The Moral Panic of Madeleine McCann

How useful is the Moral Panic thesis as a tool for helping us to understand what has happened? Moral Panic helps people to understand what has happened in a specific situation because it makes us feel empathy.  In the case of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, many people felt compassion for the parents and family, and the majority of people who followed the case would have personally known a three-year-old child, at some stage in their lives.  Moral Panic teaches people to be more cautious when in specific environments, for example, stranger danger, not leaving children alone in a foreign environment and not jay-walking.  It gives people a sense of anxiety, and if people have seen someone do something, and it has a negative outcome, then the chances of other's doing that same thing are meagre. Is the Moral Panic thesis still relevant? The question 'is the Moral Panic thesis still relevant?' is very subjective from person to person, and is all up to personal v...

What are the consequences with the type of media used in the Madeleine McCann Case? It has been over a decade since Madeleine McCann disappeared, and there have been a lot of theories as to who has kidnapped her if she is alive or dead.  The Netflix documentary, 'The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann', has had a bit of backlash and has brought out the inner detective in some public citizens.  The Netflix documentary has claimed that Madeleine was kidnapped for sex-trafficking because of her race, age, socio-economic background and her nationality. The parents of Madeleine believe that she was kidnapped through the open window, which had a 50-centimetre gap.  One of the police who visited the site of the "abduction" has discredited this theory, explaining in a  podcast  titled "Red Flags", that  "the window is only absolute maximum 50cm wide, in reality about 46cm wide, and it's already a metre off the ground ...  I had an [inaudi...

Brief background information on the disappearance of Madeleine McCann In 2007, three-year-old Madeleine McCann and her family (Mum, Dad and her two-year-old twin siblings) were on holiday in Portugal (from England).  They were staying at a Family Resort ( Praia da Luz ) with some family friends and their children.  On the third of May 2007, Madeleine's parents, Kate and Gerry McCann were having dinner at the Resort's restaurant, which was approximately 55 metres away from the room that Madeleine and her siblings were sleeping in.   The parents checked on their children every half hour throughout the evening, until 10pm (Portugal time) when Kate McCann discovered that Madeleine was not in her bed and that the window (that was next to her bed) was wide open to the street.   This started the investigation of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Many people searched for her the night of her disappearance, but there was no trace of her.  Ac...

The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann shocked the world as it took the news by storm.  This blog will be discussing the moral panic thesis and explaining the media reporting and the public response to the Madeleine McCann Case. What is moral panic? Moral panic is any widespread anxiety that some people feel about an issue that is said to threaten the very fabric of society  (Lamb, 2013) .  Moral panic is usually in the form of media technology, such as the news, newspapers, blogs and social media etc.  The term 'Moral Panic' was coined by Stanley Cohen, who  was the first to create a systematic empirical study of how the media amplify deviance and public responses and  wrote about it in his 1972 book titled, 'Folk Devils and Moral Panics'.  He based his book off of his PhD, which was written in 1967-1969.  In his book, Cohen wrote about how the media responded to huge fights that happened between two gangs (the mods and...