Figure 4. Relationship of offender to victim within crime category, Los Angeles Times reports on sexual predators, — Further analysis of article text demonstrates that graphic verbal descriptions accompany media emphasis on violent crime. Another story lists the names and details of crimes committed by sexual predators in Minnesota:.
Richard Enebak committed at least 37 sexual assaults between and , many on young girls. In one rape, a year-old girl suffered internal injuries, severe cuts and broken vertebrae that left her paralyzed. Charles Stone, a pedophile, admitted molesting as many as young girls. Donald Martenies savagely raped a 7-year-old girl, then sewed up her wounds without anesthesia. Kuebelbeck Graphic depictions of violence against children in particular appear regularly throughout the sample Chu ; Louise Roug and Haldane Thus, from the start, articles that mention sexual predators emphasize violent content and narratives.
This is not necessarily surprising, but further analyses into how violent coverage intersects with age and gender of victims demonstrate important framing distinctions in these areas. Among coverage of violent crime, articles focus more frequently on child victims than on adult victims. Figure 5 shows that articles are more likely to cover child victims in comparison with adults within three of four violent crime categories. Nonsexual physical assault or abuse is the only category for which the percentage of adult victims exceeds that of children.
Articles discussing sexual assault, although still featuring more child than adult victims, also feature the highest percentage of adult victims among any crime category and are most likely to mention both adult and child victims in the same article. In addition, although national crime data on children under age 12 are limited, official BJS indicate that only 34 percent of child sexual assault victims in the United States are under age 12 Greenfeld , while representing 57 percent of the news sample Table 1.
Figure 5. Victim age percentage within crime category, Los Angeles Times reports on sexual predators, — In addition, media emphasize large age gaps between victims and offenders. Overall, the sample is evenly divided between offenders above age 40 and those below 40, with a slightly greater emphasis on the former Table 1. Aside from two years and , this focus on older offenders remains consistent throughout the study time period Figure 6.
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When victim age is cross-referenced with offender age, articles are most likely to mention the youngest category of victims in conjunction with offenders above age 58 percent of articles about victims under age 12 mention offenders above age 40 Figure 7. Figure 6. Figure 7. Percentage of offender age category by victim age category, Los Angeles Times reports on sexual predators, to Results of an additional logit analysis also suggest a potential correlation between coverage of sex crimes, murder, and child victims.
Articles that mentioned child murder were 1. In contrast, articles that mentioned adult murder were not more likely to mention adult rape in fact, they were less likely to mention it. Yet in actual cases of child murder between and , only 3 percent of child murders occurred with or preceded a sex offense Jenkins Several articles also assume or imply, without supporting evidence, that child molestation precedes murder or abuse.
In a story about a different child assault, a man attacks and beats a 5-year old and runs away. However, there was no evidence in the Klaas case that she was sexually assaulted. Regardless, the jury found Allen guilty of murder with special circumstances, including lewd acts against a child, and sentenced him to death.
The emphasis on violence against children comes largely at the expense of adult women. The majority of adult victims in the sample are women Table 1 , which closely matches national data on victimization showing that from to , women made up 91 percent of reported sexual assault victimizations Barnett-Ryan et al.
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Although the overall proportion of female to male victims remains relatively constant across crime categories in the sample data when both gender and crime category are mentioned Figure 8 , this relationship breaks down when age is introduced into the analysis. Figure 9 , which examines the gender division of victims within the three sample age categories, shows that female victims are most likely to be above age 18, making up 81 percent of the victims in that age category, while coverage of child victims in the sample is more evenly divided by gender.
Among victims under age 12, 49 percent were female and 40 percent male. This age category also had the highest percentage of articles that mentioned both male and female victims. When the child victim age categories are combined, female victims make up 54 percent of victims under age Figure 8. Victim gender percentage within crime category, Los Angeles Times reports on sexual predators, to Figure 9.
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Victim gender percentage within age category, Los Angeles Times reports on sexual predators, to Relative to national statistics, the sample demonstrates a greater focus on male victims in every age category. BJS data indicates that only 27 percent of sexual crime victims under age 12 are male sample data indicated 40 percent , 18 percent of victims aged 12 to 17 are male sample data indicated 38 percent , and 5 percent of victims aged 18 and older are male sample data indicated 13 percent. Nationally, women make up 82 percent of victims under age 18; my news sample shows almost 30 percent fewer women victims than that Snyder Articles present such victims as neither universally representative nor unequivocally innocent.
Another story about a rape case describes how the attorney for the defendant attempted to seek a mistrial because one of the victims lied about her past as an adult film star Krikorian In contrast to universalizing narratives of child victims, these narratives set adult women aside as different. Discussions of adult victims often arise from trial coverage, where articles detail court cases surrounding rapes and other sexual crimes. These examples demonstrate the intersection of law and media: article coverage reflects the content of legal cases, but in the process, it repeats legal narratives that link the credibility of adult and even older teenage victims to their sexuality.
He is a liar and a violent predator. Are you going to convict these men on [his word]? Such representations emphasize the ways in which male victims particularly of male offenders fail to live up classic ideals of masculinity. The law named for one child is now for every child. There is no greater right than the right to raise children in peace and safety. Bornemeier The perils to children are many, not the least of which are adults who prey upon their innocence and, in ways we can only imagine, damage them forever in the blush of infancy, like stomping a flower before it blooms.
Martinez Correspondingly, articles use young child victims as a rhetorical tool to emphasize the monstrosity of sexual offenses. Richard Ramirez: The Night Stalker [who raped and murdered at least two children under the age of ten, in addition to many adults]. Sexual predators should be put away for life. This comment not only argues that sexual predation is on par with murder, but applies this term to child victims exclusively, appealing to the public for their protection.
Such appeals feed into discourse that justifies physical violence against sexual predators in the name of protecting children. A local woman speaking in an article about a sexual predator who opted to be castrated in exchange for early release from prison stated,. So what? Even if [the operation] does cleanse him of deviant thoughts, he still has to be punished for his crimes. Marosi In addition to legally sanctioned punishments, several articles also mention the physical assault of sexual predators by everyday citizens: vigilante justice.
One discusses the neighborhood apprehension of a man who exposed himself outside of a Roman Catholic high school: two men caught him and held him while the schoolgirls kicked and punched him, ultimately sending him to the hospital Reuters In one article, a community advocate is asked for her thoughts on the ethics of civil confinement of sex offenders in mental hospitals, and she responds,.
To keep these monsters in a hospital is pretty compassionate to me. Bond That many sexual predators were themselves victims of childhood sexual abuse at some point in time does not appear to make them worthy of sympathy; articles present the categories of victim and offender as mutually exclusive.
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These results indicate that media coverage of sexual predators up until recently focuses most frequently on sexual assaults committed by repeat offenders, and containing multiple victims and kidnappings and murders committed by strangers. Coverage also overemphasizes crimes against children under age 12, both relative to crimes against adults in the sample and relative to the incidence of crimes against children reported statistically.
Narratives within these articles are graphically violent and often sexual, discussing male children almost 50 percent of the time. In contrast, the media discuss adult women less and, when they do, frame these victims, even victims of serial rape, as responsible for their victimization. Coverage of offenders falls into overlapping predator tropes, both of violent criminals and child perverts.
Although it may initially appear unsurprising that media coverage of sexual predators focuses on sexual assault, results demonstrate that this coverage also focuses heavily on murder and kidnapping, which, statistically speaking, rarely overlap with sexual assault Jenkins In contrast to past research, stranger offenders are most likely to be found in kidnapping and murder stories, not stories about sexual assault Wilson and Silverman These results indicate a general conflation of violence with sexual violence in the case of sexual predators, in effect expanding the range of crimes that constitutes sexually predatory behavior Levine In addition, articles about sexual predators, in both covering various types of violence against younger children and narrating stories of child victims in particular ways, produce aged understandings of victims.
Although child and adult victims receive equal amounts of total coverage during the entire study period, in years when articles focus more on child victims, they focus less on adult victims and vice versa.
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This indicates that media choose between adult and child victims when determining which vulnerable victims to present, rather than, for example, focusing on stories of both adult and child victims during any particular year Lynch When articles do focus on younger victims, they tend to combine various components of violent crime murder with multiple victims, murder and rape, kidnapping by strangers, etc.
The association found between child murder and child sexual assault in Los Angeles Times coverage, combined with associated narratives of graphic violence, further suggests that the media sexualize both crimes against children and child victims. Graphically describing violence against children while speculating about its sexual intent eroticizes attraction to children while condemning it.
Child murders in this context inevitably become sex crimes, as the case of Polly Klaas demonstrates. Levine pointed out that this same conflation occurred in the abduction and murder of child victim Adam Walsh who was not mentioned in the sample. Media coverage of sexual predators, by reporting in this manner, produces its very own narratives of violence and child sexualization. As the Walsh case demonstrates, these narratives have far-reaching impacts, some of them legislative. Media coverage in this instance is also gendered. Although the vast majority of adult victims in the sample are women, almost 50 percent of victims under age 12 in the sample are boys.
Given that victims younger than age 12 are almost always mentioned in conjunction with offenders above age 40 in the sample, this finding also supports notions that pedophiles are most likely to be men who offend against boys, which is not statistically the case Kitzinger , and that the term sexual predator is, in many ways, synonymous with the term pedophile. Given the severity of crimes covered in the sample murder and serial rape, for example , framing of adult women victims as unsympathetic in this case remains somewhat surprising and indicates that the threshold for victim understanding and empathy has limitations for this group that it does not appear to have for children Quinn et al.
Masculinity adds an additional layer to constructions of victim legitimacy.
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To the extent that adult men victims fail to live up to masculine, heterosexual ideals, their victim status is devalued similarly to that of adult women. Yet it is notable and unmentioned in previous research that the narratives from which discussions of adult victims arise in the sample are, most frequently, legal ones. In recounting the trials of rapists, articles frequently detail defense attorney strategies that sexualize adult victims to undermine their credibility. In so doing, they introduce victim sexual history as a factor that impacts victim innocence, which simply never occurs in the case of child victims.
Although past research notes that media reproduction of political and legal images can define criminal subcultures Ferrell and Websdale , this result suggests that it can do so for victims as well. Future research should examine the extent to which recent events are leading to shifts in victim narratives.
Recent work by Saguy suggests that French cultural attitudes about sexual consent and coercion shifted in response to news media reporting about the sexual assault charges brought against presidential candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Changing news media and cultural discussions about what constitutes legitimate victimization and victimhood may thus result in shifting constructions of sexually predatory behavior. These changing news media discussions may also result in shifting constructions of sexual predator offenders.
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Narratively, it is this combination of vulnerable victims with perceived acts of extreme sexual violence that justifies violent treatment of sexual predators at both the popular and state level. Within this dialogue, sexual predators remain mostly white men. Lancaster As such, children may represent the ultimate symbolic victims, a universally accessible, ideal, and blameless victim frame Best ; Christie But will narratives about protecting women have the same impact?
Inasmuch as adult victims can be impugned, it seems doubtful that they will ever have the same universal appeal.
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These results have important substantive and methodological implications. Although this study cannot definitively say whether that is the case, this area warrants further research and analysis. Methodologically, this study shows that the partial nature of much previous work on media and crime can conceal valuable information about victims and offenders. It will be valuable for future studies to look both between and within categories when analyzing crime; we cannot understand offenders without victims, nor can we generalize either of those categories without looking at their nuance.
This is particularly important in the case of sex crimes, where victim status has historically been privileged among some groups while denied to others Collins In addition, the use of national statistics in this analysis, although not a perfect comparative measure, provides vital sociological perspective with which to view the results.
When discussing media coverage as a cultural arena, such measures indicate how large the differences between actual statistics and media coverage actually are. It is important to note that these results apply specifically to sexual predator discourse and the news media content analyzed in this study.