Folk devil
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A folk devil is a person or group of people who are portrayed in folklore or the media as outsiders and deviant, and who are blamed for crimes or other sorts of social problems. It seems people turn against some person or people, seen as outsiders and possibly subject to Deviant behavior. When we reject outsiders we can convince ourselves we are better than the deviants seen as folk devils.
The pursuit of folk devils frequently intensifies into a mass movement that is called a moral panic. When a moral panic is in full cry, the folk devils are the subject of loosely organized but pervasive campaigns of hostility through gossip and the spreading of urban legends. The mass media sometimes gets in on the act, or attempts to create new folk devils to create controversies that will increase their audience. Sometimes the campaign against the folk devil influences a nation's politics, and can sometimes result in ill-considered legislation.
The concept of the folk devil was introduced by sociologist Stanley Cohen in 1972, in his study Folk Devils and Moral Panics, which analysed media controversies concerning Mods and Rockers in the United Kingdom of the 1950s. However, the basic pattern of agitations against folk devils can be seen in the history of witchhunts and similar manias of persecution; in the long history of anti-Semitism, which frequently targeted Jews with allegations of dark, murderous practices, the best known of which is the infamous blood libel; or for that matter, in the Roman persecution of Christians that blamed the military reverses suffered by the Roman Empire on the Christians' abandonment of paganism.
More recent folk devils have included the McCarthyite persecution of alleged Communists; Satanists and allegations of Satanic ritual abuse; blaming videogames and violence, Goths, and other youth subcultures or musical genres for the Columbine massacre.