Moral panic

‘Moral panic’ is a sociological concept that seeks to explain a particular type of overreaction to a perceived social problem. Developed in the turbulent political and 
intellectual context of the late 1960s, its principal aim was to expose the processes 
involved in creating concern about a social problem; concern that bore little relationship 
to the reality of the problem, but nevertheless provided the basis for a shift in social or 
legal codes. The concept has since enjoyed a great deal of analytical purchase, 
circumscribing it to be one of the few sociological ideas that have withstood the test of 
time (see Innes, 2005). However, much of its application has relied upon ritually 
reproducing the ‘stages’ implied in the now canonized opening paragraph of Stanley 
Cohen’s (1972) seminal study, Folk Devils and Moral Panics(Critcher, 2006: 10; see 
also Young, 2009).

This simple headline shows the escalation of fear or misunderstanding of illegal immigrants. The word ‘stop’ is a call to action and implies that something needs to be done. ‘Boat people’ is the label which implies the threat of illegal immigration and it ran in a national newspaper, purportedly endorsed by the PM and used to bring to the attention of the voting public an issue which is considered to be of grave concern. In reality, a study conducted by UQ research group says there were only 1033 boat people out of 48,700 illegal immigrants in Australia.