Please don’t be alarmed, but moral panics are on the rise.
New reasons for mass concern are being reported every day, and society is reputedly under threat from all manner of social ills. Smartphones are rotting children’s brains; pre-pubescents are over-sexualised by social media; and shoplifting in broad daylight is out of control. Moral panics are the default topics of dinner-party chat, water-cooler conversations, and alarmist headlines.
But how do you distinguish between a moral panic and an over-reaction?
It can be difficult.
Recently, torches have been lit and villagers have been marching through town over the issues of homeless people not being in homes and of shoplifting in broad daylight in the Auckland suburb of Pt Chevalier.
RNZ National, no less, morally panicked and ran a lengthy segment on the issue, giving much air time to an anonymous caller who claimed that on her visits to her local supermarket, which occurred several times a week, she witnessed shoplifting that ranged from petty pilfering to a case of a shoplifter loading a trolley with wine and wheeling it out of the store under the noses of staff who failed to act.
They told her there was nothing they could do. She witnessed this sort of thing, she claimed, on at least 50% of her visits. Other examples of antisocial behaviour at this store have been alleged widely on – where else? – social media.
This writer shops at the supermarket in question and has never seen an incident of shoplifting. The only commotion in his experience occurred when someone who presumably had an alcohol problem dared to open a bottle of wine they had just bought and start consuming it in the shop. There was quite the kerfuffle from outraged workers. The shop was obviously happy to sell wine to an over-indulger, but not for them to indulge.
The standard characteristics of moral panics are usually taken to be those identified by researchers Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda in 1994. They are listed on the US National Institute of Health website – confirming that moral panics are indeed a health issue.
Goode and Ben-Yehuda “described five characteristics of moral panics, including: (1) concern, where there is a heightened level of concern about certain groups or categories, (2) hostility, where one can observe an increase in hostility towards the ‘deviants’ of ‘respectful society’, (3) consensus, where a consensus about the reality and seriousness of a threat can be found, (4) disproportionality, where public concern is in excess of what ‘should’ be, and (5) volatility, where the panic is temporary and fleeting and though it might recur, the panic is not long lasting”.
Symptoms of moral panic may include, but are not limited to, raised voices in public, curtain twitching, people filming aberrant behaviour on their phones, and public meetings being convened to “celebrate our community”.
The media are blamed for inflaming them, and there’s no doubt have in some cases. But, as the PR cliché has it, there’s nothing as powerful as word of mouth, and it is concerned citizens, especially those huddling in groups on street corners or outside supermarkets, that are the most effective disseminators of needless fears.
As the website projustice.sk puts it succinctly: “The factual (if any) original data get distorted and warped into something entirely different -- because it is the negative preconception that captures the public’s eye more often than detailed and accurate information.”
Looking back, we can see that some social phenomena that have inspired moral panic in the past are still raising alarm, but many are just part of daily life: rock and roll music, mixed flatting, sex education in schools, ritual satanic abuse, smartphones and children, the internet in general, social housing, migrants, gangs and ram raiders.
It’s notable that in many cases, those panicking are at no risk of harm from the source of the consternation, although they may be at risk of needing to get a life. Shoplifting in supermarkets, for instance, harms the supermarket owners and staff, but has no direct impact on other customers.
It can be hard to keep up to speed with the progress of moral panics. Take the case of attacks on dairies. Last year, there were almost daily reports of serious incidents. This year, hardly any. There are a limited number of options to explain this: attacks have stopped, reporting of attacks has stopped, or initial reports gave the impression that the problem was worse than it is.
If you’ve read this far and are wondering what you can do about this problem yourself, the solution is simple: don’t panic.
