Stanley Cohen

Stanley Cohen was a South African-born British sociologist and criminologist who coined the term moral panic in his 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics, a study of the media and public reaction to clashes between mods and rockers subcultures on English seaside towns in the 1960s. He argued that societies periodically identify a group or condition as a threat to social values, amplified and simplified by the media into folk devils, provoking a disproportionate public and institutional response that reveals more about the anxieties of the wider society than about the actual scale of the threat. Cohen later turned to the sociology of human rights violations and organized denial, notably in States of Denial (2001), examining how individuals, organizations, and states come to know about atrocities and suffering while still managing not to fully acknowledge or act on that knowledge.