Assess the extent to which the mass media cause the amplification of deviance.

J. Young used the interactionalist perspective to explain 'the role of the police as amplifiers of deviancy, negotiators of reality and translators of fantasy. Young explained the special role of the police and courts in amplifying deviance associated with drug abuse. The following diagram, based on Young's work, can be used to illustrate the role of the media or the role of the police in amplifying deviance.

E. Lemert distinguished primary deviance, which nearly everyone committed and usually went unnoticed or had no consequence, from secondary deviance, which resulted in labelling the person as a deviant. He argued that social reaction could be a cause of secondary deviance rather than a response to it. He applied this approach to show how social reaction amplified mental illness and stuttering.

S. Hall provided a Marxist context for the moral panic about mugging in the 1970's. He supports the interactionalist approach described above but adds that the moral panic, which falsely identified street crime as black crime with white victims, distracted the public from the economic crisis. It divided the working class on ethic lines and legitimized.

One recent example of a moral panic was the case of the James Bulger murder in the early 1990s. Two 11-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables abducted James from a shopping precinct in Liverpool. They walked him two miles through crowed streets to a railway line, where from essaybank.co.uk they inflicted massive injuries resulting in his death. This deviant act committed by fellow children dominated newspaper headlines and created a panic and outrage. The murder was portrayed by the media as a horrific act, which symbolized the degeneration of modern British society, despite the fact that statistically such murders were extremely rare and the UK, though not unique. When Mary Bell killed at age 11 murdered two toddlers in 1968 there was no such moral panic, and seemed to be largely ignored by the press. The media used the Bulger case to symbolise all that was wrong with Britain, they focused on the difference between innocence and evil and why we as a society had allowed it happen, it suggested the increase of public indifference, lowering family values and increasing isolation, generating massive public guilt and predicting a breakdown in the cohesive fabric of society itself.

Fuelled by the press reports, people searched for reasons why this might have happened. There was increasing focus on child crime, this group's stigmatisation was further fuelled by police claims that juvenile crime was on the increase, and young people were out of control, flouting the law due to insufficient penalties for their misdemeanours. This prompted demands for tighter controls, curfews for young people and stricter laws. However, other statistics showed that juvenile crime had indeed dropped, these were dismissed by the authorities because claiming the figures a misrepresentation and only appeared so due to a reduction in numbers in the juvenile population.

Functionalism does discuss moral panics and the effects of social reaction. However, the approach is structuralist (rather than interactionalist) and there is, as expected, an emphasis on how consensus can be maintained (rather than on underlying conflict between groups).

Durkheim saw the function of social reaction against crime and criminals as a way of reinforcing the collective consciousness. K. Erikson followed Durkheim and argued that the witch hunts conducted by the authorities in Puritan New England helped to clarify and reinforce norms of behaviour. The moral panic was an invention as the Puritan society was very conformist and displayed little real deviance which could be transformed into a moral panic.