Cohen's moral panic

A moral panic is the intensity of feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order.

Features of a moral panic...


Concern - behaviour of a certain group or thins is seen as a threat
Volatitlity  - the situation erupts dramatically
Hostility - "folk devils" are constricted to create a diversion
Consensus - widesprwad acceptance of this threat
Disproportionality - wild exageration of the evidence



It was Stanley Cohen who first used the term "moral panic" in his work, folk devils and moral panicks (1972)
Those deviant groups were labelled by Stanley Cohen in 1972 as folk devils. He based his theory on the media reporting of conflicts between two teenage tribes of the 1960s, the Mods and Rockers, but his thinking can be applied to any subculture labelled as deviant or dangerous by the media.