The ‘transnational folk devil’: youth, moral panic, and ‘racialised others’

While Cohen highlighted the relation of moral panics to wider processes of social change, his attention to their broader political context was more limited. But an attempt to incorporate his ideas in a broad analysis of political change was elaborated in Britain during the 1970s by researchers based at Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Originally founded in 1964, and headed by Stuart Hall from 1968, the CCCS produced research spanning a formidable array of themes - including the form and meaning of media texts, the structures of working-class culture, power and gender relations, and the political dimensions of racism. And, in their study Policing the Crisis (1978), Hall and his colleagues integrated Cohen’s notion of moral panic in an expansive, Marxist-influenced analysis of shifts within British social, economic, and political life since 1945.

The 1950s and early 1960s had been, the CCCS argued, a time when Britain’s steady economic growth laid the basis for a period of social and political consensus. By the mid-1960s, however, the country’s economic situation had nosedived, and the basis for the postwar consensus steadily unravelled. As social and political conflict intensified, the CCCS contended, ‘consensus politics’ gave way to more coercive governments that were willing to rule through force. For the CCCS team, the media played a key role in securing popular acceptance of this move to a more authoritarian political order by generating a succession of moral panics — about permissiveness, vandals, student radicals, trade union agitators, and so on - that culminated in 1972 with a major furore about street crime. The news media, Hall and his colleagues argued, drew on images of the New York ghetto to construct the idea that street robberies in Britain’s inner-cities represented the outbreak of a ‘new’ kind of violent crime - ‘mugging’. For the CCCS theorists, the hysteria about ‘mugging’ was a classic moral panic, where the magnitude and intensity of the reaction was ‘at odds with the scale of the threat to which it was a response’ (Hall et al., 1978: 17). Crucially, however, they saw this panic as serving a political purpose in the way it was employed not only to justify tougher policing and more punitive sentencing, but to legitimise a more general political shift towards authoritarianism.

Policing the Crisis was an ambitious study. And, for some, it represents a landmark analysis of crime, the media, policing and the state (McLaughlin, 2008). But the study has also attracted criticism. Detractors have seen it, for example, as a superficial examination of criminal statistics and police practices (Waddington, 1986), an over-politicised and excessively deterministic model of ‘moral panic’ (Barker, 1992), and an over-simplification of processes of news production (Schlesinger et al., 1991). Certainly, there is room to question some of the grander claims Hall and his colleagues made for their analysis of British postwar history. Nevertheless, they made a valuable contribution in highlighting the way moral panics are often woven into a broader tapestry of shifting political relations. Moreover, the CCCS shrewdly pointed to the way issues of ‘race’ and racism are often prominent in moral panics. As Hall and his colleagues observed, the ‘folk devils’ in the 1970s mugging panic were presented not just as urban youth, but — more specifically — as Black, urban youth. As such, the panic drew much of its symbolic power from a long history of ‘racialised Othering’. This has seen white, Western culture stigmatise ethnic ‘difference’ as an ‘Otherness’ that is configured as not only inferior and socially subordinate, but also as threatening, savage and dangerously ‘alien’. And, as the CCCS team explained, the mugging moral panic gained much of its potency from the way it plugged into Britain’s rich vein of racist discourse:

The symbolization of the race-immigrant theme was resonant in its subliminal force, its capacity to set in motion the demons which haunt the collective subconscious of a superior race; it triggered off images of sex, rape, primitivism, violence and excrement.

(Hall et al., 1978: 244)

And Britain is hardly alone in this respect. In the US, for example, elements of racism have figured prominently in the country’s catalogue of moral panics about youth. Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine (1989i; 1989H; 1997), for instance, argued that a deep strain of racism ran through America’s drug scares of the 1980s and 1990s. While drug abuse has undoubtedly been a significant problem in the US, Reinarman and Levine suggested that media and political responses to the issue were often orchestrated attempts to engender moral panic. They contended, for instance, that concerns about ‘crack’ cocaine during the 1980s and 1990s were ‘concocted by the press, politicians, and moral entrepreneurs to serve other agendas’ (1989Ü: 127). Asserting that the US crusade against ‘crack’ represented an exercise in scapegoating, Levine and Reinarman argued that the campaign not only appealed to ‘racism, bureaucratic self-interest, economics, and mongering by the media’ (1989ii: 258), but also ‘allowed conservative politicians to be law-and-order minded ... [and] permitted them to give the appearance of caring about social ills without committing them to do or spend very much to help people’ (1989Ü: 255).⁸

The cultural critic Henry Giroux (1996, 1997, 2012) has been particularly critical of the US media’s démonisation of youth - especially black youth - as a font of urban America’s problems. For Giroux, media representations of African-American youth have helped promote ‘a white moral panic’ (1996: 97) which has not only ‘reproduce[d] racist stereotypes about blacks by portraying them as criminals and welfare cheats’, but has also ‘remove[d] whites from any responsibility or complicity for the violence and poverty that has become so endemic to American life’ (1996: 66). Moreover, like Levine and Reinarman, Giroux sees this racist stereotyping as not simply the result of prejudice, but as part of wider political strategies. Representations of African-American youth as predatory and violent, Giroux explains, have fed into ‘the increasing public outcry for tougher crime bills designed to build more prisons and legislate get-tough policies with minorities of color and class’ (Giroux, 1996: 67).

More recently, many researchers have highlighted the way a racialised ‘Muslim Other’ has become — as George Morgan and Scott Poynting put it — the preeminent ‘transnational folk devil’ in the Global West (2012: 1). For postcolonial theorists, the basis of this process of Othering lies deep in an imperialist past. Rather than simply referring to the period after the colonial era, the concept of postcolonialism denotes the way colonialism’s discourses, power structures and social hierarchies are seen as continuing (albeit through different or new relationships) in the present day. In this respect the ideas of the Palestinian-American theorist Edward Said have been especially influential. According to Said, Western colonialism characteristically operated through ‘discourses of power’ that saw the non-Western world configured as the binary opposite of the West, as its Other. The West, he argued, constructed the East as its antithesis, so the East — or ‘the Orient’ - was defined as stagnant and unchanging, or as erotic and uncontrolled, or as oppressive and authoritarian; whereas the West presented itself as dynamic and innovatory, rational and tolerant. This discourse of ‘Orientalism’, Said contended, existed as a Western style of ‘dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’ (Said, 1978: 11).

Said’s original thesis was based on an analysis of Western art during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but he later (1981) discussed how modern-day Western media reproduced many Orientalist tropes in their representations of Islam, Muslims, and the Arab world. And, following events such as the first Gulf War and (especially) the 9/11 terror attacks of 2001, many other theorists pointed to the way Orientalist themes not only became more prolific in Western media, but were also more hostile and belligerent.* From this perspective, while incidents of terrorist violence are obviously appalling, responses from the Western media have often been highly distorted, and their constructions of Islam and Muslims - particularly young Muslims — have been characterised by significant elements of racialised Othering and ‘Islamophobia’.

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Morgan and Poynting argue, the West saw the development of ‘a globally constructed “radical Muslim” folk demon’ (2012: 5). This, they suggest, was constituent in ‘a long-term and large-scale process of Islamic moral panic’ which circulated worldwide, though was given specific ‘conjuncture, peculiarities and distinctiveness’ in national

Media representations of youth 69 contexts as it melded with local fears (5). Illustrative were events in Holland where, as Abdessamad Bouabid shows, a series of urban disorders in 2007 and 2010 were blamed on Moroccan-Dutch youngsters who then ‘became the prime symbol of nuisance, crime and Islamic radicalization’ (2016: 718). Linking with general fears about crime and youth, Bouabid argues, concerns about the disorders developed into the general perception of a ‘Moroccans problem’, a discourse which constructed social problems as being rooted in the culture of an ethnic Other (722).

Similar processes unfolded in Australia. Between 2000 and 2003, Martin Humphrey (2007) argues, Sydney saw a series of high-profile criminal cases involving murder and rape that were configured as an epidemic of crimes committed by Muslim youth. In the media and public debate, Humphrey contends, the crimes were constructed as a problem specifically related to young, Lebanese-Australian immigrants whose Muslim culture was presented as ‘trapped by tradition’ and ‘incompatible with the secular West’ (21). The episode, Humphrey suggests, reflected ‘a convergent moral panic drawing on the global script of cultural conflict’ (20). But it was a moral panic, he argues, that had particular resonance in Australia given the way immigration policy has been a key instrument in the country’s traditions of nation-building and national identity. ‘Becoming Australian’, Humphrey suggests, means ‘subordinating all minority or cultural identities to national identity’ (12), and there exists a “‘good migrant” / “bad migrant’” discourse that judges migrants according to their ability to fit in with the dominant society and achieve success’ (10). In these terms, he contends, the Lebanese-Australian crime ‘epidemic’ was blamed on the offenders’ culture and their strong attachment to Islamic values. Muslims, consequently, were judged to be ‘bad migrants’, and were made to symbolise the margins of Australian citizenship.

The same “‘good migrant” / “bad migrant’” discourse was also pivotal to Australia’s ‘African gangs’ scare of 2016—18 (see above). Indeed, the ‘African gangs’ furore can be seen as the latest instalment in a longstanding narrative that, David Nolan and his associates argue, has seen the Australian media ‘focusing on African migrant communities as a “problem group” that is represented through racializing tropes and discourses’ (Nolan et al., 2016: 260). While constituent in a long tradition of racist démonisation, however, the ‘African gang’ panic was given particular impetus by its historical context. The established prejudices and stereotypes, as Fiona MacDonald observes, merged with new fears engendered by ‘the global displacement crisis’ and ‘increasing politicisation and backlash against immigration and multiculturalism’ (2017: 1183). As MacDonald explains:

In contemporary western societies, national and local concerns around youth violence and the formation of youth gangs have merged with global prejudices of refugees, creating new stereotypes of young male refugees as the key perpetrators of racial violence. This is particularly evident in

Australia, where the violence of ethnic youth gangs is considered more of a threat to public safety than extremist violence.

(MacDonald, 2017: 1183)

For many commentators, moreover, these fears have often served as a pretext for the introduction of more coercive measures of policing. Mandisi Majavu, for instance, argues that the Australian media’s narrative of ‘African gangs’ has been used ‘as justification for heavy surveillance, harsh sentencing ... and it is further used to rationalize the vociferous calls to deport to Africa young Black Africans who break the law’ (2018: 28). More generally, Morgan and Poynting argue that escalating concerns about terrorism and the threat of ‘alien’ Others has brought worldwide moves towards authoritarianism:

In the post-9/11 world ... the idea of collective insecurity has been used throughout the ‘West’ to justify the erasure of base-line national civil and cultural liberties, on the presumption that such communities indulge a sort of‘fifth column’, a danger to ‘our way of life’, and that their communities give succour to enemies within the nation and support to enemies outside.

(Morgan and Poynting, 2012: 8)

In Western societies, then, there is a long history of moral panics underpinned by constructions of racialised Others. Representations of youth have clearly figured prominently in such discourses, but the symbolism has also been distinctly gendered. As Australian sociologist Anita Harris observes, dimensions of gendered and racialised Othering have often overlain one another. While female adolescence has typically been represented as ‘risky business that must be carefully negotiated’, Harris argues, within this general configuration ‘particular kinds of young women have been constructed as a problem for society, namely young mothers, the sexually active, and Black and Indigenous girls’ (Harris, 2004: 15).

Dimensions of gendering were, indeed, apparent in constructions of the ‘radical Muslim’ folk devil that followed the 9/11 terror attacks. As Shiva Zarabadi and Jessica Ringrose (2018) show, in the UK a moral panic ensued in 2015 after three UK Muslim schoolgirls absconded to join Islamic State camps in Syria. And, in the media coverage that followed, there was a shift in dominant constructions of Muslim femininity. While Muslim women and girls had previously been prevalently represented as docile, submissive and ‘perennially oppressed by the mass of Muslim inen/Islam/culture’, Zarabadi and Ringrose argue that media treatment of the runaway schoolgirls saw the emergence of a ‘new category of religioned femininity’ - the ‘Jihadi Bride’ (Zarabadi and Ringrose, 2018: 85). The media’s representation of the Jihadi Bride’, they contend, represented the affective birth of a ‘new “risky sexualized other’”:

...a potentially suspicious and risky figure, salacious to the public appetite as news headlines debate whether jihadi brides are willing participants or hapless victims. Are they ‘desiring subjects’ or ‘seduced’ subjects?

This ambiguity is horrifying, as both signify desire and agency in relation to the radicalization panic, enabling the mobilization of powerful desires to unveil and uncover the truth of Muslim femininity and sexuality.

(Zarabadi and Ringrose, 2018: 102)