Extreme - panic attacks, hysteria, crying, fainting
The vulnerable - Older people, women of weak institution (fragile), children
Moral Panic:
- Cohen (1972) argues that a moral panic is when the media amplifies an event to refer its consequences to much wider social issues
- A moral panic is essentially a 'crusade' against behaviour or perceived negative developments in society
- Horror films are more often of the centre of moral panics
- Mainly papers - daily mail, daily express, news of the world, sun, mirror
How and Why?
- Raising alarm in people
- An event/incident is represented of a decline in standards or values
- Society is becoming more dangerous or more permissive
- Appeals to a fragmented and fragile post-war consensus
- Morality today is not as strong as it once used to be - invoking "golden age"
- Politicians and campaigners use this panic to further their aims
- The panic arises by deliberately isolating the event from the socio-economic political circumstances in which the crime took places
E.g. Violent video games, swine flu, terrorists, immigrants
Moral panics have caused changes in the Law including the 1984 video recordings Act that gave the BBFC power to classify videos and an amendment to the criminal justice and public order bill that insisted BBFC took issues of 'harm' on broad when classifying films.
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