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WE live in a world that is increasingly characterised as full of risk, danger and threat.

Every day, a new social anxiety emerges – from hoodies and welfare scroungers to rock’n’roll and bird flu.

In recent weeks, attention has shifted to Jimmy Savile, child sexual abuse and paedophile rings.

Victims have emerged, alleged perpetrators have been named and shamed and no doubt more revelations will follow.

The furore around Savile would suggest that we are slap-bang in the middle of a moral panic around children and abuse.

This isn’t a new one – it tends to rumble along before flaring up in slightly different forms every now and again.

Those with a longer memory will recall panics over latch-key children and Satanic abuse. More recently, concern has shifted to childhood obesity and trafficked children.

However, moral panics exaggerate. They exaggerate the issue, they exaggerate the numbers involved and they exaggerate the extent and nature of the problem.

The exaggeration and focus on the spectacular has serious repercussions.

We feel paralysed about how to respond. We do not know what to do and who to trust.

We also feel afraid to express an alternative view – afraid that we will be criticised for not taking seriously what is seemingly fact and self-evident.

We are afraid that we could become the next people to be drawn into the building storm – accused of not caring about children and condoning abuse, or even accused of being abusers ourselves.

Those responsible for reporting or responding to the issues wittingly or unwittingly fuel the moral panic.

Serious abuse can be conflated with less serious abuse and, by focusing on the spectacular and exaggerated, we take our eye off the ball in terms of the real and ongoing nature of abuse and neglect in children’s lives.

The panic reiterates the notion of the abuser as a stranger when the majority of abuse happens in families.

Another consequence can be that the panic provides a fertile environment for false allegations – as demonstrated in the Lord McAlpine case.

This is not to suggest that bad things do not happen or that society has no need for people to protect the vulnerable.

Rather, it is to accept that responses to social issues and anxieties can draw attention away from the social and structural dimensions of problems in society, and may have highly negative consequences for individuals and groups as well as for society as a whole.

The first person to write about moral panics was Stanley Cohen in 1972. He wrote about rock’n’roll, Mods and Rockers and sex in the cinema, arguing that social problems which temporarily grip the public are not accidental occurrences that come out of nowhere.

Instead, they are often stoked by the media with the co-operation of “moral guardians of society” – religious leaders, pressure groups, campaigners, social workers and children’s charities.

These moral guardians often have a stake in raising the profile of the issue because this meets their own objectives in different ways, not all of which will help abused children in the long run.

This then leads to widespread alarm – “moral panic” – during which politicians feel compelled to get involved, and the behaviour of culprits or “folk devils” is made the subject of concern and, sometimes legislation – often of a highly punitive and negative nature.

Again, an over-response can result in calls for inquiries.

History would suggest the need for fewer inquiries and more deep breaths.