Moral Panic Research Articles

How Not to Become a Dominatrix: Moral Panic in the Supervision of a Social Psychology Dissertation on Heterosexual BDSM

ABSTRACT This article draws on standpoint theory, social psychology, psychoanalysis, and gender studies. Perversion is understood here as an insult aimed at controlling the (sexual) freedom of women, especially women conducting academic research on nonconforming sexualities. The author recounts the moral panic that accompanied her supervision of a Ph.D. on female domination in heterosexual BDSM. This dissertation was defended several years ago and is now published, thus allowing a retrospective reading. The candidate was rapidly identified with her research object by other professors and students in the psychology department, which aroused strong emotional reactions when she performed as Mistress Tarna in a Berlin dungeon. The author analyzes the consequences of this moral panic on the supervision of this academic work and questions the place of affect in both ethnographic fieldwork and the interactions between a Ph.D. supervisor and student.

The Politics of Post-Truth

ABSTRACT A prevalent political narrative is that we are facing an epistemological crisis, where many citizens no longer care about truth and facts. Yet the view that we are living in a post-truth era relies on some implicit questionable empirical and normative assumptions. The post-truth rhetoric converts epistemic issues into motivational issues, treating people with whom we disagree as if they no longer believe in or care about truth. This narrative is also dubious on epistemic, moral, and political grounds. It is epistemically dubious in being largely insensitive to the problem of complexity in politics; it is morally dubious because “post-truth” is often a derogatory label for individuals or groups that are deemed stupid, irrational, or morally compromised; and it is a politically toxic neologism because it purports to use the language of ‘truth’ as a weapon against power, yet these truth-claims are often themselves attempts to exert power over others by delegitimizing their perspectives. While it may seem as if truth and democracy are on especially bad terms lately, politics and truth have long had a vexed relationship, and moral panics about the value of truthfulness in politics are as old as politics itself.

France, you love it but leave it: the silent flight of French Muslims

ABSTRACT In a context when Islamophobia peaked in the wake of the 2015 terrorist attacks, evidence has been mounting that a growing number of French Muslims have been leaving the country. This article explores, through a combination of quantitative (survey) and qualitative (semi-directed interviews) methods, some of the key drivers of this flight from France. Moral panics around secularism but more crucially questions of discrimination on the job market are at the heart of this silent flight from the country these people were born in. Ultimately, this emigration from France constitutes a real brain drain, as it is primarily highly educated French Muslims who decide to leave.

Twitter-generated Moral Panic and Its Effect on Pretrial Incarceration/ Bail: Contextualizing the Tale of ‘Folk Devil’ Aryan Khan

The Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, which was enacted with an intent to control drug abuse and prohibit its trade, has blurred the line between the offender and the victim, particularly in cases of addicts. Nonetheless, the focus of this study is the multifarious victimization of the offender: overcriminalization in terms of measures, lengthy pretrial incarceration and increased sensationalism in cases of offenders belonging to high strata of society, thus creating a moral panic. Incident of victimization is juxtaposed with public concern solicited by the reporting of cases. The stigmatization endured and the trauma suffered by the accused owing to the full media glare strike on their innocence and violate their right to life and dignity. Aim and Objective: A criminal justice system is an institutionalized means of rendering justice. One of the virtuous traits of a criminal justice system modelled on the ethos of due process is its attempt to achieve certainty and transparency in its process and the outcomes. However, no institution is infallible as manifested by the misuse of draconian provisions of the NDPS Act 1985. This study first evaluates whether disposal of bail matters in NDPS cases is a classic case of overcriminalization leading to the victimization of the offender; second, it gauges the impact of public reaction depicting ‘moral panic’ of the offender in the disposal of bail matters. Methodology: The study was conducted through a detailed content analysis of the public reaction in the Aryan Khan drug case on the micro-blogging site Twitter with the help of the content analysis tool NVivo. Findings: The outcome of the study manifests positive interrelationship between moral panic and public perception, positive interrelationship between moral panic and status of the person arrested which consequentially affects the period of pretrial incarceration (denial of bail).

Institutionalized ‘bad girls’: adolescent female folk devils in Canadian newspapers between 1991 and 2012

ABSTRACT Prior literature takes for granted that media do not reflect real crime trends, but present sensationalized depictions of girls and crime. A positive correlation exists between violent guilty findings among Canadian girls and the frequency of reporting in national newspapers. Media present simplistic and problematic depictions of girls’ involvement in crime with a qualitative content analysis finding two female-specific folk devils: the modern girl devoid of innocence and the girls wanting to attain masculine power. The construction of female folk devils, corresponding with traditional gendered tropes, highlights how moral panics surrounding girls’ criminal and violent behaviour are tied to gender inequality.

HASHTAGS, HIERARCHIES AND HEGEMONIES: MAINSTREAM DIGITAL FEMINIST ACTIVISM AND INTERSECTIONAL CRITIQUES

This paper focuses on the digital-material hybridity of the contemporary feminist activist, particularly the problematic and progressive potential offered by the technological affordances of the Internet and digital social media. In addition, the paper highlights the associated anxieties for feminists of being online and engaging in what is often, in this “age of surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019) and toxic masculinity, a hostile, commodified and misogynistic milieu. Furthermore, the digital affordances enabled through the proliferation of Web 2.0 technology inform the nature of feminist online discourse and campaigning, which has, at times, contributed to the moral panic that surrounds attempts at centering marginalized voices, particularly members of the trans community and sex workers. The paper will explore the relationship between online tools and platforms adopted by mainstream contemporary feminists and the role they have played in constructing ‘othering’ hierarchies within feminism, as well in enabling the intersectional critique of these narratives. Avoiding either cyber-utopian or dystopian arguments, or a techno-determinist or utilitarian stance, this paper accounts for the complex and contradictory environment that the Internet offers to feminism. The paper also recognizes the enmeshed nature of feminists with their digital tools and platforms as well as the problematic and progressive feminist activism taking place online.

The stories behind stories: Reflections on the role of voice in research with unaccompanied refugee youth

The stories behind stories: Reflections on the role of voice in research with unaccompanied refugee youth

The Moral Panic of Islamo-gauchisme in Service of a Colorblind Approach to Racism

This essay frames Islamo-gauchisme as a moral panic and discusses how, why, and when it emerged as such in France, its relationship with critical race theory (a moral panic in the U.S.), and the broader societal implications of Islamo-gauchisme as a moral panic. More precisely, we discuss how and why Islamo-gauchisme entered the zeitgeist and why this moral panic is so dangerous. We demonstrate that this reinforces the colorblind hegemonic understanding of racism in France which allows for the entrenchment of racializing practices under the guise of progressive concepts. In what follows, we unpack the emergence and use of the term Islamo-gauchisme, and its relation to the denial of race and racism within France, the consolidation of the reactionary French republic, and why Islamo-gauchisme as a particular moral panic is so important.

The Clothes Maketh the Cult

The Clothes Maketh the Cult

Searching for “Australia’s Woodstock”: The Forgotten Australian Rock Festivals of 1970 – 1975

ABSTRACT Between 1970 and 1975, at least 18 rock festivals took placein Australia, often near regional towns. These have gone largely undocumented.By focusing on these “forgotten” festivals, this article contributes to ourunderstanding of the festival’s role in Australian music culture, mapping theAustralian context over the international rock music trends of the time. Thesefestivals highlight the contribution of regional and rural settings to the developmentof contemporary Australian popular music. The use of the mythology of Woodstockin discourses around the festivals demonstrates conflicts within the youthcountercultures of the time, and moral panics associated with them.

Violence by any other name: constructing immigration crises, the threat of the sick refugee and rationalising immigration detention through moral panic

This article is concerned with the employment of pathologising discourses of mental health and trauma by the mainstream media as they pertain to the treatment of migrants in detention in Canada. Using critical discourse analysis, this research contrasts mainstream media coverage of four major publications on immigration detention. It explores the media’s role in the (re)creation of refugee discourse, and as a purveyor of racial ideology, which problematises people of colour and demands state intervention in the form of mental health aid. The resulting discourse pathologises the refugee identity and simultaneously obscures the socio-political conditions and violence that necessitates their departure from their home countries. As refugee discourse is infused with biomedical understandings of mental health, it also legitimises the nation state’s practice of coercive social control for these populations through detention.

Cancel Culture and Other Myths: Anti-fandom as heartbreak

Cancel Culture and Other MythsAnti-fandom as heartbreak Kathryn Lofton (bio) A friend is about to give a guest lecture. She is paralyzingly nervous: "I don't want to get canceled." A colleague who is about to have an editorial published asks me to make sure there is nothing cancelable in it. When their work occurs without incident, I return to the terror that preceded their success. "You see, you weren't canceled!" "Thank god," they both reply, an oddly unifying utterance for two professed nontheists. The stakes of canceling are such that disbelievers reach for higher powers when spared. I begin to ask everyone I meet what they think of when they think of cancel culture. A student tells me her grandparents [End Page 161] complain, "It's Salem all over again." A friend tells me of a colleague who got fired for something they said on Slack. "Can you believe it?" she snaps. "Cancel culture ruins lives." I gather these instances and wonder whether cancel culture is an encroaching menace against which everyone must defend or a moral panic that inflates the problem. In a 2023 paper published in Political Studies, Pippa Norris poses the question this way: "Do claims about a growing 'cancel culture' curtailing free speech on college campuses reflect a pervasive myth, fueled by angry partisan rhetoric, or do these arguments reflect social reality?"1 Norris finds that contemporary academics may be less willing to speak up due to a fear of cancel culture. Cancel culture is not a myth, Norris decides, because, in silencing people, it does something real. There is no question that cancel culture is real. It is also a myth. Taking myths as real requires resistance to conventional usage. Seven myths about COVID-19 vaccines, yells one headline. Ten mega myths about sex, beckons another. Myth used this way refers to an idea people believe that is not true. This is a relatively recent connotation of myth. In the history of religion, myths are stories people tell about forces more powerful than them described as superhuman. A superhuman force could be a god; it could be meteorology; it could be a corporation or a foreign state. Myths occur when human beings want to explain how mysterious things come to pass. Their explanation is: "Something more powerful than us did something to make this happen." Cancel culture produces a collection of myths within a particular tradition or a mythology. Depending on your political inclinations, the cast of gods and heroes alters considerably. The question is what mystery cancel culture's mythology explains. Thinking about this requires thinking a little about religion, and a lot about what hurts people most. The history of religions is a history of organizing power relations. If this premise isn't especially sexy to you, I commend the many Netflix films about religion where you can watch charismatic figures lull followers with promises of new dawns and off-the-grid [End Page 162] togetherness. A lot of people who Netflix and chill do not identify religiously, but everybody knows a heartbreak authored by a devastating player. "Something in the way you move / Makes me feel like I can't live without you," sings Rihanna in "Stay," her 2012 blockbuster duet with Mikky Ekko. This is just one of hundreds of lovelorn tracks from the Top 40 that would serve well as a soundtrack for religion's depiction in Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey (2022), Unorthodox (2020), and Wild Wild Country (2018). Religion has a fair number of sexual mountebanks, but for a new religious movement to become an established religion, it needs to evolve from one-hit wonder to Beyoncé. New religious movements, sometimes derogatively called cults, offer ritual resolve for persons seeking solutions to their most profound questions and pain. Religions evolve from small cultic movements when, after the initial romance fades, individuals keep repeating things that other individuals repeat, and those communal repetitions come to constitute a form of belonging. If I say the Lord's Prayer, the Jewish blessing over bread, or the Muslim salat, I am speaking individually, but I am speaking in a way many other people speak, and when we hear...

Book Reviews: Nicky Falkof, Worrier State: Risk, Anxiety and Moral Panic in South Africa

Book Reviews: Nicky Falkof, Worrier State: Risk, Anxiety and Moral Panic in South Africa

Consensual sexual selfies: everyday exposure in teen girl media

ABSTRACT Despite its everydayness, girls’ digital exposure is often conceived as scandalous. Concerns about the potential of leaked nudes to “ruin” a girl’s life are part of a long history of moral panics about girls and technology that mask fears about the public expression of female sexuality. Much teen media, however, counters this panic by exploring the social and technological dynamics at play in practices of sending sexual selfies. This article analyzes teen magazines and TV series to map the alternative mainstream discourse through which girls might frame their practices of self-exposure. Teen media incorporates the exposure built into everyday technological interactions in ways that allow girls’ consensual sexuality to exist, visibly, as everyday. Magazines like Rookie and Teen Vogue and series like Riverdale and Pretty Little Liars employ such discourses in ways that often protect the hegemony of white femininity, even as they defend girls’ right to privacy and expose the unique consequences of exposure queer girls. Teen media begins to offer alternative discourses of young women’s sexual selfies that are aligned with the social and technological realities of digital culture, and which girls can mobilize to deconstruct exclusionary norms of privacy and visibility.

At the borders of the coroNATION: samfundssind, Muslim immigrants and suspicious solidarity in Denmark

ABSTRACT Muslim immigrants are vulnerable to COVID-19. They are not only at risk being infected due to extended households and frontline jobs, but they are also vulnerable to moral panics, stigmatization and corona-racism. When Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen in March 2020 closed down society, she appealed to the samfundssind (civic consciousness) of all citizens in Denmark, as a means to fight the invisible enemy of the global pandemic. The idea of samfundssind outlined a moral community between those citizens who did their best to follow the instructions of the authorities and those who deliberately ignored them. This article discusses the establishment of “Taskforce COVID-19”, an ad hoc network of Danish-Pakistanis that in 2020–21 collaborated with municipalities and different health authorities in order to fight the virus. However, despite their aspiration to be accepted and included in the collective of citizens exhibiting samfundssind their efforts were questioned and regarded with suspicion.

Ethnography at an Intersection: Law, Anti-Trafficking NGOs, and Prostitution in India

For a legal anthropologist interested in how different agents and forms of governance shape projects of sexual humanitarianism, the strategies that US-funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) use in their attempts to reframe an Indian anti-prostitution law as an anti-trafficking instrument generate broader conceptual questions. How do Indian NGOs articulate donor-driven concerns with the postcolonial socio-legal framework within which they work? What impact do they seek to have on the law, legal system, and legal actors? What, in turn, happens to formal law, which is already shaped by a complex history of legal concerns, moral panics, and NGO intervention (itself authorized by law) in this context? How do law and NGOs shape each other across anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking projects in the overlapping contexts of postcoloniality, globalization, neoliberalism, and sexual humanitarianism in India? How might one explore these intersections and relationships methodologically? I show how ethnography at the intersection of anti-prostitution law and anti-trafficking NGOs illuminates: (1) law’s imbrication in a broader, long-standing, and ever-expanding field of governmental action on prostitution; (2) how NGOs and legal actors act, in tension and in collaboration, upon the perceived “problem” of prostitution; and (3) how anti-trafficking NGOs and anti-prostitution law co-constitute each other as they shape contested meanings around prostitution.

Moral Panic as a Form of the Cultural Field

Ahlaki panik, özellikle günümüzde toplumsal süreçleri ve kültürel yönelimleri açıklamak için ele alınan önemli kavramlardan biridir. İlk olarak Stanley Cohen tarafından 1972 yılında teorileştirilen ahlaki panik, bugün pek çok araştırma ve tartışmada savunucuları ve muhalifleriyle birlikte genişleyen bir literatür inşa etmiştir. Ahlaki panik, bir olay, durum, kişi ya da olgunun toplum ya da toplumun bir kesimi tarafından tehdit olarak algılanmasıdır. Ahlaki paniğin itici gücü birincil düzeyde medyadır. Ancak toplumsal formların her kademesinde ahlaki panik çeşitli yönleriyle işlemeye devam eder. Özellikle kültürel alan ahlaki paniğin hem yaratıcısıdır ve hem de mevcut durumdan en çok etkilenen toplumsal yapı formudur. Korku, endişe ve risk merkezli eylemlilik biçimleri toplumsalı ve bireyi karakterize eden bir biçim almıştır. Risk ve korkunun karakterize ettiği ve güvenliğin yüceltildiği günümüz toplumlarında panik, kültürel yapının belirleyici formu haline gelmiştir. Ahlaki panik terimindeki ‘panik’ risk kültürü/risk toplumu, korku kültürü teorilerinin merkezi kavramı olmuş ve ahlaki panik teorilerini daha geniş bir ontolojik bağlama yerleştirmiştir. Bu çalışmada ahlaki panik kavramının olgusal, teorik ve ampirik yönelimleri üzerinden hareket edilecektir. Çalışmanın temel iddiası ise, panik’in toplumsal yaygınlığının açıklanmaya çalışıldığı risk toplumu ve korku kültürü teorileriyle birlikte ahlaki paniğin teorik konumlarının daha geniş bir toplumsal bağlama kaydığı üzerine kurulacaktır.

An onion with layers of hope and fear: A cross‐case analysis of the media representation of Tor Network reflecting theoretical perspectives of new technologies

AbstractThe Onion Router (Tor) is a sophisticated web browser accompanied by an encrypted network that enables online anonymity, protecting people's privacy. Adopted by many as a counter‐surveillance mitigation around the world, legitimate users of Tor include the military, journalists, whistle‐blowers, and citizens from authoritarian regimes. This article shows that the data protection offered by Tor is consistently associated to criminal and anti‐social uses by the media. This research looks at the British press representation of Tor conducting a thematic analysis of articles published by six newspapers between 2008 and 2017. This analysis connects the press coverage to three theoretical approaches: moral panics, technological ambivalence, and liberation technology. This research demonstrates through three case studies that the media reproduces theoretical discussions about new technologies on Tor's portrayal, presenting cases with only positive, only negatives and both positive and negative uses. However, examples of optimistic views of Tor are rare, and the press coverage focuses mainly on the criminal uses, especially crypto markets and child pornography. Overall, the British press ignores a culture of surveillance and spreads a discourse of fear through a recurrent connection of Tor to horrifying uses, undermining any potential positive outcomes.

South African tabloid coverage of Covid19: The Daily Sun.

Around the world, tabloid newspapers are routinely surrounded by a moral and cultural panic. They are criticised for lowering standards of journalism and privileging sensation above substance, diverting readers from serious news to entertainment, or foregoing ethical principles. However, scholarship about tabloids have also highlighted the ways in which these papers are frequently better attuned to their readers' everyday lived experience. In South Africa, tabloid newspapers have also received much criticism in the past for their perceived superficial treatment of important news. This article examines South African tabloid newspapers' coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic, focussing specifically on a case study of the national newspaper the Daily Sun. The national Daily Sun newspaper boasts the country's largest circulation figures. Through a quantitative content analysis of 1050 online news stories in the Daily Sun, we found that unlike mainstream front-page news reporting which was largely episodic, negative and alarmist, the majority of Daily Sun coverage was thematic and neutral. Daily Sun news coverage countered Covid-19 related misinformation and provided contextual coverage, with a large focus on the social impacts of Covid-19. The analysis concludes that despite the popular discourse of the reporting, Daily Sun reporting on Covid-19 provided readers with access to information and a focus on the micro aspects of the pandemic versus broader political issues and the views of political or scientific elites.

Slow Panic? The Regulation of Salvia Divinorum in Canada, 1991-2019

ABSTRACT Smoking a potent concentration of salvia divinorum (hereafter salvia) has the capacity to dissolve one’s ego and sense of self. Due to the catatonic state a strong dose of salvia produces, the substance has been considered alarming by claims-makers including politicians, media officials, police, and citizen groups. This paper examines news media accounts of salvia use in Canada and salvia’s regulation by the Canadian federal government. Providing a qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles spanning 1991–2019 regarding claims made about salvia, we draw from literature on moral panics and drugs to conceptualize the police and political response to salvia in Canada. We trace the shifting claims made by an array of claims-makers, showing how the focus changed from curiosity to claims about risk. The banning of salvia in Canada displays the hallmarks of a moral panic, though in this case the claims-making about the harm and risk of salvia went on for years before the substance was made illegal. We apply the notions of slow panic and panic policy to salvia regulation in Canada and reflect on the implications for literatures regarding drug panics and the new psychedelic renaissance.