Representations of sexual crime in the British national press

TL;DRAbstract

<p>In light of recent press coverage of historic child sexual abuse, we aimed to examine contemporary representations of sexual crime within the British national press. Media reports both inform and enhance public attitudes toward a host of social issues - particularly criminal justice. From ‘name and shame’ to ‘holiday camp prisons’, newspaper reports about the criminal justice system are increasingly setting the course of public debate, impacting upon societal responses to crime, political discourse of crime control, and penal policy. Data were extracted from a database search of British national press reports about convicted cases of sexual, violent, and acquisitive crime. Newspaper articles about convicted cases of sexual, violent, and acquisitive crimes were sourced through the LexisNexis Library from August-November 2013. In total, 454 articles were sampled from 8 of the 10 most-read national newspapers. These were analysed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (L

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