The Jay report was a report that investigated many child abuse cases in 204 and on August the 26th 204, the Report was published, It was over a 6-year duration. This report recognized that around 400 children were likely to have been victims of Child Sexual Exploitation or child abuse. As a result of this staggering number, the publication of the report drew a lot of attention to the town of Rotherham considering many of the abuse cases were in Rotherham, which, in turn, created a moral panic. In this essay, I am going to explore the media response to the findings of the Jay Report and the moral panic surrounding its findings. I will be examining in-depth news articles and looking out for widespread and frequent themes within the articles and information I perceive.
The term moral panic emerged in 973 by Cohen; he defined a moral panic as a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media (Cohen 973:28). Soci
al work and child abuse have often been a significant moral panic because child abuse and neglect are a major issue in society because children are just innocent and helpless. (Clapton and Smith 205). For example, there was the huge news story of Baby P with Peter Connolly (2007), who was a very young boy being neglected and abused by both his parents which left him bruised and battered, and eventually he sadly was murdered in the end. One of the main themes I noted was the fact that many of the articles I examined stated that social workers and other local authorities were rubbish and didnt help out much with child abuse cases, therefore another significant moral panic was about the fact that social workers didnt prioritize these cases, like with the baby P case, the social workers got much of the blame for not realizing soon enough what was going on even though it was obvious something wasnt right in their household but arguably, they ignored the problem and were blind to the abuse that was happening to baby P (and other abuse scandals) behind closed doors.