Against scapesharking: How sharks can help us test the morals of a moral panic - ABC Religion & Ethics

Australia Broadcast Center

27-06-2025

You can listen to Chris Pepin-Neff discuss the legacy of 'Jaws' with Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens on The Minefield.
Moral panics should not be easy. Moral certainty should be certain. And the experience of a panic need not be entirely without legitimacy. The social and political debate about the acceptability of an issue, action or group is serious and can have lasting implications through the policy process. Some policy issues collapse under their own weight, while others wait until there is a collapse in confidence.
Moral panics in society involve four general actors: rule creators, rule enforcers, rule followers and rule violators. Australia has been uniquely competitive in its embrace of moral panics in recent memory — such as the tragic Azaria Chamberlain case, the Cronulla riots, 'boat people', the photography of Bill Hansen, needles in strawberries, 'Safe Schools' and drag queen story times. It is a disturbing feature of moral panics that some of the things in this list include actual horrors, while others are social distortions.
While the likes of David Marr and Benjamin Law have made important contributions on some of these moral panics, when it comes to shark panics and the Shark Attack Industrial Complex — well, these are my specialty.
For almost 20 years, I have worked on public education for beach safety to reduce the risk of shark bites. Now, let's be clear: sharks do bite people, shark attacks do happen, and these can be fatal. What I'm opposed to is what I've come to call 'scapesharking' — the process whereby a land animal blames marine life for real or perceived negative interactions that it experiences when it intentionally enters the ocean. To scapeshark, in other words, is to blame the ocean when one gets wet.
Aerial images of Bondi Beach and Coogee Beach in Sydney. (James D. Morgan / Contributor / Getty Images)
The time has come to re-story the beach in Australia. There is no such thing as a beach. There is land and there is water. And while I am no fan of binaries, the fact remains that, for the ocean, there is just in or out — the ocean does not know how far out you are.
The moral panic that has tolerated the 'shark control' myth has gone on long enough. For 88 years, shark nets and other tools have been used to tell the public that sharks and people in the ocean are governable. Yet, policy responses to shark bites are mostly political theatre designed to calm the public and boost public confidence, to the benefit of elected officials who are feeling the heat.
It is too shallow an observation to say that politicians do not care about public safety. Politicians do care about public safety. But it is also true that they use the discourse around 'public safety' as a license to kill or cull sharks, whether it helps or not.
Human-shark interactions are largely ungovernable events and family tragedies — but the state makes the situation worse when they sell solutions that will not work, cast blame toward fish, and support retribution that perpetuates movie myths rather than evidence-based science and public education. It is also a fact, however, that the statistical infrequency of shark bites helps sustain the illusion of governability by suggesting that the absence of a shark bite for a long period means that something is working, even when it is not.
The model of a great white shark is decorated with a rainbow sleeve on 9 February 2023 in Sydney, which was hosting WorldPride. (Photo by Brendon Thorne / Getty Images)
The moral panic can be found both in the ready target and 'folk devil' that sharks make, the ease with the policy process moves to punish them and the lack of consequences for politicians in fabricating the entire outcome. Moral panics are too easy, and the accountability is too slow. A moral panic should have more consequences than a weather report that predicts rain on a sunny day. When a state or federal government chooses the easier and familiar path because it is easier and familiar, we are all in trouble.
The public should be aware that government attempts to prevent shark bites are not about preventing shark bites generally. It is more about preventing certain frequencies of shark bites in certain locations to certain kinds of people. Indeed, these programs are about preventing specific conditions that produce political penalties on government officials. This includes clusters of shark bites in a short period of time and a defined area, fatal incidents on children, shark bites near tourist locations, and shark bites near populated areas with high media exposure.
Shark 'control' programmes — including shark nets — and other forms of new age quackery from the 1930s that have been perpetuated into a commercial industry for 'public safety are like so many other slippery 'medicinal' oils. But the fact remains that shark nets are the wacky healing crystals of beach safety. The only difference is that incantations do not attract sharks to the beach, so they are harmless. Shark nets do attract sharks toward beaches when they catch fish that struggle to get away.
Shark net at Cottesloe beach in Western Australia. (Dobe / iStock / Getty Images)
Repetition is not a replacement for reliability. A pattern of repeated policy behaviours does not lower the standard for accepting the truth as truth or obscure the presence of incomplete information about public safety. Repetition without reflection creates a social and political dependency where the beach is seen as property — a domesticated recreation spot rather than a wild ocean ecosystem. And on this beach, sharks are seen as intruders. The shark is in the part of the ocean where it does not belong.
Therefore, there is a need to push back on the complacency that makes moral panics — and shark panics — escape a simple test of veracity. However, the willingness to believe something that exists based on the social and political desirability of it to exist, reinforces the idea that the beach is some kind of front-lawn to nation — an economic bounty that has valuable natural resources to the extent that the resources can be controlled. And here we see the political benefit and necessity of scapesharking.
Crowds run out of the water in a scene from the film 'Jaws', directed by Steven Spielberg. (Photo by Universal / Getty Images)
Controlling shark bites near the beach is important in order to control the public illusion. Shark bites represent a deviation from the illusion that the beach is not the wild and belongs to the citizenry in a kind of manifest destiny — where all beaches are safe, and all sharks are dangerous.
But this contends with the real-life experience of people having actually been to the beach — this is essential because the beachgoer needs to believe the beach is safe in order to sustain the illusion because of their fear of sharks and the latent awareness and vulnerability of a land animal in the ocean. Here, what I've called 'the Jaws effect' is key because it represents the political transformation where something that is 'more fiction than real' becomes 'more real than fiction' to serve political purposes.
The beach is an illustration of danger and vulnerability, and human-shark interactions are a symptom. Public safety comes from education about the environment and personal responsibility when you enter the wild. The moral panics around sharks are a distraction from the real risks that come from politicians telling people the beach is safe so they can build more hotels and win re-election.
The moral of the story is that all we need to do is treat the beach like the bush. All Australians know how to do that, and we don't blame the bush for being the bush.
Chris Pepin-Neff is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Sydney. Their research interests include agenda-setting, emotions and public policy, and LGBTQ+ politics. They are the author of Tolerable Inequality: Understanding Public Policy and LGBTQ+ Politics and Flaws: Shark Bites and Emotional Public Policymaking.