“IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU”

Abstract

This article examines broadsheet and tabloid newspaper coverage of 12 similar murder cases from the United States and UK over three decades: the 1930s, 1960s and 1990s. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, this research studies the types of narratives used to tell this story. While the coverage from both countries in both types of newspapers during the 1930s and 1960s was strikingly similar, the coverage from the 1990s was significantly different to the previous two periods, on three levels. First, the coverage was less focused on “institutional” narratives and more on the “personal” and “societal” elements of the story, with new emphases on the surviving victims’ families and how these crimes impacted on the wider community. Second, the prominence given to the story of the victims’ families inevitably produced very raw, emotional coverage. Third, the sexual elements and motivations for the cases were highlighted. In the earlier periods the crimes were defined as isolated murders committed by “evil” individuals, whereas by the 1990s these crimes were considered a result of society in decline, with the offenders defined as serial predatory “paedophiles”.

Keywords:

• children
• crime
• fear
• narrative
• newspapers
• risk

Notes

1. As measured by circulation, the main national newspapers in Britain are the Guardian, The Independent, The Daily Telegraph and The Times (broadsheets); the Daily Express and the Daily Mail (middle-brow newspapers); the Daily Mirror, The People, Daily Star and The Sun (tabloid newspapers). I also included the Sunday editions of these 10 newspapers. The search was carried out using the newspaper database, Lexis/Nexis. “Soham” was used as the search criteria.

2. Obtaining figures for the frequency of child murders by strangers is difficult because publicly available statistics rarely define murders in such a way. The most recent figures I could find stated that in the UK since 1970, the number of child sex murders has remained roughly static at about five to seven per year (Silverman and Wilson, 2002, p. 20). Using available data in the United States, Jenkins (1998) concluded that between 1980 and 1994 an average of five victims a year were abducted for a sexual crime before being murdered.

3. The definition of paedophilia is contested, and the term is often used to describe a multitude of offences and offenders. Space restrictions prevent a thorough consideration of these arguments and viewpoints, and I therefore use quotation marks around my use of the word.

4. I had originally wanted to use a broadsheet, tabloid and “middle-brow” newspaper from each country, but it was impossible to compare the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily Mail with each other as a distinct category, so the former was used as an example of a broadsheet, and the latter, a tabloid. The US newspapers are all located on the upper Eastern seaboard, as the absence of a national press in the United States provided difficulties in terms of sampling. Taking newspapers with a similar geographical location ensured all newspapers could potentially cover crimes identically, as proximity to the crime would not affect the coverage.

5. Once the coding scheme was finalised, inter-coder reliability was achieved using Holsti's (1969) inter-coder reliability statistics measuring the degree of agreement between two coders. The reliability statistics were based on a sample of 120 articles (10 randomly selected from each case). Reliability of 0.90 or over was achieved for all the variables.

6. It is interesting to consider the lack of discussion about the actions taken by Raymond Morris’ wife to protect her husband from arrest, which is in stark contrast to the outcry over Maxine Carr's similar actions to protect Ian Huntley after the murders of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells in Britain in August 2002.