Professor Viviene Cree, Dr Gary Clapton and Dr Mark Smith, social workers and social work academics at Edinburgh University, have written a persuasive academic article on moral panic and Operation Yewtree. It is worth reading in full. It would be difficult to improve on the cogency of their argument, so we simply present excerpts here in the hope that you will go and read it for yourself. (Emphases and edits are ours.)

“We live in a world that is said to be full of risk, danger and threat. Every day, a new social issue emerges to assail our sensibilities, often accompanied by the cry: What’s to be done? Who’s to blame?…

…On each occasion, there is an assumption that things are getting worse: that our society, communities and very lives are becoming more risky and more dangerous… claims of historical sexual and physical abuse have [recently] taken centre-stage.

This article explores the moral panic focused on the (now dead) media celebrity, Jimmy Savile…

In his 1972 book, Folk Devils and Moral Panics [1], Stan Cohen… observed the following process in action:

• A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests.
• Its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media.
• The moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions.
• Ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to.
• The condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible.

…Moral panics are not, he claimed, total fabrications; there is always something at the heart of a panic that is real and concerning. This does not, however, mean that there are no fabrications within a moral panic…

…In their 1994 analysis, Goode and Ben Yehuda [2] asserted that moral panics are always disproportionate, and evidence may be fabricated in support of any cause celebre…

…it is important to highlight that the Yewtree report, Giving Victims a Voice, is full of scare-mongering, exaggeration and elision, as allegations are presented as ‘facts’ and accusations become ‘offences’, held to be incontrovertibly true…

…Moral aspects are also to the fore. Through the telling and retelling of the Savile story, we are reminded that children are innocents who must be protected from the adult world of sex; that women are passive, sexually submissive creatures who are also in need of protection; and that men are predatory, powerful and not to be trusted…

…This is not to excuse sexual abuse or to minimise the harm it may cause. Nor is it to suggest that there is no need for society to protect the vulnerable or champion those with few resources, economic, social and cultural. Rather it is to argue that scares such as the one surrounding Jimmy Savile are essentially conservative: they uphold a particular (overwhelmingly negative) view of human nature and they have the effect, both intended and unintended, of increasing fear and anxiety…

…Moral panics also draw attention away from the social and structural dimensions of problems in society; it can be no accident that the Jimmy Savile affair emerged at a time of acute social anxiety, with high levels of concern being expressed about public trust, and in particular, about the behaviour of politicians, bankers and the press. By focusing on Savile, what [are] we not looking at?…

…Moral panics encourage practice that is risk-averse and that anticipates the worst in others, especially men…”

Some brief comments only.

It is likely that the effect the writers mention of increasing public fear and anxiety are both intentional and unintentional. Politicians and media editors spot an incoming wave of public moral panic and ride it, shouting as they crest it just how big and dangerous the wave is. Red tops get sold by this means. Worse, politicians get to inculcate a sense of growing public dis-ease which they can then harness more globally. A nexus of repressive measures is built up and worked upon: the pressing need for surveillance of the public by CCTV and GCHQ, and the wholly disproportionate threat of prosecution for late-teenage sexting are obvious examples.

There is a vicious spiral going on.

At a time of relative austerity and general uncertainty, people get anxious about ‘the way the world is going’. They – we – find a bandwagon to climb on. It doesn’t really matter what it is, as long as outrage can be expressed. Because to express outrage puts the blame on others and discharges the negative emotions which have built up.

Politicians spot this trend and decide to respond to it, pumping it up as they go along. After all, they can use it for other purposes of control too.

And then it either dissipates or it doesn’t. Either way, there will be another bandwagon rolling past soon.

Meanwhile, people, sometimes innocent people, get hurt as they fall under the wheels.