No need to Panic
When an issue is giving a prominent place in the public debate and becomes the subject of concern of an important portion of the population, the first reaction would be to think that this issue is really problematic and really represents a danger or potential danger. This way of thinking would be designated as naïve by E. Goode and N. Ben – Yehua in Moral Panics : Culture, politics and Social construction ; indeed according to them a problem that is in everyone’s minds could be nothing more than a “social panics”, that means overrated.
Giving in details, a moral panics is a deep feeling of fear among the population towards a problem that is either not that grave or which was not seen as problematic before. Besides disproportionality, a moral panics is also short living but can leave a legacy that is not. One of the polemic example would be terrorism according to J. S. Victor in Why the terrorism scare is a moral panic, for the author terrorism is an exaggerated fear that allows the building of a repressive legal legacy such as the Patriot Act. But how moral panics happen ?
To clarify, moral panics are not entirely artificial, they have some latent fears for basis which are exploiting by some groups or some leaders in order to gain material and or symbolical advantages. The authors defined 6 theoretical responsibilities, but only 2 are really relevant and are called “the grassroots model” and “the interest group model”. In both cases, you need a leader to give a direction and to point some targets ; in the grassroots model, latents fears brutally explode because of rumors and/or distrust of politics and medias which are “hiding something” ; in the “interest group model”, moral panics are used on purpose to insure that some rules are respected or to remind that some behaviors are not tolerated.
As we can see, an issue suddenly worrying a large part of the population are not always linked with true facts, on the contrary it could be totally irrational and used in much more machiavellian purposes. For example, designating immigrants from Mexico as a threat to receive political gain as it is described in The New politics of immigration” by K. Calavita.
