Influences behind Scares

1
Influences behind Scares

• The United States has a temperance culture.
• Protestantism and industrial capitalism demand a
  culture of self-control.
• American culture uses a vocabulary of
  attribution to justify creating scares

2
Primary forces behind Scares

• The medical profession, legislators,
  pharmaceutical professions, government
  departments, scientists, and moral or religious
  leaders often have unrelated reasons for
  criminalizing drugs.
• These components include economic, control,
  moralistic, and conformity reasons

3
Seven Ingredients of a Drug scare

• 1) A kernel of truth. Evidence that there was
  sufficient ingestion of the drug to warrant
  labeling it a problem.
• 2) Media Magnification. (routinization of
  caricature).
• 3) Politico-moral Entrepreneurs
• 4) Professional Interest Groups - Ownership of
  the drug problem, the ability to create and
  influence the publics definition of the problem.

4
7 ingredients cont.

• 5)  Historical context of Conflict that social
  events could be construed as being related, at
  least in part, to the drug use as a threat.
• 6)  Linking a Form of Drug Use to a Dangerous
  Class. the drugs are usually linked to a group
  of individuals who are already seen as a threat.
• 7) Scapegoating a drug for a wide array of
  Public problems.

5
The Discovery of Child Abuse

• An article by Stephen J. Pfohl shows how social
  and professional politics led to the
  identification of abused children.
• He explains how physicians, while engaged in a
  collective mobility project, used the issue of
  child abuse to enhance their professional esteem.
• The opening of this article also discusses why
  the social problem of child beating was not
  considered deviant until the physicians defined
  it as such.

6
Child Abuse cont.

• The conclusion of Pfohl's article is this often
  people only consider something deviant when those
  with the power to define it as deviant have a
  stake in doing so.
• One implication of Pfohl's article is that other
  things that hurt people may not be considered
  deviant because power brokers have not
  intervened.
• What is true of child abuse may be true of other
  things.

7
Moral Panic

• Can be a function of a social control movement
• Social status may be a driving force
• Example
• 1940s 50s cigarettes were socially accepted.
• By the 70s, more than 90 of population thought
  link between cancer and smoking existed
• This study looked at whether tobacco was
  associated with lower status

8
Cultural impacts of Status politics

• Polarized symbolic-moral universes smoking vs.
  non-smoking that clash (pluralistic cultures)
• Assimilative reform educate, lift the lower
  status group to the reformers higher plane
• Coercive reform the deviants deny the moral and
  status superiority of the reformers universe,
  therefore needs to be controlled through law and
  force.
• Would cigarette smoking be defined as deviant if
  there were a positive correlation between smoking
  and socioeconomic status?

9
Characteristics of a moral panic

• Widespread
• Over-reactive
• Volatile
• Hostile
• Largely irrational

10
Timing of a moral panic

• In the case of daycares, heavy metal music,
  fantasy role playing games, tarot cards, ouija
  boards, satanic cults filming child pornography,
  child sex rings, kidnappings of blond/blue kids
  from malls made it ripe
• The spread of the moral panic as in this case can
  use emotional fuel, horror, and folkdevils to
  point the finger at

11
The Backlash

• In this case, when everything died down, the
  crusaders were thought to be overzealous,
  leading, and trying to prove their point at any
  cost, therefore creating a backlash against that
  type of social worker or mental health worker.