panic about 'African gangs' in Melbourne, Australia. Empirical insight is supplied via interviews with journalists who identified traditional media outlets as 'secondary definers' that amplified and legitimised this racialised threat construction. Participants attributed the intense and sensationalised media coverage to the political climate, the newsworthiness of racialised 'folk devils', and the economic and technological transformation of the journalistic field. These transformations were perceived to have negatively influenced journalistic standards by incentivising the efficient production of commodifiable content. Participants described how these structural changes were filtered through the social personalities of different news outlets; they shaped, and were reproduced through, distinct managerial cultures, editorial routines and journalistic habitus. The emergent nomos ('rules of the game') was perceived to constrain the autonomy of journalists, particularly those lacking cultural capital, and limit opportunities for contestation of the 'African gangs' narrative. Journalists seemingly adapted by engaging in practices which reflected their attempts to negotiate these conditions and establish coherent narrative identities. In some cases, this entailed the neutralisation of what journalists recognised as ethically questionably reporting practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the book, as Schuilenburg (2021: 6) states is not to "search for the secret of hysteria", rather to understand "why it continues to operate in our society", a purpose which he fulfils in a thought-provoking, interesting and even humorous way. Whilst Schuilenburg insightfully shows how hysteria differs to panic (as used by Cohen), a deeper engagement with the extensive sociological literature on emotions could have been an interesting aspect for inclusion. Second - and this is the main focus of the book - hysteria can be used as an analytical tool for gauging contemporary society, as Schuilenburg shows with his careful and in-depth sociological analysis. [Extracted from the article]

This research note critically comments on the lack of attention that moral panic scholars are devoting to the ways in which changing digital media formats are reshaping the dynamics of interaction involved in public claims-making, modes of audience engagement, and techniques of regulation and control. Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton's seminal deconstruction of conventional moral panic studies is used as a point of departure to supplement the logic of mass mediation with insights into some of the structuring principles that ground the logic of digital mediation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to situate the concept of a ‘moral panic’ within a set of historical and social changes and thus to demonstrate that its impact and subsequent acceptability within the vocabulary of sociology were in part due to the conditions of its emergence. Earlier and more positivistic criminology was unduly committed to the ‘essence’ of an act, whereas the breakthrough afforded by Cohen and Young’s idea was to attend to the ‘appearance’ of an act in an era when image and representation were becoming primary phenomena within the social sciences. The work concludes with an analysis of the social construction of transgression. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the open and contested concept of moral panic over its 40-year history, exploring the contributions made by the concept’s key originators, as well as contemporary researchers. While most moral panic researchers are critical, humanist, interpretivist, interventionist and qualitative, this paper highlights ten areas of productive dispute within and around the meaning of moral panic theory’s ‘common sense’. Such diversity of interpretation creates multiple possibilities for convergent and divergent theorization and research within a supposedly singular conceptual framework. This lack of closure and consequent diversity of political standpoints, intellectual perspectives and fields of empirical focus, rather than representing the weakness of the concept of moral panic, reflects and contributes to its successful diffusion, escalation and innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including the context of an emergent and enduring concept of moral panic, how the idea of moral panic might relate to current issues, and the contribution of the social imagination to the sociology of deviance and moral panic theory.

This article aims to further develop the understanding of the relationship and distinction between moral panics and moral regulation. To this end, a model for the comparative analysis of discursive changes over time, and between different discursive fields, is outlined. The model consists of three steps: (1) mapping general trends in news reporting; (2) analysing thematical relations in full-text news articles; and (3) conducting closer qualitative readings of news articles indicated to be of specific importance in the first two steps. Results from the presented case study – in which news reporting on benefit fraud in Sweden and the United Kingdom is analysed using the outlined model – suggest that there is a close relationship between moral panic discourse and moral regulation discourse. Using different strategies to construct social relations and deviant subjectivities through moralizing articulations, momentary outbursts of moral panics, and the more common, routine, forms of moral regulation, draw and depend upon each other to organize consensus and the management of risks in processes of discursive legitimization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While moral panic remains a key sociological concept, it has been criticized for its lack of explanatory force. This article reports the results of a study designed to examine whether a social psychological approach to moral panic can (a) theorize the content as well as process of moral panic, and (b) understand both the cause and the impact of this response. This approach was tested in relation to the topic of asylum seekers. The research was based on a qualitative analysis of 120 newspaper articles, 8 focus groups with members of the host community and 25 semi-structured interviews with people who have sought asylum in the United Kingdom. A theoretical framework of social representations and social identity theory was used to explore psychological processes that may underpin host receptivity to moral panic discourse about asylum seekers and the impact such a moral panic may have on those labelled as ‘folk devils’. Results indicated that social psychological processes are one of the contributory factors to host receptivity to moral panic, and strategies adopted by ‘folk devils’ to cope with stigmatized group membership were identified. Implications of the findings for future moral panic research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that contemporary moral panic theorists are often too narrowly focused on either refining the sociological framings of moral panic theory or, alternatively, on applying that theory to case studies without asking how the theory might be used to frame strategic interventions into public debate and policy. It examines the way that conservative politicians and media commentators have appropriated the accusation that they are fuelling moral panic as proof that they are actively engaged in a fight for morality. It contends that moral panic theorists need to use their knowledge of how moral panics work in order to engage in strategic interventions into public debate and policy. It concludes with a call for scholars working on specific issues in the field to apply their research and redouble their efforts to ensure that evidence-based research is heard and understood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A case is made for a political economy of moral panics and moral regulation. After a brief discussion of the political economy of alcohol regulation, the focus shifts to the culture-of-fear thesis. Four writers (Glassner, Altheide, Furedi and Bauman) are interrogated for what they have to say about the culture of fear. Examined are its definition and manifestations; its historical genesis; its key agents and their motivations; how the culture of fear is constructed and disseminated; and its implications for governmental action and public attitudes. Six propositions are identified as constituting a consensus about the political economy of the culture of fear: (1) a safer society produces paradoxically more fear; (2) this fear is different from previous types of fear; (3) fear is symbolically constructed; (4) the media and popular culture are vital to sustaining fear; (5) fear distorts and misrecognizes social realities; (6) fear generates hostility to outsiders. Such a perspective revisits the original project of radical criminology. It is argued that moral panics and moral regulation analysis should be informed by the adherence of political economy to the importance of historical change, seeing society as a totality, insisting on morality as a focus and position, and through a sustained commitment to praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The concept of moral panic arose out of a particular conjuncture of political, social and theoretical circumstances; specifically the events of 1968, the social transformations of the late 1960s and the synthesis and energizing of New Deviancy and subcultural theory in British criminology centering on the NDC (National Deviancy Conference) and the CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies). This work evoked Mills’s Sociological Imagination: the placing of individual problems as public issues, the relation of the individual to his or her particular time and social structure, and the effect of social dynamics on the psychological and psychodynamics on the social. The sociological imagination is not a constant but is greatly enhanced at times of change: it is this imagination which engenders transformative politics. Such an analysis clearly demands placing both human actors and reactors, in this instance, ‘deviants’ and moral panickers, in structure and historical time and to examine both the immediate and deep roots of their behaviour. There is a tendency in these neo-liberal times to view moral panics as simple mistakes in rationality generated perhaps by the mass media or rumour. In this process any link between the individual and the social structure, between historical period and social conflict, is lost. In particular the peculiar ‘rational irrationality’ of moral panics is obfuscated, the link between social structure and individual belief diminished, and attempts to utilize moral panics to stymie social change and transformative politics obscured. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper deals with some hidden political dimensions of moral panic theory. It concentrates on the implications of two related claims about what this battle meant: first, that moral panics are inherently normative and can be categorized as good and bad moral panics (the ones that we study are invariably bad); second, that students of moral panics have to take sides in this normative battle. There are differences in the ways this question was originally posed in the late 1960s and today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The emergence of a neo-Nazi gang is an unprecedented manifestation of deviance in Israel. It has undermined the moral order and shaken the delicate nerves of Israeli society, which lives in the shadow of the Holocaust. Drawing principally on Israeli newspaper coverage, the study examines the dynamics of social discourse among policymakers, the press and pressure groups. The analysis shows that initial formulations of moral panic derived from a profound concern about changes in the social and moral order of society due to immigration. Moreover, conceptually situated within theorizations of moral risk, this moral panic was a temporary rupture in processes of moral regulation and served governing agents, which increased social control by constructing risks and dangers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the cultural construction of drug-facilitated sexual assault (DFSA) in the British media. We consider the relationship between media reporting and belief in routine DFSA, and look at the ways in which DFSA is presented and received as a legitimate, plausible, and credible threat. As a media story, DFSA shares certain characteristics of the 'crime legend' and the 'moral panic', although it is, this article suggests, more appropriately conceived of as a 'cautionary tale'. The final part of the article outlines the 'cautionary tale' as a paradigm for understanding media coverage. It is the victim and potential victim's behaviour (as opposed to that of a folk devil) that is marginalised in the 'cautionary tale', and the threat is frequently represented as both external and internal to the individual, as resulting from an opportunistic attacker and/or one's own negligent behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the nature and extent of news reports using the sociological concept, 'moral panic' (MP). Qualitative content analysis reveals that moral panic is commonly used in news reports in the USA, UK, Australia, and other countries, but it is more likely to be compatible with print (e.g. newspaper) formats than television reports. It is also widely used in literary and art reviews, editorials and op-ed pieces, often by social scientists. Use of the concept has increased over the last decade, particularly in news reports as part of an 'opposing' voice or the 'other side' of articles about deviant behavior, sexual behavior, and drug use. It is suggested that moral panic as 'opposition' fits the entertainment news format, and while this sustains its use by writers and familiarity to audience members, it also appears to be associated with certain topics (e.g. sex and drugs), but not others, such as terrorism in the mainstream media. Questions are raised for additional research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the interpretation and legacy of street crime in the book "Policing the Crisis" (PTC). According to the authors of PTC, the problem of street robbery was an issue of explaining how the criminalizing label mugger came to be imported from the U.S. to the British context and applied to identify the black mugger. It is noted that the criminalized consciousness of the street mugger is not capable of producing out of itself an emancipatory project. The author notes that the opinion of the British public in PTC were shaped through the medium of the moral panic about black muggers.

The article develops a critical analysis of the concept of moral panic and its sociological uses. Arguing that some of the concept's subtlety and power has been lost as the term has become popular, the article foregrounds its Freudian and Durkheimian aspects and explicates the epistemological and ethical issues involved in its use. Contrasting the dynamics of moral panics to the dynamics of culture wars, the author shows that both phenomena involve group relations and status competition, though each displays a characteristically different structure. The piece concludes by situating 'moral panics' within a larger typology of concepts utilized in the sociology of social reaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]