417606

CMCXXX10.1177/1741659011417606Lumby and FunnellCrime Media Culture

Article

Between heat and light: The

opportunity in moral panics

Crime Media Culture

7(3) 277291
The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission:
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DOI: 10.1177/1741659011417606
cmc.sagepub.com

Catharine Lumby1 and Nina Funnell1

Abstract
This paper argues that contemporary moral panic theorists are often too narrowly focused on
either refining the sociological framings of moral panic theory or, alternatively, on applying
that theory to case studies without asking how the theory might be used to frame strategic
interventions into public debate and policy. It examines the way that conservative politicians and
media commentators have appropriated the accusation that they are fuelling moral panic as proof
that they are actively engaged in a fight for morality. It contends that moral panic theorists need
to use their knowledge of how moral panics work in order to engage in strategic interventions
into public debate and policy. It concludes with a call for scholars working on specific issues in the
field to apply their research and redouble their efforts to ensure that evidence-based research is
heard and understood.

Keywords
asylum seekers, media, moral panic, scandal, sexting, sexualization of children, sport
The 2010 Australian federal election campaign was one of the most tightly contested in the
nations history. After the Labor Party (Australias traditionally left-leaning mainstream party) axed
their leader, first-term Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, his replacement, Julia Gillard, went to the polls
unable to promote her predecessors legacy. Voter dissatisfaction with the party was particularly
acute in the marginal working-class and lower middle-class electorates that Rudd had won back
from conservative Prime Minister John Howard in 2007. Ultimately, the election resulted in a hung
parliament with Gillard relying on four independents to hold onto power by a margin of two seats.
The campaigns undertaken by both mainstream parties were marked by unvarnished attempts
to appeal to swinging voters who, according to dominant political wisdom, were concerned about
bread-and-butter family economics and harboured socially illiberal views on asylum seekers,
immigration and same-sex marriage. Gillard exemplified this when she said: People like my own
[migrant] parents who have worked hard all their lives cant abide the idea that others might get
an inside track to special privileges We will ensure refugees shoulder the same obligations as
Australians generally (cited in Grattan, 2010). Commenting on this speech, political journalist

University of New South Wales, Australia

Email: c.lumby@unsw.edu.au

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Michelle Grattan (2010) observed: All that should go down a treat in the marginal seats, especially as Gillard has encouraged people to vent their feelings without being constrained by political
correctness.
Typifying the frustration that liberal commentators felt with both parties scapegoating of asylum seekers, Ethnic Communities Council of Australia chairman Pino Migliorino accused them of
fear-mongering and commented: Theres a real sense of being on the margin Theres a real
feeling that we dont count that this is particularly playing on and stoking fears that people
have which in the main are unfounded (cited in Macey, 2010). He went on to note that by appealing to fears about asylum seekers invading the country in leaky boats, both parties conveniently
distracted voter attention away from real issues, including the failure of successive governments
to address transport and health infrastructure in outlying suburbs and rural areas (Macey, 2010).
The 2010 campaign was founded on a legacy that, in recent Australian political history, is tied
to the rise of federal senator Pauline Hanson in 1996. Hanson, leader and founder of the One
Nation Party, owed her popularity to her anti-immigration rhetoric and her insistence that Australians
ensure that all citizens, including Indigenous Australians, adhere to an Anglo vision of national
identity (Kingston, 2001). Conservative Prime Minister John Howard mined Hansons political capital while distancing himself from accusations of xenophobia, as encapsulated in his speech used to
launch the Liberal Partys 2001 election campaign, in which he declared: Well decide who comes
to this country, but well do that within the framework of the decency for which Australians have
always been renowned (Howard, 2001). The decency involved instituting policy that saw asylum
seekers and their children housed in camps in unpopulated arid zones and offshore facilities.
After Labor lost the 2001 campaign to the conservatives, the party abandoned attempts to
educate voters on the issue and fell largely into lockstep with the Howard line. Australia is, of
course, far from alone when it comes to governments incarcerating asylum seekers and making
political capital out of hardline anti-terrorist rhetoric (Critcher, 2003; Rothe and Muzzati, 2004;
Welch, 2004). There is a growing scholarly literature that focuses on demonstrating how and why
current debates about terrorism and asylum seekers in western nations are giving rise to textbook
moral panics: for example, Dawn Rothe and Stephen Muzzattis article (2004) on the Bush administrations mobilization of fears about terrorists infiltrating North America, which concludes with
a discussion of the limits to classifying the case study as a moral panic.
There are, of course, well-established debates in moral panic literature over which theoretical
model best defines a moral panic and over whether a given case study qualifies as a moral panic
(Critcher, 2003: 930). It is not our intention to reprise those debates here or to conduct a
detailed analysis of our case studies in relation to different models. It is sufficient for our purposes
here to refer to Kenneth Thompsons general account of moral panics:
Implicit in the use of the two words moral panic is the suggestion that the threat is to something held sacred by or fundamental to the society. The reason for calling it a moral panic is
precisely to indicate that the perceived threat is not to something mundanebut a threat to
the social order itself or an idealised (ideological) conception of some part of it. The threat and
its perpetrators are regarded as evil folk devils and excite strong feelings of righteousness.
Events are more likely to be perceived as fundamental threats and to give rise to moral panics
if the society, or some important part of it, is in crisis or experiencing disturbing changes giving
rise to stress. (Thompson, 1998: 8)

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In relation to Thompsons account, we are particularly interested in both understanding the

beliefs and perceived interests of actors in a moral panic and in exploring what social or economic
factors are giving rise to the perception of threat and its attribution to a perpetrator. We agree
with Thompson that the first task in investigating cases of apparent moral panic is to try to understand the perceptions of those involved, without passing judgment on their beliefs or motives
(1998: 9). The second task in thinking through the possibility of making strategic interventions in
moral panics is to understand the underlying factors contributing to those beliefs or motives. By
careful attention to both the overt and covert concerns expressed in the discourses framing a
given moral panic, it is possible to think through appropriate modes of engagement.
The Australian experience with debates surrounding asylum seekers is a case study in the complex political and communications-related reasons why informed interventions can fail in moral
panic scenarios. It is equally a case study, however, that invites the question of how informed
commentators and researchers might more productively intervene in a given moral panic in a
manner that promotes, rather than fuels, moral panic rhetoric.
In this paper, we will contend that contemporary moral panic theorists are often too narrowly
focused on either refining the sociological framings of moral panic theory or, alternatively, on
applying that theory to case studies without first asking how the theory might be used to frame
strategic interventions into public debate and policy. In so doing, we ground our paper in the history of moral panic scholarship: a theoretical area with a longstanding tradition of investigating
the relationship between the mechanisms of moral panic discourse and its real-world effects. Two
of the foundational theorists in the field, Stanley Cohen and Stuart Hall, are equally well-known
for their active roles as public intellectuals. Julian Petley, a leading contemporary scholar in the
moral panics field, has built on this tradition with his advocacy and interventions in public debates
and policy initiatives around media regulation and censorship. This tradition of intervention into
the public sphere is one deserving of analysis in terms of its purchase in the online and mobile
media era. Certainly, there is a need continually to rethink the viability of theoretical moral panic
models according to shifting media and political landscapes. Yet there is also a need to keep sight
of the uses of academic knowledge in the field. Our provocation in this paper is to ask what scholars of moral panics can do with what we already know. In other words, how can we use our
longstanding critical analyses of historical and current moral panics to reframe contemporary
media discourses, public perceptions, and political and public policy responses? How, in short, can
we instrumentalize moral panic theory?

Working Inside a Moral Panic

To accuse others of panicking is to implicitly state: Youre panicking and Im concerned. To claim
that others are panicking is to make a claim to the high and dry rational ground to declare oneself in control and to state that others are acting the way women and working-class crowds have
historically been said to behave: unpredictably and hysterically (Felski, 1995; Huyssen, 1986). The
problematic of speaking position is critical to any reconsideration of the application of moral panic
theory in the contemporary media era. As David Garland argues, those evaluating and naming
moral panics are never simply observing, they are often adopting a stance grounded in an attitude of knowing disbelief, an urbane refusal to be taken in or carried away (Garland, 2008: 21).
A good deal of work has been done in the past two decades to advance our understanding of

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how the public sphere is an affective as well as a rational space. Feminist theorists, in particular,
have made critical interventions in understanding the relationship between affect, identity and
citizenship (Brown, 1995; Gatens, 1996; Lumby, 1999; Probyn, 2005). These interventions have
rigorously queried assumed relations between the rational, the emotive and the embodied in
personal and collective political and social relations. Even those diagnosing moral panics, it follows, are invested in them. Acknowledging the nature of this investment and its implications for
speaking positions is key to understanding the potential for refining our understanding of listening positions.
Moral panics constitute an intense site of debate about ideas that are grounded in belief systems and that are connected to embodied and visceral ways of knowing and to ideological systems of meaning. They are social sites of emergent discourse that are hot and sore to the touch,
yet they also tell us what is happening under the social and political. They are blisters on the social
skin: potentially productive if sticky sites for real-time intellectual probing and intervention. In
moments of moral panic it is not just populist commentators who exhibit a strong affective sense
of politics. Even those of us who despair of moral panics can be affected by emotional and
embodied responses ranging from indignation to alienation.
As a number of writers have noted, the term moral panic has slipped its scholarly bounds and
is now used in popular discourse by both liberal and conservative commentators and public actors
to critique and refute critiques of public policy, law and discourse (Altheide, 2009; Lumby, 1997;
McRobbie and Thornton, 1995). David Altheide notes that moral panic is one of the most successful sociological concepts in finding its way to public media (2009: 83). Similarly, David Garland
notes that:
The concept of moral panic has had an enormous impact, not just on sociology - where it has
spawned a small sub-discipline of moral panic studies - but also on the language of cultural
debate and on the practice of journalists and politicians. (2008: 9)
Popular uses of the term moral panic may be imprecise from a scholarly point of view, yet by
paying attention to the way that the term circulates we can understand much about the personal,
professional and political investments that different interlocutors bring to a given outbreak. The
co-option of the term by media commentators is instructive. To illustrate this proposition we will
unpack an example drawn from an applied research project conducted by one of the authors of
this paper and a number of her colleagues.
The research project was commissioned by the National Rugby League (NRL), the organization
that administers the competition between Australias top rugby league clubs. In 2004, the NRL
asked the research team to investigate the extent and the causes of alleged ant-social and assaultive behaviour among elite footballers towards women. The research team, based at the University
of Sydney, included researchers and allied professionals with expertise in gender and cultural
studies, education, organizational change, sexual assault and violence prevention. The research
was commissioned in the midst of saturation media coverage of allegations that a number of elite
rugby league players had been involved in the group sexual assault of a woman. The research plan
involved interviewing and surveying over 200 elite players as well as all club executives and
coaches, and to make recommendations based on the findings (Lumby et al., 2004).

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Given the level of contemporaneous public and media concern about footballers off-field
behaviour, particularly towards women, it would be reasonable to assume that many commentators would have welcomed further research into the extent and causes of the behaviour in question, particularly research that aimed to produce evidence-based solutions to the problem.
However, the announcement of the research project generated intense hostility from public commentators across the political spectrum. A common theme of the commentary was that humanities academics were incapable of understanding the brute reality of the world inhabited by
working-class men who played body contact sport and that the research aim of gaining a better
understanding of the extent and causes of antisocial off-field behaviour amounted to a nave and
elitist refutation of a common sense proposition: that working-class men who play body contact
sport are naturally violent and cannot be trusted around women. Of particular interest, for the
purposes of this paper, was the way that the term moral panic was deployed in the ensuing
debate centering on the research.
Writing in the broadsheet newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald, columnist Miranda Devine
opined:
As if the Canterbury Bulldogs rugby league club wasnt already in a pickle, now it has been
saddled with a gender studies expertBut knowing it is wrong to gang rape a woman is not
some obscure concoction of the postmodern discipline of gender politics and it cant be separated from the apparent culture of gang banging and misogyny which suffuses rugby league
and other male teams sports. (Devine, 2004)
Devine, like a number of commentators, assumed that the researchers were accusing anyone
concerned about footballers assaulting women of supporting a moral panic. Andrew Bolt, a
prominent columnist in the Herald Sun, wrote:
Catharine Lumby [research leader] accuses dull people like me of moral panic. But I cant help
it. When the National Rugby League hired her this week to deal with its sex scandal, panic is
exactly what I felt. Is this how civilisation ends? With funky academics telling a league harried
by claims of pack rape that morality is a dirty word? (Bolt, 2004)
Throughout much of the media commentary, the term morality was used to assert a boundary
between the assumed relativism of liberal humanities-based approaches to social issues and the
assumed common-sense approach of ordinary Australians who know how to treat women with
respect. Bolt epitomized this view when he wrote that the research project embodied the fashionably self-centred idea that much morality is a plot, an impediment, a prison, and we are best
off working out own ethicsWe knew God was dead. Now we know civilization is dying with
him (Bolt, 2004). Conservative Australian Prime Minister John Howard echoed this view of contemporary humanities research when he decried a postmodern culture of relativism where any
objective record of achievement is questioned or repudiated (Lucy and Niall, 2006: 150).
This strategic realignment of the word moral in the term moral panic demonstrates the way
that media commentators can appropriate the accusation that they are fuelling moral panic as a
badge demonstrating that they are actively engaged in a fight for morality, civility and basic

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human rights. Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler analyse this discursive move in their book The War on
Democracy: Conservative Opinions in the Australian Press, in which they write:
The conservative war on democracy has been conducted in the name of ordinary people
against social elites. But the right-wing redefinition of social elite has been made over to
include anybody but the very wealthy, together with conservative politicians and conservative
media professionals and intellectuals. Social elite, in short, is not a sociological term but a
political one, and it refers invariably to anyone whos to the left of the right. (Lucy and Mickler,
2006: 6)
Their analysis of conservative opinion writing is a cogent and critical record of a move to the
right in Australian politics and public commentary in the 1990s. Yet, it fails to address the question of how to intervene in the inflammatory rhetoric that characterized debates in this era on
subjects as diverse as Australian history, Indigenous land rights, immigration, tertiary education,
gender-based violence and child abuse. As they document in their book, contending with the
logic of conservative revisionism offers opportunities for conservatives to claim that the ordinary
Australians that they claim to represent are being accused of the unthinkable: of racism, of being
complicit in violence towards women and children, and of ignoring wider social injustice.
As the case study noted above illustrates, interventions in heated public debates that focus on
outlining the facts and correcting simplifications of complex issues are open to being heard as an
elitist dismissal of the core moral values held by ordinary people. In the case of the NRL research
project, the research team struggled to articulate publicly the value of an ethics-based approach
to research and education in the face of popular commentary that claimed ownership of
common-sense morality.
What then might moral panic theory tell us about a more strategic approach to intervening in
these charged debates? A key step, we contend, is to use the analytical approach behind moral
panic discourses as a starting point for promoting dialogue rather than fuelling polemic. This shift
in emphasis involves moving from seeing moral panics as the manifestation of a problem to
understanding them as an opportunity for finding a shared language at moments when there is
an intense media and community focus on a controversial subject.
Moral panics, in this light, might be understood as opportunities for strategic interventions
grounded in analysis of dominant discourses when heated issues erupt onto the public stage.

The Bill Henson Case

In 2006, a left-leaning Australian think tank, the Australia Institute, issued a report entitled
Corporate Paedophilia, which claimed that children were being sexualized in Australian mainstream advertising and popular culture. This alarming claim understandably garnered widespread
media coverage and further heightened public concern that had already been stoked by media
commentary suggesting that children were being routinely sexualized in popular media. A federal
government Senate Inquiry into the sexualization of children in the contemporary media environment followed (Lumby and Albury, 2008).
Scant evidence was provided for the reports claim that images of sexualised children are
becoming increasingly common in advertising and marketing material (Rush and La Nauze, 2006).

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Nonetheless, widespread media coverage followed, much of it citing the claim as fact. In the two
days following the release of the report there was a major news spike on the issue, with prominent coverage in mainstream Australian outlets including television station Channel 9s Today
Show, talkback radio on the ABC and commercial stations, and in the broadsheet newspapers The
Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald. The morally charged script that accompanied much of
the commentary is summarized by philosopher Joanne Faulkner (2010) in her recent monograph
on debates about the sexualization of children. She writes of the deeper anxieties underpinning
these debates:
What requires scrutiny is the publics investment in the image of childhood: the function it
performs for the construction of adult identity and sexuality; and the role these anxieties about
the sexualisation of children play in controlling that most valuable of resources and dare I say
commodities childhood innocence Indeed, sexualisation is the only aspect of a more pervasive attitude towards children, albeit an emotionally charged aspect, which eclipses the dividend that the whole community and not only the paedophile or the advertiser receives from
this fetishisation of innocence. (Faulkner, 2010: 108)
Faulkners analysis neatly unpacks the contradictions that lie at the heart of complaints that
children are being commodified and/or preyed on by external, aberrant adults. She points calmly
to the unspoken reality: innocence sells because it underpins a dominant cultural framework for
understanding beauty, experience and family values.
In May 2008, public concern over sexualization fuelled an explosive reaction to the use of an
image of a naked 12-year-old girl taken by Australian artist Bill Henson on the invitation to an
exhibition at the Sydney Roslyn Oxley Gallery. Confronted by a morning TV host with the image,
the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd denounced it as absolutely revolting, igniting talkback
radio lines across the country. A front-page debate began in the media about whether Henson
was a paedophile masquerading as an artist (Marr 2008; Ninemsn, 2008; Westwood, 2008).
Many in the art world appeared blind-sided by the intensity of the outcry. Henson, after all, had
been exhibiting images of naked teenagers for decades and 65,000 people had attended one of
his exhibitions containing similar images at the Art Gallery of NSW.
The media storm was visceral (Albury and Lumby, 2010: 57). Even those Australian academics
working in relevant areas and who were accustomed to public commentary discussed whether
the issue was too hot to touch. As is characteristic of moral panics, the debate quickly became
polarized between those who defended the image on the grounds that it was art and those who
argued it was a blatant form of child pornography (Marr, 2008). It thus followed axiomatically that
any commentator who wanted to interrogate the complex issues underlying the ethics of making
and exhibiting the image or to analyse the social anxieties underpinning the debate was potentially declaring that they were less troubled by harm to children than by threats to freedom of
speech for artists.
In relation to the Henson affair, it is clear that any attempt directly to defend the image on the
grounds of artistic complexity potentially played into an account that saw a concern for morality in
opposition to freedom of expression. The first step in any intervention into such a heated debate
must arguably begin by accepting that many actors in a moral panic are genuinely concerned, even
if their concerns are misplaced. Rather than highlighting the emotive nature or the disproportionality

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of such claims, a strategic intervention would begin by finding potential common ground. Critics of
the Henson image were united in their view that the protection of children should be an overriding
social goal. Endorsing that general claim and acknowledging the sincerity of their aims is, then, a
logical entry point into the debate. Unpacking the question of where we need to focus our efforts
in order to protect children and indeed the question of what they are most in need of protection
from becomes more possible once there is room for dialogue rather than polemic.
Reframing a given moral panic involves close attention to the characteristic contradictions and
illogicalities in the claims that such heated debates generate. In the Henson affair, commentators
frequently referred to the way the image sexualized the 12-year-old girl for a general audience.
At the same time, these commentators were clearly arguing that anyone who saw a naked
12-year-old girl as sexual was an aberrant viewer. This contradiction is held in place by an implicit
opposition between right-thinking ordinary citizens and a phantom aberrant viewer who finds the
image erotically charged. A useful intervention into the heightened anxiety surrounding the image
might be to point out that, since the great majority of viewers do not find images of naked children sexually arousing, it makes little sense to evaluate this image by looking through the eyes of
a paedophile. An intervention of this kind has the potential to reposition the debate by focusing
attention on the reassuring fact that most adults do not see children as sexual objects, while opening the door to discussing evidence-based strategies for protecting children from adults who do
indeed want to sexually abuse them.
In 2008, one of the authors of this paper and a colleague tested this approach to debates
about the sexualization of children in an invited submission to an Australian Federal Senate inquiry
(Lumby and Albury, 2008). The submission began by affirming that:
Protecting, educating and nurturing children are rightly seen as one of our most important and
primary social tasks. If the authors of the Australia Institute report [referred to above] are correct in their assertion, then we are failing our children in the most basic way and urgent intervention is required. (2008: 8).
Despite the politically and emotionally charged debates that attended the inquiry, we were
careful to respect the bona fide concerns expressed by other commentators. Our approach was to
establish common ground before drawing on research that offered evidence-based solutions to
preventing child sexual abuse and other harm to children. The submission unpacked the disparate
concerns that were constantly conflated under the umbrella concern that children were being
prematurely sexualized. The submission noted that:
The term sexualisation is often used in such a broad way that it loses any analytical precision.
In public debate the term collapses a number of distinct concerns: that children are being
depicted in ways that suggest they have an adult understanding of self and sexuality; that
children are being encouraged to behave in an adult sexual manner; that popular images of
children are fuelling child sexual abuse; and that children are being exposed to adult sexual
material. (Lumby and Albury, 2008: 9)
The Senate Committees final report adopted a number of our submissions recommendations,
including one that further expert research was needed to establish the scope and impact of the

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perceived problem and another which called for the establishment of a clearing house for community concerns about popular media and their content in relation to children.
In Australia, attempts to make strategic and research-based interventions into debates about
the sexualization of children are relatively recent. In the UK, by contrast, a number of humanities
and social science researchers have made substantial inroads into public policy and debate. These
include David Buckingham, Sonia Livingstone and Tanya Byron, all of whom have been commissioned by government to synthesize and report on the best research into children, teenagers and
media use and representation (DCSF, 2008, 2009). The reports Safer Children in a Digital World
and The Impact of the Commercial World on Childrens Well-Being both exemplify a mode of
scholarship that applies research in arenas of heightened community concern and takes those
concerns seriously while offering governments and other public policy bodies evidence-based
ways of responding to, rather than merely pandering to, media and community perceptions of the
sources of harm to children.

Sexting Panics
Writing of Oscar Wildes trial in his introduction to the edited collection Moral Panics, Sex Panics,
Gilbert Herdt suggests that:
Victorians of the time paradoxically may have had their sexual attitudes altered, their vocabulary expanded, and their private lives exposed to same-sex desires and behaviours The
effect was to speed up social change in the cultural meanings surrounding sexuality and
homosexuality. (Herdt, 2009: 13)
Moral panics, he argues, can provoke authoritarian policies and heated debate in the short
term, but over the longer term they are also capable of providing an opportunity to take the heat
out of taboo subjects and of offering progressive social and political groups a window for lobbying for change.
Looking to future opportunities to study the potential for intervention in moral panics, the
growing concern about sexting offers a resonant comparative case study. Sexting is an example
of a social phenomenon that has provoked moral panic level responses in the US while attracting
little attention in Australia.
The term has been defined in numerous ways by various stakeholders. In one of the first public
studies on sexting in 2008,1 the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy
defined sexting as the taking and sending of sexy pictures or videos or sexy messages to others
via electronic media. Sexy pictures or videos were defined as sexually suggestive, semi-nude, or
nude personal pictures/video taken of oneself (alone or by a friend) and not those found on the
internet, received from a stranger (like spam) etc. (National Campaign to Prevent Teen and
Unplanned Pregnancy, 2008: 7, emphasis in original). The study also defined sexy messages as
sexually suggestive written personal texts, emails, IMs, etc. and not those you might receive
from a stranger (like spam) (2008: 7, emphasis in original).
While these definitions provide a useful entry point into discussions about sexting, they are also
inherently limited. Determining what constitutes sexually suggestive content is a highly subjective task, and one that is open to wide interpretation. Furthermore, it is unclear what exactly

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constitutes a semi-nude photo (are images of topless men, or women in underwear/bikinis, considered semi-nude?) and why the survey bundled together indiscriminately semi-nude and nude
photos. According to the researchers, semi-nude refers to some part of the body that would
likely invite the attention of law enforcement, if shown in public (Bialik, 2009: 1). However, the
survey did not specify this to respondents and it should not be assumed that there is any consensus on what parts of the body would attract the attention of law enforcement, as this may vary
depending on factors such as time, place and context. The survey also failed to define the terms
stranger (are any/all relationships which are conducted exclusively online considered stranger
relationships?) or why these exchanges should be excluded from a working definition of sexting.
Mirroring the problems encountered in early attempts to define sexting for social research
purposes, those working in public policy and law have also encountered difficulties in defining
sexting. In various international jurisdictions, prosecutors have deferred to existing child pornography laws when deciding how to respond to sexting cases. In Greensburg, Pennsylvania, for
example, public debate erupted over the response to a sexting incident in 2009 where six adolescents were threatened with child pornography charges after three teenage girls allegedly took
and sent nude and semi-nude images to three teenage boys (Cumming, 2009). In the media
commentary that followed, some claimed that prosecution was an appropriate response that
would serve to deter other teenagers from engaging in sexting, while others argued that it was
unethical and disingenuous to use child pornography laws as a framework for dealing with the
issue in question. The Pennsylvania case invites the question: are laws that are intended to protect
children being used instead to criminalize teenage sexuality? More to the point, is it appropriate
to group sexually curious teenagers together with convicted paedophiles? And what can really be
gained by listing these minors on a sex offender register for the rest of their lives?
Rather than turning to legislators and social researchers in order to define sexting and to set
the terms of the debate, we argue that academics and researchers interested in sexting ought to
turn their attention to how those engaged in or associated with the activity of sexting define it for
themselves. While there has been limited research conducted with young people engaged in sexting, the evolution of the term and its position within popular youth culture can be located and
traced online. One of the earliest recorded definitions of sexting appeared in 2005 on a subversive
and colloquial web-based dictionary called Urban Dictionary2 (Funnell, 2010). The Urban Dictionary
website includes neologisms, colloquial expressions and slang words. Since 2005, Urban Dictionary
has housed a detailed historical archive of popular definitions of sexting. Unlike other collaborative definitional sites, such as Wikipedia, which merge and refine duplicate definitions, Urban
Dictionary preserves and records individually the entry date of each definition, allowing readers to
trace their genesis.
The earliest Urban Dictionary definition of sexting was registered on 16 November 2005. This
defines sexting as sending booty calls via text message. In 2006 a second definition was added,
which modified the meaning significantly from a text message designed to organize sex to a
sexual act in and of itself, like phone sex, except through texting. In 2008 and 2009, the definition evolved to include instances where: a guy and girl send dirty text messages back and forth
to each other. Pictures may also be included, but only if youre lucky, and sending nude pictures
of oneself to another person. These early definitions demonstrate how the meaning of sexting
has evolved over time from a text message used to arrange sex, to simulated sex via text message
or phone call, through to the sending and receiving of sexually explicit personal photographs via

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text message. It is highly likely that this evolution reflects the increasing capacity of mobile phone
technology, in particular the inclusion of cameras and the greater capacity to send large amounts
of information at high speeds (Funnell, 2010).
The definitions began to morph into a cultural critique of how the word is used and by whom.
For example: Sexting: a term created by the media referring to sending sexually explicit text messages. The term is used by adults who are out of the loop, and not by the individuals actually
sending the messages. More recent definitions such as this suggest that the term is perceived by
some young people as a media construct, developed by adults and cynically deployed against
young people in an attempt to police their sexuality.
In his article Childrens Rights, Childrens Voices, Childrens Technology, Childrens Sexuality,
youth studies scholar Peter Cumming embarks on a critical examination of sexting and moral panics in the US. He argues that a media feeding frenzy has erupted in America, resulting in a moral
panic around sexting (Cumming, 2009: 2). What interests us here is the opportunity for intervention into extant but ill-equipped laws that is offered by the often sensationalist media interest in
the US and by the comparative silence of the media in Australia on the subject.
In the US, a series of sexting events coincided, sparking national coverage of sexting in 2008
and 2009. In 2009 the Pennsylvania case noted above made national headlines, and resurfaced
when the American Civil Liberties Union launched a suit against the District Attorney for threatening to lay charges against the young people concerned. In the same time frame, 18-year-old Jesse
Logan hanged herself in her family home after her ex-boyfriend distributed nude photos of her,
which led to schoolyard taunting. The case quickly became a media fixture, and remains so in
articles on sexting. At this same time, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned
Pregnancy released the oft-cited figure that one in five teens had engaged in sexting. The combination of the release of the sexting report, the suicide and the Pennsylvania case triggered an
eruption of interest in the subject including an episode of Law and Order (6 May 2009) on the
subject (Cumming, 2009).
In Australia, there has been comparatively little mainstream media discussion about sexting,
despite the initiation of a series of prosecutions. In 2007-8, for example, a total of 32 minors in
Victoria were charged with possession of child pornography, that is sexting images sent or
retrieved by mobile phone or the Internet. Other Australian states and territories may also have
charged minors with possessing nude images of people under the age of 18, but these states do
not record stand-alone figures of this crime by children, making it difficult to determine exact
numbers. But despite the prosecutions which have taken place, the Australian media have only
very recently identified sexting and the legal ramifications around it as an issue in need of
discussion. For example, on 1 November 2010 the Sydney Morning Herald published a story entitled Prosecutor pursues first sexting conviction in case involving naked 13-year-old (McClymont,
2010). Ninemsn.com and other media outlets and blogs followed, dubbing it Australias first
sexting case (Funnell, 2010).
While the public debate appears to be more evolved in the US, the intense heat generated by
media debates there has also instigated legal and educational policy changes that are yet to occur
in Australia. Following the Pennsylvanian case, where the ACLU successfully argued that the teenage girls images were not pornographic, several states moved towards aligning their laws more
closely with teen sexuality and technology courting practices. Thus, in Vermont, a bill was introduced in April 2009 to legalize the consensual exchange of sext images between people aged 13

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to 18. Furthermore, in Connecticut, Ohio and Utah bills have been introduced to reduce the crime
from a felony to a misdemeanour offence, eliminating the possibility of a teenager being labelled
a sex offender. In New York a bill has also been introduced that would create an affirmative
defence where a minor is charged if they possess or disseminate images of themselves or another
within four years of the age of consent (Funnell, 2010).
In Australia, by contrast, no law reform has been initiated, and discussions about the need for
such reform are still largely confined to small pockets within the academic community. Heated
debate in the US has also led to a series of proposed workshops and education and outreach
programmes for teens, parents and educators.
While our thesis is thus yet to be tested in the Australian public sphere, we hypothesize that
the emerging attention to sexting will offer an opportunity to study the relationship between
popular and expert knowledge in the field and to research the question of how academics and
related professionals can intervene in charged political debates on the subject.

Conclusion: A Call to Scholarly Action

Moral panic theory has evolved into a field of study through careful theoretical scholarship, primarily in the fields of cultural studies, sociology and criminology. This paper fully accepts the
importance of those theoretical contributions to the field. Equally, though, it asks if and how
contemporary moral panic theory prepares researchers to apply their detailed knowledge of media
and public discourse and their knowledge of evidence in a given area to extant moral panics. It is
our contention, following the example of the early scholars in moral panics, that scholarly knowledge should be applied. In this paper, we offer a provocation: that theorists of moral panics should
not simply stand by when moral panics erupt but should be prepared to use their knowledge to
make a difference.
If we return to the account of the charged Australian politics that attends the arrival of asylum
seekers, the difficulties of engaging politicians and publics in a rational debate on the subject are
clear. What is, however, equally clear from a close analysis of the moral panic that attended
debates about refugees arriving in boats, was that accusing politicians or conservative commentators of fuelling nascent racism played directly into the hands of those who were stoking the moral
panic. Being accused of racism alienated many Australians who might otherwise have been
inclined to listen more closely to evidence about why particular groups were arriving on our shores
and what alternative measures could be taken to process them humanely and justly.
The lesson we take from the culture wars that framed the Howard governments term of
office is that many liberal commentators and humanities-based scholars were too quick to fall into
polemical lockstep with the dominant discourse and therefore missed opportunities to open up
the debate by introducing different ways of understanding the issue. They, and implicitly we, too
often allowed alternative arguments to be co-opted into a frame of reference designed by those
we wished to counter.
It is abundantly clear that the emotive and contradictory discourses that define moral panics
are now implicating disciplines outside the traditional domains of the humanities and social
sciences. The attacks on climate science by climate change sceptics are evidence that academic
expertise and research have themselves become highly politicized and are being openly challenged
by commentators who often work in an anecdotal and polemical fashion. In this environment, it

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is certainly tempting to respond with defensive assertions of our expertise and it is perfectly reasonable to feel outraged when anecdotes are presented as equally valid as solid facts in scholarly
fields that we have tilled rigorously for decades. Rigour is, of course, the ground on which careful
scholarly work germinates and is reaped. The contemporary public sphere fragmented, polemicridden and increasingly indifferent to expert gate-keeping is a very different terrain.
How, then, might academics working in diverse areas of moral panics studies apply their work
in more strategic ways? A clear way forward is to work more collectively in research clusters to
design submissions to government inquiries and to offer support and advice to each other when
a media firestorm erupts in one of our areas of expertise. Moral panics provoke embodied
responses for all of us who engage with them. It is important to acknowledge the critical role that
supportive colleagues can play in offering advice about managing public sphere appearances and
in debriefing those of us who have recently emerged bruised from the fray.
In conclusion, we argue that real-world moral panics offer an opportunity for scholars in the
field to assess opportunities for intervening in popular and dominant discourses in their given
areas. In our paper we have discussed case studies that demonstrate lessons that can be learned
from errors and successes in this respect. The next task, we suggest, is for scholars working on
specific issues in the field to quarantine a measure of their scant time for networking with colleagues internationally in order to ensure that when moral panics do erupt there is a shared
history and expertise on which to draw. Academics in our field are often excellent at networking
in order to generate pure research outputs, but strategic and applied uses of research in the
public sphere work are too often left to individuals or small teams of researchers. It is time, we
argue, to mobilize our expertise in a way that allows evidenced-based research to be heard and
understood.

Notes
1 The study included an online survey that was fielded to a total of 1280 respondents between 25
September 2008 and 3 October 2008. The survey was answered by 653 teens (aged 1319) and 637
young adults (aged 2026).
2 Urban Dictionary was founded in 1999 by Aaron Peckham, then a freshman computer science major at
California Polytechnic State University. In 2008, Time magazine included Urban Dictionary in its list of 50
best websites. Quality is regulated democratically, with registered users acting as editors and voting to
accept or reject newly submitted definitions. Anyone can self-nominate to become an editor by signing
up to the site at no expense.

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