Moral panic

Moral panic refers to a phenomenon in which mainstream society experiences large amounts of fear and uncertainty fuelled by the perception that a particular moral institution (such as childhood innocence) or group of people (such as children or adolescents) are under threat. The perceived threat often comes in the form of a socially excluded, alien group of people (pedophiles or sex offenders) and the ideologies and real life events attributed to them. Necessary to the incitement of moral panic is the persistant exchange of misinformation, by the media for example.

The concept is often used in the British sociological sense to refer to shorter-term events, such as groups of hooligans or mods supposedly inciting flash panics in society, and the resulting authoritarian crackdowns. This (while it was the original usage, by Stanley Cohen), is a highly questionable phenomenon, since it usually relies on moral enterprise and media/institutional involvement to manufacture consent to "moral panics". Academics such as Bill Thompson describe the British theory of Moral Panic as a bourgeoise construct of middle-class sociologists who themselves partake in this manufacturing of panic and benefit from it.

Timeline

The beginnings of (anti)sexual morality

Controls on sexuality have been used to varying degrees in traditional cultures, but what we now know as Christian sexual morality goes back a lot further than the present era of repeated moral panics, possibly even before the founding of the religion, as revealed in scripture. Fornication (sex outside of marriage) and other sinful/wasteful/impure indulgences were the target, rather than intergenerational encounters per se.

• Some forms of early ascetic Gnosticism held all matter to be evil, and that unnecessary gratifications of the physical senses were to be avoided. Married couples were encouraged to be chaste. The Skoptsys were a radical sect of the Russian Orthodox Church that practiced castration and amputation of sexual organs. They believed that Christ had been castrated during his crucifixion, and it was this castration that brought about salvation.

• Augustine of Hippo is often held up as an early example of a Puritanical Theologian:

Sex has always been a thorny problem for Christianity. Since the religion’s early stages, its doctrines have included an antisensual strain—a sense that sexual love is at best a necessary evil [...] The greatest early champion of that puritanical, antisexual approach was St. Augustine, a monk who lived in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. As Pagels shows, his personal history was extremely important in shaping beliefs that eventually dominated the church’s policies in critical areas. As a young man, Augustine had freely indulged in the sexual licentiousness common during the declining years of the Roman Empire. By his own admission, he was ruled by an insatiable lust. Then, when he converted to Christianity, he became obsessed with triumphing over the temptations of the flesh. He valued celibacy more than married life and emphasized the essential depravity of the human race. Adam and Eve’s disobedience, Augustine argued, tainted their descendants forever after with what he called “original sin.”

• There are reports of men and boys being burned at the stake by the Church for mutually consented sexual activity in the middle ages - a period spanning from 500 AD to roughly 1500. The prohibition appears to have been on homosexuality and sodomitical activity in general.

• In the following Renaissance era, ages of consent were soon established - usually 10-12 for girls.

• In 1762, Emile, or On Education by Jean-Jacques Rousseau is published. The popular idea of childhood innocence pioneered by such romanticists begins to gain traction. The idea of insanity is slowly bought into the realm of medicine during the enlightenment, and sexual deviance is similarly medicalized. Psychiatry (as a medical science) emerges in the 1800s, along with pathologization of masturbation.

The "panic era" from 1880, onwards

Charting the cycles of panic

Since the Victorian era, mass media/politics, industrialization, globalization and the artificial extension of childhood has allowed for a series of moral panics concerning the erotic potential of children and minors. We are at the start of a fourth panic, which relates to normalization of sexual and romantic attractions towards minors. We insert titles to identify the rough start and end of different waves of moral panic in the graphic on the right.

Identification (Child Pro) Panic

• 1874 - New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children is founded by Quakers and Moral Crusaders - the world’s first organization devoted entirely to child protection. Eleven years later, W. T. Stead's 1885 exposé of child prostitution in London, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” boosted the circulation of the Pall Mall Gazette ten times. Child protection is framed as a women's issue, and concerned feminists seize upon the panic.

Pathologization (Molester) Panic

• 1930s-50s - De Orio notes "In the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, lawmakers enacted new “sexual psychopath” and other sex offender laws in an effort to combat sex crimes of all kinds but especially ones involving children. In practice, those laws gave the police the discretion to enforce them in a discriminatory and disproportionate way against gay men, and furthermore the stereotype of the gay child molester underpinned and served to justify the over-criminalization of even homosexual conduct involving only consenting adults."

• 1950s - According to De orio, the state conflated the category of the male homosexual with the category of the child molester; in the eyes of the state, all homosexuals were potential child molesters, and vice-versa. The notion of the “pedophile,” as distinct from the “homosexual,” was not prevalent at this time. He adds that police departments cracked down increasingly on men who were involved in sexual activity with teenage boys, some of whom were actually straight hustlers whom the state criminalized as “juvenile delinquents.”

• Late 1960s - For a long time, the mob had run extortion schemes against prominent pederasts and gays, however, the 60s were a time of relative latency in the war against sex offenders. Gay liberation and homophile activists were joined by sexual freedom activists, and progress began to be made with law reforms.

Problematization (CSA) Panic

• April 1971 – Florence Rush presents her ground-breaking: “The Sexual Abuse of Children: A Feminist Point of View” about childhood sexual abuse and incest, at the New York Radical Feminists Rape Conference. Focus is on sexual violence against female children within the family, seen as a pervasive, if not universal factor in socializing females to accept subservient & submissive role in society. Sexual violence is reframed as an inherently political, women’s issue.

• 1973 – Revelations that dozens of teenage boys had been tortured, raped, murdered and secretly buried by serial killer Dean Corll. Rumors that the boys had been involved in prostitution and/or pornography are encouraged by Police leadership, blaming victim “lifestyle” for the tragedy to offset parent’s revelations that police had refused to investigate the disappearance of the early victims. No verification of lifestyle claims from any family members or friends of the deceased.

• Boy prostitution and pornography operations subsequently uncovered in California, the DOM-LYRIC case, and in Houston, the Roy Ames case, 1973-75, but no link to Corll.

• 1975 – Dr Judianne Densen-Gerber publishes “Incest as a causative factor in anti-social behavior: An exploratory study” in Contemporary Drug Problems. Establishes incest of female children as a public health issue linked to drug addiction and prostitution.

• Family members of children living in Christian Brothers run orphanage in Newfoundland Canada, supported by a concerned community employee, attempt to reveal the long history of physical and sexual abuse of the boys by the staff, which is ongoing. The whistle is blown over local radio, inciting police investigation but is quashed by collusion of prominent Catholics. Efforts continue however, over the next decade.

• 1974–76 – Pederast network shut down by police investigation and successful prosecution of several principle conspirators, revealed in three linked cases: the New Orleans Boy Scout troop (Halvorsen), the Tennessee Boy’s Farm (Vermylie) and Brother Paul’s Christian Mission – Michigan (Gerald Richards). Dozens of boys aged 10-19 years linked with multiple men in prostitution and pornography operations over the previous 5 years. Perpetrators ran charities providing services to “wayward” or delinquent boys previously identified as juvenile prostitutes, including short and long term crisis housing. Images of the victims published as pornography.

• 1977 - Anita Bryant launches her divisive Save Our Children campaign, splitting the gay movement against the pederasts. While some radical voices argued for age inclusivity, the dominant faction saw that as a recipe for disaster and (foreshadowing the gay marriage movement) tried to minimize the differences between gay culture and heteronormativity, assimilating itself first to the latter's stigmatization of youth sexuality as deviant and harmful and later to its stigmatization of all sex outside of marriage (or, at least, of a monogamous relationship). "Consenting Adults" became the slogan for gay assimilationism.

• 1978 - Bryant's campaign falters as an attempt to ban gay teachers is defeated in California. De Orio notes "In response to the decreasing popularity of “the homosexual” as a demonic figure, law enforcement officials such as the LAPD detective Lloyd Martin refocused their energies on demonizing the “pedophile.” By focusing less on homosexuality per se and more on other, less sympathetic deviant subjects, who remained outside the boundaries of identity politics, conservatives managed to pursue a law-and-order agenda with respect to sex crimes unhindered by resistance from gay and progressive activists."

• 1977–79 – Densen-Gerber and Det. Lloyd Martin (LAPD) aggressively lobby state and federal legislators for new laws effectively banning and criminalizing possession or sale of child pornography. Heavy print media coverage of these issues, multiple hearings with testimony from various social sciences experts, incarcerated perpetrators, models. Victimization of children in state or private custody of various kinds is a secondary focus.

• 1978 – John Wayne Gacy confessed to police that since 1972, he had sexually assaulted, tortured and murdered approximately 25 to 30 teenage male, whom he falsely claimed were all runaways or male prostitutes, burying many of them in a crawlspace under his home.

• 1979 – Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy publishes “The Public School Phenomenon” in the UK, documenting a long history & culture of relationships between older and younger students, as well as violence perpetrated on residents by other residents and staff.

• 1980 – Lawrence Pazder publishes Michelle Remembers, inventing the terminology and concepts of Satanic Ritual Abuse/Ritual Abuse/Ritualized Abuse. Pazder attempts to have Michelle Smith declared a living saint by the Vatican.

• 1982-86 - Johnny Gosch and a succession of other Des Moines teenage boys go missing over the following years. Speculation is rife as to organized "pedophile" conspiracy.

• 1983 – The first adult women claiming to be survivors of SRA are being evaluated and studied by psychiatric staff in California. Allegations are of long term sadistic abuse by satanic family cult members, with supernatural elements and frequent diagnosis of the previously rare Multiple Personality Disorder.

• 1985 – Media coverage of CSA issues is entirely focused on women’s allegations of satanic cult abuse and mind control in childhood, or large-scale daycare abuse accusation cases with allegations by some parents that children have revealed SRA victimization. Child protection resources are also dominated by cases of this nature, as are police child sex crime investigation resources, and psychiatric treatment/ therapy services for women and child sexual abuse victims. This social situation persists throughout the decade.

• 2007-2016 - This was a period of relative calm, representing a slight relief in the news cycle as the problematization that commenced in the mid-70s belatedly burned out. Attention shifted to institutional forms of abuse, celebrity abuse scandals and generalized trends such as human trafficking, right-wing conspiracy theories and the #MeToo movement.

Normalization (MAP) Panic

• 2016-2022 - Pedophile panic re-emerges in the conspiracy-fuelled culture wars of the Trump era. In 2018, a new wave of social media hysteria focusing on the "normalization of pedophilia" begins. Various controversies in academia follow, FOX News and the right wing media/influencers start identifying liberal trends in education and trans-inclusivity, accusing Disney among others of "grooming" children for degeneracy. 2021 and 2022 social media controversies included Allyn Walker, Stephen Kershnar, USA Today, Karl Andersson and Miranda Galbreath.

Quotes on moral panic

Don Pierce, a Sex offender GPS tracking expert on the possibility of surgically implanted GPS for sex offenders:

"One of the things we want to make sure that we don’t do is something that feels good or looks good or causes the public to relax."

Reading list

• Moral Panic: Changing Concepts of the Child Molester in Modern America - 1998 treatment by historian, Philip Jenkins.
• Punishing Queer Sexuality in the Age of LGBT Rights - Scott De Orio's 2017 dissertation.