Women's Studies International Forum 40 (2013) 230-242 - Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Women's Studies International Forum WOMEN'S STUDIES INTERNATIONAL FORUM ELSEVIER journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif Appropriating the rights of women: Moral panics, victims and exclusionary agendas in domestic and cross-borders sex crimes CrossMark Selda Dagistanli a,*, Sanja Milivojevicb a School of Social Sciences and Psychology, University of Western Sydney, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia b School of Social Sciences, Morven Brown Building Room G44, University of New South Wales, NSW 2052, Australia ARTICLE INFO Available online 27 September 2013 SYNOPSIS In this article we focus on moral panic driven publicity and policy surrounding female victims of sexual assault and sex trafficking in Australian and international contexts. The case studies comprise a series of racialised gang rapes in Sydney, Australia between 2000 and 2004, and anti-sex trafficking campaigns around major sporting events including the 2006 World Cup in Germany and 2012 London Olympics. While heightened public awareness around the sexual victimisation of women is welcome, we also critique the sort of attention that these cases and their victims receive, questioning whether increased publicity and knee-jerk policies around certain sex crimes is genuinely based on the realities of women's victimisation. We seek to demonstrate that moral panic driven attention for victims neither eases their suffering nor necessarily bolsters their rights while interrogating who does come to benefit from such "feminist" causes, and how we should begin to re-think our engagement with women's victimisation. c 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction In a recent collection on contemporary moral panics, Stan Cohen (2011) expressed a concern to distance the politics of moral panic from its negative associations with conservative hysteria over relatively routine events or disempowered minor- ities. In seeking a less judgemental delineation of the concept, Cohen (2011: 240) referred to the possibility of 'good' alongside 'bad' moral panics, suggesting that the former bring to our attention legitimate and justifiable topics of concern, issues with which we, as 'sociological critics of moral panics', should sympathise. While the notion of a 'good moral panic' may seem paradoxical to some (Critcher, 2011; David, Rohloff, Petley, & Hughes, 2011), it does raise some significant questions around which social issues are judged as 'worthy' of moral outrage, who judges them to be so, and whether social scientists can really claim to be disinterested observers equipped with the ability to label some displays of heightened moral outrage to be * Corresponding author. overreaction. When we, as social scientists, call some social reactions a 'moral panic' we politically distance ourselves from the 'moral entrepreneurs' - such as the popular media, politicians, law enforcement and other criminal justice agen- cies or indeed, any agent we hold responsible as fanning the 'hysteria' - while at the same time leaving unquestioned a self-proclaimed right to label such reactions as hysterical. This has led Cohen to ask "whose side" we are on when we judge society's responses as melodramatic and reactionary. This certainly seems a pertinent question in the context