They want us to be scared

Moral panics matter, but we can work to prevent them. And it starts by calling it out.

I am a longtime Washington, D.C., resident who studies and shapes public language for a living and a mom raising an adolescent here. Recent public depictions of children and youth make me fear the policies that might lie ahead. We're witnessing a daily, disturbing trend in which hyperbolic claims about “roving mobs of wild youth” are gaining traction while proven therapeutic services are unfairly ridiculed as “yoga and ice cream socials.” Typically, in the next breath, proposals to lower the age for trying adolescents as adults—and sending children to adult prisons—are floated as solutions.

Stories about social issues are dress rehearsals for the policies society will adopt. As a linguist, I recognize these calls for harsher policing and sentencing of young people as precisely what they are: fearmongering and scapegoating. The goal is to manufacture fear, providing a convenient justification for repressive approaches.

The demonization of young people has received relatively little public backlash. But we ignore it to our own detriment. We’re already seeing this kind of scapegoating pave the way for regressive youth policies across the country: from Maryland to Tennessee to Louisiana, states are placing young people in the adult criminal legal system at younger ages than before. This runs directly counter to everything we know about healthy adolescent development and what works for young people involved with the criminal legal system.

A clear-eyed analysis of fearmongering tactics and techniques can point us to more effective responses. For example, the knowledge that moral panics tend to follow a predictable pattern can help us diagnose the stage of a panic and do our part to prevent harmful rhetoric from becoming a harmful reality. As citizens, as parents, on social media, at work, or around the kitchen table, we all have opportunities to counter and quell fearmongering and scapegoating of young people.

To effectively deter a moral panic, we must first understand its fuel: the fear of becoming a victim. The most effective approach is to calmly address this fear in ways that don't open the door to harmful policies offering the illusion of "safety" from an exaggerated or even nonexistent threat. This doesn't mean pandering to people who are afraid or patronizing those who express concerns about community safety. It means strategically framing our conversations to address the needs of the moment.

Among the most important things we can do is to reject and redirect depictions of a scapegoated group as a dangerous, deviant “other,” because moral panics only escalate when enough people begin to be afraid. We can notice and name it when young people—particularly and disproportionately Black and immigrant youth—are being painted as a "threat.”

We can counter this race-baiting, nativist framing of “lawless youth” with examples that highlight the reality of adolescence: a period of growth, discovery, and a search for purpose and connection. We can remind our conversational partners—and ourselves—that young people are not a monolith of mayhem but individuals navigating complex lives.

We can also calmly and consistently direct people’s attention to a different problem: the risk of being taken in by falsehoods and fearmongering. It’s important to clearly characterize manufactured ideas as false and harmful. Don't be afraid to name the deceptive tactic. Explicitly explain how false ideas are being presented—whether it's through mischaracterizing statistics, exaggerating isolated incidents, or outright fabricating narratives. But don’t stop there. Connect the tactic to the effects it has on the quality of our public language and the dynamics of our democracy.

For example, it’s not hard to imagine a public figure using emotionally charged content to short-circuit people’s capacities for critical assessment. In such a moment, it can help to say, “I worry that this is an attempt to play on people’s fears. When we are afraid, we’re less likely to think things through, and more willing to tolerate things that we might otherwise consider unfair, unnecessary, or even unacceptable.” This helps create social norms that insist on respectful, honest public language. It doesn’t attack an individual politician, which can sap public will for meaningful, structural democratic reforms. It doesn’t belittle people who have been influenced by fearmongering. Instead, the suggested response points people to the effects of public figures’ ideas and approach, and respectfully invites their critical thinking.

Fearmongering isn't a problem that will simply die down. If we, as a society, cede the discussion to those stoking fear, the public will only hear dystopian depictions of who and what surrounds us. This week, the scapegoats are young people of color in D.C., among others. Next week, it might be someone else. In fact, it likely will be: fearmongers often switch swiftly from one target to another to heighten the general sense of threat. That means we need to be equipped with response strategies that are both reliable and ready-to-go.

Our all-purpose anti-scapegoating toolkit needs the antidotes to fear: clarity and possibility. We can speak with moral clarity even as humanizing, inclusive opinions become less common in public language. The “possibility” part means grounding our policy thinking and civic participation in hope and a vision for a positive future.

Once public figures successfully ignite social anxiety about dangerous youth, the resulting policies are invariably harmful to kids and communities alike. That gives us all a responsibility to call out the language of fear, call people into a conversation about the damage it does, and call for humane, reasonable solutions that are in proportion to the real problems we face.

Julie Sweetland, PhD, is a sociolinguist and a senior advisor at the FrameWorks Institute.

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