Day Care as Battleground: using moral panic to locate the front lines

Abstract

While moral panic has been studied from a range of perspectives, much of this work underestimates its numerous spatial dimensions. Discussion of how place, space or location might inform a particular public moral crisis, or how moral panic is a phenomenon with significant socio-spatial causes and effects, has been left to those interested in how space and place inform social relations, to add a critical geographic perspective to moral panic analyses. Drawing on a recent episode of moral panic around a childcare centre in Sydney, this paper shows how moral panic can be used to locate the current sites of social change.

Keywords:

• Moral panic
• family
• sexuality
• parenting
• media