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Moral panic is a sociological term, coined by Stanley Cohen, meaning a reaction by a group of people based on the false or exaggerated perception that some cultural behavior or group, frequently a minority group or a subculture, is dangerously deviant and poses a menace to society. It has also been more broadly defined as an "episode, condition, person or group of persons" that has in recent times been "defined as a threat to societal values and interests."^[1] They are byproducts of controversies that produce arguments and social tension, or aren't easily discussed as some of these moral panics are taboo to many people.^[2] Characterization of the group reaction as a moral panic requires a presumption that the group's perceptions are unfounded or exaggerated.

These reactions are often fueled by media coverage or propaganda around a social issue, although semi-spontaneous moral panics do occur. Mass hysteria can be an element in these movements, but moral panic is different from mass hysteria in that a moral panic is specifically framed in terms of morality and is usually expressed as outrage rather than fear. Moral panics (as defined by Cohen) revolve around a perceived threat to a value or norm held by a society normally stimulated by glorification within the mass media or 'folk legend' within societies. Panics have a number of outcomes, with one being the certification to the players within the panic that what they are doing appears to warrant observation by mass media and therefore may push them further into the activities that led to the original feeling of moral panic.

The influences and behaviors of young people are common themes in many moral panics.

The term was coined by Stanley Cohen in 1972 to describe media coverage of Mods and Rockers in the United Kingdom in the 1960s. A factor in moral panic is the deviancy amplification spiral, the phenomenon defined by media critics as an increasing cycle of reporting on a category of antisocial behavior or other undesirable events.

While the term moral panic is relatively recent, many social scientists point to the Middletown studies, first conducted in 1925, as containing the first in-depth study of this phenomenon.^{[citation needed]} In these studies, researchers found that community and religious leaders in an American town condemned then-new technology such as the radio and automobile for promoting immoral behavior. For example, a pastor interviewed in this study referred to the automobile as a "house of prostitution on wheels," and condemned this brand new invention for giving citizens a way of driving out of town when they should be attending church.

In Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (1978), Stuart Hall and his colleagues studied the reaction to the importation into the UK of the heretofore American phenomenon of mugging. Employing Cohen's definition of moral panic, Hall et al. theorized that the "rising crime rate equation" has an ideological function relating to social control. Crime statistics, in Hall's view, are often manipulated for political and economic purposes. Moral panics (e.g. over mugging) could thereby be ignited in order to create public support for the need to "police the crisis." The media play a central role in the "social production of news" in order to reap the rewards of lurid crime stories.^[3]

A wide variety of phenomena have inspired moral panics. Satanic ritual abuse is an example of a phenomenon that some sources believe gave rise to a series of moral panics which originated in the U.S., but spread to the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Netherlands in the 1980s and 1990s.^[4][5] Moral panics often take the form of persecutions of particular groups. Anti-Semitic pogroms, Stalinist purges, the witch-hunts of Renaissance Europe, the demonization of Communists (see McCarthyism)^[4] in the US during the 1950s, the panic-inciting rhetoric concerning international terrorist threats in recent years, and the treatment of Arabs and Muslims in Western countries since 9/11^[6] have all been referred to as moral panics by various sources.

Another example of moral panic is that which surrounds pedophilia. An ongoing tabloid newspaper campaign in the UK resulted in the (incorrectly) reported^[7] assault and persecution of a pediatrician by an angry mob (which had confused the two words) in August 2000.^[8] In 2005 a man in Manchester, England was killed with a knife after being mistakenly accused of child molestation by a mentally disordered man in the neighbourhood.^[9] Also in 2005, a 68 year-old man from Portsmouth died in a hospital after being attacked by a group who falsely accused him of being a pedophile.^[10] In 2007, an Indian TV station in Delhi falsely accused a female schoolteacher of forcing her students into prostitution, which led to an angry mob attacking the school at which she worked and beating her.^[11]

• Book burning
• Conspiracy theory
• Crowd psychology
• Culture of fear
• Folk devil
• For The Children (politics)
• Missing white woman syndrome
• Propaganda
• Scapegoat
• Witch hunts
• White Slavery

• Moral Panics, MediaKnowAll (website)
• "Society's moral panic attacks - all grist for the media mill" by Russ Grayson, On Line Opinion, August 16, 2004.
• "Be afraid, be very afraid... no, don't" by Frank Furedi, Times Higher Education Supplement, September 16, 2005.
• "Moral panics, old and new" by Gilbert Herdt, American Sexuality. Accessed, March 15, 2007.
• "Moral Panics Over Youth Culture and Video Games" by Kenneth A. Gagne, bachelor's thesis, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, April 27, 2001.
• "Who's afraid of sexual minorities? Homosexuals, moral panic, and the exercise of social control" by Iwona Zielinska, Graduate School of Social Research Polish Academy of Sciences/ Centre for Criminological Research, Occasional Paper 1, 2005.
• "Abortion as Moral Panic: How reproductive rights became a divisive political issue" by Carole Joffe, American Sexuality. Accessed March 27, 2007.
• "The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade" by Ronald Weitzer, Politics & Society 35(3):447–475, September 2007.
• "Moral Panic Marketing" by Chris Byrne, ukhh.com. Accessed September 25, 2007.
• Section 3.4: "Interpreting the crime problem" from Free OpenLearn LearningSpace Unit DD100_1 Online Open Education Resource Creative Commons by-nc-sa Licensed (originally written for the Open University Course, DD100, 2000)