Challenging Myths? Male Rape in the News

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The media–crime link within criminology has been described by Howitt (1998) as ‘the silent discipline’, emphasising the relative neglect of criminological research in this area. Howitt identifies four main areas of questioning which have developed within criminology, in respect of the media. The first is whether the mass media, particularly television, through depictions of crime, violence, death and aggression, can be proven to have a causal impact on criminal or deviant behaviour. This view was highlighted in early work by Tarde (1912), who maintained that newspaper coverage of Jack the Ripper resulted in identical crimes being committed. More recently, the copycat theory was applied to the murder of two-year-old James Bulger, in 1993, who was brutally murdered on a railway line by two young boys. The judge in this case suggested that videos such as Child’s Play might have stimulated this imitative crime (Young 1996). However, as Howitt (1998) summarises, while copycat crimes may occur, the evidence is more than occasionally flawed and cannot therefore be used to draw firm conclusions. The second question to receive attention has been whether ‘real’ crime and fictional crime impact on the viewer in the same manner, particularly in the electronic media. Thirdly, focus has been on whether the mass media, particularly the press, construct and present our social world in ways that distort reality, and unjustly stereotype particular groups or individuals, labelling them as ‘outsiders’, eliminating their credibility, and in the process exploiting and furthering the media’s own privileged access to powerful state institutions. Finally, the question, of whether the mass media engender ‘moral panics’ and cause people to be fearful by over-reporting criminal and violent events, misrepresentation, and looking primarily for sensation above accuracy, has received much academic and public interest.