Moral panics: Towards a new model.

This dissertation reworks sociological theories of the causes, processes, and consequences of moral panics. Sociologists who study panics see material life as real and ideologies as false. In this view, moral panics deflect attention away from real problems. However, sociologists cannot explain why panics focus particular subjects. Nor do these theorists identify how panics develop or how they leave a lasting imprint on society. To investigate these processes, I study the panic over day care in the 1980s. The panic was triggered by the 1983 McMartin Preschool case in Los Angeles. After McMartin, media attention to day care skyrocketed, and the claims of danger proliferated to include socio-emotional damage, disease spread, and moral decay. In all cases, however, prescriptions of full-time motherhood exempted women on welfare, who require day care to become economically independent. Rather than dismiss the panic as false, my dissertation argues that ideology makes material life possible by constructing meanings that guide human behavior. Thus, the moral panic over day care gave urgent meanings to mothers' rising employment and use of day care, expressing deep-seated, race- and class-bound anxieties about changing gender roles and family arrangements. Far from concealing its causes, the panic over day care openly expressed the cultural beliefs out of which it grew. To study the processes by which panics develop and spread, I borrow Foucault's genealogy. This method attends to three levels of discursive and material processes: inter-discursive (the discourse on child care since the early 1900s), intra-discursive (between the discourses of child care, Satanism, mother-child attachment and conservative morality), and extra-discursive (the context of changing family and gender roles, the ascent of the New Right, and the competitive public arenas in which problems are constructed). Finally, I examine the effects of moral panics. Rather than assume panics, as smokescreens, deny and repress truth, I examine how panics produce truth regimes. These regimes control the production of truth by circulating some claims and silencing others. The day-care panic, for instance, elevated certain truths about day care, pedophilia, and welfare dependency and excluded competing interpretations.Ph.D.Social SciencesSociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132757/2/9990865.pd