Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other, Scott Poynting, Greg Noble, Paul Tabar and Jock Collins, Sydney, Institute of Criminology Series, 2004

When Stan Cohen published his research into 'mods' and 'rockers', youth culture and conflict, in 1972 he could not have envisaged the extent to which his conceptualisation and naming of moral panics would become established within English language popular discourse. The term, framing how specific acts or identifiable groups'folk devils' -are represented as posing significant threats to the social order, has become incorporated into everyday language. Partly due to its ubiquity but also because of academic critiques that portray moral panics as an ideological construction rather than a material reality, its currency has been devalued. Yet folk devils are tangible, in their creation, their promotion and, most significantly, in the social and societal reactions they induce.