Anxiety about disaffiliated youth generates moral panics that recruit social control agencies

Evidence

In all these arenas, “youth” seemed to figure as recurring agents of “trouble,” symptomatic of a certain social dis-affiliation and of wider social trends and problems, around which public and official disquiet circled. This social anxiety contributed to the generation of “moral panics”—excessive waves of fear and apprehension among sections of the public about a perceived threat to society itself and, in reaction, the recruitment of the agencies of social control and wider political structures to deal with it. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1045

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the influential concept of moral panic: excessive public fear plus recruitment of control institutions against a perceived social threat.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing note rejecting a moral-panic framing for a specific case; Hall’s causal definition sharpens that.