The Moral Dynamics of Riots in Contemporary Australia

In July 2006, "Current Issues in Criminal Justice" (volume 18 number 1) published an article entitled 'Moral Indignation, Criminality and the Rioting Crowd in Macquarie Fields' by John Owen. The following article is, for the most part, a reply to many of the positions raised contemporaneously since then, including those of Murray Lee in 'The Blame Game: Struggles over the Representation of the "Macquarie Fields Riots"', "Outrageous! Moral Panics in Australia" (Poynting & Morgan eds); Don Weatherburn in 'Riots, Policing and Social Disadvantage', "Current Issues in Criminal Justice" volume 18 number 1; and Rob White in 'Swarming and the Social Dynamics of Group Violence', "Trends and Issues in Criminal Justice" no 326 (AIC). It is a defence of the indignation/moral economy approach developed in Owen's 2006 Article... Since the publication of Stanley Cohen's influential text "Folk Devils and Moral Panics" in 1972 a whole variety of social disorder has been seen through the prism of media construction. Moral panics have become a norm oftheir own in scholarly accounts of social disturbance, as though reporters were themselves creators of moral virtue, and as if society's concerns about disruptions to everyday harmony were born (and subsequently died) with such accounts. Cause for moral panic was, by design, a reaction to events out of the ordinary, received and appropriated by the civic mass through a careful consideration and select representation of the facts.