For over 40 years, the term moral panic and concept to which it is adjoined have been used throughout the socio-criminological literature as a means of describing collective overreactions to perceived wrongs. Since the 1980s, the concept has also been criticized for its inability to adapt to differing moral viewpoints and research paradigms. To address these criticisms and question the significance of moral panic’s continued use, this paper works to redefine the concept from its theoretical foundation to practical employment. A contextual-constructionist/post-positivist approach is, first, used to weigh claims of fact against an imperfect understanding of ‘the truth’. Moral panic is then defined as a means of describing collective, corrective-intended behaviour based on an irrational belief that exaggerates the threat posed by a social problem. To test and further nuance this definition, the Parliament of Canada’s decision to pass four bills that introduced or amended section 172.1 (luring a child) of the Criminal Code of Canada is deconstructed. Using a Historical Dialectic-Relational Approach to analyze the transcripts of House of Commons and Senate debates and committee meetings related to bills C-15A, C-277, C-2, and C-10, the concept of moral panic is found to be an appropriate means of describing certain forms of collective behaviour. An outline of how members of parliament spoke, during the legislative process, of the media, expert witnesses, Internet child lurers, and victims of child sexual abuse provides additional context. The paper concludes by arguing that the moral panic concept can be mobilized in a way that is theoretically justifiable, adaptable to differing moral viewpoints, and of practical use.

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SARAH ADJEKUM B.A., B.S.W. A Research Project Submitted to the School of Social Work in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Social Work McMaster University 2016 / As observed with the ongoing migrant crises, media coverage of refugee and asylum seekers connects the concepts of mental health and trauma to their experiences. The resulting discourse around refugees pathologizes the refugee identity and simultaneously obscures the violence that necessitates their departure from their home countries. As refugee discourse incorporates discourses of mental health, it also legitimizes nation state’s practice social control towards these populations through detention. As the utilization of technologies of securitization is normalized, detention has become increasingly accepted as a response to humanitarian crises. Past research on detention has consistently demonstrated the harmful effects it has on children, adults, and especially individuals with symptoms of mental illness. In particular, research drawing on trauma and mental health discourse has been effective in bringing attention to the counterproductive outcomes of detention. This paper is concerned with the employment of discourses of mental health and trauma by mainstream media as they pertain to the treatment of migrants in detention in Canada. It explores the media’s role in the re(creation) of refugee discourse and purveyors of racial ideology that problematizes people of colour and demands state intervention in the form of mental health aid. Using critical discourse analysis, it contrasted mainstream media coverage of four major publications on detention. This study finds prevalent use of mental health discourse and little mention of violence in several online publications. It also finds that recommendations made in the articles emphasized micro and mezzo focused changes that are unable to challenge federal policy that enables securitization. Nor is it capable of addressing the forms of violence inherent to the mental health system. As such, this paper makes recommendations for a critical examination of refugee and immigration policy that takes into account the states’ participation in the creation of refugee crises. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)

The purpose of this study is to examine the rhetoric and subsequent media framing of President George W. Bush during the years following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and how such frames have been able to generate and sustain a national moral panic. While a number of scholars have explored the effect of presidential rhetoric in generating panic (53; Cohen 1972; Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994; Hawdon 2001; Kappeler and Kappeler 2004), none have evaluated the effect of media framing on such rhetoric. This study will use three major sources of data: (1) National Public Opinion Data from Gallup Poll, (2) daily USA Today news articles, and (3) rates of international terrorism from the U.S. State Department. Employing a content analysis of USA Today articles pertaining to terrorism, I will evaluate the relevant themes used by the corporate media to frame the Bush administration's rhetoric, and further analyze the relationship between such rhetoric and the collective conscience across the eight years of the Bush presidency, while controlling for rates of international terrorism. / Master of Science

This research is examines the nuclear arms race that dominated the 20th century, during which the United States manufactured and stockpiled a large number of strategic weapons. Using moral panic theory, the roles of the President of the United States and the media are examined in facilitating public interest in the manufacture of these weapons from 1955-1990. The project uses both time series and historical analyses to determine the extent to which the strategic nuclear weapons crisis was a moral panic created to insure public acceptance of such this massive defense sector expenditure. The time series analysis reveals that the President does have the ability to influence the public via the State of the Union Address, but that influence does not extend strongly to the media. However, what influence the President does have appears to be correlated to the use of substantive rhetoric, and the percentage of the speech dedicated to the issue. Finally, the historical analysis demonstrates that the moral panic moves through three phases. The first phase is characterized by grassroots concern over the technical gap represented by Sputnik 1's launch was utilized by interested actors to accomplish their goals. During the second phase, this concern transformed into an institutional technique utilized for deflecting institutional challenges when the moral panic moved into an interest group model. The final phase occurs during the rise of the "security state", when elites begin using the moral panic to achieve their own ends. / Ph. D.

This research uses moral panic theory to investigate the ways in which print media coverage influences the association of mental illness with acts of mass violence in schools. I explore the relationship between the rhetoric of moral entrepreneurs (such as victims' friends and family members, law enforcement agencies, criminal justice and mental health professionals, gun rights activists, mayors, members of Congress, and presidents), the construction of a moral panic, and the identification of a folk devil (a person or population deemed responsible for the evils of a society; to be feared and controlled in order to minimize threat). Perpetrators of school shootings are often discussed in terms of their consumption of violent media (such as movies, music, and video games), their access to firearms, their social standing among their peers (socially isolated, ostracized, or bullied at school), and their mental health status. I hypothesize that mental illness has become a common frame in which school shooters are discussed by the media, despite the fact that mentally ill persons are less likely than non-disordered individuals to commit acts of violence. Therefore, this characterization of the mentally ill as violent and dangerous is disproportionate to the actual level of threat. I conduct a quantitative frame analysis of print newspaper articles published in the New York Times and one local newspaper during the month following each mass school shooting between 1991 and 2015, coding for the type of moral entrepreneur (grassroots, interest-group, or elite), the folk devil identified (violent media, firearms, social alienation, and/or mental illness), and whether the folk devil was being affirmed or denied. Results reveal that guns are affirmed as the folk devil more often than mental illness, but are also denied most often; whereas mental illness is affirmed nearly as often as guns, and is less frequently denied as the folk devil — leading to the conclusion that mental illness is the most frequently accepted folk devil associated with school shootings. This serves as a cautionary warning against the conflation of mental illness with mass shootings, because it intensifies the stigma attached to mental illness — a known deterrent to seeking treatment. / Ph. D.

This study analyzes the reporting and editorializing in several major American newspapers during the height of the Citizen Genêt Affair in July and August, 1793. A hybrid form of sociological moral panic theory, focused predominantly on the "iteration" of moral panics and the language used to communicate them, is used to understand the dynamics of the information landscape of 1793. Specific attention is paid to the effects of time and space, personal and political bias, and incendiary historical rhetoric on reporting of and reactions to Genêt's actions. In doing so, this study highlights possible flaws or blind spots in both moral panic theory and historiography, and brings new understanding to the media environment in which America's political traditions gestated. Brief connections are drawn between this historical information landscape and series of events and contemporary concerns with regards to social media and incendiary political rhetoric. / Master of Arts

Yes / New wave public health places an emphasis on exhorting individuals to engage in healthy behaviour with good health being a signifier of virtuous moral standing, whereas poor health is often associated with personal moral failings. In effect, the medical is increasingly being collapsed into the moral. This approach is consistent with other aspects of contemporary neoliberal governance, but it fuels moral panics and creates folk devils. We explore the implications and dysfunctional consequences of this new wave of public health policy in the context of the latest moral panic around obesity.

This thesis considers why some crimes persist beyond the moment of newsworthiness and how they are able to transcend this period of intense reporting to become a feature of popular memory. The central argument is that the popular memory of a crime is built up over time through a synthesis of public discourses, which are predominantly developed in news reporting, people s everyday experience and the normative social frameworks of everyday life. A temporally sensitive analysis of two case studies, the murder of James Bulger and the murder of Sarah Payne, tests this hypothesis by exploring the connections and disconnections between the ongoing reporting of these crimes and the remembering of them. The study finds that the personal past and public discourse intertwine in remembered accounts of these crimes and considers that this is evidence of the ways audiences utilise crime news as an imaginative resource for understanding crime and criminality more broadly. It can thus be said that audiences use the news to frame, but not define their understandings of the world around us.

This study does research on the Swedish media's portraying of an extraordinary crime event in Sweden - the grenades in Malmö 2015. The study focuses on how the media portrays three major participants in the media image: the public, the politicians and the police. The question examined was: How does the media portray the public and the authorities during the grenades in Malmö 2015? I made a framing analysis of 30 news articles from the summer of 2015. The result showed that the public received the role as the victim, where the media image emphasizes on fear from the public. The police received two different images - the safe image where the media emphasizes on the work the police does on preventing crime. The other image was the critical image, where the media emphasized on how the public criticized the police success rate during these incidents. The politicians received a neutral image, where a small amount of critic was portrayed. The results of the analysis diverged from previous studies and theories in the field when it came to the police and the politicians.