What is a moral panic?

Question

I know - and have used the phrase - moral panic. I've read Marshal McLuhan's Understanding Media but I've come across several uses of "moral panic" that makes me interested in delineating what is, and what is not, a moral panic.

A law.stackexchange answer sparked this question. One of the answers stated:

Basically, bestiality laws are reactions to moral panic:

Why is bestiality illegal in the United States?

What is the evidence of that? Laws exist, for among other things, to prevent a multitude of actions. When should we ascribe moral panic as a reason for a law to have been written?

For instance if ascribing bestiality laws to a moral panic is accurate then should we not ascribe gun control laws to be a result of a moral panic?

I would say that neither (bestiality laws nor gun control efforts) are the result of a moral panic. Now, if moral panic simply means breathlessly condemning an activity and not being receptive to logical objections then almost everything and nothing is the result of a moral panic (including bestiality and gun control).

Answer 1

In everyday discourse, particularly political discussions, "moral panic" is often used as a polemical term. It is a way of saying something is overly emotional and irrational. There will inevitably be subjective instances where one person's (wrongful) moral panic is another person's (rightful) moral outrage.

But as the Wikipedia article makes clear, moral panic is also a social scientific concept. In that context it is important to emphasize the objective criteria of a moral panic. What objectively makes something a moral panic is, above all, that there is an emotionally charged social movement to suppress something as a threat to social order. Heavy coverage by mass media is almost always an important secondary feature. Saying something is a moral panic in this more objective social scientific sense also generally implies an acceptance of false or exaggerated beliefs, but not necessarily so.

By that definition, I don't think the answer on Law Stack Exchange really makes a very convincing case that bestiality laws were driven by a moral panic. It's certainly a plausible hypothesis, but more evidence would be needed to support this claim. It's not really relevant if the law is ultimately rational or not. What's relevant is whether there was any sort of popular crusade appealing to the moralistic fears of a mass audience. The quote from Colorado in 2005 is consistent with that, but I would need to see a widespread pattern of statements like this in the media before I would agree that moral panic theory explains the law.

Answer 2

I want to focus on this part here:

For instance if ascribing bestiality laws to a moral panic is accurate then should we not ascribe gun control laws to be a result of a moral panic?

The answer is that some gun control laws might be part of a moral panic, and some of them might not be. The key way to figure that out is whether the motivation is based upon fear that could also be fueled by mass media.

As an example, there is a perception that mass shootings with AR-15 style rifles and other "assault weapons" are increasing in number, and that these particular rifles are especially dangerous. Yet if you look at FBI murder statistics (https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8.xls), rifles of any type only make up about 2% of all murders, and there hasn't been much of an increase of them in absolute terms. If the goal of having more gun control is to reduce the number of homicides in the US (which, is not the only possible goal for gun control policies), then AR-15 bans are a foolish waste of effort because very few homicides are committed with them; it would make more sense to focus on banning handguns.

But, effort is not put in that direction by activists and lawmakers at this time because media focuses on school shootings in suburban neighborhood with AR-15 rifles which happen infrequently, and ignores the kind of routine violence that goes on with handguns every day in inner cities all across the country. There's nothing novel or especially frightening about people in the inner cities killing each other to the audience of mass media, because most of them don't live there and it can be explained away as the fault of poor people making bad choices. Something that appears in a suburban school district and starts killing children out of nowhere is a lot more frightening.

Answer 3

Moral panic is when you have a democratic body enter a state of agitation over a situation and demand immediate legislative action to fix it. This doesn't need to be a momentary thing, but typically it involves a well-supported movement that gathers political steam to force the hands of legislators into acting.

A satirical instance that illustrates this well happens in the musical The Music Man. Professor Harold Hill comes to River City, Iowa and induces a moral panic over the new pool hall, by claiming that gamblers will soon invade their town and corrupt their youth. He then suggests that the town needs a band instead (and it just so happens he sells the instruments).

The problem with moral panics is that the laws are often crafted hastily, without regard for how they will be used.

A real life version of a moral panic was the spate of laws passed to register sex offenders so that the handful of tragic cases involving repeat offenders would not happen again. The problem is that these laws were often written when most child exploitation involved simple child pornography or rape (things most people still agree are bad). Many of these laws did not conceive of a day when teens with smartphones would technically produce child porn... of themselves. As such, some poorly written state laws can charge teens for "victimizing" themselves

When he was 17, E.G. sent a text message with a photograph of his erect penis to a young adult woman he knew through his mother. The woman reported the incident to police, and the prosecutor chose to charge E.G. with the felony sex offense of dealing in depictions of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct — a law typically used to prosecute child pornographers.

That’s right: E.G. was named as both the perpetrator and the victim of the crime of child pornography. He was convicted and required to register as a sex offender after the trial court rejected a motion to dismiss for insufficient evidence.

Bestiality doesn't seem to fit here. Many laws prohibiting sex were passed during a time when society was in tighter agreement about having laws enforce general morality. While laws like that might not get passed today, there's also not much impetus to remove them either.