What the papers say

This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 37, Summer 1998.

Radical feminists have been stern critics of the way the media reports sexual violence, and child sexual abuse in particular.  Hilary McCollum reports on her systematic study of reporting in four national newspapers.  Using the concept of a ‘moral panic’ she shows how the kinds of stories selected and their content re-define the issues, and manage to ignore all the key questions feminists have posed about sexual abuse in childhood.

Over the last twenty years feminists have developed a perspective which understands child sexual abuse as part of a continuum of male violence, linking offences such as rape, incest and domestic violence with ‘a range of male behaviours that have often been dismissed as mere routine minor nuisances’ (Cameron & Fraser p164). This analysis defines male violence not as aberrant and abnormal but as ordinary, everyday expressions of patriarchal social relations between men and women, boys and girls, adults and children.

Liz Kelly (T&S 33) has criticised the re-emergence of a professional and popular discourse on ‘paedophiles’ which sees child sexual abusers as abnormal, as ‘other’, thus disguising the connections that they have with ‘normal men/normal masculinity’. This article is based on research which examined the extent to which this process of ‘othering’ men who sexually abuse children can be found in newspaper reporting, and the strategies they use to achieve this. It also looks at whether it helps feminists to make sense of these responses using the concept of a ‘moral panic’.

In one sense the influence of the media on public opinion is obvious. What detailed studies of the media reveal is not just how news reporting selects the stories it presents, but also that the various newspapers present stories in particular ways. What is selected for coverage, and how it is covered can tell us a lot about the preoccupations of specific newspapers. What is not covered is also revealing, so I looked at the silences, gaps and omissions as well as what the papers did say about child sexual abuse.

The sources

I looked at four British national daily newspapers during January and February 1997: The Mail, The Mirror, The Guardian and The Times. This selection reflects the range of target audience and political perspective within the British media. The Times and The Guardian are both ‘quality’ broadsheets aimed at a middle class market. The Times is regarded as representing a right wing/establishment viewpoint, whereas The Guardian is associated with a more left wing/liberal stance. The Mail and The Mirror are both tabloids: The Mail is aimed at a lower middle class market and reflects a right wing/traditionalist viewpoint; The Mirror is a populist paper aimed at the working class market and has traditionally supported the Labour Party.

New technology has made this kind of research much easier to conduct, since many newspapers are now available on CD-ROM; simple searches on key words will select all the stories which appeared on that topic. It was possible to do this for The Guardian, The Times and The Mail. The search in The Mirror had to be done by hand. Only reporting on events in Britain (including those where a British national has abused children in another country) were included. Letters were excluded, as these were not the representations of the newspaper itself, but features and arts reporting were included.

Making the news

The period covered included 51 publishing days. The number of reports on child sexual abuse in each paper was: The Times, 20; The Guardian, 38; The Mail, 45; The Mirror, 59. The higher level of reporting of sexual violence by the tabloids has previously been noted by feminist campaigning groups such as the Campaign Against Pornography, which criticised the sensationalised presentation of specific cases of sexual violence as ‘isolated entertaining horrors’ in the tabloids (CAP Action Pack 1993).

A further 26 articles potentially relating to child sexual abuse were found in The Mirror. All were reports about murders or about girls who were missing and whose murdered bodies were eventually discovered. Each of these could potentially be sexual murders as defined by Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Fraser. Equivalent articles were not uncovered in the computer searches on The Times, The Guardian and The Mail as murder was not a specific search criterion used; it was the visual search of The Mirror which revealed them. They are not included in this section, but are discussed later.

Whether there was consistency of reporting between papers — did they cover the same stories — was assessed, allowing a time lag of three days for the story to be covered. In this analysis, when a number of articles in the same paper related to the same story on the same day, it was only counted once. Table 1 records the results.

Interestingly, only three stories were reported in all four newspapers. These were the opening of the Clwyd tribunal into allegations of widespread sexual abuse in children’s homes made by more than 180 ex-residents (22/1/97); allegations of child sexual abuse within Ashworth secure hospital involving unsupervised visits with convicted sex offenders by an ex-inmate and his 8-year-old daughter (8/2/97); and reviews and commentaries on the television drama No Child of Mine (26/2/97).

Since the first two of these stories related to allegations of abuse within state institutions, it is not surprising that all four newspapers reported on them. More interesting is the coverage of No Child of Mine. It was a controversial drama which represented a challenge to the public discourse that emphasised abuse outside the family. It told the story of a girl sexually abused by her mother, raped by her stepfather, prostituted by her father and sexually abused by a care worker and, according to the producer, it was based on a true story. The newspapers, in a variety of ways, ‘made’ a long running story (most of which is outside the time frame of my research) about the programme. Rather than addressing the central theme of the programme, attention focused on: whether the story was ‘true’; identifying the woman whose story the programme was based on; and whether it was a form of abuse for the child actor to play the part. Thus the newspaper reporting undercut the challenging message of the programme.

The majority of stories were covered in only one of the papers. This raises the question of whether this group of newspapers have a different definition of what child sexual abuse stories are ‘newsworthy’. The stories were placed in categories according to the particular focus of the piece, and the results of this second analysis are in Table 2. There is a difference of emphasis between the papers with different types of reporting being accentuated. Some categories of reporting were entirely absent in some papers whilst composing a significant part of reporting in others. For example there were no reports about the Wests or Myra Hindley in The Guardian whereas The Mirror had 11 articles.

Total12345

Much of this variation can be understood in terms of the place each paper occupies in the mass media market. The Times, being ‘the establishment’ paper, could be expected to concentrate on public policy issues. Because public sector workers and care professionals are significant elements of its readership, the same focus can be seen in The Guardian. The Mail has a predominantly female lower middle class readership. Whilst retaining an interest in policy, a ‘human interest’ element is introduced through coverage of cases and trials which are largely ignored by the broadsheets. The Mirror is a mass circulation sensationalist ‘entertainment’ tabloid; its interest in trials, cases and celebrated sex murderers (the Wests and Myra Hindley) is entirely unsurprising.

Abuse on trial

Many media researchers see the reporting of trials as crucially important in defining opinion on crime and deviance. However most crimes reported in newspapers are not followed through the criminal justice system to trial. Even where trials are reported this is often inconsistent, since the whole process from opening, evidence, verdict and sentencing is rarely covered. In fact it is only a tiny minority of criminal trials which are reported on at all.

15 trials were covered in the 29 reports. None of them involved abuse in the family. The closest relation was the ex-boyfriend of the five year old victim’s mother, who was found guilty of rape and murder and sentenced to life (The Mail 15/1/97, 7/2/97; The Mirror 15/1/97, 16/1/97). Sex murder was the subject of another of the trials in which a 20-year-old man was found guilty of mutilating and murdering a 15-year-old girl (The Mirror, The Times, The Mail, 31/1/97). Again, the offender and victim knew each other. Both are discussed later in the section on sex murders.

Of the remaining 13 trials, six concerned offences committed by male strangers and six involved men known to their victims in a variety of ways. The remaining trial was the only one where the defendant was a woman. This was the only case which made a front page; Miss Filth: Teacher jailed for sex notes to boy 11 (The Mirror 4/1/97) reports that a ‘perverted’ woman teacher had been sent to prison for six months ‘for sending filthy notes to an 11 year old boy in her class’. The high profile coverage afforded to this case would appear to bear out Emily Driver’s observation that although ‘women rarely sexually abuse children … in the few cases that have come to light, public outrage reflects society’s contradictory expectations of women’.

Most offenders, especially if convicted, were presented in various ways as ‘other’. For example in £3,000 fine for pervert photographer whose mother ran a nursery (The Mail 24/1/97), the offender is described as a ‘pervert’ and ‘loner’ and in Madness (The Mirror 18/2/97) as mentally ill. Sex shame PC jailed (The Mirror 19/2/97) reported the conviction of a policeman for three indecent assaults in 1985 and 1986 against girls from his youth club. Although no explicit reason for the assaults is offered, the reader is told that ‘a car crash in 1985 left him impotent’. In Shame of punk Rev with girl, 11 (The Mirror 28/2/97) the curate’s ‘mohican haircut’ is emphasised. Both The Guardian (Warden of home ‘vile paedophile’) and The Mirror (Evil Captain Hook preyed on lost boys) use the ‘Captain Hook’ characterisation coined by the prosecuting barrister to describe Keith Laverack, on trial for 21 sexual offences against children in his care.

The impending trial of Briton, James Fraser-Darling, accused of sexually abusing nine boys aged 7 to 13 in Thailand was one of only two trials covered in The Times, perhaps because the accused was an academic and son of former Oxford don Sir Frank Fraser-Darling (The Times 27/1/97). This trial was also reported in The Mail and The Mirror. There are similarities in the reporting of the three papers, all using the framework of ‘paedophiles’ and ‘child sex’ (The Times and The Mirror) or ‘sex with children’ (The Mail). Fraser-Darling’s representation of himself as the victim of a ‘witchhunt’ by non-governmental organisations is common to The Mail and The Mirror; and The Times and The Mail both report that he was known as ‘Uncle James’, ‘befriended’ the boys, and bought them presents. Both of these slants on the story serve to minimise the victimisation of the boys concerned. Another strategy which served to minimise can be seen in two reports — both Video pest’s £1,000 fine (The Mirror 10/1/97) and Groping soccer steward jailed (The Mirror 1/2/97) use the words ‘pest’, ‘groped’ and ‘fondled’ to describe the abuser and his actions.

In contrast The Mail is outraged by another case of indecent assault when the conviction was overturned because evidence of the girl’s distress was ruled out as corroboration by a higher court. The issue became the subject of The Mail’s leading article:

Since in the majority of sexual assaults the only witness other than the assailant is the victim, this major change in legal procedure presents serious implications — not least for those who the law has a duty to protect as well as afford justice. (The Mail 29/1/97)

Although the article does mention that this was a ruling in Scotland, it implies that the situation has been made worse across the whole of Britain. In reality, the ruling puts the Scottish system in line with the rest of Britain where distress has never been considered as corroboration. Readers are not told that, until 1995, judges in England and Wales had to give the corroboration warning (that it is dangerous to convict only on the words of a woman or child) or that, despite a change in the law making this discretionary, many judges continue to give the warning. The high (and rising) attrition rate in rape (see T&S 35) and sexual abuse cases is also not mentioned. Readers of this editorial could be forgiven for thinking that there was no problem until this ruling.

The real victims

Sex trial diving coach is cleared (11/1/97) was in fact a report of a rape trial in which it was claimed by the defence that the teenage girl had ‘invented the allegations as revenge for failing to be picked’. Although a child protection investigation rather than a criminal trial, The Mail’s Abuse claim nightmare ends, 20/1/97, took a similar tone. A police chief superintendent was apparently the victim, after being accused of sexual abuse by one of his adopted Brazilian daughters. The Mail reports that he was ‘cleared’ following an investigation. His solicitor is quoted as saying ‘There has been no corroboration of the wild allegations’.

In the light of these two reports with their emphasis on ‘invented’ allegations and ‘no corroboration’, at first sight it seems strange that the ruling on corroboration mentioned above should have provoked such outrage. However that case involved an attacker not known to the girl. Such a man can readily be presented as ‘other’, as unconnected to ‘normal’ men, so convicting him does not threaten the ‘traditional’, and in particular the ‘family’ values that The Mail sees itself as upholding. By contrast, the 60-year-old diving coach was a ‘father of two’ supported ‘throughout his ordeal’ by his ‘estranged wife’ who had left him prior to the allegations because she was a ‘diving widow’. The other allegation was not only in the family but also involved a police chief superintendent.

The Mail chose to report two cases where the ‘family’ men rather than the children could be presented as the victims. The many cases where ‘family’ men are found guilty or where the child protection investigation reveals sexual abuse, would be more difficult for The Mail’s family values agenda and so are ignored.

Making a mess of it

The reporting of trials therefore reveals that in most coverage the offender, especially if convicted, is constructed as ‘other’. This is done through the use of terms like ‘pervert’, ‘paedophile’, and ‘loner’ or through other details, such as impotence, which sets him apart. The exception to this is in cases where ‘family’ men are found not guilty. This serves to reinforce the distinction between convicted sex offenders and ‘normal’ men. A number of the reports also reveal elements of minimisation of the seriousness of the offence.

A number of other stories illustrate other techniques which are used to ‘otherise’ men who sexually abuse. The examples here are typical of how reporting in the tabloids and middle range newspapers achieve this.

Doc ‘kept girl of 15 as sex slave’ (The Mirror 7/2/97) opens with ‘A hospital doctor and his wife are wanted by police following claims that they smuggled an orphaned girl into Britain from Pakistan and kept her as a sex slave.’ In the next paragraph the reader discovers that the girl had been sexually abused only by the husband. The family had returned to Pakistan before the police could intervene. This, the only case of sexual abuse in the family that The Mirror chose to report, is in many ways a ‘safe’ case — it does not threaten the white nuclear family or ‘normal’ British white men because the victim was an orphan and both she and her abuser are Pakistanis.

Apart from a brief mention in a report on another trial, rape is absent from the trial reports. However four different rapes are covered in six case reports. Three of these four reports are explicitly stranger rapes. In all but one of the reports traditional tabloid representations of sex offenders are used to create the perpetrator as ‘other’.

Cop had sex with hooker in rape flat (The Mirror 9/1/97) reports that a man broke into a flat at midnight and raped a mother and her nine-year-old daughter. No description of ‘the brute’ is given; instead the focus is police embarrassment because a ‘cop had sex with a prostitute’ in the same flat.

The man who raped a 14 year old girl on a bus in broad daylight (The Mirror 28/1/97) was described as a ‘fiend’ and a ‘brute’.

Sisters raped on way to school (The Mail 7/2/97) tells the reader how the girls, aged 12 and 14, were forced into woodland by ‘a man with staring eyes’. The original report is followed up in The Mail four days later with details of other attacks that may have been carried out by the same man. In The Mirror’s report (8/2/97) the attacker is labelled the a ‘sex maniac’, and ‘a brute’. A warning from the police to parents ‘to accompany their children to school if possible’ is included. The danger to children here can be explicitly located with strangers not parents.

Sex murders

Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Fraser in The Lust to Kill define sexual murder as ‘including all cases where the killer was motivated by sadistic sexual impulses’. This definition would include murders where the victim was not raped or sexually assaulted but where the ‘act of killing [is eroticised] in and for itself’. I used this definition in considering the reports on sex murder, and I also drew on their analysis that most sex murderers are defined as either ‘bad’ or ‘mad’. As we will see, journalists are not averse to using both categories, even though this is often contradictory.

The preoccupation of the populist press with the Moors murderers, particularly Myra Hindley, has been linked to the ‘existence of a particular discourse on the beauty of the Horrid and the pleasure of cruel acts.’ (Cameron and Fraser). Since the publication of The Lust to Kill, the Wests have been added to the canon of sex murderers (see T&S 33 & 34). Of the fourteen reports on the Wests and Hindley, two relate to Fred West’s forthcoming biography and six to the possibility of a film about Fred West. An explicit comparison between the Wests and the Moors murderers was made in The Times (1/1/97):

Only perhaps the calculating sadism of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley stands comparison. The Wests chose the innocent, the vulnerable, their own flesh and blood for sexual violence and torture.

All of the other stories relating to the Wests and Hindley were only reported in The Mirror and covered a number of issues including the inquest verdict on John West’s suicide, and three reports on Hindley’s continuing campaign for freedom. The Wests and the Moors murderers have come to epitomise ‘folk-devils’ (This is the term Stan Cohen introduced when developing the concept of moral panics; it refers to individuals or small groups who are constructed as the ultimate threat to social values and social order.)

Three papers covered the trial of Edwin Hopkins — The Mail, The Mirror, and The Times. The Mirror follows the tabloid recipe for sex murder in their coverage of the trial of Edwin Hopkins, found guilty of sexually assaulting, mutilating and murdering a 15 year old girl. Hopkins knew his victim, Naomi Smith, who lived in the same village. Her bitten and mutilated body was found in the playground. Hopkins denied the charges but overwhelming forensic evidence resulted in his conviction. Following the conviction, Naomi’s parents demanded the reintroduction of the death penalty, which was covered in all three papers. The opening, progress and verdict in the trial were reported by The Mirror (23/1/97, 25/1/97, 29/1/97, 31/1/97). Hopkins was referred to variously as a ‘maniac’, ‘sex fiend’, ‘powerful brute’ and ‘loner’ and described as ‘evil’, ‘twisted’ and ‘obsessed’. In Possessed by evil: Mum’s rage as Naomi murderer is locked up for life (The Mirror 31/1/97), Naomi’s final minutes of life were speculated on in a salacious way that places some of the responsibility for the murder on her:

Naomi kept a diary. But her accounts of sexual adventures were just teenage fantasies.

She was a virgin who had never had a boyfriend.

Twisted Hopkins killed her after what could have been her first kiss. (my emphasis)

Naomi ‘who knew him [Hopkins] and had confided to pals that she fancied him strayed into’ Hopkin’s path while she was posting a letter and he was going to the shop.

She may have gone willingly with him for a kiss and cuddle and been slaughtered when she tried to call a halt. (my emphasis)

In a linked article, the reader is told that Hopkins had previously attacked another woman in a similar way but she had managed to get free. No charges were brought. In this attack, two years previously, Hopkins had chased his victim across a field before dragging her to the ground, ripping off her bra, biting her breast and trying to pull off her pants. No suggestion was made that this woman ‘may have gone willingly with him’.

Only the verdict in the Hopkins trial was reported in The Mail. It described him as a ‘savage loner’ with a ‘warped personality’ who was ‘a familiar sight shuffling about the village with his head bowed and was seen as withdrawn and a “weirdo”.’ Like The Mirror, the attack on the other woman ‘in a chilling dress-rehearsal of Naomi’s murder’ is reported. She complained to the police at the time but when Hopkins denied the attack she withdrew her complaint because she had learning difficulties and thought she would not be believed in court. This extra information was not included in The Mirror at all and is not commented upon in The Mail.

The Times also reported on the verdict. It fails to mention the similar attack instead concentrates on the forensic evidence and Hopkins’ obsession with knives. However in contrast to The Mail’s weirdo theory it leans more towards the ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ explanation of sex murderers, quoting Detective Superintendent Bayliss:

He portrayed himself as a fairly inoffensive young man but obviously I think some of his more surly side was demonstrated in the court. There were no outward signs that he would obviously be considered a suspect for this offence. (The Times 31/1/97)

What these ‘outward signs’ could have been is not even hinted at.

The other sex murder trial was that of Andrew Pountley for the rape, abduction and murder of five-year-old Rosie McCann. The opening and progress, but not verdict, were covered in The Mirror. Rosie, the daughter of Pountley’s ex-girlfriend was kidnapped from her bed, raped and suffocated. Her body was found seven weeks later. No motivation for the murder was offered although the reader is told that Pountley had ‘called round in a drunken rage.’ In contrast to the reporting on Hopkins, the coverage of Pountley does not employ the usual sex murderer language, possibly because the relationship between Pountley and his victim was too close for him to ‘fit’, since sex murderers are so strongly associated in the tabloid imagination with strangers.

The Mail report the opening day and verdict of the Andrew Pountley trial. The opening day article reported Pountley’s motivation as ‘a fit of jealous rage’. It also reported that Rosie’s mother had moved out of Pountley’s flat ‘after Pountley began to drink to excess and became aggressive and jealous’. The verdict of the trial is covered in Justice for Rosie: Drunk who killed girl to spite mother is given life (The Mail 7/2/97). Following his conviction, it was revealed that an accusation against Pountley was lying on file for the rape and indecent assault of a 13-year-old girl and that he had a history of violent attacks. Yet even after this, The Mail still do not apply the sex murderer framework to him. Mrs Justice Steel’s comments to Pountley were quoted:

‘Rosalene’s abduction resulted basically from a jealous and wicked motive to punish the woman you regarded as your wife.’ (my emphasis)

Quite why a jealous abduction should also involve rape and murder is not explored.

A large number of reports in The Mirror related to the murders of three girls, Zoe Evans, Kayleigh Ward and Billie-Jo Jenkins. Kayleigh and Zoe were both missing for some time before their bodies were found. Zoe’s stepfather was charged with her murder (he has since been convicted). A local man was charged with the rape and murder of Kayleigh Ward. Billie-Jo Jenkins was found in her garden, beaten to death with an 18-inch metal tent peg (Find the scarface killer of Billie-Jo, The Mirror 15/2/97). A ‘scar-faced maniac’ was sought who had allegedly been stalking the family. Police declared their puzzlement at the motive for the crime; a sexual motive had been ruled out, in spite of the fact that the frenzied nature of the attack could have suggested this, primarily because she had not been sexually assaulted. After interviewing two men, at least one of whom was reported as scarfaced, the police arrested Billie-Jo’s foster father despite being neither ‘scarfaced’ nor fitting the tabloid stereotype of a ‘maniac’. Although he was subsequently released, he was not cleared by the police (at the time of writing this piece he is in fact on trial for Billie-Jo’s murder).

Kayleigh Ward’s murder was clearly sexual. Billie-Jo Jenkins’ murder may also have been sexual. No information was reported about whether or not Zoe Evans’ murder was sexual. However feminists have documented that one of the tactics used by men who sexually abuse within the family to stop children from telling is threatening to kill them. We currently have no way of knowing the frequency with which this threat is carried out. This means that murders of children carried out to cover up sexual abuse will remain outside the current definitions of sexual murders.

Is there a moral panic?

Within sociology and media studies attention has been paid to the media’s power to influence public opinions through generating moral panics, which in turn inform political and policy responses. The term ‘moral panic’ was first used by the sociologist Stan Cohen. Moral panics occur when something or someone is perceived as threat to widely held social values or to social order. In a situation of moral panic, reactions are exaggerated out of all proportion to the actual threat. The subject of the panic may be new, such as a new drug like Ecstasy, or it may have existed for sometime but becomes highlighted in a different way. There are a number of ways in which mass media representations create moral panics, most commonly by using stereotypes and by exaggerating the scale or the consequences of the phenomenon. The significance of these responses is that they can lead to swift, re-active and ill-considered changes in law and in social policy by fostering a sense that ‘something must to be done’ about it. Policy changes which take place in the context of a moral panic tend to reinforce, rather than challenge, the status quo. Evidence of a moral panic, therefore, is often seen in terms of responses from the government, police and the courts and the wider community — if there is a moral panic about ‘paedophiles’ one would expect to see aspects of this in the newspaper reporting.

The fact that the largest category of reports concerned community/policy responses gives some support to the idea of a moral panic. An ongoing theme in the broadsheets and The Mail throughout the period related to proposals to set up a national Sex Offenders Register. The register was first proposed by the Home Secretary in March 1996 and was fuelled by the Dutroux case in Belgium (see T&S 36).

The register was reported in The Mail in the context of ongoing local demonstrations against a convicted child sex offender, Alan Christie. Christie was released from prison in December 1996 to a hostel near Stirling. Schools in the area were warned about his presence in a letter from the council about Christie’s release. The Mail (11/1/97) reports a demonstration by ‘angry mothers… chanting “beast out”’. Whilst quoting the mothers’ conception of Christie as a beast — the ‘bad’ label — The Mail also turned to the ‘mad’ label, reporting that Christie had spent 11 years in a psychiatric hospital after a previous attack against a child and that at his recent trial ‘a clinical psychiatrist warned the paedophile may well strike again because he suffers from “deviant sexual arousal”’. Although the reader is told that Christie is married with three children under the age of 10, no concern about the danger he may pose to them is expressed.

The Times also reported this demonstration, informing the reader that he was living on an estate five miles from Dunblane. The link to the massacre at Dunblane was made explicit by one of the mothers:

They all had suspicions about Hamilton but they didn’t act on them. If we don’t act, the council will wait until perhaps our children are raped and murdered and our schools are shot up and then they’ll say ‘Oh we had a theory about him. (Margaret Haney, quoted in Jeering mothers drive paedophile off council estate [The Times 11/1/97])

A separate article on the same day outlined the proposals for the register. A further demonstration against Christie, described as a ‘fugitive paedophile’, was reported in Pervert besieged in hostel (The Mail 1/2/97). It was only in the next report, Stop hiding perverts say protest mothers (The Mail 3/2/97), that the proposals for the Sex Offenders Register were mentioned in the context of demands by the demonstrators to make it public ‘so parents can check if they are in their area’. Government proposals at this stage were that the register should be held by the police — wider notification was not intended, apart from ‘exceptional cases’ and was to mainly concern schools and other agencies rather than the wider community. The demands for a more public register fits with the idea of a moral panic and one protestor was reported as saying: ‘Something needs to be done about this.’

The idea of a public register as a solution was rejected two days later in Colette Douglas Home’s A register of evil just invites a witch hunt (The Mail 7/2/97). Whilst noting that ‘no one wants to live next door to a child molester… moves to alert communities to the presence of a convicted paedophile in their midst invites witch hunts, lynch mobs. Most importantly, it fails to protect children’. Home’s argument is that the real problem is the release of men who are still considered a danger to children, and that this is the issue which politicians should be addressing. She accuses legislators of ‘behaving like Pontius Pilate’:

In providing a register they are washing their hands of real responsibility. But it is their job to establish the rules that will protect society. It is their job to protect the innocent; to incarcerate the guilty and the dangerous. They must not be allowed to pass the buck.

The register again features in More than 100,000 paedophiles at large says Home Office (The Times 20/2/97) which reports that a detailed study by the Home Office has revealed that 260,000 men have been convicted of sexual offences since the 1950s. ‘The proposed register will not be retrospective so it would be decades before a comprehensive list of men who pose a potential danger to children and women is complete.’ The report also highlights further problems with the register resulting from the fact that most cases are not reported to the authorities, do not go to court and do not result in a conviction. Liberal Democrat spokesperson Peter Thurnham is reported as saying that ‘paedophiles should remain in custody until they were assessed as being safe for release’. The proposed register receives extensive coverage in The Guardian, which also opposes a public register, as it would serve to fuel ‘vigilante action’ (The Guardian, 15/1/97, 12/2/97, 19/2/97).

In all three newspapers, the register is referred to interchangeably as the Sex Offenders Register and the ‘paedophile register’. The use of ‘paedophile’ in this context narrows the frame not just to child sexual abuse, but a particular stereotype of sexual abusers. Yet the proposed Sex Offenders Register covered a wide range of offences: rape; intercourse with a girl under 16; incest by a man; indecent assault; indecency between men and causing or encouraging prostitution. The only paper to list the offences was The Times. This narrowing of the frame could also account for the fact that none of the reporting referred to criticisms of the list of offences: gay groups were concerned that the inclusion of indecency between men would lead to gay men convicted for consensual cottaging offences being included on the register; various women’s organisations made similar points about the proposal to include all prostitution offences and the way this would define many women working as prostitutes as ‘sex offenders’. (In fact the eventual law excluded both indecency between men and most prostitution offences.) The fact that most sex offenders commit offences against adult women (150,000 of the 260,000 offenders in the Home Office study reported in The Times) did not prevent the newspapers following their agenda on ‘paedophiles’. This fits both aspects of moral panics — the accentuating stereotypes and the exaggeration.

The Sex Offenders Register was not the only policy response discussed during this period. Whilst the idea of treating child sex offenders is touched on by The Mail and The Times, it is at its most developed in The Guardian: Law and the lynch mob (19/2/97) argues that ‘it is high time we recognise that finding and solving the area of fault — although notoriously complex — is a possibility that can be achieved through therapy’. The article makes no reference to the highly gendered nature of child sexual abuse, although unlike much of the other reporting it does highlight the fact that ‘most abuse still occurs within the family’ so the focus on ‘stranger-danger’ is the wrong one. This theme is also developed in The danger of living in ignorance (19/2/97) which criticises the government for allowing:

the ‘stranger danger’ account of child abuse to be promoted at the expense of the knowledge that it is within the home that children are most likely to become victims of childhood sexual abuse

In On The Record: Paedophiles: Warning word to the wise (3/2/97), MP David Mellor argued for the development of tribunals to conduct risk assessments of individuals thought to pose a danger, even if they had not been convicted. Again the ‘something more must be done’ message is clear. It was also present in an article in The Mail (5/2/97) which outlined the need for a national solution to housing convicted sex offenders. Pat Begley, the Director of Social Services in Christie’s area, said: ‘There needs to be consideration nationally about what arrangements can be made for individuals like Mr Christie’. That the issues raised in terms of housing policy had shifted to another level was revealed in reports in The Guardian and Times (9/1/97) that Middlesbrough Council was considering banning known sex offenders from council housing. The decision of Hounslow Council to refuse to re-house a specific child sex offender echoed this trend. The high court ruling which declared Hounslow’s decision lawful was reported in The Guardian, The Times and The Mirror (20/22/97). In the period this study covered — and in many of the similar issues raised since — there are many examples of local protests and actions becoming both national stories and calls for nationwide action; again these are processes one might expect to find in the context of a moral panic.

The only newspaper to discuss a policy intervention aimed directly at children is The Mirror (Sex education is kids salvation 28/2/97) The brief report opens:

Child prostitution and abuse are increasing. Meanwhile it is suggested that children need more sex education. Quite right. If kids are to be better protected they need to know what they are to be protected from.

This analysis of reporting during January and February 1997 suggests that a moral panic was (and arguably still is) taking place. The subject of the panic, however, is not child sexual abuse or even child sex abusers, but the narrow stereotype of ‘paedophiles’. This framing of the issue means that both the scale of sexual abuse and the fact that children are most at risk from men that they know almost disappear from the popular and policy agendas. What matters for feminists about moral panics is that whilst they generate the impetus to do something — the Sex Offenders Act was passed, and a number of other policy changes have been introduced since — the responses are unlikely to be either effective or appropriate.

I am not arguing that all proposed responses in this moral panic were ‘wrong’ — the calls to do something about the release of dangerous offenders and the questions raised about where known sex offenders should live are important issues. The problem is rather that not only do they focus on a tiny minority of sex offenders, but also that the narrowing of the agenda to paedophiles means that limited measures can be represented as having ‘done something’ about child sexual abuse. The moral panic about paedophiles serves to disguise the realities of child sexual abuse. The fact that no newspaper or government representative — during the period of study and since — commented on the fact that proposals with reference to ‘paedophiles’ are at odds with civil law rights accorded to fathers who have sexually abused their children, is just one example of the many contradictions which now exist between public policy and the realities of child sexual abuse.

Back to normality

The stereotyping and ‘othering’ which are part of the creation of folk devils and moral panics can be seen in much of the reporting in both the quality and tabloid press during the period this study covered. This process of ‘othering’ has been noted by both Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Fraser and Liz Kelly (T&S 33) who identify it as the means by which the connections between ‘normal’ men, masculinity and men who commit sexual offences against women are children is hidden.

‘Paedophile’ was by far the most popular term, being used more than 20 times in The Times and more than 30 times in The Mail and The Guardian. In contrast, The Mirror uses ‘paedophile’ only twice preferring ‘perverts’ (9), ‘sex fiends’ (5), ‘sex monsters’ (4), ‘sex pests’ (3) and ‘sex maniacs’ (6). ‘Pervert’ was also popular in The Mail (8) but is not used at all by The Times and The Guardian. ‘Child molester’ was occasionally used by all four newspapers. Offenders are described in The Mirror variously as sick, shamed, evil, brutal, twisted, depraved and vile; in The Mail as evil, warped, manipulative, cunning and savage; in The Times as sick, evil, cunning and manipulative; and in The Guardian as vile, sinister and anti-social. Perhaps most revealing of all, the issue of gender, the fact that the vast majority of sex offenders are male, was not explicitly addressed by any newspaper in any report.

Liz Kelly (T&S 33) documents the growing tendency within the discourse of child protection professionals to view men who sexually abuse children as deviant and ‘other’. This research has found a similar process within popular discourse. Men who sexually abuse children are created as ‘other’ in newspaper reporting not only through the label ‘paedophile’ which Liz Kelly highlighted, but also through terms such as ‘pervert’, ‘sex maniac’ and ‘sex fiend’.

By focussing on a certain type of man (paedophile/pervert) rather than a certain type of behaviour (the widespread sexual abuse of children, particularly girls), attention is shifted away from political solutions addressing male power and the construction of masculinity towards a range of ‘problem-management’ solutions: long-term incarceration (The Mail); risk assessment tribunals for dangerous men (The Guardian; to registration for offenders (The Mail, The Guardian and The Times); and individual therapy (The Guardian). Unfortunately, it is currently a moral panic about ‘paedophiles’ rather than feminist analysis which is fuelling the social policy agenda in Britain on child sexual abuse.

But the problem remains: most abuse is carried out by known men, often within the family. Writing of sexual murder, Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Fraser have argued that the pages of the tabloids:

are apparently still stalked by motiveless ‘fiends’ whose ‘brutal lusts’ remain for ever unspecified, their connection with masculinity somehow obvious, yet unexplained.

As with sexual murder, in the reporting of child sexual abuse and policy responses to it, the issue of gender is never addressed — the question of why child sex offenders are overwhelmingly male and their victims primarily female is never asked. To ask it would be to spotlight masculine sexuality and male power. To answer it would require solutions based on changing the construction of male sexuality and the distribution of power in society. Instead the newspapers parade paedophiles and perverts, monsters and maniacs thus obscuring the issue of male sexuality and removing the most crucial question of male power from the debate.

References

Debbie Cameron ‘Wanted: the female serial killer’ T&S 33 (Summer 1996)

Debbie Cameron ‘Motives and meanings’ T&S 34 (Winter 1996/7)

Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Fraser The Lust To Kill: A Feminist Investigation of Sexual Murder (Polity Press, 1987)

Stan Cohen Folk Devils and Moral Panics (Martin Robertson, 1980)

Kate Cook ‘Raging about rape’ T&S 35 (Summer 1997)

Emily Driver and Audrey Droisen Child Sexual Abuse: Feminist Perspectives (MacMillan, 1989)

Liz Kelly ‘Weasel Words: Paedophiles and the Cycle of Abuse’ T&S 33 (Summer 1996)

Liz Kelly ‘Confronting an atrocity’ T&S 36 (Winter 1997/8)