engleski

Media role in supporting child sexual abuse myths and stereotypes: Content analysis of online CSA news and comments

Background: Media have a great potential in the primary prevention of CSA and supporting resilience in child sexual abuse survivors. Unfortunately, while reporting on CSA offenses, victims, and perpetrators, they role can be too often described as negative. Premature conclusions and generalizations in news stories can create moral panic, journalists, and editors can violate victim’s rights to privacy and dignity, media stories can become a source of secondary abuse, media language can sometimes be described as a textual abuse (e.g. use of consensual words to describe abuse), some newspaper stories can unintentionally become a guide for abusers (e.g. stories on online child sexual exploitation) or even sexually explicit material (e.g. use of victim’s forensic drawings). But one of the most dangerous aspects of CSA media coverage and presentation is support of CSA myths or inaccurate stereotypes about CSA, victims, and perpetrators. Research confirms that CSA myths acceptance can have a negative impact on CSA disclosure, reactions to disclosure, believing victims, judicial decisions, prosecution of offenders, prevention, and treatment programs. Instead of creating a protective environment, media can actually endanger victim’s recovery and support vulnerability. Aims: The objectives of this research were 1) to determine which CSA myths and stereotypes about victims, and perpetrators are presented in the direct online comments of CSA news ; 2) to investigate the differences in the stereotypical commenting based on the newspaper’s description of the abuse, victim, and perpetrator ; 3) Oral presentation to explore the relationship between different stereotypes. Method: Content analysis of online CSA news published in the Croatian national newspaper Jutarnji list during 2015. (N=78) and associated Facebook comments (N=531) was conducted. The frequency of each CSA myth and stereotype in news comments was recorded for each CSA news story. Results: The analysis confirmed that the most prevalent myths and stereotypes in online comments of CSA news were perpetrator stereotypes, CSA prevention stereotypes, myths and stereotypes about male victims. The use of pejorative terms to describe the perpetrator, presence of detailed description of abuse, the disclosure of the victim’s identity and consensual words to describe the abuse encouraged stereotypical news commenting. Conclusion: These findings suggest that such reporting can create an environment which supports victim’s vulnerability, and prevents CSA disclosure and resilience of survivors.

media coverage of CSA, CSA myths and stereotypes, content analysis, online comments, resilience in CSA survivors

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