A moral panic is a feeling of fear spread among many people that some evil threatens the well-being of society. It is "the process of arousing social concern over an issue – usually the work of moral entrepreneurs and the mass media".
In recent centuries the mass media have become important players in the dissemination of moral indignation, even when they do not appear to be consciously engaged in sensationalism or in muckraking. Simply reporting the facts can be enough to generate concern, anxiety, or panic.[need quotation to verify] Stanley Cohen states that moral panic happens when "a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests". Examples of moral panic include the belief in widespread abduction of children by predatory paedophiles, belief in ritual abuse of women and children by satanic cults, and concerns over the effects of music lyrics.
- 1 Use as a social science term
- 2 Cohen's stages of moral panic
- 3 Mass media
- 4 Characteristics
- 5 Examples
- 5.1 20th–21st century: public health
- 5.2 1919–1920, late 1940s, and 1950s: Communism
- 5.3 1950s: Switchblades
- 5.4 1960s: Mods and rockers
- 5.5 1970s–present: increase in crime
- 5.6 1970s-present: Halloween candy tampering
- 5.7 1970s–present: violence and video games
- 5.8 1970s–present: war on drugs
- 5.9 1980s–1990s: Dungeons & Dragons
- 5.10 1980s–1990s: Satanic ritual abuse
- 5.11 1980s: HIV/AIDS
- 5.12 1970s–present: sex offenders, child sexual abuse, and pedophilia
- 5.13 1999–present: Mass shootings
- 5.14 2001–present: Terrorism and Islamic extremism
- 5.15 2000–present: human trafficking
- 5.16 2000–present: jenkem
- 5.17 2000–present: chemsex
- 5.18 2018–present: Momo Challenge
- 6 Criticism
- 7 Other uses
- 8 See also
- 9 References
- 10 Further reading
- 11 External links
Marshall McLuhan gave the term academic treatment in his book Understanding Media, written in 1964. According to Cohen, author of a sociological study about youth culture and media titled Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972), a moral panic occurs when "...[a] condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests". Those who start the panic when they fear a threat to prevailing social or cultural values are known by researchers as 'moral entrepreneurs', while people who supposedly threaten social order have been described as 'folk devils'.
British and American differences in definition
Many sociologists have pointed out the differences between definitions of a moral panic as described by American versus British sociologists. Kenneth Thompson claimed that American sociologists tended to emphasize psychological factors, while the British portrayed "moral panics" as crises of capitalism.
British criminologist Jock Young used the term in his participant observation study of drug consumption in Porthmadog between 1967 and 1969. In Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (1978), Stuart Hall and his colleagues studied the public reaction to the phenomenon of mugging and the perception that it had recently been imported from American culture into the UK. Employing Cohen's definition of 'moral panic', Hall et al. theorized that the "...rising crime rate equation..." performs an ideological function relating to social control. Crime statistics, in Hall's view, are often manipulated for political and economic purposes; moral panics could thereby be ignited to create public support for the need to "...police the crisis".
Cohen's stages of moral panic
According to Cohen, there are five key stages in the construction of a moral panic:
- Someone, something or a group are defined as a threat to social norms or community interests
- The threat is then depicted in a simple and recognizable symbol/form by the media
- The portrayal of this symbol rouses public concern
- There is a response from authorities and policy makers
- The moral panic over the issue results in social changes within the community
In 1971, Cohen investigated a series of "moral panics". Cohen used the term "moral panic" to characterize the reactions of the media, the public, and agents of social control to youth disturbances. This work, involving the Mods and Rockers, demonstrated how agents of social control amplified deviance. According to Cohen, these groups were labelled as being outside the central core values of consensual society and as posing a threat to both the values of society and society itself, hence the term "folk devils".
In a more recent edition of Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Cohen suggested that the term "panic" in itself connotes irrationality and a lack of control. Cohen maintained that "panic" is a suitable term when used as an extended metaphor.
The concept of "moral panic" has also been linked to certain assumptions about the mass media. Cohen stated that the mass media is the primary source of the public's knowledge about deviance and social problems. He further argued that moral panic gives rise to the folk devil by labelling actions and people.
According to Cohen, the media appear in any or all three roles in moral panic dramas:
- Setting the agenda – selecting deviant or socially problematic events deemed as newsworthy, then using finer filters to select which events are candidates for moral panic.
- Transmitting the images – transmitting the claims by using the rhetoric of moral panics.
- Breaking the silence and making the claim.
Moral panics have several distinct features. According to Goode and Ben-Yehuda, moral panic consists of the following characteristics:
- Concern – There must be the belief that the behavior of the group or activity deemed deviant is likely to have a negative effect on society.
- Hostility – Hostility toward the group in question increases, and they become "folk devils". A clear division forms between "them" and "us".
- Consensus – Though concern does not have to be nationwide, there must be widespread acceptance that the group in question poses a very real threat to society. It is important at this stage that the "moral entrepreneurs" are vocal and the "folk devils" appear weak and disorganized.
- Disproportionality – The action taken is disproportionate to the actual threat posed by the accused group.
- Volatility – Moral panics are highly volatile and tend to disappear as quickly as they appeared because public interest wanes or news reports change to another narrative.
- Hidden dangers of modern technology.
- Evil stranger manipulating the innocent.
- A “hidden world” of anonymous evil people.
20th–21st century: public health
The fear of disease (or fear of threats to public health) and spread of panic dates back many centuries and continues into the 21st century with diseases such as AIDS, Ebola, H1N1, Zika, and SARS. Cohen's idea of the "folk devil" and epidemics may be synonymous in their role in spreading mass panic and fear. Prior to the 20th century, an intense concentration on hygiene emerged with a medical belief referred to as miasma theory, which stated that disease was the direct result of the polluting emanations of filth: sewer gas, garbage fumes, and stenches that polluted air and water, which results in an epidemic. The Great Stink of 1858 was blamed on miasma, along with reoccurring cholera epidemics during the Victorian era. Although the water was safe to drink in most parts of London, such a panic had arisen that very few people would dare drink the water.
1919–1920, late 1940s, and 1950s: Communism
During the year 1919, the year 1920, the late 1940s, and the 1950s, the United States had a moral panic over communism and feared being attacked by the Soviet Union. In the late 1940s and the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy led a witch hunt against communists called McCarthyism, where people were accused of being communists.
In the United States, a 1950 article titled "The Toy That Kills" in the Women's Home Companion, about automatic knives, or "switchblades", sparked significant controversy. It was further fuelled by highly popular films of the late 1950s, including Rebel Without a Cause, Crime in the Streets, 12 Angry Men, The Delinquents, High School Confidential, and the 1957 Broadway musical, West Side Story. Fixation on the switchblade as the symbol of youth violence, sex, and delinquency resulted in demands from the public and Congress to control the sale and possession of such knives. State laws restricting or criminalizing switchblade possession and use were adopted by an increasing number of state legislatures, and many of the restrictive laws around them worldwide date back to this period.
1960s: Mods and rockers
In early 1960s Britain, the two main youth subcultures were mods and rockers. The "mods and rockers" conflict was explored as an instance of moral panic by sociologist Stanley Cohen in his study Folk Devils and Moral Panics, which examined media coverage of the mod and rocker riots in the 1960s. Although Cohen acknowledged that mods and rockers engaged in street fighting in the mid-1960s, he argued that they were no different from the evening brawls that occurred between non-mod and non-rocker youths throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, both at seaside resorts and after football games.
1970s–present: increase in crime
Research shows that fear of increasing crime rates is often the cause of moral panics. Recent studies have shown that despite declining crime rates, this phenomenon, which often taps into a population's "herd mentality", continues to occur in various cultures. Japanese jurist Koichi Hamai explains how the changes in crime recording in Japan since the 1990s caused people to believe that the crime rate was rising and that crimes were getting increasingly severe.
1970s-present: Halloween candy tampering
An article published in The New York Times in 1970 claimed that "Those Halloween goodies that children collect this weekend on their rounds of ‘trick or treating’ may bring them more horror than happiness", and provided specific examples of potential tamperings, including "that plump red apple that Junior gets from a kindly old woman down the block. It may have a razor blade hidden inside," and "Last year in Oneida, N. Y., someone gave three children trick‐or‐treat apples with sewing needles in them." Rumors of randomly-distributed poison candy or fruit are nothing more than urban legends; no child has ever been killed by eating a Halloween candy from a stranger.
1970s–present: violence and video games
There have been calls to regulate violence in video games for nearly as long as the video game industry has existed, with Death Race being a notable early example. In the 1990s, improvements in video game technology allowed for more lifelike depictions of violence in games such as Mortal Kombat and Doom. The industry attracted controversy over violent content and concerns about effects they might have on players, generating frequent media stories that attempted to associate video games with violent behavior, in addition to a number of academic studies that reported conflicting findings about the strength of correlations. According to Christopher Ferguson, sensationalist media reports and the scientific community unintentionally worked together in "promoting an unreasonable fear of violent video games". Concerns from parts of the public about violent games led to cautionary, often exaggerated news stories, warnings from politicians and other public figures, and calls for research to prove the connection, which in turn led to studies "speaking beyond the available data and allowing the promulgation of extreme claims without the usual scientific caution and skepticism."
Since the 1990s, there have been attempts to regulate violent video games in the United States through congressional bills as well as within the industry. Public concern and media coverage of violent video games reached a high point following the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, after which videos were found of the perpetrators, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, talking about violent games like Doom and making comparisons between the acts they intended to carry out and aspects of games.
Ferguson and others have explained the video game moral panic as part of a cycle that all new media go through. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that legally restricting sales of video games to minors would be unconstitutional and deemed the research presented in favour of regulation, as "unpersuasive".
1970s–present: war on drugs
Some critics have pointed to moral panic as an explanation for the War on Drugs. For example, a Royal Society of Arts commission concluded that "the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 ... is driven more by 'moral panic' than by a practical desire to reduce harm."
Some have written that one of the many rungs supporting the moral panic behind the war on drugs was a separate but related moral panic, which peaked in the late 1990s, involving media's gross exaggeration of the frequency of the surreptitious use of date rape drugs. News media have been criticized for advocating "grossly excessive protective measures for women, particularly in coverage between 1996 and 1998," for overstating the threat and for excessively dwelling on the topic. For example, a 2009 Australian study found that drug panel tests were unable to detect any drug in any of the 97 instances of patients admitted to the hospital believing their drinks might have been spiked.
1980s–1990s: Dungeons & Dragons
At various times, Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop role-playing games have been accused of promoting such practices as Satanism, witchcraft, suicide, pornography and murder. In the 1980s and later, some groups, especially fundamentalist Christian groups, accused the games of encouraging interest in sorcery and the veneration of demons.
1980s–1990s: Satanic ritual abuse
Also known as the "satanic panic", this was a series of moral panics regarding Satanic ritual abuse that originated in the United States and spread to other English-speaking countries in the 1980s and 1990s, which led to a string of wrongful convictions.
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) may lead to or exacerbate other health conditions such as pneumonia, fungal infections, tuberculosis, toxoplasmosis, and cytomegalovirus. A meeting of the British Sociological Association's South West and Wales Study entitled "AIDS: The Latest Moral Panic" was prompted by the growing interest of medical sociologists in AIDS, as well as that of UK health care professionals working in the field of health education. It took place at a time when both groups were beginning to voice an increased concern with the growing media attention and fear-mongering that AIDS was attracting. In the 1980s, a moral panic was created within the media over HIV/AIDS. For example, in Britain, a prominent advertisement by the government suggested that the public was uninformed about HIV/AIDS due to a lack of publicly accessible and accurate information.
The media outlets nicknamed HIV/AIDS the "gay plague", which further stigmatized the disease. However, scientists gained a far better understanding of HIV/AIDS as it grew in the 1980s and moved into the 1990s and beyond. The illness was still negatively viewed by many as either being caused by or passed on through the gay community. Once it became clear that this wasn't the case, the moral panic created by the media changed to blaming the overall negligence of ethical standards of the younger generation (both male and female), resulting in another moral panic. Authors behind AIDS: Rights, Risk, and Reason argued that "British TV and press coverage is locked into an agenda which blocks out any approach to the subject which does not conform in advance to the values and language of a profoundly homophobic culture—a culture that does not regard gay men as fully or properly human. No distinction obtains for the agenda between 'quality' and 'tabloid' newspapers, or between 'popular' and 'serious' television."
In the 1990s, blame shifted to "uncivilized Africans" as the new "folk devils", with a popular theory alleging that HIV originated from humans having sex with simians. This theory was debunked by numerous experts.
1970s–present: sex offenders, child sexual abuse, and pedophilia
The media narrative of a sex offender highlighting egregious offenses as typical behaviour of any sex offender, and media distorting the facts of some cases, has led legislators to attack judicial discretion, making sex offender registration mandatory based on certain listed offenses rather than individual risk or the actual severity of the crime, thus practically catching less serious offenders under the domain of harsh sex offender laws. In the 1990s and 2000s, there have been instances of moral panics in the UK and the US related to colloquial uses of the term pedophilia to refer to such unusual crimes as high-profile cases of child abduction.
The moral panic over pedophilia began in the 1970s after the sexual revolution. While homosexuality was becoming more socially accepted after the sexual revolution, pro-contact pedophiles believed that the sexual revolution never helped pro-contact pedophiles. In the 1970s, pro-contact pedophile activist organizations such as Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) and North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) were formed in October 1974 and December 1978, respectively. Despite receiving some support, PIE received lots of backlash when they advocated for abolishing or lowering age of consent laws. As a result, people protested against PIE. Until the first half of the 1970s, sex was not yet part of the concept of domestic child abuse, which used to be limited to physical abuse and neglect. The sexual part of child abuse became prominent in the United States due to the encounter of two political agendas: the fight against battered child syndrome by pediatricians during the 1960s and the feminist anti-rape movement, in particular the denunciation of domestic sexual violence. These two movements overlapped in 1975, creating a new political agenda about child sexual abuse. Laura Lowenkron wrote: "The strong political and emotional appeal of the theme of 'child sexual abuse' strengthened the feminist criticism of the patriarchal family structure, according to which domestic violence is linked to the unequal power between men and women and between adults and children." Although the concern over child sexual abuse was caused by feminists, the concern over child sexual abuse also attracted traditional groups and conservative groups. Lowenkron wrote: "Concerned about the increasing expansion and acceptance of so-called 'sexual deviations' during what was called the libertarian age from the 1960's to the early 1970's," conservative groups and traditional groups "saw in the fight against 'child sexual abuse' the chance" to "revive fears about crime and sexual dangers".
The moral panic over sex offenders and pedophiles became very intense in the early 1980s. In the 1980s, the media began to report more frequently on cases of children being raped, kidnapped or murdered. In 1981, a 6 year old boy named Adam Walsh was abducted, murdered, and beheaded. Investigators believe the murderer was serial killer Ottis Toole. The murder of Adam Walsh took over nationwide news and led to a moral panic over child abduction. After Adam Walsh was killed, new laws for missing children were created. According to criminologist Richard Moran, "[The Adam Walsh case] created a nation of petrified kids and paranoid parents. [...] Kids used to be able to go out and organize a stickball game, and now all playdates and the social lives of children are arranged and controlled by the parents." During the 1980s, inaccurate and heavily flawed data about sex offenders and their recidivism rates was published. This data led to society believing that sex offenders have a particularly high recidivism rate, which led to the creation of sex offender registries. Later information revealed that sex offenders, including child sex offenders, have a low recidivism rate. Other highly publicized cases, similar to the murder of Adam Walsh, include the abduction and murder of eleven year old boy Jacob Wetterling in 1989, the rape and murder of seven year old girl Megan Kanka in 1994, and the rape and murder of nine year old girl Jessica Lunsford in 2005. These cases of children being killed, raped and/or abducted led to a creation of sex offender registries and sex offender laws. Another contributing factor in the moral panic over pedophiles and sex offenders was the day-care sex-abuse hysteria in the 1980s and early 1990s, including the McMartin preschool trial. This led to a moral panic where parents became hypervigilant with concerns of predatory child sex offenders seeking to abduct children in public spaces, such as playgrounds.
Society's opinion on sex offenders is generally extremely negative, with sex offenders being one of the most hated types of people in society. Daniel J. Wood wrote, "Many studies have been conducted to evaluate the public's attitude toward sex offenders and most, to put it bluntly, would like to torture them before they are sentenced to death". Pedophiles and child molesters are also some of the most hated types of people in society. Pedophilia is one of the most stigmatized disorders. One study reported high levels of anger, fear and social rejection towards pedophiles who have not committed a crime. Society's attitude towards child sexual abuse is extremely negative, with some surveys ranking child sexual abuse as morally worse than murder.
1999–present: Mass shootings
After the Columbine High School shooting happened on April 20, 1999, people began to become very worried about school shootings. In a survey from April 2000, 63% of Americans with children in grades K–12 believed it was very likely or somewhat likely for a shooting similar to the Columbine massacre to happen in their community. 70% of parents in an April 2000 survey said they were either somewhat more concerned or much more concerned about school violence specifically as a result of the Columbine massacre. A survey in August 2019 revealed that 48% of Americans worry about being a victim of a mass shooting or their relative being a victim of a mass shooting. Worrying about this was most common among women (58%), adults ages 18–34 (54%), democrats (and democrat-leaning independents) (64%), and non-gun owners (58%). A survey in September 2019 revealed that 61% of Americans are somewhat or very worried about a mass shooting happening in their community. According to a Pew Research survey from March and April 2018, 57% of teens in the United States are either somewhat or very worried about a school shooting happening at their school. In the surveys by Pew Research in March and April 2018, 63% of parents with a teenage son or daughter said they are either somewhat or very worried about a shooting happening at their son or daughter's school. Studies show that the media reporting constantly on mass shootings inspires more mass shootings to happen, creating copycats, with many mass shooters attempting to emulate previous mass shooters.
2001–present: Terrorism and Islamic extremism
After the September 11 attacks in 2001, a widespread fear of terrorism has proliferated in the United States. The United States began the War on Terror, which included a war in Afghanistan and a war in Iraq. Following the September 11 attacks, there was a dramatic increase in hate crimes against Muslims and Arabs in the United States, with rates peaking in 2001 and later surpassed in 2016. Islamophobia became an issue for Muslims in the United States after the September 11 attacks and Islamophobia continued when the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) became an issue in the 2010s. According to data from 2010, 48% of Muslims said they experienced discrimination for their religion in the past year.
2000–present: human trafficking
Many critics of contemporary anti-prostitution activism argue that much of the current concern about human trafficking and its more general conflation with prostitution and other forms of sex work have hallmarks of moral panic. They further argue that this moral panic shares much in common with the 'white slavery' panic of a century earlier that prompted passage of the 1910 Mann Act.
In the mid-1990s, jenkem was reported to be a popular street drug among Zambian street children manufactured from fermented human waste. In November 2007, there was a moral panic in the United States after widespread reports of jenkem becoming a popular recreational drug in middle and high schools across the country, though the true extent of the practice has since been called into question. Several sources reported that the increase in American media coverage was based on a hoax and on faulty Internet research.
It has been observed that reliable data and relevant research are generally lacking about chemsex (the consumption of drugs by gay men to facilitate sexual activity) and this situation is generating a climate of moral panic. In a 2015 article published by The Guardian, it has been argued that an exaggerated reporting might give the public a distorted impression of the magnitude of this phenomenon – and that can only increase the level of collective anxiety.
2018–present: Momo Challenge
In mid-2018, reports began emerging of a supposed "suicide challenge" dubbed the Momo Challenge, where people would be threatened into carrying out dangerous or even life threatening tasks by users with avatars depicting a frightening face – in reality, an image of a sculpture produced by a Japanese artist in 2016 – then being pressured to do these tasks with images of gore and violence if they did not obey. While reports of the challenge directly resulting in injury or suicide are unsubstantiated, media outlets in several countries began perpetuating rumours that children had injured themselves or even committed suicide following the challenge, although most evidence has revealed that no such incidents have taken place.
Paul Joosse has argued that while classic moral panic theory styled itself as being part of the 'sceptical revolution' that sought to critique structural functionalism, it is actually very similar to Durkheim's depiction of how the collective conscience is strengthened through its reactions to deviance (in Cohen's case, for example, 'right-thinkers' use folk devils to strengthen societal orthodoxies). In his analysis of Donald Trump's 2016 electoral victory, Joosse reimagined moral panic in Weberian terms, showing how charismatic moral entrepreneurs can at once deride folk devils in the traditional sense while avoiding the conservative moral recapitulation that classic moral panic theory predicts. Another criticism is that of disproportionality: there is no way to measure what a proportionate reaction should be to a specific action.:xxvi–xxxi
Writing in 1995 about the moral panic that arose in the UK after a series of murders by juveniles, chiefly that of two-year-old James Bulger by two ten-year-old boys but also including that of 70-year-old Edna Phillips by two 17-year-old girls, the sociologist Colin Hay pointed out that the folk devil was ambiguous in such cases; the child perpetrators would normally be thought of as innocent.
In "Rethinking 'moral panic' for multi-mediated social worlds", Angela McRobbie and Sarah Thornton argued "that it is now time that every stage in the process of constructing a moral panic, as well as the social relations which support it, should be revised." Their argument is that mass media has changed since the concept of moral panic emerged so "that 'folk devils' are less marginalized than they once were", and that 'folk devils' are not only castigated by mass media but supported and defended by it as well. They also suggest that the "points of social control" that moral panics used to rest on "have undergone some degree of shift, if not transformation."
The British criminologist Yvonne Jewkes has also raised issue with the term 'morality', how it is accepted unproblematically in the concept of 'moral panic' and how most research into moral panics fails to approach the term critically but instead accepts it at face value. Jewkes goes on to argue that the thesis and the way it has been used fails to distinguish between crimes that quite rightly offend human morality, and thus elicit a justifiable reaction, and those that demonise minorities. The public are not sufficiently gullible to keep accepting the latter and consequently allow themselves to be manipulated by the media and the government.
Another British criminologist, Steve Hall, goes a step further to suggest that the term 'moral panic' is a fundamental category error. Hall argues that although some crimes are sensationalized by the media, in the general structure of the crime/control narrative the ability of the existing state and criminal justice system to protect the public is also overstated. Public concern is whipped up only for the purpose of being soothed, which produces not panic but the opposite, comfort and complacency.
Echoing another point Hall makes, the sociologists Thompson and Williams argue that the concept of 'moral panic' is not a rational response to the phenomenon of social reaction, but itself a product of the irrational middle-class fear of the imagined working-class 'mob'. Using as an example a peaceful and lawful protest staged by local mothers against the re-housing of sex-offenders on their estate, Thompson and Williams show how the sensationalist demonization of the protesters by moral panic theorists and the liberal press was just as irrational as the demonization of the sex offenders by the protesters and the tabloid press.
Many sociologists and criminologists (Ungar, Hier, Rohloff) have revised Cohen's original framework. The revisions are compatible with the way in which Cohen theorizes panics in the third Introduction to Folk Devils and Moral Panics.
The term was used in 1830, in a way that completely differs from its modern social science application, by a religious magazine regarding a sermon.:250 The phrase was used again in 1831, with an intent that is possibly closer to its modern use.
- "Panics and Mass Hysteria". FormsOfCollectiveBehavior. Retrieved 10 November 2015.
- see also: Jones, M, and E. Jones. (1999). Mass Media. London: Macmillan Press
- Scott, John, ed. (2014), "M: Moral panic", A dictionary of sociology, Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, p. 492, ISBN 9780199683581 Book preview.
- Cohen, Stanley (1973). Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. Paladin. doi:10.4324/9780203828250. ISBN 9781138834743.
- Hesselink-Louw, Anne; Olivier, Karen (2001). "A criminological analysis of crimes against disabled children: the adult male sexual offender". CARSA. 2 (2): 15–20.
- Lancaster, Roger (2011). Sex Panic and the Punitive State. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 4, 33–34, 76–79. ISBN 9780520262065.
- Extein, Andrew (25 October 2013). "Fear the Bogeyman: Sex Offender Panic on Halloween". Huffington Post. Retrieved 26 November 2014.
- Goode, Erich; Ben-Yehuda, Nachman (2009) . Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. pp. 57–65. ISBN 9781405189347.
- Deflem, Mathieu. 2019. "Popular Culture and Social Control: The Moral Panic on Music Labeling." American Journal of Criminal Justice, Vol. 44 (First published online July 24, 2019).
Rodwell, Grant (2017). Moral Panics and School Educational Policy. Routledge Research in Education Policy and Politics. London: Taylor & Francis. p. 188. ISBN 9781351627818. Retrieved 29 March 2019.
As with the “reds under the beds” moral panics of the post-World War II decades, moral panics have often been manufactured for political purposes [...].
Brysk, Alison; Meade, Everard; Shafir, Gershon (2013). "1: Introduction: Constructing national and global insecurity". In Shafir, Gershon; Meade, Everard; Aceves, William J. (eds.). Lessons and Legacies of the War On Terror: From moral panic to permanent war. Routledge Critical Terrorism Studies. London: Routledge. p. 1. ISBN 9781136188749. Retrieved 29 March 2019.
The contributors examine the social, cultural, and political drivers of the war on terror through the framework of a 'political moral panic.'
- McLuhan, Marshall (1994). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262631594
- Hayes, Hennessey; Prenzler, Tim (2012). Introduction to Crime and Criminology. Frenchs Forest, New South Wales: Pearson Australia. ISBN 9781442545243.
- Thompson, Kenneth (2006) . "The History and Meaning of the Concept". In Critcher, Chas (ed.). Critical Readings: Moral Panics and the Media. Maidenhead England New York: Open University Press. pp. 60–66. ISBN 9780335218073.
- Thompson, Kenneth (1998). Moral Panics. London & New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415119771.
- Young, Jock (1971), "The role of the police as amplifiers of deviance", in Cohen, Stanley (ed.), Images of Deviance, Harmondsworth: Penguin, ISBN 9780140212938; Young, Jock (1971). The Drugtakers: The Social Meaning of Drug Use. London: MacGibbon and Kee. ISBN 9780261632400.
- Hall, Stuart; et al. (2013) . Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 9781137007186.
- Killingbeck, Donna (2001). "The role of television news in the construction of school violence as a 'moral panic'". Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture. 8 (3): 186–202.
- Radford, Benjamin (27 February 2019). "The 'Momo Challenge' and the 'Blue Whale Game': Online Suicide Game Conspiracies". Skeptical Inquirer. Archived from the original on 28 February 2019. Retrieved 28 February 2019.
- Halliday, Stephen (22 December 2001). "Death and miasma in Victorian London: an obstinate belief". BMJ: British Medical Journal. 323 (7327): 1469–1471. doi:10.1136/bmj.323.7327.1469. ISSN 0959-8138. PMC 1121911. PMID 11751359.
- Pollack, Jack H., The Toy That Kills, 77 Women's Home Companion Magazine 38, November 1950
- Dick, Steven (1997), The Working Folding Knife, Stoeger Publishing Company, ISBN 978-0-88317-210-0
- Levine, Bernard R., The Switchblade Menace, OKCA Newsletter (1993): Rep. Sidney R. Yates (D) of Illinois was convinced of a sadistic connection, proclaiming that "vicious fantasies of omnipotence, idolatry...barbaric and sadistic atrocities, and monstrous violations of accepted values spring from [switchblades] ... Minus switchblade knives and the distorted feeling of power they beget—power that is swaggering, reckless, and itching to express itself in violence—our delinquent adolescents would be shorn of one of their most potent means of incitement to crime".
- Cohen, Stanley (2002). Folk devils and moral panics: the creation of the Mods and Rockers. London New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415267120.
- British Film Commission (BFC) (PDF), Film Education.
- Cohen, Stanley (2002). Folk devils and moral panics: the creation of the Mods and Rockers. London New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415267120. p. 27
- Goode, Erich; Ben-Yehuda, Nachman (2009) . Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. p. 217. ISBN 9781405189347.
- Byron, Reginald; Molidor, William; Cantu, Andrew (2018). "US Newspapers' Portrayals of Home Invasion Crime". The Howard Journal of Crime and Justice. 57(2): 250-277. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/hojo.12257
- Koichi, Hamai (October 2004). "How 'the myth of collapsing safe society' has been created in Japan: beyond the moral panic and victim industry (rising fear of crime and re-building safe society in Japan: moral panic or evidence-based crime control)". Japanese Journal of Sociological Criminology. 29 (29): 4–93. doi:10.20621/jjscrim.29.0_10.
- Klemesrud, Judy (28 October 1970). "Those Treats May Be Tricks". The New York Times. p. 56.
- Blakemore, Erin (16 October 2017). "How Americans Became Convinced Their Halloween Candy was Poisoned". History.com.
- "The Men Who Murdered Halloween". Psychology Today. Retrieved 30 December 2018.
- Byrd, Patrick (Summer 2007). "Comment: It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt: the effectiveness of proposed video-game legislation on reducing violence in children" (PDF). Houston Law Review.
- Koucurek, Carly (September 2012). "The Agony and the Exidy: A History of Video Game Violence and the Legacy of Death Race". Game Studies. 12 (1).
- Ferguson, Christopher J. (2013). "Violent video games and the Supreme Court: Lessons for the scientific community in the wake of Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association". American Psychologist. 68 (2): 57–74. doi:10.1037/a0030597. PMID 23421606.
- Ferguson, Christopher J. (2010). "Blazing angels or resident evil? Can violent video games be a force for good?". Review of General Psychology. 14 (2): 68–81. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.360.3176. doi:10.1037/a0018941.
- Ferguson, Christopher J.; Coulson, Mark; Barnett, Jane (2011). "A meta-analysis of pathological gaming prevalence and comorbidity with mental health, academic and social problems". Journal of Psychiatric Research. 45 (12): 1573–8. doi:10.1016/j.jpsychires.2011.09.005. PMID 21925683.
- "Drugs Report". Royal Society of Arts Action and Research Centre. March 2007. Retrieved 24 November 2014. Pdf.
- Jenkins, Philip (1999). Synthetic Panics: The Symbolic Politics of Designer Drugs. New York, New York: New York University Press. pp. 20 and 161–182. ISBN 9780814742440.
- Webber, Craig (2010). Psychology & Crime. Los Angeles & London: Sage. p. 67. ISBN 9781412919425.
- Quigley, Paul; Lynch, Dania M.; Little, Mark; Murray, Lindsay; Lynch, Ann-Maree; O'Halloran, Sean J. (2009). "Prospective study of 101 patients with suspected drink spiking". Emergency Medicine Australasia. 21 (3): 222–8. doi:10.1111/j.1742-6723.2009.01185.x. PMID 19527282.
- Waldron, David (2005). "Role-Playing Games and the Christian Right: Community Formation in Response to a Moral Panic". The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. 9: 3. doi:10.3138/jrpc.9.1.003.
- Jenkins, Philip (1998). Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press. pp. 207–231. ISBN 9780300109634.
- Victor, Jeffrey S. (1993). Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company. ISBN 9780812691917.
- Young, Mary (2004). The Day Care Ritual Abuse Moral Panic. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. ISBN 9780786418305.
- Gilligan, J. H., and Coxon, A. P. M. (eds.), 1985, AIDS: The Latest Moral Panic, Occasional Paper No 11, December, The School of Social Studies, University College of Swansea[page needed]
- Pemberton, Max (3 December 2012). "HIV/Aids treatment has come a long way - in the West". The Telegraph. Retrieved 14 June 2017.
- Aggleton, P., Davies, P., & Hart, G. (1992). AIDS: Rights, Risk, and Reason. London: Falmer Press. ISBN 9780750700405[page needed]
- Sowadsky, Rick (25 November 1998). "Did AIDS come from having sex with monkeys?".
- Fox, Kathryn J. (2012). "Incurable Sex Offenders, Lousy Judges & the Media: Moral Panic Sustenance in the Age of New Media". American Journal of Criminal Justice. 38: 160–181. doi:10.1007/s12103-012-9154-6.
- Wolmar, Christian (27 February 2014). "Looking back to the great British paedophile infiltration campaign of the 1970s". The Independent. Retrieved 19 September 2019.
- de Castella, Tom; Heyden, Tom (27 February 2014). "How did the pro-paedophile group PIE exist openly for 10 years?". BBC News. Retrieved 16 September 2019.
- Lowenkron, Laura (2014). "All Against Pedophilia". journals.openedition.org. Material was copied from this source, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
- Waxman, Olivia B. (10 August 2016). "Adam Walsh Murder: The Missing Child Who Changed America". Time. Retrieved 16 September 2019.
- Wood, Daniel J., "Sex offender registry acts: Deterrence or moral panic?" (2017). Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations. 766. http://commons.emich.edu/theses/766
- Borneman, John (29 June 2018). "Can Child Sex Offenders Be Rehabilitated?". Sapiens. Retrieved 16 September 2019.
- "Myths and Facts About Sex Offenders" (PDF). Center for Sex Offender Management. August 2000. Retrieved 16 September 2019.
- Jeglic, Elizabeth (13 February 2019). "Five Myths About Child Sexual Abuse". Psychology Today. Retrieved 16 September 2019.
- Kolata, Gina (1 September 1996). "The Many Myths About Sex Offenders". The New York Times. Retrieved 16 September 2019.
- "How the daycare child abuse hysteria of the 1980s became a witch hunt".
- Feige, David (7 March 2017). "Sex offender bans are based on bad science". Slate. Retrieved 16 September 2019.
- William Winslade, et al., Castrating Pedophiles Convicted of Sex Offenses against Children: New Treatment or Old Punishment, 51 SMU L. Rev. 349 (1998) https://scholar.smu.edu/smulr/vol51/iss2/4
- Smith, Jordan Michael (18 February 2018). "The Professor of Horrible Deeds". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 16 September 2019.
- Jahnke, S., Hoyer, J. (2013). "Stigma against people with pedophilia: A blind spot in stigma research?". International Journal of Sexual Health. 25 (3): 169–184. doi:10.1080/19317611.2013.795921.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
- Jahnke, S., Imhoff, R., Hoyer, J. (2015). "Stigmatization of People with Pedophilia: Two Comparative Surveys". Archives of Sexual Behavior. 44 (1): 21–34. doi:10.1007/s10508-014-0312-4. PMID 24948422.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
- Seto, Michael (2008). Pedophilia and Sexual Offending Against Children. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. p. viii.
- "Majority of Parents Think a School Shooting Could Occur in Their Community". Gallup. 6 March 2001. Retrieved 16 September 2019.
- "Nearly Half in U.S. Fear Being the Victim of a Mass Shooting". Gallup. 10 September 2019. Retrieved 16 September 2019.
- "Six in 10 Fear a Mass Shooting; Most Think Gun Laws Can Help" (PDF). Langerresearch.com. September 2019.
- Graf, Nikki (18 April 2018). "Majority of teens worry about school shootings, and so do most parents". Pew Research Center. Retrieved 16 September 2019.
- "Does Media Coverage Inspire Copy Cat Mass Shootings?". National Center for Health Research. Retrieved 16 September 2019.
- Carey, Benedict (5 August 2019). "What Experts Know About People Who Commit Mass Shootings". The New York Times. Retrieved 16 September 2019.
- Kishi, Katayoun (15 November 2017). "Assaults against Muslims in U.S. surpass 2001 level". Pew Research Center. Retrieved 16 September 2019.
- "Islamophobia: Understanding Anti-Muslim Sentiment in the West". Gallup. Retrieved 16 September 2019.
- Doezema, Jo (1999). "Loose women or lost women? The re-emergence of the myth of white slavery in contemporary discourses of trafficking in women". Gender Issues. 18 (1): 23–50. doi:10.1007/s12147-999-0021-9. PMID 12296110.
- Weitzer, R. (2007). "The Social Construction of Sex Trafficking: Ideology and Institutionalization of a Moral Crusade". Politics & Society. 35 (3): 447–75. doi:10.1177/0032329207304319.
- Cunneen, Chris; Salter, Michael (2009). "Women's bodies, moral panic and the world game: Sex trafficking, the 2006 Football World Cup and beyond". Proceedings of the Second Australia and New Zealand Critical Criminology Conference. pp. 222–42. doi:10.2139/ssrn.1333994. ISBN 978-0-646-50737-8.
- Milivojevic, Sanja; Pickering, Sharon (2008). "Football and sex: The 2006 FIFA World Cup and sex trafficking". Temida. 11 (2): 21–47. doi:10.2298/TEM0802021M.
- Davies, Nick (20 October 2009). "Prostitution and trafficking – the anatomy of a moral panic". The Guardian. Retrieved 29 November 2009.
- Fuller, Alexandra (2005). The effects can be super dramatic including seizures, vomiting, and hallucinations We just want enough. National Geographic, Volume 208, Issues 1-3, p. 119
- Collier County Sheriff's Office (26 September 2007). Information Bulletin: New Drug - JENKEM. via The Smoking Gun
- Pietras, Jamie (9 November 2007). "Smoke this shit". Salon.com. Retrieved 9 November 2007.
- Emery, David (6 November 2007). "Jenkem — Drug Warning". urbanlegends.about.com. About.com. Retrieved 7 November 2007.
- "PSA tackles PNP: TV ad warns against crystal meth usage in the gay male community". metroweekly.com. 21 September 2007. Archived from the original on 21 September 2007. Retrieved 11 December 2015.CS1 maint: unfit url (link)
- "Gay men need clear information about 'chemsex', not messages about morality". The Guardian. 10 November 2015. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 9 July 2017.
- This Morning (28 February 2019), The Momo Challenge That's Terrifying Parents | This Morning, retrieved 1 March 2019
- Joosse, Paul (2017). "Expanding Moral Panic Theory to Include the Agency of Charismatic Entrepreneurs". British Journal of Criminology. 58 (4): 993–1012. doi:10.1093/bjc/azx047.
- Hay, Colin (1995). "Mobilization Through Interpellation: James Bulger, Juvenile Crime and the Construction of a Moral Panic". Social & Legal Studies. 4 (2): 197–223. doi:10.1177/096466399500400203. Cited in Hunt, Alan (2011). "Fractious Rivals? Moral Panics and Moral Regulation". In Hier, Sean Patrick (ed.). Moral Panic and the Politics of Anxiety. London: Routledge. p. 58. ISBN 9780415555555.
- McRobbie, Angela; Thornton, Sarah L. (1995). "Rethinking 'Moral Panic' for Multi-Mediated Social Worlds". The British Journal of Sociology. 46 (4): 559. doi:10.2307/591571. JSTOR 591571.
- Jewkes, Yvonne (2011) , "Media and moral panics", in Jewkes, Yvonne (ed.), Media & Crime (2nd ed.), London & Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE, pp. 76–77, ISBN 9781848607033
- Hall, S. (2012). Theorizing Crime and Deviance: A New Perspective. London: Sage. pp. 132–139. ISBN 9781848606722.
- Thompson, W.; Williams, A. (2013). The Myth of Moral Panics: Sex, Snuff, and Satan. Routledge Advances in Criminology. London: Routledge. ISBN 9780415812665.[page needed]
- Hier, Sean P. (2011). "Tightening the focus: Moral panic, moral regulation and liberal government". The British Journal of Sociology. 62 (3): 523–41. doi:10.1111/j.1468-4446.2011.01377.x. PMID 21899526.
- "Dr. Cox on regeneration". Millennial Harbinger. 1: 546–550. 1830. OCLC 1695161. Preview. Cox asserted that regeneration of the soul should be an active process, and stated: "...if it be a fact that the soul is just as active in regeneration as in any other thing ... then, what shall we call that kind of orthodoxy that proposes to make men better by teaching them the reverse? To paralyze the soul, or to strike it through with a moral panic is not regeneration." (page 546) and "After quoting such scriptures as these, "Seek and you shall find," "Come unto me, and I will give you rest," they ask, ...is it not the natural language of these expressions that the mind is as far as possible from stagnation, or torpor, or "moral panic? (page 548)
- "Review: Regeneration and the manner of its occurrence". The Biblical Repertory and Theological Review. 2: 250–297. 1830. OCLC 8841951. Preview.
- The Journal of Health Conducted by an Association of Physicians (1831) p. 180 "Magendie, a French physician of note on his visit to Sunderland, where the Cholera was by the last accounts still raging, praises the English government for not surrounding the town with a cordon of troops, which as "a physical preventive would have been ineffectual and would have produced a moral panic far more fatal than the disease now is."
- Barron, Christie; Lacombe, Dany (2008). "Moral Panic and the Nasty Girl". Canadian Review of Sociology. 42: 51–69. doi:10.1111/j.1755-618X.2005.tb00790.x.
- Ben-Yehuda, Nachman (1986). "The Sociology of Moral Panics: Toward a New Synthesis". The Sociological Quarterly. 27 (4): 495–513. doi:10.1111/j.1533-8525.1986.tb00274.x.
- Ben-Yehuda, Nachman; Goode, Erich (2009) . Moral panics: the social construction of deviance (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 9781405189347.
- Boëthius, Ulf (1995), "Youth, the media and moral panics", in Fornäs, Johan; Bolin, Göran (eds.), Youth culture in late modernity, London Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, pp. 39–57, ISBN 9780803988996.
- Colomb, Wendy; Damphousse, Kelly (2004). "Examination of newspaper coverage of Hate Crimes: A moral panic perspective". American Journal of Criminal Justice. 28 (2): 147. doi:10.1007/BF02885869.
- Cree, Viviene E.; Clapton, Gary; Smith, Mark (2015). Revisiting moral panics. Bristol, UK Chicago, Illinois, USA: Policy Press. ISBN 9781447321859.
- Critcher, Chas (2008). "Moral Panic Analysis: Past, Present and Future". Sociology Compass. 2 (4): 1127–1144. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9020.2008.00122.x.
- Gill, Aisha K; Harrison, Karen (2015). "Child Grooming and Sexual Exploitation: Are South Asian Men the UK Media's New Folk Devils?". International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy. 4 (2). doi:10.5204/ijcjsd.v4i2.214.
- Fitzgerald, Maureen H. (2005). "Punctuated Equilibrium, Moral Panics and the Ethics Review Process". Journal of Academic Ethics. 2 (4): 315–338. doi:10.1007/s10805-005-9004-y.
- Frankfurter, David (2008). Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691136295.
- Gausel, Nicolay; Leach, Colin Wayne (2011). "Concern for self-image and social image in the management of moral failure: Rethinking shame". European Journal of Social Psychology. 41 (4): 468. doi:10.1002/ejsp.803.
- Heathcott, Joseph (2011). "Moral panic in a plural culture". CrossCurrents. 61: 39–44. doi:10.1111/j.1939-3881.2010.00159.x.
- Hier, S. P. (2002). "Conceptualizing Moral Panic through a Moral Economy of Harm". Critical Sociology. 28 (3): 311–334. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.117.1290. doi:10.1177/08969205020280030301.
- Hunt, Arnold (1997). "'Moral Panic' and Moral Language in the Media". The British Journal of Sociology. 48 (4): 629–648. doi:10.2307/591600. JSTOR 591600.
- Jasper, James M. (2001), "Moral panics", in Smelser, Neil J.; Baltes, Paul B. (eds.), International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences, Amsterdam New York: Elsevier, pp. 10029–10033, ISBN 9780080430768.
- Jenkins, Philip. Intimate Enemies: Moral Panics in Contemporary Great Britain (1992),
- Klapp, Orrin E. (1954). "Heroes, Villains and Fools, as Agents of Social Control". American Sociological Review. 19 (1): 56–62. doi:10.2307/2088173. JSTOR 2088173.
- Klocke, Brian V.; Muschert, Glenn W. (2010). "A Hybrid Model of Moral Panics: Synthesizing the Theory and Practice of Moral Panic Research". Sociology Compass. 4 (5): 295. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9020.2010.00281.x.
- Kuzma, Cindy (28 September 2005). "Rights and liberties: sex, lies, and moral panics". AlterNet. Retrieved 5 September 2008. Author affiliation: Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA)
- Lawson, Louanne (2008). "Why Moral Panic is Dangerous". Journal of Forensic Nursing. 3 (2): 57–9. doi:10.1111/j.1939-3938.2007.tb00103.x. PMID 17679267.
- McRobbie, Angela; Thornton, Sarah L. (2000) , "Rethinking 'moral panic' for multi-mediated social worlds", in McRobbie, Angela (ed.), Feminism and youth culture (2nd ed.), Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press, pp. 180–197, ISBN 9780333770320
- Monod, Sarah Wright ed. Making Sense of Moral Panics: A Framework for Research (Palgrave Studies in Risk, Crime and Society, 2017)
- Montana, Riccardo (2009). "Prosecutors and the Definition of the Crime Problem in Italy: Balancing the Impact of Moral Panics" (PDF). Criminal Law Forum. 20 (4): 471–494. doi:10.1007/s10609-009-9108-y.
- Pearce, J. M.; Charman, E. (2011). "A social psychological approach to understanding moral panic". Crime, Media, Culture. 7 (3): 293. doi:10.1177/1741659011417607.
- Rodwell, Grant (2011). "One newspaper's role in the demise of the Tasmanian Essential Learnings Curriculum: Adding new understandings to Cohen's moral panic theory in analyzing curriculum change". Journal of Educational Change. 12 (4): 441–456. doi:10.1007/s10833-011-9163-0.
- Rohloff, A.; Wright, S. (2010). "Moral Panic and Social Theory: Beyond the Heuristic". Current Sociology. 58 (3): 403. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.427.24. doi:10.1177/0011392110364039.
- Ungar, Sheldon (2001). "Moral panic versus the risk society: The implications of the changing sites of social anxiety". British Journal of Sociology. 52 (2): 271–91. doi:10.1080/00071310120044980. PMID 11440057.
- Victor, Jeffrey S. (1998). "Moral Panics and the Social Construction of Deviant Behavior: A Theory and Application to the Case of Ritual Child Abuse". Sociological Perspectives. 41 (3): 541–565. doi:10.2307/1389563. JSTOR 1389563.
- Waiton, Stuart (2008). The politics of antisocial behaviour: amoral panics. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415957052.
- Ward, Russell E (2002). "Fan violence". Aggression and Violent Behavior. 7 (5): 453–475. doi:10.1016/S1359-1789(01)00075-1.
- "Moral panic studies working paper series". College of Business, Arts and Social Sciences, Brunel University London.
- "Special issue on Moral Panic: table of contents". The British Journal of Criminology, Oxford Journals. January 2009.
- Ben-Yehuda, Nachman (2009). "Foreword: Moral Panics--36 Years on". British Journal of Criminology. 49 (1): 1–3. doi:10.1093/bjc/azn076. JSTOR 23639651.
- Young, Jock (2009). "Moral Panic: Its Origins in Resistance, Ressentiment and the Translation of Fantasy into Reality". British Journal of Criminology. 49 (1): 4–16. doi:10.1093/bjc/azn074. JSTOR 23639652. SSRN 1315137.
- Critcher, Chas (2009). "Widening the Focus: Moral Panics as Moral Regulation". British Journal of Criminology. 49 (1): 17–34. doi:10.1093/bjc/azn040. JSTOR 23639653. SSRN 1315133.
- Jenkins, Philip (2009). "Failure to Launch: Why Do Some Social Issues Fail to Detonate Moral Panics?". British Journal of Criminology. 49 (1): 35–47. doi:10.1093/bjc/azn016. JSTOR 23639654. SSRN 1315131.
- Levi, Michael (2009). "Suite Revenge?: The Shaping of Folk Devils and Moral Panics about White-Collar Crimes". British Journal of Criminology. 49 (1): 48–67. doi:10.1093/bjc/azn073. JSTOR 23639655. SSRN 1315136.
- Ajzenstadt, Mimi (2009). "Moral Panic and Neo-Liberalism: The Case of Single Mothers on Welfare in Israel". British Journal of Criminology. 49 (1): 68–87. doi:10.1093/bjc/azn067. JSTOR 23639656. SSRN 1315135.
- Weitzer, Ronald (2009). "Legalizing Prostitution: Morality Politics in Western Australia". British Journal of Criminology. 49 (1): 88–105. doi:10.1093/bjc/azn027. JSTOR 23639657. SSRN 1315132.
- Woodiwiss, Michael; Hobbs, Dick (2009). "Organized Evil and the Atlantic Alliance: Moral Panics and the Rhetoric of Organized Crime Policing in America and Britain". British Journal of Criminology. 49 (1): 106–28. doi:10.1093/bjc/azn054. JSTOR 23639658. SSRN 1315134.
- 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)
- Moral Panic Research Network, College of Business, Arts and Social Sciences, Brunel University London