5. Media Representations of Victims and Offenders

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this lecture, we think about media representations of victims and offenders and how these are influenced by factors such as ethnicity, gender and class, focusing in particular on: (i) the role of victims’ and offenders’ ethnicity in how they might be depicted in news media, and broader issues of racialisation; (ii) media representations of female offenders and gender stereotyping, especially the notion of double deviance; (iii) the factors which shape how female victims are depicted; (iv) the idea of intersectionality and the ways in which class and gender can intersect to influence media representations.

Course

In this course, Dr Francesca Menichelli (University of Surrey) explores the relationship between crime and the media. In the first lecture, we think about depictions of crime in news media and the factors that shape which incidents of crime are selected to appear in the news. In the second lecture, we look at crime fiction, its influence on how people think about crime, and how it is studied by scholars. In the third lecture, we consider research into media effects and the notion that the media can cause crime. Next, we turn to moral panics. In the fifth and final lecture, we think about media representations of victims and offenders and how these are informed by factors such as ethnicity, gender and class.

Lecturer

Dr Francesca Menichelli is Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Surrey. Her research focuses on crime prevention, policing and social control, and her teaching covers a broad range of criminological issues. She is author of Order and Conflict in Public Space (2016).