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Today we are now able to access a wide variety of media interactive
technologies which have completely revolutionised the ways in which we
are able to access and receive information. The use of television, which
now offers 24 hour news channels,satellite, telecommunications,
including mobile phones, the internet (websites and blogs), radio and
newspapers, have completely reconstructed our concepts of time and space
as we are now able to access first-hand information from around the
world. These new technologies have also completely restructured the way
in which the media ‘does’ news reporting. Now the media is able to
present global news stories to a wide variety of viewers from a range of
respective cultural backgrounds. The media’s ability to transmit live
images through satellite to an ever-present audience has completely
changed our perspective on news reporting.
This relative ‘revolution’ in communication technologies, systems and
media structures has also been met with a protracted growth in media
discourses towards crime.
In the modern context, crime has continued to represent a considered
proportion of news reporting, with dedicated crime reporters giving
detailed, up to the minute accounts of recent cases on Television news
shows. Newspapers give ever increasing column inches to the latest crime
headline and internet websites provide sources of information and
dedicated blogs for members of the public to indulge.
We have also seen a growth in both fictional crime programmes and crime
documentaries, both on Television and through Film, with film-makers
following Police on their latest case, ‘cop’ shows gaining high TV
ratings, and the shows like Crimewatch becoming a regular part of
British evening viewing.
With these developments, we have also seen a growing sophisticated body
of criminological analysis which has examined the media-crime
relationship. These analyses have continued to reflect upon how crime
news has been presented through the media, often focusing upon how it is
constructed and to what purpose the media has reported them. What we
have subsequently been left with is a rich tapestry of literature and
examinations which have continued to represent that the relationship
between crime and the media has become as central to criminological
discourses as its usual focus on law and order institutions, social
control mechanisms, and social deviancy.
For instance, in focusing upon the media and its relation to crime we
should perhaps ask ourselves whether the mass media presentation of
crime is real or a distortion? How does the mass media construct crime
and why does it focus on certain cases? What does media discourse
reflect within the wider public context? And does the media influence
public perceptions of crime? Although such questions are forever present
within any examination of the relationship between the media and crime,
such questions are often relevant to contrasting theoretical and
epistemological approaches to understanding media and crime.
A recent examination upon the media’s reporting of crime has seen a
considered proportion of its time and resources focusing upon child
victimisation cases. Although this may still pale in comparison with the
reporting of other forms of victimisation, child victimisation has found
itself occupying a more central role in media discourses towards crime.
As equally important as this, media discourses on child victimisation,
have continued to inform public ideas about crime and social reactions
towards crime. Consequently, what we have been left with is a growing
public debate about child victims, with ever increasing measures to
protect children within the public sphere.
Although media depictions of child victim cases have forever remained an
ever-present within media reporting, a more casual shift towards media
reporting of child victims grew during the 1990s following high profile
cases including James Bulger, the crimes of Fred and Rose West, and a
number of cases relating to child sex abuse in care homes, which helped
to capture the public imagination. Despite this relative shift in media
reporting, a more collective representation of child victimisation has
not been realised. Instead, the media has continued to show it’s
pre-dominance towards child victim cases of sex offences, abuse,
abduction and murder. This focus on highly emotive cases has
consequently only sought in playing upon existing public anxieties.
The media’s continued pre-occupation with such extraordinary cases is,
on reflection, a largely pragmatic one, given the relative emotiveness
and shock-value of the crime leading to widespread public interest and
higher viewing figures, listeners and sales figures.
However, such analysis continues to underplay and devalue the very
important role that social ideologies play in the selection,
construction, dissemination and overall discourses of child victim news
stories. Central to this focus is a respective understanding of the
media as a reflection of its own pre-existing ideologies through its
selection of individual cases and presentation of particular details,
values, voices and ultimate solutions to each case.
Few recent cases in living memory have received the high level of public
attention and media frenzy than that of the most recent case of
Madeleine
McCann. This story of a young British girl who, in May 2007,
when she vanished from her parent’s holiday
apartment,
captured the public imagination and was met with virtually unprecedented
media attention and reporting. The media’s near hedonistic reporting of
the case, its round the clock updates on TV news channels, the continued
presence of the story on newspaper front-pages and the considered
advertisement of the international campaign to find missing Madeleine
keeps the story within the public sphere and marked it out as one of the
most significant ‘signal crime’ within the 21st century to
date.
On reflection, the media attention is hardly surprising given its usual
pre-occupation with child abductions, child murders, and possible sex
offences. Historically, the media has continued to focus upon possible
cases of stranger danger, especially if they are seen as more
extraordinary within usual depictions of crime cases.
The case of
Sarah
Payne, a small British girl, who, in 2000, was murdered near
her home in Sussex,
has become as big a part of the collective public conscience as any case
which has proceeded or preceded it since. The murder, committed by a
convicted sex offender who had been released back into the community,
led to widespread public outrage and culminated in a ‘naming and
shaming’ campaign led by the News of the World, in which details and
photos of convicted sex offenders were printed in their pages. It also
led to a nationwide public campaign to introduce ‘Sarah’s Law’, a
community notification scheme, which ensures that the public are
notified when a convicted sex offender is released into their community.
In 2002 the issue of stranger danger and sex offenders in the community
once again rose to prominence within the media following the tragic
deaths of
Jessica
Chapman and Holly Wells in a small Cambridgeshire town called
Soham. Their deaths, again highlighting the perceived threat of stranger
danger, was met with a collective outpouring of public grief and high
media attention with round the clock updates of the case, extended
column inches in newspapers, and the inclusion of expert analysis.
The media, with ever growing public interest, continued to use
traditional discursive practices, a relative ‘story narrative’ in which
individuals became actors on a stage, each detailing their experiences
of the case for public consumption.
The considered media attention given to the murders of Jessica and
Holly, the lurid details of the background of the man charged with their
murders, Ian Huntley, and the media’s detailing of systemic failings
within the Police Force and Social Services, all led to growing pressure
to introduce reforms to protect children in the future. The resulting
inquiry, the Bichard enquiry, was ultimately a product of such
pressures, and introduced extensive reforms, including a national
information system for Police in England
and Wales,
and the new Independent Safeguarding registration scheme which comes
into force in July this year for those who wish to work with children.
Although the cases of Madeleine, Sarah, Jessica and Holly, stand alone
in their relative emotiveness, collective public interest and media
attention, the obvious common threads in the media’s construction and
discourses towards each case are plain to see. Given that each girl was
white, photogenic, from a respectable middle class home, and was the
victim of a stranger (thus was a prime example of stranger danger), only
colluded in making each case equally more newsworthy and the victim more
‘deserving’ of media attention. Fundamental to the media’s selection,
construction and consequent dissemination of each story were underlying
conservative ideologies with regards to family structures, victims and
stranger danger.
The media’s continued pre-occupation with the threat of stranger danger,
its continued focus on victims of strangers, has only sought to
re-affirm pre-existing conservative ideologies within the public sphere.
It does this by firstly constructing an image of the ideal family (or
individual) that is under threat from a demonised ‘other’, an alienated
individual, who lives in the margins and no longer plays a central role
in ‘normal’ family life. The contrast is consequently centred upon the
family who offer security and sanctity through parental responsibility,
good homes and discipline, and those who no longer abide by these rules
and seek to destroy it. Secondly, the media re-affirms conservative
ideologies by focusing on cases, which deflect attention away from the
more obvious sites of child victimisation and thus underplay or ignore
the fact that sexual violence exists- indeed, is endemic- in all
communities and that sexual abuse of children and infanticide are more
likely to occur within the family than at the hands of an evil stranger.
In the 21st century, new communication technologies have
revolutionised the ways in which information and news stories can be
disseminated to the public. However, despite these new forms of
disseminating information, what is clear with recent cases of child
victims, is that the media will still select and construct the cases
through dominant existing conservative ideologies.
The media’s presentations of high profile, emotive cases of child
victims, have in essence been able to construct, replicate and re-affirm
conservative ideologies within the public sphere.
Mark Williams-Thomas
April 2010 |
