Moral Panic Research Articles

Refraining from culture-related discussions in English as a foreign language classrooms: lessons from negative cases

IntroductionThis study examined the factors that determined English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher decisions to refrain extending the use of culture-related classroom discussions. Specifically, we focused on the episodes in which teachers decided against holding specific culture-related discussions, to better understand the reasons for limited inclusion of diverse cultural content.MethodsIn our examination of the data, we opted for the Theory of Planned Behavior as a lens to interpret teachers' motives for deciding at will not to have a culture-related discussion. The study followed negative case methodology to gain insight into why teachers avoided classroom discussions about culture. Within this methodology, we applied the Possibility Principle to define and select relevant sample of cases. To analyse the cases, we employed hybrid approach of qualitative methods of thematic analysis.ResultsA thematic analysis of teacher interviews (N = 30) revealed that Israeli EFL teachers' decisions to refrain from culture-related classroom discussions were influenced by their personal norms and attitudes, perceptions of their roles as teachers, social conventions, and expectations of various school stakeholders. Specifically, we found that the major barriers to conducting culturally-related classroom conversations in the Arab sector had to do with the values endorsed by the school culture, with teachers' tendency to avoid taboo topics in their teaching due to concerns about how students would react or become alienated. For immigrant teachers, personal norms and perceptions of control operated as key factors in their decisions to avoid sensitive issues. Majority teachers cited negative attitudes, moral panics, school culture and perceptions of control as principal reasons for avoiding controversial topics.DiscussionThe emergent patterns are discussed as embedded in the cultural and social norms with possible implications for teaching in the multicultural classroom.

Six Decades of Media Routinizing Exaggerations Concerns and Fears

ABSTRACT Comparing police crime-rates to newspaper reports for a period of over six decades this reasearch first examined crime reporting in the media. Second, it confirmed what we know: location of crime news in the paper (front page, center), reports length, tone, choice of words, gender, race or class issues. Third, it suggests a new challenging insight. Rather than have periodic, discrete crimereports, waves or moral panics, the data indicate that the media maintains inflated, consistent and continuous levels of crime reporting, thereby keeping a relative high level of concern and fear thus normalizing and routinizing these concerns and fears.

Beyond panic: navigating the tides of change in relationships and sex education

ABSTRACT This paper critically evaluates societal reactions to integrating LGBTQ+ content into the Relationship and Sex Education (RSE) curriculum in England and Wales. Utilising Stanley Cohen’s theory of moral panics, it examines the roles of media, moral entrepreneurs, authorities, and the public in shaping debates around educational reforms. The paper highlights the complexities of balancing traditional values and inclusivity in education, emphasising the necessity of a considerate and comprehensive RSE approach. The study employs mixed methods, combining qualitative and quantitative analyses, to explore the multifaceted nature of this societal issue and its wider implications.

Rethinking the Problem of Disproportion: Overreaction, Underreaction, and Normativism in Moral Panic Studies

Rethinking the Problem of Disproportion: Overreaction, Underreaction, and Normativism in Moral Panic Studies

Fashioning Frankenstein: Deathliness, technology and the body in contemporary fashion photography

The deathly aesthetic of Heroin Chic caused a moral panic in the late 1990s for its aestheticization of cadaverously pale and skeletally thin models. Subsequent photographers have experimented with the female body as a prop, staging high-fashion crime scenes and mimicking the passivity of corpses in prone posture. Fashion photography offers an arena to explore daily life and the national imagination by materializing concepts through a focus on corporeality and compelling stylized visuals. These images therefore represent a commercialized articulation of broader cultural concerns surrounding mortality. Steven Klein’s 2015 fashion editorial ‘Love machine’, published in W magazine, will be analysed to argue that this represents a cultural response to the shifting relationship between the human body and technology. The discourse of human–machine coexistence presents the transhumanist stance as idealized with the fashion field’s agenda of body modification, wellness and leisure assisted and instigated by technology. However, the tone of this shoot presents a less optimistic vision of a posthuman future. Whilst posthuman ideology is decisive and assured in its deference to technology, Klein’s use of Frankensteinian and cyborg motifs evidence the uncertainty and unease with which biological and technical forms begin to blur. The styling of the model as cyborg and the invocation of Frankenstein’s monster are a logical vehicle for personifying the ontological anxieties coming to the fore of public conscience as debates on digital immortality and artificial intelligence become more prevalent.

Trans Youth Sport Bans and the Facilitation of Moral Panic: A Cross-Platform Comparison of 2022 Media Narratives

ABSTRACT This study incorporates moral panics as a lens for investigating discussions in US news reports and on social media surrounding anti-transgender youth sports legislation. A total of 210 newspaper articles and 6,405 Twitter posts from January 2022 through November 2022 were analyzed to highlight the proportion of content that incorporated moral panic elements of concern, hostility, consensus, and disproportionality within the discussion. While the frames advanced on the two platforms largely mirrored one another, social media posts were more likely to incorporate aspects of moral panic escalation (concern and hostility) than were news reports. Escalation elements stayed high on both platforms over the course of time. Pro-ban protests significantly rose on social media while equity/fairness arguments cross-state comparisons diminished as content moved closer to election day.

The Polycrisis and the Centaur: Hegemony, Masculinity and Racialisation

The multiplicity of crises that mark the contemporary era, the polycrisis, also constitutes a crisis of hegemony. This article explores the functions of gendered racialisation in elite management of this hegemonic crisis, with reference to Gramsci’s use of the figure of the Centaur, a hybrid of humanity and animality. It discusses the ways in which this hybrid evokes racialising tropes of human bestiality to express the dynamic interplay of consent and coercion through which hegemony is maintained. Moral panics in relation to the threat of the racialised male Other, variously figured as migrant, terrorist and/or criminal, draw on a bestialised humanisation of racialised masculinities in order to elicit consent to the exercise of coercive authority. Such authority in turn invokes a plasticity of excess/deficiency of the racialised male Other to sanction exclusionary and exterminatory violence. To seize the political opportunity of the current moment to reimagine gender justice and social justice together requires a deeper engagement with the deployment of racialised masculinities in securing consent to coercive authority amid the deepening polycrisis.

‘They abscond’: migration and coloniality in the contemporary conjuncture in Europe

ABSTRACT Over the past decade, the public sphere in Europe has become increasingly ‘culturalised’. Ideas about European heritage and culture have been used as a way to exclude people, notably migrants. My intention is to understand how at this time the cultural, political and economic are articulated together in Europe. I do so by examining the trope of ‘migrants absconding’ which is a prominent concern of the European Commission, as reflected in legal innovations and in media and far-right generated moral panics. By focusing on the social, political and legal relations around ‘migrants absconding’, I read from the ground up value regimes that animate and organize the European social formation at this conjuncture. This social formation is made up of articulations along political, economic and cultural grounds, which allow for incorporating the themes of populist far right groups into the very core of the European Commission. This fosters and legitimizes value regimes bent on culturally cheapening migrants as incompatible, deviant or dangerous outsiders with a very limited right to social and political participation, much less an independent social reproduction. This then allows for their labour power to be also cheapened, super exploited and disposable. This type of value regime centring on culturally cheapening people deemed outsiders, controlling their social reproduction, and making them available as cheap labour was also a key feature of the colonial social formations of the mid 19th to mid 20th centuries, where concerns about ‘natives’ absconding tended to also be prominent. That there is something colonial about the contemporary conjuncture may be seen in the cultural-political-economic articulations dominant in Europe and their cultural and economic cheapening strategies. To abscond is to leave value regimes. Absconding is transgressive, it is to deliberately step out of place, and to attempt to pursue an independent social reproduction.

Payment Services, the Deplatforming of Sex, and the Governance of Platform Intimacy

Much of the considerable regulatory attention directed at sexual content online focuses on platform content moderation policies, but payment and advertising services play a gatekeeping role on platform content as well. In 2021, OnlyFans cited the difficulties of meeting the policies of payment processors and banks in its announcement that the site would stop hosting sexual content. This decision was subsequently retracted under public criticism of the platform for profiting off sex workers and then removing them from the platform. The case of OnlyFans provided a rare reversal of the moral panics that often surround the governance of sexual content online. This article discusses the deplatforming of sex as a case of contested platform governance identifies how public conflicts over platform governance of sexual content fit within broader “no platform” politics, and draws on research from affected communities to make the case for alternative policy approaches.

Moral panics on social media are fueled by signals of virality.

Moral panics have regularly erupted in society, but they appear almost daily on social media. We propose that social media helps fuel moral panics by combining perceived societal threats with a powerful signal of social amplification-virality. Eight studies with multiple methods test a social amplification model of moral panics in which virality amplifies perceptions of threats posed by deviant behavior and ideas, prompting moral outrage expression. Three naturalistic studies of Twitter (N = 237,230) reveal that virality predicts moral outrage in response to tweets about controversial issues, even when controlling for specific tweet content. Five experiments (N = 1,499) reveal the causal impact of virality on outrage expression and suggest that feelings of danger mediate this effect. This work connects classic ideas about moral panics with ongoing research on social media and provides a perspective on the nature of moral outrage. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The kids are not alright: Children as objects, audience, and agents in the 2022 Canadian convoy protests

AbstractChildren figure prominently in far‐right movements, ideologies, and conspiracy theories as innocent targets of nefarious and decadent forces, unwitting symbols of social and political decay, and potentially dangerous objects of moral panic. Far‐right movements thus map a wide‐ranging network of concerns about immigration, race, public health, education, and globalization onto children's bodies and spaces. Yet children and youth also actively participate in these movements or are otherwise socialized into them, inhabiting and making the everyday geographies of the far right in numerous ways. Children's presence at and participation in a series of protests and occupations in Canada in early 2022 demonstrates well their place in far‐right movements as symbols and agents, and connects the Canadian far right to broader spatial and temporal perspectives shared across the transnational landscape of such movements. These protests, dubbed the “Freedom Convoy” by participants and ostensibly aiming to end vaccine mandates in the Canadian trucking industry, quickly turned to more general antigovernment demands and became far‐right networking events. This paper examines more closely children's presence at and participation in the Canadian protests and how the movements behind them position children as object, audience, and agent in the spatiality of the far right's current transnational resurgence.

Reshaping the narrative: Tracing the historical trajectory of HIV/AIDS, gay men, and public health in Sweden.

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) emerged as an endemic health crisis in the United States during the early 1980s. Initially labelled a "gay disease" due to its prevalence among gay men, the spread of HIV led to widespread fear and moral panic, as there was limited medical knowledge on preventing its transmission. While HIV is often associated with Sub-Saharan Africa, this article focuses on Sweden, a pioneering nation that became the first to achieve the remarkable Joint UNAIDS/WHO 90-90-90 continuum in addressing the epidemic. However, despite this significant milestone, the punitive legislation and attitudes prevalent in Sweden have had a counterproductive effect on curbing the virus's spread. Drawing upon a comprehensive triangulation of various data and sources on the evolution of public policy in Sweden, this article argues for the urgent need to reduce stigma surrounding HIV and AIDS. By undertaking further measures to combat stigmatisation, we not only have the potential to prevent the spread of HIV but also significantly enhance the quality of life for individuals living with the virus. An essential step in this journey is to eliminate the legally-enforced mandatory disclosure of one's HIV status, which would mark a tremendous victory for all those affected. With limited evidence to support the effectiveness of criminalisation and penal laws, no longer being viewed as criminals for non-disclosure would be a monumental achievement, positively transforming the lives of people living with HIV and fostering a more inclusive and supportive society.

Out-of-School Time Programs in the United States in an Era of Racial Reckoning: Insights on Equity From Practitioners, Scholars, Policy Influencers, and Young People

The out-of-school time (OST) field in the United States has a complex history. The push to offer programming reflects a legacy rooted in moral panics about racially minoritized youth. However, this field is populated by community spaces that act as multipurpose sites of culturally sustaining educational practices supporting positive youth development. We report findings from interviews with OST leaders, youth workers, policy influencers, and youth about how to create, sustain, and protect more liberatory and humanizing practices, demonstrating that racism and deficit-based thinking continue to inform programmatic practices and youth experiences. Furthermore, this study reveals that programs with expansive ideas of youth voice, healing justice, and whole-child approaches to youth development create better opportunities for connection and belonging.

Backlash after Quotas: Moral Panic as a Soft Repression Tactic against Women Politicians

Abstract Advocates of gender quotas emphasize their transformative potential for women’s political participation. Yet evidence on the symbolic effects of quotas remains inconclusive, with some studies uncovering significant backlash after implementation. Although elite resistance to quotas has been posited as an explanation, the underlying mechanisms generating negative effects remain underexplored. This study proposes the utilization of “moral panic” by elites as a mechanism of resistance. By leveraging their media influence and employing conservative moral rhetoric, elites engineer moral panic, framing women’s political engagement as detrimental to social order and gender hierarchies. Such panic aims to incite public opposition and rationalize elite resistance to progressive changes. Notably, this tactic is more prevalent in countries with reserved-seat quotas, where elites possess limited control over electoral outcomes. Using an original dataset encompassing politician names and genders, I analyze over 150,000 news articles from 2000 to 2021 across 10 sub-Saharan African countries. The findings indicate that quota-induced gains in women’s representation are followed by significant increases in conservative ethical language in news coverage of women politicians, particularly in countries with reserved-seat quotas. These findings bear important implications for gender equality in politics and shed light on the dynamics of backlash after quota implementation.

Moving beyond deficit media figurations of young people: troubling the contemporary ‘youth crime crisis’

ABSTRACT It is common for the media to cast young people as dangerous and delinquent, particularly when those young people derive from marginalized backgrounds. Moral panics are fuelled and sustained by the media in their role as agents of moral indignation. Additionally, the media represent a powerful source of moral regulation, often working against the interests of young people. In this paper, a recent media focus on the ‘youth crime crisis’ in Queensland, Australia is examined to consider potential ways in which public discourse might move beyond deficit tropes to develop more nuanced and productive conceptualizations of youth. We draw on emergent theorizations of the ‘figurations’ that define the ways in which ‘youth’ is understood in public discourse to consider how mediated social imaginaries work to produce representations of young people and frame possibilities for thinking about their place in contemporary society.

Policy opinions regarding the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools

Critical Race Theory (CRT) has recently been positioned as a serious problem requiring urgent policy response among partisan media outlets. Making a case for pressing policy demands, several policy makers have proposed federal, state, and local level legislation and other measures to restrict how race, racism, or American history in general can be taught in K-12 schools, higher education institutions, and state agencies. Anti-CRT rhetoric in media and policy proposals have also propagated the notion of CRT as being divisive as well as ubiquitous in public education. Given this, it is critical to examine whether policy opinions regarding reactionary legislation is based on a real understanding of CRT. We conduct a conceptual and theoretical inquiry into anti-CRT rhetoric relying on the sociological concepts of moral panics and folk devils. Then, we examine familiarity, knowledge, ideology, policy beliefs, and policy opinions regarding CRT in education using nationally representative survey data. The analysis showed that most parents are not familiar with CRT, and the average parent neither opposes nor supports teaching of CRT. The opposition to teaching of CRT is largely driven by political affiliation and related ideological beliefs and positions.

Nationalt monogami og queer tilknytninger

Through the queer theoretical concepts of heteronormativity and compulsive monogamy, this article examines the notion of attachment in Danish family reunification law. From 2000 until today Danish migration law has been dominated by the understanding that applicants must prove a strong and unique connection to Denmark. The article argues for reading the attachment requirement in its changing forms in the context of shifting moral panics regarding perceived ethnic minority marriage traditions, as well as the notion of the citizen’s exclusive national orientation. Examples from family reunification legislation indicate that this legislation has been less interested in determining whether the parties in the migrating family desire each other. Rather, they must demonstrate to desire Denmark. The article suggests that the notion of national allegiance draws on historical discourses that link marriage forms and nation-formation to each other. These historical tropes can be seen as co-constructing the idea of non-Western immigrants’ and descendants’ family forms as queer disruptions of a monogamous national attachment.

The moral behaviour of single young women immigrants to Mandatory Palestine: Between nationalism, gender, and professionalism in social work

Summary Migration has always constituted a meeting point of opportunity, risk, and vulnerability. Concerns surrounding the sex trafficking of women have caused moral panic since the mid-1800s and led to social workers’ preventive initiatives and interventions in Europe and the United States. This article explores a historical moment in which Henrietta Szold, who headed the Social Welfare Department in Mandatory Palestine in 1934, decided to send social workers to the Jaffa and Haifa ports to welcome young, single immigrant women from Germany in the light of rumours of the moral dangers they faced upon entering the country. This feminist historical study of social work employed qualitative analysis of archival texts to investigate the professional decision-making processes involved in sending a social worker to the Jaffa port and the results of the decisions that were made. Findings The findings trace the course of events that took place in 1934 using three categories: the rumours, their investigation, and the results and implications of the investigations. The findings point to intersections of nationalism, gender, and professionalism in social work. Applications This article contributes to the evolving knowledge on moral panic in social work and reveals the historical practice used in social work policy and interventions in facing moral panic regarding young women immigrants.

Moral Panics or Mindful Caution? Moderating Excitement for and Expectation of AI's Impact

Moral Panics or Mindful Caution? Moderating Excitement for and Expectation of AI's Impact

Fear and Loathing in Animus: Moral Panic, the Contextualizing Tool for Challenging Gender-affirming Care Bans

Fear and Loathing in Animus: Moral Panic, the Contextualizing Tool for Challenging Gender-affirming Care Bans