Rumors began to spread of children in different parts of the world having been found dead, having committed suicide per Momo’s instructions. Needless to say, none of those reports ever was actually confirmed.
This brings us to now, the start of March, 2019. Finally it is starting to dawn on everyone that just like the Blue Whale challenge before it and several other things of its kind, this Momo Challenge appears to be a hoax. In other words, everyone was all worked up about nothing at all. So no harm done. Right?
Wrong. The Momo Challenge wasn’t real, but people’s reactions to the rumors were very real. Reactions of this sort are a phenomenon known as “moral panic”, which Wikipedia defines as “a feeling of fear spread among a large number of people that some evil threatens the well-being of society”. moral panic is something that does indeed have consequences. It is true that the destruction of the Mother Bird sculpture from which the face of this alleged Momo was taken was for reasons unrelated to the hysteria, but the artist received plenty of death threats that were indeed related to the hysteria.
Death threats are, of course, no laughing matter – but as serious as they are, the consequences of this instance of moral panic are tiny compared to those of some other moral panics that have occurred throughout history. For instance, there was that Satanic Panic back in the 1980s that resulted in people being given lengthy prison sentences for having committed Satanic Ritual Abuse. Such lengthy sentences, of course, would have been well deserved were it not for the fact that it is unlikely that the abuses that they were sentenced for ever actually occurred.
And then there was the mother of all moral panics that first emerged in the Middle Ages – the Blood Libel, which alleged that Jews were abducting Christian children and murdering them in order to drain their blood, which the rumor claimed was an important ingredient in Passover Matza. Of course, anyone who knows anything about Judaism and Jewish culture knows how ludicrous the Blood Libel is, but that didn’t prevent many Jews from being put to death for alleged ritual murders that never occurred because they never were a thing. Furthermore, as repeatedly as it has been debunked, there are still people today who believe the Blood Libel and its variants, such as a Saudi Arabian newspaper who back in 2002 claimed that Jews use the blood of Christians and Muslims in the filling of the pastries eaten during Purim.
And, of course, let us not forget the more modern Restroom Libel that is a constant thorn in the side of transgender people in the United States, myself included. As a matter of fact, the mistreatment of transgender people that it fuels is one of the reasons why I not only had to leave the town in which I grew up, but don’t even feel safe going down there for visits.
So, one might wonder – if moral panic causes such devastation, why do so many people keep falling for them over and over and over again? The answer is that averting moral panic simply isn’t a task that human instinct is particularly equipped to handle. When people in society, parents especially, hear of something that could be a threat to their children, they don’t stop and do calculations as to how real the threat is. They just roll right into action and do what they feel must be done to protect the child.
Do I blame people for this? Well, not for the part about wanting to do anything to protect a child. I do not have any children, but I do have a nephew, and I would be devastated if anything bad ever happened to him. I can’t even imagine how devastated my sister (for whom he is not a nephew, but a son) would be. Without a doubt, such a strong commitment to protecting the young people of society is a good thing.
But what about the leap-before-you-look approach that so many people take to the task of protecting our young people? Well – that I also don’t entirely blame people for that either, but not because it is a good thing – rather, because it isn’t entirely their fault. In the stone age environment in which human beings evolved, the typical potential threat to children would be anything from a large animal rummaging through the camp to some other emergency for which every second counted. If people stopped to evaluate the severity of the threat and the most rational course of action, there would be a good chance that before they finished their calculations they would find out first-hand how significant the threat was in a manner that they would prefer not to, like a precious child being mauled to death.
Do things that threaten our young people today have that same second-to-second nature? Well, some of them indeed do – but those second-to-second emergencies are not the stuff that moral panic is made of, and should in fact be easy to differentiate from the stuff that moral panic is made of. For example, if my nephew were about to hurt himself (which I hope would never happen, but you never know) I wouldn’t want the adult on the scene to start doing calculations on the probability that he would actually go through with it. I would want the adult on the scene to immediately take action to protect my nephew from himself. But you know what else I wouldn’t want the adult on the scene to waste time doing? I wouldn’t want that adult to waste time worrying whether my nephew were on the verge of self-harm because of instructions from Momo or because of any of the far more likely reason why a young person might attempt to inflict self-harm.
The time to delve into what would motivate a young person to inflict self-harm is not until after the immediate emergency is dealt with. Once you get to the part where you have time to ponder what motivated the young person to attempt self-harm, you have gotten to the part where you have time to ponder it rationally.
Of course, one might argue, when someone enters a restroom that your precious child is in, that is one of those times that you have only moments to assess whether or not that person entering the restroom is a threat. However, while your evaluation of the threat that an individual person poses might be a second-to-second thing, without a doubt, a lot of the shortcuts that you take in this assessment process are formulated well in advance. Gender-segregated restrooms are not a concept that is hard-coded into anybody’s DNA. If you see the person entering the restroom as a threat to your child on account of that person being transgender, it is undoubtedly because you have spent the last six months psyching yourself up to see transgender people as a restroom threat. Someone who has spent the last six months seeing transgender people as people just like anyone else trying to make it in this world would be far more disposed to seeing a transgender woman entering the restroom that their daughter is in as just another person who needs to pee, maybe check her makeup, and leave. Which path you took during those six months was not by any means a moment-to-moment risk assessment, but a matter that you had more than enough time to approach rationally.
But you might wonder – even if a threat to your child’s safety is very tiny and remote, wouldn’t you still want to take it seriously? After all, where your child’s safety is concerned, it is better to be safe than sorry, isn’t it?
Well, the answer is that, sad as it is, is that there is no path available to you that is guaranteed to be safe that bears no chance at all of leaving you sorry. If the devastation that a moral panic might reek on the children of other people who love their children as much as you love your own isn’t enough to restrain you – then consider the risk that the effects of irrational hysteria might boomerang onto your own child.
In the case of many moral panics, the group that you would inflict harm on might be a group that your child could someday surprise you by also being a member of that group. Of course, that particular danger isn’t a serious risk for every instance of moral panic – but even when it isn’t, by indulging in moral panic, you are still contributing to a mentality in society that could manifest in another form (one that neither of us can predict) to which your child could indeed be a victim.
And if you aren’t scared enough by any of these potential consequences on your child should you indulge in moral panic, then consider this. What if, while you are so busy fixating on a non-existent threat to your child’s safety, your child wanders onto a far more real threat and you are too distracted to protect your child? Will you ever be able to forgive yourself if that happens?
Wonderful. I HAVE to share it.