‘Beauty and bullets’: A content analysis of female offenders and victims in four Canadian newspapers

Abstract

Media-generated discourse can provide a framework for its consumers to construct representations of the world they live in. These representations, however, are often disproportionate to the true incidence of crime or risk of victimization. In order to examine the extent to which the gender of the offender or victim impacts portrayals of crime, content and discourse analyses were carried out on four Canadian city newspapers over a span of 30 years. The results from the 1190 sampled crime articles revealed that, although portrayals of female offenders accurately depict them as generally lower-risk, both female offenders and female victims were treated equivocally. Women offenders were dichotomized into sexualized bad girls or malicious black widow archetypes. Similarly, female victims were depicted either as bad victims who were blamed for their circumstances, or good victims who garnered sympathy through negative portrayals of the offenders. The findings are discussed within the context of gender differences surrounding the social discourse of violence, particularly chivalry.

The female offender - A century of registered crime and daily press reporting on women’s crime

“…As has been found in previous research, the material confirms that daily newspapers choose to focus their attention on violent crime (see e.g. Collins, 2016;Pollack, 2001). Although homicides committed by women are extremely 1905 1915 1925 1935 1945 1955 1965 1975 1985 1995 2005 2015 Men Women…”

“…In our material there are roughly 12 articles focused on men's offending for each article focused on the offending of women (calculations based on Figure 4). The same marked preponderance has also been noted in a Canadian study, in which 90% of the daily newspaper material during the study's 30-year observation period focused on offences committed by men (Collins, 2016).…”

“…This can be contrasted with the assumption of the 'chivalry' school, that by comparison with the offending of men, the response to women's crime is instead characterized by a greater degree of understanding than of condemnation. These are all important nuances that our quantitative analysis is not able to capture, and we therefore agree with Collins' (2016), that our next step should be to focus more attention on how language is used in descriptions of men and women as offenders.…”

“…Studies that analyse media descriptions of women's offending over long periods of time have been difficult to find. One such study is that published byCollins (2016), which examines three decades, the 1990s to the 2000s. One of Collins' findings noted clear differences in descriptions of women's and men's offending; women's offending was less often rationalized and was instead more often described as being rampant and out-of-control.…”

Debating credibility

“…The use of the term "woman" alone contrasts with this and creates a more questionable victim, free of any valued legitimizing social roles. Further, research suggests that female victims of crime are more likely to be negatively depicted if they are poor or part of a minority group, and the crimes to which they are victim rationalized through suggestions that they were in the wrong place or that the crime had occurred as a result of decisions they had made (Collins, 2016).…”