โ Scribed by David Gough
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The Literature on Child Abuse and the Media I
The media have a long history of making a public issue out of child abuse. Over 120 years ago, the media were reporting the Mary Ellen case in New York and the subsequent formation of the New York Society for the Protection of Children, whose cases were then routinely reported by the New York Times in the mid-1870s (Nelson, 1984, Chapter 4). Since the rediscovery of child abuse in the 1950s and 1960s, there has been a dramatic increase in media reporting which itself has become a subject of study. This paper reviews these studies to provide a context for the other more specific articles in this special issue of Child Abuse Review.
Studying the media is complex, as it concerns how social and ideological issues are framed and presented (see Skidmore, 1995; Soothill and Walby, 1991; papers in journal Media, Culture, and Society), but research can mostly be classified as studies of media content, media production or effects of the media including audience studies. In child abuse and the media the interest is principally with news or feature articles or television programmes, but also includes dramatic presentations of abuse in magazines, television plays, soap operas (see, for example, Henderson, 1996) and comics (for example, the Spiderman comics with child abuse stories produced by the National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse in Chicago). Finally, there are studies of media campaigns by child abuse personnel to develop awareness about child abuse issues.
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