What’s the Story? The Impact of Race/Ethnicity on Crime Story Tone for Female Offenders

Vandenberg, Abby L.; Brennan, Pauline K.; Chesney‐Lind, Meda

doi:10.1007/978-1-4614-5871-5_4

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…Conversely, news reports contained more measures of exacerbation for Māori women offenders and, therefore, took on an overall unfavourable tone compared to stories about Pākehā women offenders. These findings echo what Brennan and Vandenberg (2009) and Vandenberg et al (2018) found in their US-based research, which demonstrated that 47.8% of stories about White women offenders took on an overall favourable tone compared to only 16.7% of stories about racialized women. Table 3 shows the distribution of various neutralization and exacerbation measures for the study sample.…”

Section: Measures Of Neutralization and Exacerbationsupporting

confidence: 87%

Indigeneity matters: Portrayal of women offenders in New Zealand newspapers

Deckert

2019

Crime, Media, Culture

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A growing body of research investigates women’s experiences within New Zealand’s criminal justice system, and several studies have addressed the misrepresentation of crime’s reality in news media. However, the discriminatory depiction of Indigenous women offenders in New Zealand’s press has yet to receive scholarly attention. Indigeneity and gender are both critical factors because Māori women constitute the fastest growing segment of New Zealand’s prison population, and media discourses help shape public consent to penal policies. To address this research gap, New Zealand newspaper articles featuring women offenders were collected over a 2-year period (2016–2018) and analysed for their use of neutralization and exacerbation techniques. The findings reveal that New Zealand newspapers distort our understanding of who is most affected by the criminal justice system and what crimes Pākehā1 and Māori women typically commit. Most importantly, stories about Pākehā women were more likely to use a favourable tone (56.5%), while stories about Māori women were more likely to take on an unfavourable tone (83.3%). Finally, motherhood, as an additional exacerbating factor, was mentioned nearly twice as often for Māori women. This article adds to the body of knowledge on the portrayal of Māori people in the media, linking it to public consent to governmental policies.

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Section: Measures Of Neutralization and Exacerbationsupporting

confidence: 87%

Indigeneity matters: Portrayal of women offenders in New Zealand newspapers

Deckert

2019

Crime, Media, Culture

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“… 5. These stories were initially pulled as part of a larger study of media coverage of offenders, but the stories that focused on victims were never coded (Brennan & Vandenberg, 2009; Vandenberg, Brennan, & Chesney-Lind, 2013). Although these stories are from 2006, implicit bias remains a concern in 2017, as evidenced by the large number of corporate workshops geared toward eliminating it (Nordell, 2017) and its continued discussion in the media (Vedantam, 2017).…”

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confidence: 99%

The Differential Representation of Latina and Black Female Victims in Front-Page News Stories: A Qualitative Document Analysis

Slakoff

Brennan

2017

Feminist Criminology

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Critical race feminists posit that perceptions of White and minority females differ, which suggests that media representations will vary among female crime victims. To explore this proposition, we examined front-page crime stories from four different U.S. newspapers using Altheide’s approach to qualitative document analysis. We found that stories about White female victims received more repeated coverage and were more likely to contain sympathetic narratives than stories about Latina/Black female victims. In contrast, Latina/Black female victims were more likely to be portrayed as risk-takers and “bad” women, and their victimization was normalized through descriptions of their unsafe environments.

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“…While there have been a handful of studies examining the gendered and racialized dynamics of media coverage and framing for white, female offenders (Brennan & Vandenberg, 2009;Vandenberg et al, 2013), little is understood about public discourse and penal spectatorship related to spectacle criminal images. In particular, little attention has been paid to the gendered and racialized dynamics of penal spectatorship related to white femininity and criminality.…”

Section: Gendered Boundary Maintenancementioning

confidence: 99%

‘She’s White and She’s Hot, So She Can’t Be Guilty’: Female Criminality, Penal Spectatorship, and White Protectionism

Dirks

Heldman

Zack

2015

Contemporary Justice Review

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Despite mainstream criminology's burgeoning interest in issues of race, class, and gender, very little scholarship has examined whiteness and its attendant privileges in understanding public discourse on criminal offenders. This paper examines the role of penal spectatorship as a discursive mechanism by which white, female offenders are protected in public spaces by virtue of their racial and gender identity. Using a content analysis of comments posted on the mug shot images of white women on a popular 'mug shot website,' we find that these women are viewed as victims of circumstance deserving of empathy and redemption rather than as criminals. We offer 'white protectionism' as a means by which whites extend privilege and protection to other whites who transverse the boundaries of whiteness through criminality to guard against 'deviant' or 'criminal' designations. These findings add to our understandings of penal spectatorship as yet another tool of white supremacy operating in the Post-Civil Rights era of mass incarceration. scholarship demonstrates that white women offenders are depicted as less culpable and more capable of reform as compared to women of color (). Yet, little is understood of how this privileging is accomplished beyond media coverage. We take up these questions in looking at broader public discourse in the form of online comments in order to understand how white women's offending is perceived, discussed, and reconciled.

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What’s the Story? The Impact of Race/Ethnicity on Crime Story Tone for Female Offenders

Cited by 8 publications

References 55 publications

Indigeneity matters: Portrayal of women offenders in New Zealand newspapers

Indigeneity matters: Portrayal of women offenders in New Zealand newspapers

The Differential Representation of Latina and Black Female Victims in Front-Page News Stories: A Qualitative Document Analysis

‘She’s White and She’s Hot, So She Can’t Be Guilty’: Female Criminality, Penal Spectatorship, and White Protectionism

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