Introduction
In order to delineate the transactional process which distinguished moral panic from other reactions to horror-headlines, we have used bold script for the nine necessary elements and bold italics for the ‘must have’ features in the three-phase panic process. To save space and avoid repetition, we cover most of the specific evidence Cohen offered for these elements and features in the next chapter; although it will become apparent long before then that neither the descriptive panics or the ‘new, improved’ generic panics contain the essence of moral panic as Cohen defined them.
Phase One: The Inventory
The first phase of moral panic concerns the creation of a media inventory covering the precipitating event with its panic inducing images [1973: 30]. The first element, exaggeration and distortion includes the use of generic plurals presenting single events as common occurrences, publishing ‘facts’ known to be false or rumors, and over-reporting by using melodramatic language. In the case of mods and rockers:
The regular uses of phases such as ‘riot’, ‘orgy of destruction’, ‘battle’, ‘attack’, siege’, ‘beat up the town’ and ‘screaming mob’ left an image of a besieged town from which innocent holiday makers were fleeing to escape of marauding mob [1973: 31].
The meaning of the initial horror-headlines and reports were reinforced by the editorials and feature articles that appeared in the news-cycle sequence common to major stories, which pass comment on the misleading accounts rather than the real nature of events [1973: 30]. The subsequent societal-wide reaction is shaped by the erroneous putative definitions that emerge during this reinforcement. In Clacton’s case, they consisted of:
• “Gangs”—when most groups present were unstructured;
• Giving the mods and rockers distinct identities—before they had polarized into two groups;
• Inferring a deliberate “invasion from London”—when going to Clacton was a Bank Holiday tradition and many arrestees were local;
• Emphasizing the role of the motor bike and scooter riders—though they were in a minority;
• Claiming that the youths were “affluent”—though most were not;
• Inferring that they were “classless”—when most were working-class;
• Imputing “deliberate intent”—despite a lack of evidence; and
• Emphasizing the “violence and vandalism”, “cost of damage” and a “loss of trade”—when there was little serious violence, the vandalism was no greater than usual, the damage was not as excessive as reported, and the poor trading figures were the result of bad weather [1973: 34–37].
The vital role accorded to the feature articles demonstrates that horror-headlines alone are not enough for moral panic. As both are also common to crime reporting, a moral panic requires the other elements, beginning with the predictions that shape the next two phases. In Cohen’s case, the predictions consisted of the “implicit assumption, present in virtually every report that what had happened was inevitably going to happen again” [Cohen, 1973: 38]. Without that the social disaster, the self-fulfilling prophecy of deviancy amplification creating the problem being denounced, would not occur [1973: 38–39]. Likewise, the third element, symbolization, contains far more than the erroneous stereotypes found in subsequent case studies. That is because the disproportionality that appeared had nothing to do with the claims made as the US boosters contend, but the way that the symbolization process created the impression that the problem was rapidly getting worse. That impression also explains what later case studies do not: why the wider public was sucked into the panic; and why the claims and prediction did not appear to be disproportionate.
The first feature of the symbolization process involved the metamorphosis of positive and neutral concepts into negative symbols, making the problem appear bigger than it was. For example, the image of the quiet resort town of Clacton was now turned into ‘a disaster area’ indicated by the expression “we don’t want another Clacton here”. Second, Cohen drew attention to the three-step process whereby other youths became guilty by association. As ‘mod’ became symbolic of delinquent status, anything associated with mod like their hairstyle came to symbolize mod, and so anyone with a similar hairstyle was believed to be both a mod and a delinquent; making the problem look bigger still. Third, follow-up stories turning unrelated incidents into part of the problem encouraged people to believe that the predictions were coming true. By failing to cover these aspects, descriptive and generic panics cannot account for the effects of the symbolization. Rather than merely demonize the folk devil as later studies purport; by creating the appearance of an outbreak of the deviancy and offering the public an explanation for the precipitating event Cohen’s symbolization ensured that the effect of the inventory was total, not least because no one offered an alternative interpretation [1973: 43–44].
As well as demonstrating that horror-headlines and demonizing folk devils by stereotype are not enough to create a moral panic, these elements involve far more than the “concern” or “hostility” found in generic panics. Cohen’s first three elements have extensive social effects, fuelling the moral panic by creating the disproportionality which descriptive and generic panics imply is a function of existing anxiety rather than emerging from the interactive process. As we shall see, the existing anxiety about another suppressed problem is made visible by its projection onto the folk devil through the moral panic process, which also enhances it.
Reaction: Phase One
The second phase of Cohen’s model involved the inculcation of the media inventory amongst the public creating the societal-wide agreement about the symbolic meaning of the threat, especially when the deviancy is seen as a symptom of a “dislocation in the social structure” or a “threat to cherished values”. That is why this phase ensured that the reaction concerned the implications of the event for society rather than merely condemned the folk devils, and enabled Cohen to assert that moral panics restored the societal values under threat [1973: 49]. The forth element, the media orientation, spells out the implications of the deviancy for “society as we know it” and thereby determines “what is to be done” as a consequence [1973: 49]. It does this by reporting the subsequent public reactions to the inventory, from public meetings to government debates, reinforcing the psychological impact of the precipitating event, and linking the deviants to the structural strain creating the group myth that now emerges about the causes and consequences of the precipitating event [1973: 49–50]. In Cohen’s case, this was achieved by the increasing number of disaster analogies and prophecies of doom that appeared in the press, which were warning the public that unless “something was done” the situation would get worse. Although commentators offered several variants the public could consider, their collective effect was to increase the symbolic meaning of Clacton. It mattered not whether people argued that it was “not so much what happened” at Clacton but that it “could have been worse, and was likely to become so”; or, as “various social groups” insisted, that “it’s not only this” but other adverse social trends from teen pregnancy to illicit drug consumption that constituted the problem. As every comment alluded to the same structural strain, every reaction increased the size of the apparent threat [1973: 51–53].
As well as ignoring the psychology of moral panic that generated the reactions; it is rare to find any other case study illustrating the reports of the reactions in the press or the fifth element: the folk devils’ new image. This emerged from the spurious attributions and specific auxiliary status traits repeated in the press that linked the folk devils to the specific values perceived to be under threat. Indeed, unless one explores these claims emanating from the moral barricades, you can not explain why the folk devils became demonized. Later studies referring to existing stereotypes can not be panics. In Cohen’s case, the new labels “mods and rockers” replaced the emotive symbolic labels from the past like “hooligans” or “wild ones” used in the initial horror-headlines. In Cohen’s case these traits were summarized by a local prosecutor as: a lack of views on serious subjects, inflated ideas about their own importance, immaturity, irresponsibility, arrogance, and a lack of respect for law and peoples’ property. They were also encapsulated in a single phrase by the magistrate Dr. Simpson who denounced the youths as “sawdust Caesars”.
This re-labelling process with its new specific stereotypes could be seen in both the guilt by association mentioned earlier and the legends and myths about the youths that subsequently emerged. The most widely reported legend concerned the youth who offered to pay his £75 fine by bank check. Repeatedly told to prove that, as “fines won’t hurt them” harsher punishments were needed, the legend reinforced the media orientation that the problem was caused by the teens’ affl uence. In reality, it was a sarcastic comment, given that £75 would take months to pay off [1973: 55–57]. Once again, while there were disagreements on the moral barricades, with some arguing that delinquency was endemic and others suggesting it was only a lunatic fringe [1973: 59–61]; these contradictions did not confuse the public because every claim generated and diffused normative concerns and drew a sharp distinction between the new stereotype of the youths and normal behaviour [1973: 61].
The ability of moral panic to accommodate variations and even contradictions applied to the causation element too. A precise diagnosis was less important than the fact that everyone agreed that the deviancy was a “sign of the times”, part of the wider “social malaise” caused by being soft on crime, a decline in religious belief, and the delinquents’ lack of a sense of purpose having been “coddled” by the welfare state. In their turn, these explanations reflected a common reactionary or conservative belief that the permissive reforms of Victorian values had gone too far [1973: 61–62]. As a result, it mattered not that liberals believed that the youths’ boredom and alienation followed from a lack of creative outlets, or that conservatives argued that the youths were not using the outlets on offer; everyone agreed that the youths were alienated and bored [1973: 63–65]. While descriptive and generic panics give the impression that the impact of horror-headlines is immediate, Cohen did not. The media inventory did not spread across society in “an absorbed symmetry” and the public continued to disagree over the specific images and stereotypes, the class composition, the precise causes, and the potential longevity of the problem. For example, the informed public of magistrates, teachers, social workers, and probation officers:
were overwhelmingly critical, if not hostile, towards the mass media: 40.5 per cent felt that the media had exaggerated and blown the whole thing up, and a further 41.3 percent actually attributed responsibility to media publicity for part of what happened [1973: 69].
This deferential reaction did not undermine the panic, because these groups were unrepresentative of the wider public whose beliefs and reaction were covered in the third phase of the panic [1973: 74]. Later case studies rarely cover two other features from this phase. Despite offering a social strain to ‘explain’ the panic, with the exception of the odd US drug panic they rarely demonstrate how the folk devils come to personify the social strain because of the new stereotypes generated [Best, 1999]. Likewise, one rarely finds any discussion of the moral panic’s unique features that reflect the specific nature of the perceived threat in each panic. In Cohen’s case this consisted of the divide and rule tactic whereby:
the adult community, faced with an apparent attack upon its most sacred institution (property) and the most sacred guardians of this institution (the police) reacts, if not consciously, by over emphasising the differences among the enemy [1973: 58].
Although Cohen did not say so, these unique features are as important as the nine elements given they not only explain and demonstrate why each panic takes hold, but also help inhibit alternative explanations which would undermine their total effect. In the case of the mods and rockers, the divide and rule feature inhibited a class analysis, deflected blame away from society, and negated the possibility that the reaction reflected a fear of physical violence as the polarized youths only attacked one another. In other words, one is entitled to expect case studies to identify the unique features of a panic that reinforce the nine elements.
Reaction: Phase Two
The last phase, the rescue and remedy phase in Cohen’s natural disaster analogy [1973: 85] is vital because it is during periods of crisis like moral panic that the common values regarding what is “damaging, threatening or deviant” in societies are revealed, and explain both the success of the appeals for social unity and the panics’ ability to transcend any contradictions concerning causation [1973: 75–76].
The focused fear generated by the two previous phases is both a cause and effect of the sensitization process that creates the amplification of the deviancy which resolves “the anxiety inducing ambiguity” of the precipitating event by “structuring the situation” and making it “more predictable” despite being akin to mass hysteria [1973: 77]. In Cohen’s case, any act that looked like hooliganism was immediately reclassified as part of the mods and rockers phenomenon, making it look larger than it was by generating a large number of false alarms, the cancellation of legitimate activities because they “might lead to trouble”, and the reporting of non events keeping the issue to the fore [1973: 78]. This hysteria was matched by the diffusion, escalation, and innovation in police activities, expanding from the local to the national level, as their pre-Bank holiday preparations for invasions by the youths become increasingly complex and sophisticated. As this surpassed the normal response to deviancy and trampled on civil liberties it not only offered a standard to differentiate panics from the normal reaction to deviancy, it provided proof that a panic was in progress [1973: 86–87]. The failure of descriptive and generic panics to address these issues, from the initial confusion through to its ironic resolution by the escalation in social control culture enables us to argue that they amount to label slapping. They turn a normal level reaction to deviancy into a moral panic and do not contain the appearance and resolution of the psychological response that justified the label.
As well as mobilizing civil defense and other local government resources [1973: 92–93], Cohen argued that the police reaction led to the dramatization of evil whereby:
Deviants must not only be labeled but must also be seen to be labeled; they must be involved in some sort of ceremony of public degradation. The public and visible nature of this event is essential if the deviant’s transition to folk devil status is to be successfully managed [1973: 95].
As the police escorted the youths out of town, and the public demanded more controls [1973: 88–91 and 96]; this dramatization reached its peak in the Brighton courts during Whitsun 1965. Although the lack of a threat was indicated by the use of convenient charges like ‘willful obstruction’ and ‘threatening behavior’; the court’s recourse to numerous extra-legal measures and punishments such as needless remands in custody encouraged the opposite impression. This show of power, with its ritual outbursts of hostility, “clamping down hard” and “making examples of offenders” drew approval from the public gallery and was widely reported in the press; whereas the successful appeals against those extra-legal measures were not [1973: 108–109; 97].
This offcial response was complemented by the informal elements of public opinion, another form of social control exercised by the public who were given several active roles by Cohen. It was the on the spot reaction of the local community, the “pristine form of public reaction”, which led to the disaster analogies in the media [1973: 111]. The public also contributed to the generalized build up of the reaction, through statements made by local MPs, those invariably quoted on youth problems in the press, church sermons, and speeches at conferences, school prize-giving days, and passing-out parades. The ultimate effect of the panic also depended upon the moral entrepreneurs, the local business owners who held meetings and lobbied their local government and parliamentary representatives who then repeated the entrepreneurs’ demands in council chambers and in Parliament. If the entrepreneurs’ solution remained at a general level, little would happen. If they created a specific appeal reflecting the values transgressed, which was then adopted by national action groups exploiting the social control agents’ perspective and the media coverage to justify doing so, the moral panic would lead to a new law or social policy change because of the generalized belief that now existed about the threat [Cohen, 1973: 111–112].
In Cohen’s case, the moral entrepreneurs gained policy changes at the local level like banning beatniks from sleeping on the beaches, but they failed to secure a new law because the two main resort town action groups did not create a specific appeal [1973: 79–81 and 83–85]. On the other hand, after the Whitsun disturbances, these two action groups helped create a pyramidical conception of blame and responsibility holding the government responsible for depriving the social control agencies of the powers they needed to resolve the threat. By ensuring that MPs took up their demands and tabled Parliamentary questions, the action groups forced the Home Secretary, Mr. Brooke, to reconsider his belief that the law was adequate. After calling a joint meeting of Chief Constables, and holding a private meeting with one of Brighton’s MPs, Brooke introduced a Malicious Damage Bill increasing the penalties for the vandalism [1973: 136]. The fact that this moral enterprise emerged out of the moral panic was evidenced by the philosophy of Blake, the organizer of one of the action groups who, like the nationally known Mary Whitehouse and Lord Longford, personified the typical moral crusader’s authoritarian personality [1973: 123, 127–132, and 173].
The exploitative culture, the final element, is analogous to the “warning and impact phases” in a natural disaster. Whereas warnings about impending natural disasters often led to panic and/or denial that the threat is real making the consequences worse, the opposite occurs in moral panic. While there is no warning about the precipitating event, subsequent warnings about “next time” are not only readily believed, they generated the false alarms and “widening the net” to other acts of hooliganism that make the situation look worse. When subsequent invasions did occur they enhanced the validity of the media inventory and institutionalized the threat through the police’s heavy-handed approach [1973: 144–148]. The most important aspect of this element, however, concerned the interaction between the press, the public, the control agents, and the deviants on the beaches. This produced an in situ amplification of deviancy and offered a “more sociological explanation” why the public flocked to the beaches despite the horror-headlines. Rather than forming “two highly structured opposing groups (or gangs)”, or even exhibiting homogeneous patterns of participation [1973: 149–50]; the youths’ polarization, against each other and collectively against the adult community, followed from the media inventory. By promoting the image of “warring gangs”, the press turned a “minor antagonism” between the youths that was “not especially marked” given their common working-class origin into “something greater” by offering a deviant role to play and leading the youths into publicity seeking behaviour. Having turned every innocent act that then occurred beachside into an exemplar of the deviancy, the inventory effectively encouraged the escalation of the violence at the beaches and legitimised the heavy-handed reaction to it [1973: 152–154, 158–166]. This link between the media reports, the changing expectations, and subsequent events can be seen in the youths’ targets: Easter—the Clacton residents; Whitsun—the other youth group; and, thereafter—the police [1973: 157]. Likewise, instead of being drawn to the beaches by “sheer curiosity” or “vicarious satisfaction”, the public went to see “a modern morality play” in which ‘good’ society dealt with the ‘bad’ deviants, evidenced by the way that the public’s passive fascination was “livened only when the forces of good triumphed” such as “cheering the police when they made an arrest” [1973: 158–60]. Although the immediate cause of amplification was the police who arbitrarily enforced the rules [1973: 166–67], and the courts then fed the panic by “making an example of the offenders”; the ultimate blame rests with the media which promoted the images of the “thin blue line” of the police as saving society from chaos and the magistrates as society’s mouth-piece [1973: 172].
The effect of the panic on society involved two types of exploitation. The commercial exploitation of the youths consisted of exaggerating their fashion differences that reinforced their polarization and helped create the youths’ self-identities. The ideological exploitation of the issue took several forms. Religious groups were able to control their members’ behaviour. Government reasserted the social consensus. Social control agents secured more resources. “Other groups” also claimed that the events justified their previous positions on various social issues, and new positions such as the claim Clacton followed from the failure to heed previous warnings about media violence [1973: 139–143].
Delineating Moral Panic
In short, in order to match Cohen’s definition of moral panic case studies should have exhibited a vast array of phenomenon including: appeals for unity, mass hysteria, false alarms; the amplification of deviancy in situ and/or otherwise; an escalation in control culture activity; the dramatization of evil; courts in action; the appearance of specific moral entrepreneurs; and the widespread condemnation of the deviants across society, as people exploit the issue for other ends, as well as on the moral barricades. The fact that descriptive panics rarely mentioned any of these issues, let alone followed the process by which the elements and features invoked and resolved anxieties, suggests that whatever else they were recording, it was not moral panic. As generic panic has now replaced the elements, features, and process that quantified the meaning of moral panic, they no longer exhibit the psychological dimensions and effect that gave the label its original meaning. Whether or not the amplification of deviancy was the key issue, its frequent failure to appear is seminal because Cohen argued that the crucial stage in the emergence of the folk devil is when the public adopts the symbolization that facilitates the stigmatization, making the negative sanctions much easier to apply. As that process also enhances the solidarity amongst the folk devils, it also facilitates the public’s fear that the deviants pose a threat to society [1973: 157]. Without that, the moral panic could and would not turn the original claims about the threat into a socially constructed reality through the amplification of deviancy that create the “social disaster” that panics always do.
The Context and Background
The interactive phases of moral panic did not explain why it occurred, but offered the clues that facilitated an explanation. In Cohen’s case, the boundary crisis, focusing the anxiety caused by social strain on the mods and rockers, can be found in the predominant themes of affluence and youth that had dominated post-war discussions of social change. After Clacton, adult society drew erroneous links between teen affluence, the supposed homogeneity of youth culture, and the aggressive acts of fringe delinquency at the beaches and so became convinced that delinquency was a major social problem [1973: 177–180]. As a consequence, society ignored the real problem that led to deviancy. Society had created a large number of secondary modern school graduates facing dull, tedious jobs after a decade of dull, tedious teaching, who adopted a materialistic approach to life, maximizing the aspects of teen culture that they could. Unlike the middle-class adolescent who went to grammar school that offered far more options, the working-class teen had no alternative. As contemporary city-scapes provided few opportunities for legitimate excitement, the youths responded to the leisure goals that they could not achieve by manufacturing their own form of excitement, “making things happen out of nothing”, and took this do-it-yourself excitement to the resort towns that likewise offered them nothing. Although this involved engaging in acts of vandalism and hooliganism, the youths were not really responsible for their actions:
One chose these things, but at the same time one was in a society whose structure severely limited one’s choice and one was in a situation where what deterministic forces there were—the lack of amenities, the action of the police, the hostility of locals—made few other choices possible [Cohen, 1973: 183].
Having identified the real problem, Cohen could now explain the cause and nature of the panic. Drawing on Nuttall’s cultural analysis of mod [1970], Cohen suggested that the adults exacerbated an existing jealously induced generation gap between themselves and the youths by their failure to understand the nature of contemporary teen culture:
The sixties began the confirmation of the new era in adult-youth relations. The Teddy Boys were the first warnings on the horizon. What everybody had grimly prophesied had come true: high wages, the emergence of a commercial youth culture ‘pandering’ to young people’s needs, the elevation of scruffy pop heroes into national idols (and even giving them MBEs),1 the ‘permissive society’, the ‘coddling by the Welfare State’—all this had produced its inevitable results. As one magistrate expressed to me in 1965, ‘Delinquency is trying to get at too many things too easily … people have become more aware of the good things in life … we’ve thrown back the curtain for them too soon’ [1973: 191–192].
As a result, the mods and rockers’ spending power and sexual freedom when combined with their flouting of societal values was perceived as the inevitable result of permissiveness which had placed traditional values under strain, not least because of the mods’ apparent incongruousness. They did not conform to previous images of slum louts, yet behaved like a hooligan; and despite looking like a bank clerk, they did not adopt society’s values:
His disdain for advancement in work, his air of distance, his manifest display of ingratitude for what society had given him: these were found more unsettling than any simple conformity to the folk lore image of the yob [1973: 195].
As Erikson said it would, when a boundary crisis emerges it generates deviancy, the punishment of which restores social order by reasserting the values that are under strain [1966]. In Clacton’s case, the youths not only became the scapegoats for the decaying resort towns’ failure to adjust to the respectable working-classes’ tendency to opt for inclusive vacations in Spain with its guaranteed sunshine; but for what the youths had come to represent in the public imagination. This was almost inevitable, given that moral indignation born of wider social change has to have an outlet, and those identifying with societal norms have a lot to lose if the norm breaker goes unpunished. As well as the direct threat to persons, property, and commercial interests, the mods and rockers’ moral panic reflected their “violation of certain approved styles of life”: the ethics of sobriety and hard work [1973: 197].
The Real Thing
Neither descriptive panics nor the ‘new, improved’ generic version capture the essence of Cohen’s moral panic that distinguish panics from other overreactions to horror-headlines and/or deviancy [1973: 11]. This consisted of the psychological impact of the media inventory that ensured that the moral indignation generated by pre-existing fears caused by wider social change was projected onto the folk devil. Later studies clearly ignore the role of the transactional process in creating the disproportionate fear regarding the threat, but which is understandable because the panic makes the claims about the threat look real. On the other hand, although Cohen defined what a moral panic was, that does not mean that he uncovered one; and we will explain how Cohen’s moral panic model amounted to a myth in the next chapter.