Essay One – Exploring Crime & the Media

My critical research was based upon Crime & the Media, yet more specifically women criminals and the media’s chosen representation of them. I realise that the media’s publication of criminality and crime has derived a lot of current issues, is the media encouraging crime amongst our society or generally aiding in reducing it, and similarly to that is the frequent debate about market available Computer games, such as GTA and Crack Down. I decided to focus however my attention on whether there is any significant difference between the representations of masculinity related crime and women law abiders. The finalised topic area I will base my discovery upon is” are female criminals represented equally, to the same extent, less or more to that of male equivalences? (For instance, Fred & Rosemary West.) Continuing my findings I will then investigate the most commonly committed female crimes publicised within the tabloids and an overall insight into media based representations of notorious female serial killers.

I decided to choose this topic area as I realised it would be somewhat challenging yet extremely interesting overall. A lot of people are intrigued as to why people commit crime and in particularly what gender has a tendency to commit what type of offence, for example, A female is often an accomplice or a shoplifter, more recently however we are supposedly always drunk and disorderly as the percentage of young women booze drinking has soared within the last two years. (Apparently). Yet there is evidence that this could well be another media blamed exaggeration connecting simply to that of Stuart Hall’s “Policing the Crisis”1978, When he suggested moral panic about mugging which was not a rational response to a new and rapid growing crime yet a misunderstanding of economic crisis, crimes similar to those which had been committed had been so for over 200 years.

Firstly I collected relevant sources recommended from my tutor, these were “Investigating women: Work, Criminality and Sexuality.” And “You’re Nicked” by Terry Davies. Originally I was going to focus solidly on each gender investigating how the media publicises limited information about the supposed convicted, for instance, his or hers childhood, biological and psychological theories and a possible stressor point. My tutor clarified this and supposed it was a reasonable idea. However during my first week of investigation I had already began to struggle, I searched thoroughly through the internet for articles on infamous male serial criminals hoping to find a bibliography, and this was successful and allowed me a clear insight into why someone would commit, perform and often plan something so abnormal and unnatural. The ultimate pause occurred when I couldn’t find articles on notorious criminals such as Peter Sutcliffe, Ian Huntley & Fred West. I was somewhat surprised as Ian Huntley was convicted in 2003, yet I couldn’t access any articles about his conviction, or his sentence unless I paid. However the BBC was very useful supplying me with a list of events on their “BBC on this day” site, located within the BBC News forum.





Web addresses on the internet such as www.truecrimelibrary.com and previous separate essays helped me define what I was specifically looking for.

Women as criminals

You are going to look across a range of media at the idea of the woman as a criminal and how it has developed. You'll use some factual media (eg Shannon Matthews' mother) and some fictional (eg Bad Girls). For primary research you'll analyse these representations to see if the fact of being female inflects the representations (slants them or colours them) in any particular way. Are women criminals protrayed as "badder" than men for doing the same crimes...

For promary research take some of these representations and explore them with a group of women, in some way (we'll have to define this more clearly).

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2294/is_/ai_77384285

http://www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol14is1/britto.pdf

Your first ideas

Crime and the Media

Representations of criminality in the popular media. You are interested in how criminals are portrayed in over-simplified, "monster" terms and how the media do not attempt to engage in a real exploration of why crimes happen.

Great idea. Begin by collecting media materials which contain descriptions of killers, or violent criminals. The newpapers are the obvious place to start. If you can follow the development of one story that would be good.

Begin by reading the chaptes on tv representations of cops and criminals that I will give you. They focus on fiction but do include discussion of the constructions of criminality, so are useful for you. And, of course, all media is fictional for a certain perspective...

Sean