ABSTRACT This article examines the Blue Whale phenomenon as a case of moral panic with particular attention to its trajectory in Turkey. Originating in Russia in 2015, Blue Whale spread rapidly through sensationalist media coverage and soon became framed as a global threat to adolescents. In Turkey, the panic intensified between 2016 and 2019, marked by repetitive headlines, expert warnings, state interventions, and even academic publications, all of which reinforced a protectionist discourse while leaving the veracity of the phenomenon largely unquestioned. Adopting a sociological perspective, this article situates Blue Whale within the broader tradition of moral panic studies, highlighting how archetypes of evil and conspiratorial imagination shaped its circulation. It further argues that the Turkish experience mirrors global patterns yet unfolded through its own media ecologies and cultural anxieties. Ultimately, the Blue Whale panic reveals how digital‐age fears are constructed, sustained, and localized in specific social contexts.

This article analyses anxieties surrounding glue-sniffing in 1980s Britain and their entanglement with the era's accelerated deindustrialization. A vibrant 'New Drug History' has overlooked glue-sniffing, despite its prevalence and prominent media coverage during the 1980s, which placed it at the vanguard of a renewed concern about drugs. Concurrently, scholarship on deindustrialization has largely neglected related anxieties surrounding drug use. This article addresses these lacunae by arguing that glue-sniffing offers a potent lens through which to examine the emotional dimensions of accelerated industrial decline during the early 1980s. Drawing upon popular media, expert discourse, and subcultural artefacts, it contends that the figure of the glue-sniffer became emblematic of broader societal fears regarding diminished opportunities for youth amidst unprecedented unemployment. This perceived crisis of youth futurity saw glue-sniffing become entwined with concerns surrounding not only joblessness, but also dereliction, juvenile crime, and youth subcultures. As such, this article helps take the notion of foreclosed futurity beyond the realm of theory through historicizing it as an everyday structure of feeling intensified by Thatcherite political decision-making.

This paper looks at the United Kingdom’s governing of the Channel during the late 2010s, early 2020s – exposing how relationships of capital and race have been configured in this particular conjuncture through the policing of “small boats”. Using the analytic of moral panics (Hall et al. 2013), I investigate how concerns of maritime safety, hard immigration, and crackdowns on “smuggling” gangs convene in the policing of “entry” via sea, yet obfuscate a set of socio-economic conditions prevailing in post-2008 racial capitalism. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s analysis of “mugging” in 1970s Britain (Hall et al. 2013), and Ida Danewid’s conjunctural work on the European border regime (2022), the paper situates “small boats” in a longer arc of racialised panics in which various crises of accumulation and racial hegemony have been rendered onto migrants and vessels (via policing, mediatisation, courts and policy). In particular, I focus on Eastern and Southeastern European migrants as an important part of the Channel’s political economy. Foregrounding the historic interaction of enclosure of Britain’s imperial space and Europe’s peripheries, and ongoing securitisation of Channel crossers (as facilitators, criminals, bogus asylum seekers, and surplus labour), I argue for a closer understanding of how the racialisation of Black, Brown and “not quite white” articulate.

Introduction: Informational Autocracy and the Moral Panic Button – Using Migration Discourse as Manipulation at Master Level

Safeguarding is wielded as a threat to dissuade parents from supporting their trans child. The 2024 Cass Review prompted revision of gender healthcare in the UK, including banning gender-affirming hormonal treatment for trans children and young people (CYP) via the National Health Service outside of a currently unavailable research project and a UK government ban on overseas and private puberty blocker prescriptions. Parents supporting trans CYP to access this treatment were pushed to the legal fringes. English social workers enact duties under the Children Act 1989 to safeguard CYP from harm; however, safeguarding guidance for social workers regarding trans CYP is limited. This article explores the contemporary legal, medical and social landscape for trans CYP and warns of the risks when social workers are uninformed about their experiences, including participating in trans moral panic, paternalism and cisnormativity, departing from anti-oppressive values, and enabling discrimination.

Abstract In recent years, the United States has experienced a surge in anti-trans legislation, with numerous states advancing laws that restrict transgender individuals’ access to healthcare, education, and public life. This study advances a novel framework grounded in moral panic theory to explain the conditions under which such legislation emerges. We conceptualize this policy wave as a strategically constructed moral panic, orchestrated by elite actors to reassert control amid perceived social and political disruption. Our multidimensional framework identifies three pathways through which moral panic is activated: (1) cultural conflict and symbolic threat construction, (2) political polarization and institutional capture, and (3) economic precarity and neoliberal retrenchment. Using state-level data AND negative binomial regression models, we analyze predictors of anti-trans legislation introduced in 2024. Results show that conservative partisan dominance and the presence of conservative networks are the strongest predictors of legislative activity, while higher LGBTQ+ support and stronger democratic safeguards are associated with legislative restraint. Economic disadvantage, investment in welfare and education, and prior legislative history are not associated with the number of bills introduced. These findings suggest that anti-trans policymaking reflects an engineered moral public escalation. The study contributes to theories of gender, politics, and moral regulation, underscoring the institutionalization of panic as a mode of governance.

Conspiracy theories and religion intersect within the profane world of politics, society, and social communities. The role of religion in the instigation and perpetuation of moral panics is well known, but what occurs when conspiracy, moral panics, religion, and the securitization of perceived national threat interact? In this paper, social media posts, podcasts, and online interviews with the leaders of an organized protest, Take Back Our Border, are analyzed for content of each of these topics. The Take Back Our Border convoy named themselves God’s Army and are fighting to save the United States from unauthorized immigrants. These immigrants are perceived to be crossing into the nation to destroy its culture and Christian faith, and to stop the elites behind the Great Replacement conspiracy: the enslavement of white Christians.

ABSTRACT Education in the U.S. has become a central battleground in contemporary culture wars, with classrooms, curricula, and educators increasingly targeted by political mandates, parental activism, and media-driven moral panics. These pressures have fueled academic repression, including efforts to suppress critical race theory, restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and limit professional autonomy. Such measures not only silence dissent but also constrain resources addressing racialized, gendered, and marginalized histories. This conceptual article offers a comparative analysis of U.S. academic repression in the 2010s–2020s and pre-WWII Germany in the 1930s–1940s. We argue that both contexts reflect the coloniality of power, and perpetuated through capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. By foregrounds these parallels, our framework situates contemporary struggles within the colonial matrix of power and extends scholarly debates on academic freedom.

ABSTRACT This paper explores how powerful men appeal to male victimhood in cases of sexual abuse. The paper focuses on Luis Rubiales, former president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, and his non-consensual kiss to the player Jenni Hermoso during the 2023 Women’s Soccer World Cup. Since believability in cases of sexual abuse is highly mediated, we have examined how the Spanish reactionary press constructed Rubiales’ victimhoot through a reflexive thematic analysis. The findings reveal that narratives of male victimhood and female culpability are mutually constitutive: the credibility of men depends upon the discrediting of women’s voices. This is done through Luis Rubiales’ claims of a ‘witch hunt’ against his persona led by ‘fake feminists’ and their amplification in the media. By portraying women in their dual role of witches and witch hunters, the case illustrates how powerful men like Rubiales strip the terms of their historical and gendered meaning, transforming metaphors for patriarchal persecution into a degendered narrative of male victimhood. In doing so, the witch archetype is used as a way of portraying the dangers of feminism, feeding into the far-right moral panics.

ABSTRACT Migrants and refugees trigger intense public reactions in European societies which range from denial to confusion, from open violence to humanitarianism, and constitute the discourse of the “refugee crisis”. This paper applies Robin DiAngelo's term White Fragility to European discourses on migration and refugees and to the European border regime for developing an understanding of the border spectacle and its moral panics as a defensive reaction to racial stress. Although European reactions are contradictory in many ways, the “refugee crisis” performs a stabilizing function in the European border regime: Instead of listening to the political arms of refugee and migrant movements, European societies fight about their own identities and values. Considering this, there is still also a possibility to deal with fragility as a source of knowledge and understand it as a possible terrain for radical solidarity.

When Filipinas began entering Denmark in unprecedented numbers from the mid-2000s, this group of migrants gained substantial political, scholarly, and media attention. This seemingly sudden inflow of workers from another continent – who at this point primarily entered through the so-called au pair visa – was treated as an isolated, contemporary, and unintelligible phenomenon, clouded in moral panic. However, the au pair migration was but the latest type of entry in a long history of labour migration from the Philippines to Denmark that commenced in the 1960s, a period marked by the development of guest worker programs in western and northern Europe and the emergence of state-brokered labour export in the Philippines. Though recruitment of Philippine labour for the service sector in Europe has been substantial since the 1960s, and though Filipinas came to play a significant role in the Danish hotel and restaurant workers union, they had fallen through the cracks of both labour and migration history. Through oral history and the collection of source material neglected by archival institutions, it became possible to restore the connections between these two fields, to create a Philippine history of Denmark, by tracing the lives of Filipinas recruited for hotel work, and by documenting and narrating the previously overlooked role played by the Philippine state.

This article reframes debates on Muslim women’s piety by moving from essences to practices that materialize at thresholds. Taking the short-story collection Heart Lamp as an analytic site, it proposes an “interface ethics” that reads piety as embodied coordination across veil–gate–movement. A diffractive close reading aligns posthuman feminism with Islamic feminist hermeneutics to map domestic ecologies, school-gate encounters, bus rides, humor as de-escalation, and multilingual drift as instances where agency is distributed across bodies, garments, objects, and spaces. This study identifies three significant findings: first, domestic scenes disclose micropolitics of piety that recalibrate authority through care work, timing, and spatial tact rather than doctrinal dispute. Second, material thresholds—corridors, ticket lines, doorways—assemble pious comportment as relational, iterative, and auditable in the text, shifting analysis from moral judgment to situated coordination. Third, accented translation sustains a polyvocal, posthuman voice: local Islamic registers remain audible while critique travels, preventing flattening into secular feminist or pietist monologues. These insights offer a portable heuristic for literary criticism and policy discourse: attend to interfaces, not identities. The study clarifies hijab controversies beyond binary moral panics, and suggests design implications for school-gate protocols, uniform guidelines, and queue management that minimize coercion while supporting dignity. It also outlines methodological audit trails—scene matrices linking indicators, quotations, and claims—that render hermeneutic reasoning transparent. The contribution is conceptual (interface ethics), empirical (text-grounded mappings), and practical (design heuristics). Centered on Heart Lamp’s South Asian Muslim milieux, the framework generalizes to comparable literatures and arenas, offering prompts for gate design, translation pedagogy, and dignity-forward regulation.

In 2018, Emmanuel Macron started assembling what became the Renew Europe group in the European Parliament and, in 2024, announced the New Europeans (NE) Europarty. We argue that this transnational NE alliance of parties is not merely centrist on the economic left-right dimension but rather opposes the rising populist radical right (PRR) on an emerging nationalist-cosmopolitan ‘cultural' cleavage in Western political systems. Our qualitative content analysis of public messaging by NE leaders as they built their alliance suggests that it met four criteria in the literature for constituting a new party family. First, they built a transnational alliance. Second, NE statements acknowledged their historical origin in a cleavage realignment in voter demand and the political ‘supply' within European party systems, including strategically targeting the PRR as adversaries. It less clearly distanced NE from establishment party families. Third, ideological statements overwhelmingly positioned NE on the cultural cleavage, advocating Europeanism, liberal democracy, progressivism and rationalism and attacking PRR populism, authoritarianism, nationalism and irrationality. Economics, the core issue of the traditional left-right cleavage, was only occasionally mentioned. Fourth, NE demonstrated elements of a distinctive political ‘style’ such as Manichean struggle narratives, moral panics and transformative personalised leadership, distinguishing NE from the establishment.

In the last two decades, the issue of female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) has become subject to considerable public and policy attention. Across Europe, with the rise of right-wing populism, revival of assimilationist policies and fears over Islamic extremism, FGM/C and other gendered cultural practices have been located at the heart of heated debates over migration, multiculturalism and social cohesion. In addition to exemplifying a moral panic in its own right, representations about FGM/C have also played a part in maintaining the moral panic over forced migration, which frames refugees as a threat to the British nation, economy, values and identity. This article first traces the making of these two moral panics, before attending to their consequences. In drawing from qualitative research with FGM/C-affected women and key informants in Scotland, I analyse how these colliding moral panics give rise to fragmentated professional approaches in multi-agency safeguarding, perpetuating further harm to FGM/C-affected women.

The (Un)Changing Language and Sentiment Associated with the Moral Panic Button (MPB) in the Wake of the Russian–Ukrainian War: The Hungarian Case

Hungary as an Ideological Informational Autocracy (IA) and the Moral Panic Button (MPB) as its Basic Institution

The growing dominance of social media in everyday communication has transformed how crime is committed, perceived, and responded to in contemporary society. This study examines the dual influence of social media on criminal behaviour and public perceptions of crime, highlighting its role as both a facilitator of unlawful activities and a powerful shaper of collective attitudes. The purpose of the research is to evaluate how offenders exploit digital platforms for planning, executing, and publicizing crimes, while also analysing how user-generated content, viral videos, and misinformation amplify fear of crime and distort public understanding of safety. Using a qualitative research design based on thematic analysis of existing criminological literature, case studies, and digital behaviour trends, the study synthesizes interdisciplinary insights from criminology, media studies, and psychology. Key findings indicate that social media enhances opportunities for cybercrime, extremist recruitment, and performance-driven offenses, while simultaneously fostering sensationalism, moral panics, and declining trust in law enforcement. The study concludes that although social media offers strategic benefits for crime reporting and prevention, its unregulated features intensify both criminal innovation and public anxiety. Policy reforms must balance digital freedom with stronger regulation, digital literacy, and improved law enforcement capacity. The rapid expansion of social media has fundamentally reshaped how individuals engage with information, communicate, and perceive their environment. These platforms have also become influential spaces for the facilitation, representation, and interpretation of criminal behaviour. This article investigates how social media contributes to the commission of crimes, aids offenders in planning and performing illegal acts, and shapes public perceptions of crime prevalence and severity. Drawing on interdisciplinary research from criminology, psychology, and media studies, the article provides an in-depth analysis of the complex relationship between digital networks and criminality. It further examines how social media amplifies fear of crime, influences public trust in law enforcement, and contributes to moral panics. The study concludes with policy recommendations for governments, law enforcement, and tech companies to mitigate criminal misuse of social media while ensuring protection of digital rights.

ABSTRACT This study analyses how conservative Muslim speakers in Kerala, India, use YouTube to produce and circulate anti-LGBTQ+ discourse. Through a qualitative content analysis of 15 Malayalam-language videos posted after India’s 2018 decriminalization of same-sex relationships, the research identifies a multi-stage “architecture of digital exclusion.” This rhetorical system is built from four discursive repertoires that guide audiences from moral-theological certainty to a populist moral panic. It launders religious objections into the language of science and frames LGBTQ+ identities as an existential threat, weaponizing Kerala’s partial state-led inclusion policies as proof of a hostile, Western-backed “gender ideology.” The findings show how digital platforms are used to amplify exclusionary religious narratives and mediate anxieties about social change. The study contrasts this with the “architecture of resilience” constructed by queer Muslims, who use the same digital platforms to forge alternative, queer-affirming communities and theologies

ABSTRACT In 1969, Armstrong State College suspended Professor W. Haynes Dyches after he was arrested in his classroom for allegedly sharing The Great Speckled Bird, an underground newspaper out of Atlanta, with young men in Savannah, Georgia. The criminal charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor was eventually dropped after courts ruled that The Great Speckled Bird did not constitute obscene material. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) alleged that Armstrong had violated the professor’s academic freedom by neglecting due process. The AAUP’s investigation revealed that Professor Dyches was fired because he was a member of Students for a Democratic Society and he was believed to have invited young men to his apartment. The AAUP added Armstrong to the organization’s censure list in 1972. The censure lasted a little over 10 years as Armstrong State College’s president, Harry Ashmore, refused to meet the AAUP’s conditions. Based on archival research in the Armstrong archives, the AAUP collections at George Washington University, local and student newspapers, and oral history interviews with Armstrong students and faculty, this case study illuminates the ways in which communities used Cold War moral panics about communists, gays, and lesbians to limit academic freedom and achieve political conformity in public higher education in the South during the “long Sixties.”

This essay analyses Brazil’s Sociedade Brasileira de Defesa da Tradição, Família e Propriedade (Brazilian Society for the Defence of Tradition, Family, and Property; TFP) to explore the deep roots of a signal pattern in contemporary Christian conservatism. I argue that confrontations between TFP and its detractors reveal the politics of family, children, sexuality, and manhood as critical battlegrounds in dictatorial Brazil – battlegrounds to which Christian conservatives eagerly took, but which proved an uncertain terrain. Conservatives and progressives, authoritarians and democrats appealed to these constructs as sacred and threatened elements in struggles over the future of TFP, Brazil’s social fabric, and the nation itself. Supported by allies in the regime and among security forces, TFP demonstrated near-obsession with young men and traditional masculinity. Conversely, public hue and cry about TFP in the 1960s and 1970s showed similar discourses of family, gender, and youth invoked to attack TFP. Classic moral panic defined each of these discourses; what was at stake, in the fight over TFP, was a heteropatriarchal vision of Brazil’s future: its (male) children, their potential for manliness, and their cultivation of suitable familial relationships. In this way, TFP and its critics portended a near future; moral panic around such issues continues to constitute a – perhaps the – fundamental axis of debate and polarisation in the 2020s.