Moral Panic in the Industrial Town: Teenage ‘Deviancy’ and Religious Crisis in Central Scotland c. 1968–9
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article argues that Falkirk-a medium-sized industrial town in Central Scotland-became the scene of a localized, yet typical moral panic about teenage deviancy in the late sixties. Located within a broader context of secularization and changes to popular youth cultures, the panic was sparked by a succession of trials. As a result of these, several teenage boys were charged with cannabis possession, and a 19-year-old man was convicted of unlawful intercourse with a 15-year-old girl. Responding to public outrage, local moral entrepreneurs attributed the changing attitudes and behaviours of numbers of young people to a decline in churchgoing and religious piety. With assistance from North American and Canadian evangelicals, they attempted to mobilize a mass religious revival in the style of Billy Graham's 'Crusades'. By seeking to reassert the discursive power of Christianity in the face of moral change, their enterprise sought spiritual remedies to complex social and cultural developments. However, by the time evangelicals arrived, the panic had subsided due to the court case providing a measure of closure, and many churchgoers in Falkirk felt uncertainty about whether a greater role for churches in policing morality was desirable. Thereby, this article challenges literature that has sought to downplay secularization in Britain during the sixties and which emphasizes the influence of discursive change within Anglican Christianity on the sexual and moral revolutions of the 1960s. It contests London-centric conceptions of moral change and demonstrates that this was a product of regionalism as well as cosmopolitanism.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".