Tim Burke has been blogging on moral panics in the context of oral sex, rape, and children’s television. Reading his stuff I was struck by the most famous case of Moral Panic in Chinese history, the sorcery scare of 1768, as studied by Phillip Kuhn.

The actual case was one of sorcerers perhaps cutting off the queues of Chinese men and using them to take control of their souls. Kuhn points out that it is not clear if queue cutting happened at all, and it was in any case not as widespread as the emperor feared it was. The Qianlong emperor took it seriously, however, in part because the queue was seen as a locus of self-ness and his subjects took their loss seriously. More importantly, the queue was a symbol of loyalty to the Manchu dynasty, and anything involving cutting it off smacked of sedition.

Kuhn suggests that there was another cause for the scope of the campaign, the Emperor’s desire to break out of the confines of regular bureaucratic politics. The problem of Chinese emperors being constrained by their bureaucracies is not a new concept in scholarship and was not new to the emperors, who had been struggling with this problem for a long time. As Kuhn points out, “bureaucratic monarchy” is an oxymoron. To the extent that the state is bureaucratic what room is there for a monarch? Qianlong took advantage of the sorcery crisis to force his officials out of their ordinary routines and break out of the confines of the normal bureaucratic relationship.

One significant difference between this and the panics Burke talks about is agency. The Chinese case was not created by “mass media” or “fear of social change” but by the Qianlong emperor. More significant is the way that Kuhn emphasizes the value of moral panic in breaking out of normal politics or political debate. It strikes me that many of the moral panics Burke talks about are exactly the type of things that American elites would be inclined not to worry about much, or at least not as much as other Americans might think they should. Moral Panic is democratizing. You don’t need a study from the Centers for Disease Control to tell you something is wrong with kids today, panic restores agency to “us” and our “common sense.” It really does too, since action will come of panic in a democratic or popular state. One recent local case is the dropping of a plan to build a Turkish Cultural Center here in Pittsburgh. The plan was dropped due to local fears that the place would be a nest of terrorists. An ignorant and embarrassing reaction to be sure, but one that got results. Kuhn is trying to fit moral panic as a violation of normal politics into a new, broader definition, which might work for the modern ones as well.

But the use of the phrase in the popular press and in much public discourse is not textured. Moral panics are frequently equated with “witch hunts” and “hysteria.” And since there were no witches, the subtext is often that the underlying phenomenon does not exist. See historian Philip Jenkin’s book Preists and Pedophiles for a view that minimizes, if not denies, the underlying problem.

That is also how “moral panic” has been used by many in the child sexual abuse context. The leading book on child suggestibility—which addresses questions that Tim argues (in the other thread) were not adequately addressed during the panic—makes none of the subtle distinctions that Tim does. Indeed, Ceci and Bruck use the Salem witch trials as one of their “case studies.” To assert that the witch trials are in the case category as Frank Fuster and the Country Walk babysitting service case is, I think, absurd. The effort to equate to the two deserves more attention. It has political roots and policy consequences.And it is a usage that should, I think, concern anyone with a complex definition of moral panic.

I think it would be worth asking a series of questions, then, about why “moral panic” is applied in ways that sometimes deny underlying problems that we know to exist. I often hear the argument that a panic makes it less, not more, likely that the problem will be addressed successfully. I certainly understand the logic. But politically, the fact remains that many of the people crying “moral panic” about child sexual abuse have a very specific agenda of their own. It involves eliminating mandatory child abuse reporting, making it easier to sue prosecutors, and limiting the ability of children to testify. That agenda is not, I would argue, an agenda that will improve social responses to child sexual abuse. Nor is that its real intention.

In short, I think we need to be wary of who is making moral panic claims and why. But then, I am a political scientist. I also submit that in the child sexual abuse context, those who are most concerned about “panic” are not those who are most concerned about the optimal way to protect children in our society. Rather, they are most concerned about how best to protect potential defendants. That is an important issue, but it should be seen for what it is. Moreover, as indicated in the other thread, I think there is substantial evidence that we have had a moral panic about false convictions for child sexual abuse—a moral panic that, curiously, has not been recognized by those otherwise well-versed in moral panics.

On the other hand, I did hear that there were girls in my high school who would give a blowjob to any boy on the ice hockey team who got a hat trick. So take what I say with a grain of salt.

I’m sure we can agree that Judy Blume’s books would have been unpublishable by a major trade house even a decade earlier than their arrival; I think we can also agree that The Rainbow Party would have been similarly unpublishable a decade ago. (Can’t we?) Flanagan offers an explanation of this phenomenon, a familiar moral-decline sort of story. But the familiarity of the narrative shape is no indication of its rightness or wrongness. Before you dismiss the narrative as a characteristic product of moral panic I think you need at least to offer a sketch of an alternative narrative that would account for the sociological change without recourse to Flanagan’s assumptions. Otherwise you can stigmatize any strong critique — for instance, of Abu Ghraib, or Guantanomo — as a product of moral panic just because it is strong. Yet obviously there are political or social events which mandate an vigorous response, such that the providing of such a response is not a sign of panic but rather of appropriate moral awareness.

Flanagan’s essential argument is this: if we consider it normal for young women to service young men without expecting pleasure or intimacy in return, that’s an indication of moral apathy or obliviousness — and the one who says so is not panicking but being simply responsible. As I said earlier, I think that’s a plausible argument — not irrefutable, but plausible.