Depictions of female offenders in front-page newspaper stories: The importance of race/ethnicity
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Date
2009
Authors
Brennan, Pauline K.
Vandenberg, Abby L.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Uludağ Üniversitesi
Abstract
This paper examined how a female offender’s race/ethnicity influenced how she was portrayed by the media. Existing literature on gender stereotypes, racial and ethnic stereotypes, and media depictions of offenders provided the basis for this study. Few have focused solely on the media’s treatment of offenders, in general, and fewer have looked closely at how the media depict female offenders, in particular. This study, therefore, filled a void. We predicted that minority women would be portrayed less favorably than white women, and conducted a content analysis of front-page newspaper articles that featured female offenders to test our expectation. The articles were gathered from two different U.S. newspapers for the 2006 calendar year—the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. We found that stories about white female offenders were more likely to contain excuses for their alleged or actual offenses and were, therefore, more likely to take on an overall favorable tone than stories about minority female offenders.
Description
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Criminology (St. Louis).
Keywords
Media depictions of offenders, Media treatment of offenders, Female offenders, Differential treatment by race/ethnicity, Gender stereotypes, Techniques of neutralization, Racial/ethnic discrimination
Citation
Brennan, P. K. ve Vandenberg, A. L. (2009). "Depictions of female offenders in front-page newspaper stories: The importance of race/ethnicity". International Journal of Social Inquiry, 2(2), 141-175.