Folk Devils Research Articles

What does and should influence the number of lawyers?

Before we can ask whether there are too many lawyers we must answer several preliminary questions: whom do we consider lawyers, and what does and should influence their number? The term ‘lawyer’, w...

‘Salafisme is overal’

Salafism is at the center of public attention because of its alleged ties to recent violent attacks in Europe and because the threat they appear to be for secular and sexual liberties in Europe. In this article I will analyze the paradigm shifts we can find in politics, debates and media with regard to the governance of religion. The central concept in this analysis is Islamophobia which I regard as a structural phenomenon producing and expressing a categorization and hierchisation of groups of people that are subsequently denied access or granted conditional access to the Dutch moral community. I will show how the logic of Islamophobia is based upon cultural differentialism, and anxiety over the future of the Dutch moral community with its ideal of secular and sexual liberties and on securitization. In this logic a distinction is made between liberal and radical Islam and I argue that the Salafists have become the folk devil of the Dutch moral community because they appeal to and evoke abstract feelings of fear related to religion, ethnic diversity and migration. The Islamophobic logic turns them into the concrete examples of how ‘we’ should not be.

The Delinquent Girl , and: Between Good and Ghetto: African-American Girls and Inner-City Violence , and: Beyond Bad Girls: Gender, Violence, and Hype (review)

Reviewed by: The Delinquent Girl, and: Between Good and Ghetto: African-American Girls and Inner-City Violence, and: Beyond Bad Girls: Gender, Violence, and Hype Alison Fyfe (bio) The Delinquent Girl edited by Margaret Zahn. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2009, 344 pp., $56.50 hardcover, $31.95 paper, $56.50 electronic. Between Good and Ghetto: African-American Girls and Inner-City Violence by Nikki Jones. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010, 228 pp., $22.95 paper. Beyond Bad Girls: Gender, Violence, and Hype by Meda Chesney-Lind and Katherine Irwin. New York: Routledge, 2008, 236 pp., $36.95 paper. The authors of the three books I review here critically examine the realities of girls' delinquency. Margaret Zahn's edited volume, The Delinquent Girl, is a compilation of eleven book chapters explaining girls' delinquency from multiple and intersecting perspectives. Nikki Jones's Between Good and Ghetto: African-American Girls and Inner-City Violence is a long overdue in-depth analysis of African American girls' experiences with violence and aggression in inner-city ghettos. Meda Chesney-Lind and Katherine Irwin's Beyond Bad Girls: Gender, Violence and Hype compares the realities of girls' aggression to popular media hype around the "mean girl" folk devil. The broadest investigation of girls' delinquency is found in Zahn's edited volume. The chapters were written by eighteen members of the Girls Study Group, a multidisciplinary group of academics and practitioners who study girls' delinquency and recommend prevention and intervention programs. This book explores various factors explaining girls' delinquency, discusses policy implications, and provides avenues for future study. Chapters 1 (Robert Agnew) and 2 (Jody Miller and Christopher Mullins) begin the book with an examination of how mainstream and feminist theories of crime explain aspects of girls' delinquency. In chapter 3, Darrell Steffensmeier and Jennifer Shwartz compare trends in girls' and boys' delinquency and argue that the alleged increase in girls' delinquency may, in fact, be a result of stronger social controls on girls, rather than a rise in their delinquency. Chapter 4 (Diana Fishbein, Shari Miller, Donna Marie Winn, and Gayle Dakof) examines biopsychological factors of crime to show how psychological and biosocial factors (for example, stress, early puberty, and ADHD) differentially affect girls' and boys' delinquency. [End Page 197] The next six chapters, respectively, explore how familial (Candace Kuttschnitt and Peggy Giordano), peer (Peggy Giordano), school (Allison Ann Payne, Denise Gottfredson, and Candace Kruttschnitt), gender differences and neighborhoods (Margaret Zahn and Angela Browne), larger and intersecting contexts (Merry Morash and Meda Chesney-Lind), and gang relationships (Jody Miller) can affect girls' delinquency. Together, they indicate that girls' delinquency, in addition to having biopsychological causes, is influenced by the environment in which they live and grow. Thus girls' delinquency is the result of a complex network of various internal and external factors affecting girls on a day-to-day basis. Finally, the author of chapter 7 (Barry Feld) outlines and compares longitudinal U.S. American trends in girls' delinquency, arrest rates, and sentencing trends to those of boys. For instance, although girls' arrest rates for simple assault are increasing while boys' are decreasing, Feld posits that this difference in rates reflects a change in police arrest practices, rather than a rise in girls' criminal behavior. Police tend to target girls more than boys for minor acts of violence and aggression (that is, simple assaults) that are uncharacteristic of traditional definitions of femininity and girlhood. Such gender differences in arrest rates also reflect boys' tendency to use weapons, which elevates their charges from simple assault to assault with a weapon. Another significant point Feld presents is that, contrary to popular belief, youth delinquency and crime, particularly that of girls, is decreasing rather than increasing. This finding is consistent with other current research on youth delinquency, such as Mike Males's (2010), who found that girls today are much happier, more successful, less aggressive, and experience fewer arrests and criminal charges, with the exception of simple assaults, than they have historically. This has policy implications, since current youth-crime policy is designed under the assumption that youth crime and delinquency are rising. Overall, the authors of The Delinquent Girl explore how gender, race, and class differences...

Incurable Sex Offenders, Lousy Judges & The Media: Moral Panic Sustenance in the Age of New Media

There is consensus that since the 1990s, we have experienced a spike in public concern over sexual offenders. Analyzing this concern as a moral panic, this paper argues that national television coverage, as it picks up local news, adds heat to the fire by re-naming the villain as an inadequate judicial system. This process helps to sustain a moral panic, while narrowing the available discourse about the nature of appropriate punishment. Drawing upon a well-publicized example of a media event in Vermont, this paper extends the theory of moral panics to add another stage to the process—a stage presented by the advent of cable news programming, the relationship between local and national media, and the explosion of blogs. In order for a panic to sustain over an extended time period, the rhetoric about it must transform. In particular, the claimsmaking about the nature of the problem must evolve. In particular, the panic has evolved from sex offenders as folk devils to an attack on judicial discretion. The development of the outcry over judicial discretion was due, in part, to media distortion of the case. I will thus trace the trajectory of this one case to demonstrate the role of the media in shaping and sustaining the panic.

The demonisation of politicians: moral panics, folk devils and MPs’ expenses

This article makes an argument of almost primitive simplicity: politicians have become examples of Cohen's ‘folk devils’. This, in turn, raises as yet unexplored questions about demonisation and social discourse, the capacity of politicians, the role of invisible political actors, the dangers of ‘self-evident truths’ and the challenges of revitalising politics within a low-trust high-blame environment. More specifically, this article engages in a process of conceptual travelling through which the theory of moral panics and the concept of ‘folk devils’ are deployed in order to tease apart a recent political crisis. The core argument of this article is that Cohen's seminal work on folk devils provides a powerful conceptual lens through which to generate a more reasoned and balanced account of political behaviour. More broadly, it argues that the ‘bad faith model of politics’ presents a severely distorted view of political reality that urgently needs revision.

Negatively shaping the asylum agenda? The representational strategy and impact of a tabloid news campaign

This article examines coverage presented in a news campaign (on asylum and immigration) by the UK tabloid newspaper, the Sun, from January to March 2003. The analysis reveals how tabloid news conventions rather than government definitions or viewpoints frame the character and contours of campaign representations, an observation that throws into sharp relief existing explanations of elite influence or authority skew. This campaign includes portrayals of the asylum seeker as ‘the other’ or ‘folk devil’, a moral framework explaining their deviant intentions and actions, as well as expressions of irreverence at elite decision-making and government UK asylum policy. Yet it is striking how accompanying tabloid representations of public opinion, featuring consistently through the coverage, offer additional hostility to asylum policy and government officials. The article outlines how such representations and appeals garner the attention of the political elite and elite media on this occasion and develop new concerns over the newspaper’s role in negatively shaping the asylum agenda.

A social psychological approach to understanding moral panic

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.

Underlying the Riots: The Invisible Politics of Class

Rioters from what has been contemptuously dismissed as a ‘feral underclass’ have become instant ‘folk devils’, a judgement evoking wider ‘moral panic’. In this brief contribution to an already lively project to make sociological and explanatory sense of four days of unpredicted mahem, together with its political/media packaging, we provide some pointers from sociology's classic tradition. It is argued that the post-1970s era of financial capitalism has witnessed a shift in the dynamic between class and state. The class politics of the advantaged, engineered by core members of Britain's capital executive and their allies in the state's power elite, has effectively restricted the potential for a class politics of the disadvantaged. The riots cannot be reduced to class action, far from it: they seem to have been more opportunistic and consumerist than political. Nevertheless, they cannot be explained without reference to the class politics of the advantaged. Issues of oppositional mobilization are addressed and three proposals for a research programme commended.

Foreword: Moral panics in the contemporary world

The papers in this special issue stem from the conference ‘Moral Panics in the Contemporary World’, held at Brunel University in December 2010 – nearly 40 years since the landmark publication of Stan Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972) and Jock Young’s The Drugtakers (1971) and ‘The role of the police as amplifiers of deviancy, negotiators of reality and translators of fantasy’ (1971). Over 150 international delegates from a variety of disciplines came together to discuss the continuing relevance of the concept of moral panic to analysing a range of contemporary phenomena. The aim of the conference was to explore and evaluate how the concept has developed and continues to develop, and how relevant and useful it remains to the analysis and understanding of current fears, risks, social problems and controversies. Speakers from the plenary sessions included the key progenitors of the moral panic concept, Stan Cohen and Jock Young, and current central figures in moral panic (re)conceptualizing, Chas Critcher and Sean Hier; the academic Catharine Lumby and the journalist James Oliver offered their reflections on being involved and implicated in specific moral panics. This issue includes: papers featuring four of the six speakers from the plenary sessions; a paper authored by Chris Jenks, who gave the opening address at the conference; and two papers from the thematic strands, the first by Julia M. Pearce and Elizabeth Charman, the second by Ragnar Lundstrom. The conference began with an opening address from Brunel University’s Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Sociology, Chris Jenks. In his paper here, ‘The context of an emergent and enduring concept’, Jenks traces the genesis of the concept of moral panic against the backdrop of the social and intellectual upheaval that accompanied its development. He then goes on to explore some of the subsequent developments since its initial formulation, in particular how the possibilities for breaking free of moral constraints have, in contemporary culture, become increasingly individualized and privatized – a process which has accompanied a more general shift in which questions of liminality and transgression have effectively moved to centre stage. Jenks discusses how transgression can be understood as at once a component of, and a counterpoint to, moral panics. He shows how transgressive behaviour is intimately tied up with the continual drawing and redrawing of limits on behaviour, with moral panics a means simultaneously to secure and redefine the

The Impact of the Researcher on the Researched

The Impact of the Researcher on the Researched

Tough-on-Crime Tolerance: The Cultural Criminalization of Bigotry in the Post-Civil Rights Era

This article extends critical scholarship on the problem of hate crimes in the U.S. into the field of cultural criminology. Highlighting the role cultural production plays in reinforcing identity-based social harms, this study analyzes the cultural construction of the figure of the white hate crimes perpetrator, or “the hater.” The article integrates findings from a comprehensive discourse analysis of major U.S. news sources from 1986 to 2010 with insights from the fields of whiteness studies and critical criminology. The study first finds that the figure of the hater embodies modern day bigotry through terse stereotypes about white poverty, masculinity, hate group membership, and criminality. It then argues that these widely distributed discursive performances create rhetorical opportunities to define bigotry as an individualized problem with law enforcement remedies and to further normalize extreme hate crimes cases. Ultimately, a new theoretical construct, “post-difference ideology,” is mobilized to challenge the hater’s prescribed role as folk devil.

Informers and the Transition in Northern Ireland

Though criminological literature has paid attention to the use of informers in ordinary law enforcement, there is a research gap regarding their usage in contexts of conflict and political violence. This article explores the social, political and security functions of IRA informers in the transition from conflict in Northern Ireland. Based on that experience, it develops four heuristic models regarding informers that the paper argues may be of direct relevance to other conflicted and transitional societies. These are the informer as folk devil, the informer as rumour, the informer as political manipulator, and the informer as celebrity. All these themes demonstrate the long-term effects of the use of informers during the Northern Ireland conflict—an important finding given the increasing prevalence of the use of informers in a political context

THE LATINO CYBER-MORAL PANIC PROCESS IN THE UNITED STATES

In the past few decades, the anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States has been influenced, in part, by the massive immigration of Latinos to the United States. The internet technology in the Web 2.0 age offers a new medium in which this anti-immigrant movement can appear and create what Cohen calls a ‘moral panic’, which we claim to has become a Latino cyber-moral panic. Of a subsample taken from 170 anti-immigrant websites, the authors examine the role of internet in the creation of a cyber-moral panic against Latinos in the United States in which they find the classic stages of moral panic must be modified and updated. Facilitated by the internet, a ‘call for civil action’ stage is added to the classic moral panic process in which donations and direct civil and political action are sought from online visitors. Recycled information is spread via other anti-immigrant websites, blogs, forums, and other social media, helping to accelerate the moral panic process due to the ability to quickly spread information, reach those who have access to online technologies and hardware, the assumption of anonymity, etc. Using the updated moral panic process model, the authors apply these stages to the current nativist movement which has resulted in a wave of hate crimes against immigrants, several pieces of new anti-immigrant legislation, and fostered an environment widespread discrimination, oppression, and dehumanization against the contemporary ‘folk devils’, or Latinos in the United States.

The Active Aging Agenda, Old Folk Devils and a New Moral Panic

The proposal that older people should engage in “active aging” has come to dominate local, national, and international policy agendas. This encompasses a variety of ways that older persons might maintain active citizenship, but invariably promotes physical activity and exercise as having health and social benefits, despite a lack of conclusive evidence to support such claims. In this paper, I further examine the meaning of these claims through an analysis of policy documents, reports, and media articles which promote the perceived benefits of physical activity in later life. I revisit Cohen’s (2002) concepts of folk devils and moral panics to understand how these messages simultaneously problematize older people while creating a market for emergent moral entrepreneurs who claim to have the solution to the problem they have in part created. I conclude with recommendations for improved understanding of the benefits and appropriate provision for active aging.

Beyond folk devil resistance: Linking moral panic and moral regulation

This article is a contribution to widening the focus of moral panic studies. Our aim is to advance recent attempts to link moral panic studies to the criminological literature on moral regulation. We argue that moral panics should be conceptualized as volatile expressions of long-term moral regulation processes. To substantiate these conceptual and theoretical arguments, we examine claims-making activities about the threat posed by British youth who don hooded tops in public places.

One newspaper’s role in the demise of the Tasmanian Essential Learnings Curriculum: Adding new understandings to Cohen’s moral panic theory in analyzing curriculum change

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of print media in the development of systemwide curriculum change. Consideration is given to the nature and influence of newspapers on public opinion about curriculum change through the examination of the role of the Mercury in one period in the history of Tasmanian curriculum change. The application of Cohen’s (Folk devils and moral panics: The creation of the mods and rockers (3rd ed.), London: Routledge, 2002) work on moral panics in influencing public opinion is utilized as a theoretical framework.

“Wild West,” “Gangster,” and “Desperado” Feelings: The Perception of the “West” in Youth Subcultures in Hungary in the 1960s

AbstractThe images of the “modern youth” and moral panics concerning the youth as a metaphor played an important part in the identity construction process throughout Cold War Europe. For Hungarian youth the West represented the land of promise and desires, albeit their knowledge of the Western other was highly limited and controlled by the socialist state. But how did the partly unknown West and its “folk devils” become the objects of desire in the East? For Western youngsters it seemed to be easier to realize their cultural preferences, however, youth cultures of the sixties were represented in the transnational discourses as manifestations of intra-generational, parent–adolescent conflicts not only in the Eastern Bloc, but also in Western democracies. The perception of the parent–child conflict became a cornerstone of the studies on the sixties, and the youth studies represented youth subcultures as “countercultures.” This paper addresses the role of the official discourse in the construction of “youth cultures” which lies at the heart of identity politics concerning youngsters. It looks at some of the youth subcultures which emerged in socialist Hungary and, in particular how “Eastern” youth perceived “the West,” and how their desires concerning the “Western cultures” were represented in the official discourse. It also seeks to show that borders created in the mind between “East” and “West” worked not only in the way that the “iron curtain” did, but it also became a cultural practice to create social identities following the patterns of Eastern and Western differentiation in the socialist countries.

Book Review: Muslim Women and Sport, School Trouble: Identity, Power, and Politics in Education, the New Folk Devils: Muslim Boys and Education in England, Chinese Learning Journeys: Chasing the Dream

Book Review: Muslim Women and Sport, School Trouble: Identity, Power, and Politics in Education, the New Folk Devils: Muslim Boys and Education in England, Chinese Learning Journeys: Chasing the Dream

Folk devils and the proposed Islamic school in Camden

It started in October 2007. A charity submitted a proposal to build an Islamic school in the semi-rural suburb of Camden (located on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia). Opposition to this proposal was sparked instantly. After two rallies, over 3000 objections to Camden Council, the involvement of several politicians, the distribution of several anti-school petitions and flyers, the formation of an anti-school residents' group, and the placement of two pigs' heads and an Australian flag on the proposed site; Camden Council rejected the application. The drive behind these hostile actions to the proposal was fuelled by the representations of the folk devil deviant. Moral panic theories regarding folk devils are used to make sense of the recent controversy in Camden.

Mobile Phone Intimacies and Moral Panics in India

The rapid proliferation of mobile phones in India has brought along several new cultures to the country’s young users of mobile phones. The culture of mobile phone intimacies that young Indians are seeking through the integration of mobile phone functionalities in their everyday lives requires scholarly attention within the framework of new media modernity. The latter engenders new cultures of intimacies. It also induces moral panics over these new cultures of intimacies. This study demonstrates that the primary and secondary definers of moral panics are gradually scrutinizing the so-called new cultures of young Indians. This paper further shows that the primary location of the moral panic agent is the family. This is where mobile phones and their users encounter the domesticated dimension of cultural politics of mobile phone intimacies. Finally, this study demonstrates that both the moral panic agents and the young users of mobile phones (a.k.a. “folk devils”) use simplistic and stereotypical prisms to address their concerns.