A Televised Social Problem Construction? Pushing Back Against the Invisibility of the Male Rape Victim in American Crime

Abstract

From reality to representation and back: the rise of 'socially aware' television From the news coverage of physical-world events like O.J. Simpson's or Oscar Pistorius' trials and their TV dramatisation to concerns over jurors relying heavily on scientific evidence due to an alleged 'CSI effect' (Mopas, 2007), the boundaries between social reality and its televised counterpart become increasingly fluid. Manning (1998) describes a televised world of 'media loops' whereby images are constantly recycled and reproduced in new contexts. Similarly, Ferrell (1999, p. 397) refers to a process through which images nowadays 'bounce endlessly one off the other' creating an 'infinite hall of [mediated] mirrors'. This process goes beyond Baudrillard's (2001) idea of an artificial hyper-reality where people escape from the 'desert of the real'. What Manning (1998) and Ferrell (1999) ultimately suggest is that contemporary reality (including the reality of crime, violence and criminal justice) is inextricably intertwined with its representation and it is therefore imperative that criminological research takes this relationship into consideration. As far as TV content is concerned, academic scholarship has mainly focused on the study of news discourse, whilst TV fiction has been regarded primarily as a site of pleasure and entertainment (Henderson, 2007). The escapist function served by television (Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) and the disproportionate emphasis often placed in fictional narratives on individual pathologies (instead of deeper social forces) for entertainment purposes (Best, 2008) should not be overlooked, but neither should the potential of such narratives to inform and even provide a kind of educating entertainment (the so-called 'edutainment') (Klein, 2011).