The media, fear of crime, and gender : the production of news in a popular Canadian women's magazine

Abstract

This thesis examines how the media constructs fear of crime for women, and explicates why. I analyze 155 news articles regarding crime and criminal justice from 1970 to 1989 in Chatelaine magazine. Both content and textual analyses are deployed to evaluate media representations of crime and their role in facilitating images of fear and safety. This analysis is framed by social constructionism and feminist criminology to allow an evaluation of claims-making activities and gendered crime myths. I argue that the meanings associated with women's danger and safety in news narratives are socially constructed through claims, sources, content and culture, making the "social reality of crime" a human accomplishment. I found that the dominant form of news reporting in this study did not significantly incorporate signifiers of fear. Rational and balanced presentations of crime and criminal justice aimed at educating the reader prevailed. However, transformations in these representations did occur over time. Crime messages increasingly incorporated images of fear and danger, which were influenced by the rise in neo-liberal thought during the 1980s. These results indicate that ideological struggles external to the media itself construct and reconstruct representations of crime, which ultimately influence media signifiers of both danger and safety.