Andrea Mayr - David Machin - The Language of Crime and Deviance - An Introduction To Critical Linguistic Analysis in Media and Popular Culture-Continuum (2011)

The Language of
Crime and Deviance

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM CONTINUUM
Analysing Police Interviews, Elizabeth Carter

Language and Power, Andrea Mayr
The Language of
Crime and Deviance
An Introduction to
Critical Linguistic Analysis in
Media and Popular Culture
ANDREA MAYR
AND
DAVID MACHIN
Continuum International Publishing Group
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London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038
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© Andrea Mayr and David Machin 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
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system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
Andrea Mayr and David Machin asserted their right under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified
as Authors of this work.
British Library Cataloguing-in- Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
EIISBN: 978-1- 4411-8692-8
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data

The language of crime and deviance: an introduction to
critical linguistic analysis in media and popular culture / Andrea Mayr
and David Machin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Sociolinguistics. 2. Mass media and language 3. Language and culture.
4. Discourse analysis. I. Machin, David, Ph. D. II. Title.
P40.M398 2011
306.44–dc23
2011020736
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Printed and bound in India
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
1 Introduction: crime, deviance and language 1

2 Simple word choice and the representation of
people and action in crime 27
3 Concealment and evasion in crime reporting through
grammar 51
4 Young people and crime 79
5 Women and crime 111
6 The criminal justice system in the media: the police 137
7 The criminal justice system in the media: the prison 169
8 Corporate crime 199

9 Conclusion 223
Bibliography 229
Index 245
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank a number of people for their assistance in the
design, writing and production of this book.
Thanks go to Jake Scamell and Joseph Paul for producing the line drawings
for stills used in this book. Of the team at Continuum, we are grateful to
Gurdeep Mattu and Colleen Coalter for their assistance and advice throughout
the project. We are also indebted to the anonymous referees who devoted
their time to write detailed reports on the proposal.
The authors and the publishers wish to thank the following for permission
to use copyrighted material in this book:
Getty Images for the picture of the female drug addict on p. 54 and the
picture of the ‘hoodies’ on p. 63;
Liz Somerville/Photofusion Picture Library for the image of the youth with
a knife on p. 142;
Ciaran Barnes/Sunday Life for the images and the ‘Black widow duped
friend’ newspaper page on p. 161;
Glen Marks/Rex Features for the image of the prisoner in a cell on p. 235;
UTV News for the ‘Wife jailed for husband killing’ article on p. 167;
Daily Mail /Solo Syndication for the ‘Pampered prisoners supplied with
£221,726 of PlayStations’ article on pp. 234–7, and for the ‘Women’s
prisons should all close within a decade’ article on pp. 244–6;
The Times/ NI Syndication for the ‘Prison officers fear that Muslim inmates
are turning to extremism’ article on pp. 82–5.
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have
been inadvertently overlooked, the authors and publishers will be glad to
make suitable arrangements at the earliest opportunity.
Transcription conventions
In different parts of this book, we have used passages of spoken interaction
for analysis, transcribed in such a way as to capture varying aspects of real
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
speech. Below is a key to the transcription symbols we have used in these

passages.
[ Interruption and overlap (two speakers talking at the same time)

[] Speaker’s turn completely contained within another speaker’s
turn
e.g. A: Have you turned off [B: yes] the lights?
[?] Unintelligible words
CAPS emphatic stress through capitals
... short pause
[. . .] parts of speech omitted
ehm hesitation
Conventions for capturing non-standard pronunciation

Ah’m = I am
an =and
defnly = definitely
doin’ = doing
1
Introduction: crime,
deviance and language
T his book is about the language of crime and deviance in the mass media.
The relationship between crime and media has been extensively studied
in a number of disciplines, most notably criminology, sociology, psychology
and media/cultural studies. These have shed much light on the way that the
media may distort crime and on the way that some events are defined as
crime and others, that appear to have equal gravity, are not. But there has
been little systematic enquiry into the mediatized language of crime. The
approach we offer in this book therefore focuses on the details of language
use in the media, giving us a powerful tool to analyse the intricacies of media
representations of crime. These tools allow us to uncover broader ideologies
and patterns described in the existing literature from other fields more
effectively. They also permit a deeper understanding of how the distortion of
crime and deviance is legitimized and naturalized in the media. Additionally,
this book draws on visual methods that have been taken from critical linguistics
to reveal the details of visual media representations .
Our contemporary societies, early in the twenty- first century, have been
described as ‘late modernity’ (Beck, 1992), an era characterized by uncertainty,
instability, and rapid change, in which jobs, families and even identities can
be fleeting and unsure. Importantly, late modernity is also a fundamentally
mediatized era, in which the mass media not only reflect society but also
shape it. In this media environment, images of crime and deviance proliferate.
They are both entertaining, due to their dramatic nature and appeal to morbid
curiosity about the worst in human nature, and compelling, as they appear
to tell us about features of our society that best characterize our sense of
insecurity and impermanence. They feed into concerns about change and lack
of respect for older values and former ways of doing things. They also feed
into our concerns about our own lack of place and safety in our societies. The
2 THE LANGUAGE OF CRIME AND DEVIANCE
study of language in representations of crime and deviance is one important

way through which we can take apart the details of these representations.
We can show precisely how some events are shaped to fit and embody
these fears. We can also demonstrate how responsibility for the changes we
perceive is glossed over and how actual causes and effects are abstracted
through language use, often painting a highly misleading picture of the reality
of crime.
Media portrayals of crime and deviance are a source of fear, but also,
as we shall see, of fascination and escapism. But most importantly, as we
show at times, they can be used by the powerful to distract from their own
responsibilities to create safe and supportive societies. Much crime is clearly
related to issues of poverty and marginalization. And one of the biggest
economic burden on society is caused by corporate crime, which is rarely
taken on by the media in the same demonizing way as other forms of crime. All
of this is well documented in the existing and growing literature in criminology
and sociology, as we shall see. However, a linguistic approach can help to
reveal some of the more subtle strategies by which authors persuade us that
these are reasonable states of affairs.
Crime stories have always been prominent in all parts of the media. This is
because they serve important social, cultural, political, economic and moral
purposes. These purposes have been interpreted in different ways by media
theoretical approaches, which we will come back to later. Recent British
Crime Surveys (BCS) have revealed that 75 per cent of the public obtain
information about crime and criminal justice from the media (Levenson, 2001).
This suggests that news coverage plays a significant part in shaping people’s
perceptions of crime and deviance. This should come as no surprise. Every
day the media vie for our attention with stories about crime designed to shock,
outrage, titillate and entertain, reducing what is a complex social and political
problem to simplified accounts and easy to understand sound bites for news
bulletins on radio and television. In this way, the media function ideologically,
although this is not simply a matter of bias. If we want to understand media
texts (‘discourses’) on crime and deviance, we need to place them within the
context of the institutional procedures and practices of news organizations
and the constraints of ownership and control – all factors which have an
impact on what becomes news more so than the events themselves. It is in
this context that we must place our critical linguistic analysis.
People’s perceptions of crime and deviance are also influenced by its
representations in popular culture and its repackaging as entertainment. For
example, airport and railway bookshops now fill entire shelves with what has
been dubbed ‘True Crime’, books that feature ‘real’ stories about serial killers
and sex crimes, and autobiographies by former criminals, some of which
have formed the basis of films such as Monster, Chopper, Bronson and many
INTRODUCTION 3
others. The focus of these books and films is usually on excessive violence,
constructing criminals as a ‘breed apart’ and emphasizing the idea of the free-
floating evil ‘other’.
There has also been a proliferation of criminal justice as a mass media
entertainment commodity. Programmes on crime and deviance (factual,
fictional and ‘factional’) are widely apparent on prime time British television,
many imported from the United States. They range from crime appeal
programmes (Crimewatch; Crimestoppers ) – in which the police and television
companies work together to catch offenders – to crime series and forensic
crime dramas (Taggart, the Bill; Law and Order ; CSI ; Dexter ), prison dramas
(Oz ; Bad Girls; Prison Break ), prison documentaries (Lockdown: Women
Behind Bars; America’s Toughest Prisons ) and reality- based TV programmes
featuring the police (Cops with Cameras ), in which the camera follows officers
performing dramatic raids on the homes of suspected criminals. Some of these
programmes suggest that they portray a realistic representation of the risks
and dangers posed by crime and criminals in late modern market societies.
This is underscored both in the dramatic language and, just as importantly, in
the images used. The success of these shows lies precisely in the blurring
of the boundaries between fact and fiction. What all these representations
have in common is that crime is largely portrayed as the product of individual
choice or individual pathology and as more or less unrelated to wider social
structures and culture.
Some of these fictional and non- fictional media portrayals of crime and
the criminal can be seen as an expression of the shift in thinking about
offenders which began in the mid-1980s and 1990s in America. At that time,
clinical psychiatrists and behavioural psychologists proposed an individualistic
cognitive behavioural interpretation of crime which conceives of the offender
as a free-willed ‘decision- maker’ who turns to crime because he or she
lacks the requisite skills, abilities and attitudes to lead a law- abiding life. It
makes sense to argue that the prevailing criminological notion of the ‘criminal
personality’ and the current neo- liberal discourses of crime control espoused
by politicians in Britain and the United States are helping to construct and
legitimize common-sense and populist ideas of crime fighting around the
individual offender as the object of analysis, as opposed to acknowledging
social and economic causes. In this punitive climate, existing social policies
and welfare- state solutions have been replaced by a criminology of the
dangerous ‘other’ and discourses about crime using the language of warfare
and defence (Garland, 2001).
These discourses are most clearly disseminated to the public by the media.
Not only do the media focus disproportionally on the most serious and violent
crimes, they also tend to frame the crime issue in a ‘law and order’ perspective,
promoting policing and harsher punishments as antidotes to the problem of
crime, while marginalizing alternative perspectives and approaches. This is

particularly true of the popular press. In so doing, the media rely heavily on
official definitions of crime provided by powerful institutional sources and
individuals, which include the police and the criminal justice system as well
as politicians (Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994). But the police also depend on
the media, which they need for crime solving and image construction (Reiner,
2003).
The media have also been accused of scapegoating and criminalizing
certain people or certain groups of people (often along the lines of class,
race and gender). Successive British governments have harnessed the media
to criminalize certain individuals and groups (e.g. recreational drug users,
single/teenage mothers, girl gangs, ravers, paedophiles, young offenders,
protesters, immigrants, the homeless and the young). Women who commit
serious crimes and who thereby deviate from the maternal, caring and
nurturing stereotype are, as we shall see, subject to particularly strong
vilification and symbolic punishment by the media. So are young people,
who are forever under media scrutiny, whether for minor infractions judged
to be problematic, such as graffiti writing or rowdiness, or for more serious
offences, such as knife crime and the use of illegal drugs and alcohol (‘binge
drinking’). The prevailing message is one of youth out of control. Typically,
media and political discourses declare rather rare violent crimes committed
by young people to be indicative of some social and national malaise and
use them as metaphors for the state of modern youth and society on the
verge of collapse. Government initiatives in turn often focus on surveillance
and control, thereby diverting attention from the links between poverty, lack
of opportunity and delinquency that often characterizes the lives of (young)
people who fall foul of the law. Many criminologists, however, have pointed
to the strong link between inequality and both violent and property crime, and
to the fact that both have been exacerbated by late modern capitalism and the
culture of consumerism (e.g. Reiner, 2007).
Crime and media in late modernity

Numerous commentators have suggested, late modern society can be
characterized by a profound sense of insecurity and disorientation. As Ferrell
et al. have put it, in late modernity, ‘space and time compress under the forces
of economic and cultural globalization, culture comes loose from locality, and
material and virtual realities intermingle, with many people consequently
experiencing a profound sense of disembeddedness and dislocation’ (2008:
560). It is a world characterized by ‘hyperpluralism’ (Ferrell et al., 2008), that
is, an unprecedented diversity of values and cultural perspectives, carried by
INTRODUCTION 5
the globalized media and ever new media forms, resulting in the potential for
people to cast off transmitted cultures and traditions while at the same time
heightening uncertainty about their existence. Linked to this is the emergence
of a ‘risk society’, (Beck, 1992) another characteristic of late modernity, and
its associated quest for security. These risks are global (e.g. environmental
disasters, international terrorism), but they are accompanied by a more vague
fear that pervades people’s everyday existence. Problems generated by
changes in moral, social and economic life are intimately bound up with fears
about crime and the containment of criminals. For Muzzatti (2011), this fear is
misplaced, because it is not a legitimate fear of government, corporations or
other authority, but a fear of other people. This fear of crime and criminals is
in turn stoked by the media. Stories on crime and crime control, justifications
for punitiveness and policing circulate globally and ambiguously for mediated
consumption. According to Garland, a ‘crime- consciousness’ appears to have
become institutionalized in the media and popular culture and in the built
environment (e.g. the increased use of CCTV cameras in cities). Concerns
about economic insecurity and personal safety have contributed to a ‘culture
of control’ (Garland, 2001), which, particularly in the United Kingdom and
the United States, allows politicians to lock up ever more offenders, pass
increasingly harsh laws (e.g. ‘three strikes and you’re out’) and impose
increasingly strict controls upon behaviours that were previously tolerated
and not criminalized (e.g. ‘joyriding’).
Also important in this debate about crime and media in late modernity
is the theoretical approach of a new wave of scholars whose work is often
collectively referred to as ‘cultural criminology’ (Lyng, 1990; Presdee,
1994, 2000; Ferrell et al., 2008; Hayward and Presdee, 2010). Like the
early British conflict criminologists (Cohen, 1972; Cohen and Young, 1973;
Hall et al., 1978), cultural criminologists emphasize the social/cultural
construction of crime and crime control and particularly focus on the
centrality of the media image in this process. However, taking their cue
from Katz (1988), they also examine crime as a mass- marketed form of
pleasure: the style, representation and performance among deviant (youth)
subcultures; the ‘seductive’ nature of many crimes; and ‘the creeping
criminalization of everyday life’, which they see as a cultural enterprise of
the powerful (Presdee, 2000). Cultural criminology therefore ‘represents a
phenomenology of transgression fused with a sociological analysis of late
modern culture’ (Hayward, 2002: 12).
An important characteristic of all these late modern economic, social and
cultural arrangements is that they exist as discourses as well as processes
taking place outside these discourses, (Fairclough, 1999: 6). We can therefore
say that the transformations of late modernity are to a significant degree also
transformations in language and discourse. As for crime control, the last
20 years have seen the re- emergence of an explicitly retributive discourse

which has made it easier for politicians and the media to express punitive
sentiments and to introduce ever new measures to combat deviant behaviour
(e.g. Anti- social Behaviour Orders or ASBOs; curfews). Britain has largely
avoided the excesses of the United States (e.g. the reintroduction of the chain
gang in the South), although there are similarities in the language adopted
by government ministers (e.g. ‘condemn a little more and understand a little
less’). A noticeable discourse of punishment conveying public sentiment is
openly embraced, and not just for very serious crimes but also in juvenile
justice and community penalties. The language of condemnation has
re- entered official discourse, and what purports to be the expression of public
sentiment is frequently taking priority over the professional judgement of
experts (see Garland, 2001). For example, the feelings of victims and their
families or of a fearful public are now routinely expressed in the media and
invoked as ‘common sense’ reasons in support of harsher laws and penal
policies (e.g. James Bulger’s mother’s media campaign against the release of
her son’s teenage killers).
These developments create a space for the critical analysis of mediated
discourses of crime as a fundamental element in the theorization and analysis
of crime control in late modernity. Since media theoretical, criminological
and sociological accounts on these issues do not specifically address the
importance of discourse, this is where Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has
a contribution to make.
So far we have given an overview of some of the themes and issues that
we will focus on in the present volume. We have also hinted at the centrality
of discourse in the critical study of media representations of crime and
deviance. Before we turn to some of the main theoretical and conceptual
tools that have been used in media studies to explain and understand these
processes of media production and representation, we need to look in more
detail at the concept of ‘discourse’ and the linguistic theory and approach we
have adopted for the present book, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).
Discourse
‘Discourse’ is a contested concept that is used by social theorists (e.g.
Foucault, 1977), critical linguists (e.g. Fowler et al., 1979) and, finally, critical
discourse analysts (e.g. van Dijk, 1990; Fairclough, 1992), all of whom define
discourse differently and from their various theoretical and disciplinary
standpoints. We will now elaborate on the meanings of the term and how
we intend to use it in this book for our study of mediated representations of
crime and deviance.
INTRODUCTION 7
Discourse is often defined in two different ways. According to the formalist

or structuralist paradigm, discourse is ‘language above the clause’ (Stubbs,
1983: 1). This approach to discourse focuses on the form which language
above the sentence takes, looking at structural properties, such as sentence
organization and cohesion, but paying little attention to the social ideas that
inform the way people use and interpret language.
This social aspect of language is emphasized by the second, so- called
functionalist paradigm, which states that discourse is ‘language in use’ (Brown
and Yule, 1983: 1) and should be studied as such. Brown and Yule state that
[. . .] the analysis of discourse is, necessarily, the analysis of language in use.

As such, it cannot be restricted to the description of forms independent
of the purposes or functions which these forms are designed to serve in
human affairs. (Brown and Yule, 1983: 1)
According to the functionalist paradigm, the analysis of language cannot be

divorced from the analysis of its purpose and functions of language in human
life. Discourse is therefore seen as a culturally and socially organized way
of speaking. As Richardson notes, researchers who adopt this definition
of discourse ‘assume that language is used to mean something and to do
something’ and that this ‘meaning and doing’ is linked to the context of its
usage (2007: 24; emphasis in original). If we want to interpret a text properly,
for example, the linguistic and visual features of a news report on crime figures
or an online newspaper article on ‘rioting’ youths, ‘we need to work out what
the speaker or writer is doing through discourse, and how this “doing” is
linked to wider interpersonal, institutional, socio- cultural and material contexts’
(Richardson, 2007: 24). The term ‘text’ refers to ‘the observable product of
interaction’, whereas discourse is ‘the process of interaction itself: a cultural
activity’ (Talbot, 2007: 9).
This view of language as action and social behaviour is emphasized in
CDA, which sees discourse – the use of language in speech and writing – as
a form of social practice. It is this definition of discourse as a social practice
that is the most useful for our analysis of media discourse, as it implies a
two-way relationship between a ‘discursive event’ (i.e. any use of discourse)
and the situation, institution and social structure in which it occurs; discourse
is shaped by these, but it also shapes them (Fairclough, 1992: 62). In other
words, language represents and contributes to the (re)production of social
reality. This definition of discourse establishes a link to our view of the
institutional discourse of the media as engaged in ‘reality construction’.
A different view of discourse that has also been incorporated into the
theoretical framework of CDA, especially the one developed by Fairclough
(1992), is that of Foucault. This is because Foucault offers important theoretical
concepts for understanding media institutions as sites of discursive power.

Foucault does not think of discourse as a piece of text, but as ‘practices that
systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (1972: 49). Discourse,
Foucault argues, constructs the topic and provides ‘a language for talking
about – a way of representing the knowledge about – a particular topic at a
particular historical moment’ (Hall, 1992: 291). In other words, it governs the
way that a topic can be meaningfully talked about. Discourse also influences
how ideas are put into practice and used to regulate the conduct of others.
This means that discourse (or ‘discourses’ in the social theoretical sense) can
limit and restrict other ways of talking and producing knowledge about the
problem of crime. For example, current media discourses about imprisonment
promote a populist and highly punitive penal policy in the United Kingdom.
In Foucault’s terms, the media are ‘a regime of representation’, producing
a discourse of imprisonment that is limited to the narrow construction of
prisoners within a discourse of fear and dangerousness that legitimizes
prison (Mason, 2006a: 253), as we will show in Chapter 7. This means that
debates about alternatives to prison are sidelined, as are debates about
prisoner self- harm and suicides and the rising number of women and young
people being sent to prison.
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is the name for a rather loose combination of
approaches to the critical study of (media) discourse, all of which are located
broadly within the tradition of critical social research. The theoretical roots of
CDA go back to Western Marxism, which includes key figures in twentieth-
century social and political thought: the Frankfurt School (especially Habermas),
Gramsci and Althusser. Western Marxism has focused on the cultural
dimensions of society, arguing that capitalist social relations are established
and maintained not just through economic, but also to a large extent through
cultural and ideological processes. Another, maybe less apparent, influence
on CDA is Hall’s work on encoding/decoding of media texts: the way that
media texts are encoded by their producers and decoded by readers and
viewers. Although CDA approaches have developed largely independently
from each other, they are united by a concern with demonstrating how the use
and abuse of social power is produced, reproduced and maintained through
language. For example, a typical focus of CDA research has been on the
nature and use of racist language in the media and other institutions, and how
this use both reflects and reinforces racist institutional policies and individual
racist attitudes. Given this kind of focus, it is not surprising that, in contrast to
most mainstream discourse analysis, CDA practitioners do not see their work
INTRODUCTION 9
as value- neutral scholarship. CDA practitioners take an ‘explicit socio- political

stance’ (van Dijk, 1993: 252), seeing their work as not merely describing the
inequitable discourse practices on race, gender, class and so on, but also as
contributing to the contestation and even transformation of those practices.
Discourse analysts working within the critical tradition have examined the
ideological work done by a range of (media) texts, both linguistic and visual,
such as advertisements (e.g. Bloor and Bloor, 2007; Machin, 2007), women’s
and men’s magazines (e.g. Caldas- Coulthard, 1996; Benwell, 2003; Machin
and Thornborrow, 2006; Jeffries, 2007), television news programmes and
documentaries (Fairclough, 1995b: 167–82), online news (Scollon and
Scollon, 2004; Mautner, 2005), radio broadcast news (Montgomery, 2007)
and language and the law (e.g. Cotterill, 2003; Heffer, 2005; Coulthard and
Johnson, 2007; Rock, 2007). CDA has also addressed the involvement of
language in the workings of contemporary capitalism (e.g. Fairclough, 2002;
Mautner, 2005; Machin and Mayr, 2007). However, the type of media text
that has received the most attention by far has been printed news (e.g. van
Dijk, 1988; Fowler, 1991; Richardson, 2007).
The ‘critical’ analysis of discourse can be defined in the following way: it is
analysis which aims to systematically explore often opaque relationships

of causality and determination between (a) discourse practices, events
and texts, and (b) wider social and cultural structures, relations and
processes; to investigate how such practices, events and texts arise out
of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power and struggles over
power; and to explore how the opacity of these relationships between
discourse and society is itself a factor securing power and hegemony.
(Fairclough, 1995a: 132- 3)
CDA maintains that discourses, including those of the media, are a site
of social struggle (Fairclough, 1992). It is therefore an important tool for
investigating media power and state influence, as it is primarily concerned
with how social inequality is reproduced through discourse (van Dijk, 1988,
1991, 1993; Fairclough, 1995a; Richardson, 2007). Language is seen not as
transparent or representational but as constructing versions of social reality
that then ‘[. . . ] enter the discursive economy to be circulated, exchanged,
stifled, marginalized or perhaps come to dominate over other possible
accounts’ (Wetherell, 2003: 16). It is concerned with ‘discursive ideologies’,
which reproduce the dominance of those with privileged access to (media)
resources. Discourses of the powerful may take the form of overt support
for a particular position (e.g. greater use of police powers in demonstrations)
or outright denial of another (e.g. through euphemistic labelling of corporate/
environmental crime as ‘error’, ‘accident’ or ‘disaster’). However, more often
these discourses are exercises of power through inconspicuous, less visible

forms. CDA’s aim, therefore, is to show how discourse produces and maintains
relations of power, domination and inequality which are often obscured and
not readily apparent. It is through persuasion, manipulation and disinformation
in everyday texts that the institutions of the powerful are more likely to be
legitimized. Such discourses appear routine, normal and established. The
continuous exposure to and consumption of media texts and images can
result in ideologies being so deeply ingrained in our thought patterns and
language use that we take them for granted. And when an ideology has
become ‘a socially imbued unconscious attitude’ (Bloor and Bloor, 2007: 10)
and been accepted as ‘common sense’, it is much more difficult to question
or challenge. The more commonsensical (‘naturalized’) the discourses and
practices appear, the greater is the capacity for dominant groups to rule by
‘consent’, hence hegemony.
The term ‘hegemony’ dates back to Lenin, but it was elaborated by Gramsci
(1971), who maintained that the ruling classes win approval for their moral,
political and cultural values not through coercion but through consent. This
consent is achieved largely through the institutions of civil society, one of
which is the media (the others being the law, the family and the educational
system). This domination by consent, however, is only ever achieved partially
and temporarily. The media, along with the other institutions and the political
system, are an important site of hegemonic struggle, in which battles take
place over ideas, concepts and language. Richardson (2007) points out
that the work of mainstream journalism supports hegemony by naturalizing
or taking for granted the inequalities of contemporary capitalism, mainly
reporting events as they are seen by officials and sidelining other voices.
However, it is important to realize that such dominance ‘arises as a property
of the system of relations involved, rather than as the overt and intentional
biases of individuals’ (Hall, 1982: 95; quoted in Richardson, 2007: 36). What
we have to bear in mind is the fundamentally institutional nature of news and
that this determines the professional practices of journalism.
Although the general thrust in CDA has been towards an analysis of
linguistic structures in media and other institutional discourses, some scholars
have emphasized the importance of incorporating visual images into concepts
of discourse and have moved towards broader, multimodal conceptions (e.g.
Kress and van Leeuwen,1996; Machin and van Leeuwen, 2007). Discourse is
regarded as multimodal, because visual as well as linguistic structures express
(ideological) meanings. While political and ideological views of newspapers can
be expressed in the choice of different vocabularies (e.g. ‘anti- capitalist riot’
vs. ‘anti- capitalist protest ’) and different grammatical structures (e.g. active
vs. passive constructions), the same applies to the visual representation of
events, of what Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) have termed ‘the grammar of
INTRODUCTION 11
visual design’. In our highly visual and globalized media sphere, it is not just TV,
but also press representations that have become ‘intensely visual phenomena’
(Greer, 2010: 227), featuring, for example, photographs of offenders, victims
and their family members; careful redrawings of crime scenes or routes taken
by criminals; weapons used; tables of crime rates and statistics, often in full
colour and therefore with a more immediate and dramatic impact than words
might have. Stories are also more easily individualized and personalized and
have far more shock or entertainment value when accompanied by images.
The right image can elevate a criminal or crime victim to iconic status (e.g. the
now infamous mug shot of ‘moor murderess’ Myra Hindley).
Scholarly research in media studies has somewhat neglected multimodal
aspects of meaning- making, although Hall pointed out back in 1973 that images
have always played a defining part in the manufacture of (crime) news. We
therefore address this issue in the present volume and demonstrate through
multimodal analyses of media discourses that images are ‘entirely within
the realm of ideology’ (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996: 13). Media images
convey reality and fiction at the same time, complicating interpretation. The
perceived denotative, and hence ‘objective’, status of press photographs can
act as a mask for political and ideological bias. The process by which news
images are selected parallels that of text, as news images are subject to the
same criteria in terms of selection, interpretation and, often, modification.
Just as reporters and editors decide which story topics are chosen and how
they will be presented, similar decisions influence the selection of images in
the news.
That is why it is so important to focus on the interplay between word and
image (and other visual features, such as headline size, font and colour) in
reinforcing ideological representations of crime.
Media theory and the social production

of news
The ways in which crime and deviance have been represented in the press
and broadcast media, and particularly how they ideologically distort the reality
of crime, have been investigated by the pioneering work of scholars who have
worked at the intersection of criminology and media/cultural studies, such as
Stan Cohen, Jock Young, Stuart Hall and Steve Chibnall, to name but a few. We
all know that the media are selective in the kinds of events and circumstances
they report, and crime reporting is no exception. Crimes happening in the
private sphere, such as child abuse and domestic violence, receive relatively
little media attention. So do less ‘sensational’ offences, such as corporate
crime, police and state violence, denial of human rights in the workplace or
pollution of the environment. But maybe we should not expect the media to
reflect the social reality of crime. Maybe media stories function not so much
as vehicles of information but more as moral instruction, so that they can best
be understood as ‘modern folk tales’ (Kania, 2004). As Hall et al. say on the
popular appeal of crime stories in the news, ‘crime allows all “good men and
true” to stand up and be counted – at least metaphorically – in the defence of
normality, stability and “our way of life”’ (1978: 50). The questions we might
ask ourselves are why do media organizations focus on some crimes and not
on others, why do they favour particular classifications and interpretations
of deviance and why are certain individuals and groups singled out for
condemnation and demonization? These questions have to be understood in
the context of the prevailing political and cultural climate and through the ways
news organizations and their news production processes work.
Research on media production has focused on the underlying ideological
factors that influence the selection, production and dissemination of media
stories, particularly (crime) news stories, and how ideology and power are
expressed through various institutional and professional decision processes.
In what follows, we provide a summary of the two main theories of news
media production.
Broadly speaking, there are two basic, opposing theoretical positions on
media production: radical and liberal pluralist. Radical approaches go back to
Marxism, the Frankfurt School and Antonio Gramsi’s notion of hegemony,
and stress the unequal distribution of economic, social and cultural power
in society and its impact on media production. Liberal pluralist approaches,
on the other hand, are informed by the ideals of classical liberal theory and
emphasize the principles of freedom and choice. In a nutshell, radical readings
see the media as controlling the public, whereas liberal pluralist readings see
the media as serving the public.
Starting with radical approaches, the so- called political economy model
focuses on the relations between media and other economical and political
institutions, arguing that since the media is largely privately owned, the drive
for profit will shape its output and political stance. News is reduced to what
is commercially viable, popular, easily digestible, mainly unchallenging and
uncritical (Golding and Murdock, 2000). Media organizations are seen as
‘informational capitalists’ (Castells, 1996) that ensure the stable social and
political conditions that are necessary for capitalism to thrive. Important
in this respect is Herman and Chomsky’s (1988) propaganda model, an
important exploration of the structures of media power through corporate
ownership and advertising. Herman and Chomsky view the media as a
mouthpiece of the state, whose economic, political, cultural and military
elites control media information and ‘manufacture’ consent. A ‘hierarchy of
INTRODUCTION 13
credibility’ (Becker, 1967) is created in which the ideas and definitions of the
powerful (e.g. the police) are reproduced by the media, and the reader or
viewer is largely deprived of comparative material offering divergent views.
The role of journalists as objective seekers of truth is marginal compared to
the dominance of these elites.
Unlike the political economy model, the hegemonic model of media
production sees the media not under the more or less total control of the
state but as a site of contestation in which alternative viewpoints actively
compete for hegemony. Hegemony has played a central role in theorizing
about the media’s portrayal of crime, deviance and law and order, and has
informed much of the most influential work from the 1970s and 1980s, which
sought to expose the influence of structural inequalities on crime and on the
criminalization of people and whole groups of people (e.g. Cohen, 1972; Hall
et al., 1978). Hall et al. argue that institutions such as the media, the judiciary
and the police are not simply passive recipients of consensual, unambiguous
notions of crime but
. . . active in defining situations, in selecting targets, in initiating ‘campaigns’,

in structuring these campaigns, in selectively signifying their actions to
the public at large, in legitimating their actions through the accounts of
situations which they produce. (Hall et al., 1978: 52)
Due to their privileged access to the media, criminal justice institutions are able
to function as what Hall et al. called primary definers of deviance (1978: 58),
which enables them to provide the most authoritative information on crime
issues, thereby setting the frame for debate. In what Chibnall (1977) termed
the ‘structured access’ of news – the imperative that news stories should
be based on the authoritative statements of experts in the field – the media
are subordinate to elite and powerful sources (police officers, government
ministers and judges) and are therefore, according to Hall et al., secondary
definers of deviance. As such, the media support and legitimize dominant
definitions and discourses of crime and deviance. These discourses, it is
suggested, over- concentrate on crimes of the young, the working class, the
unemployed and ethnic minorities, requiring greater punishment and control
for these groups, while comparatively neglecting the crimes of the socially
privileged and those in power.
While liberal pluralist theorists (e.g. Gans, 1980) would concede that
certain official interests receive privileged coverage, they would also insist
that bias from institutional sources or pressure from media owners is
balanced by concerns about journalistic integrity and objectivity and the open
and equal competition between a wide range of groups that vie for media
access and influence. Nor, they would argue, does the ‘privileged access’ of
criminal justice organizations guarantee absolute control, as both journalists

and the wider public can and do challenge the views of primary definers. In
the liberal pluralist view, the media act as the ‘fourth estate’, with journalists
being seekers of truth, exposing injustice, holding the powerful to account
and acting as a mouthpiece for marginalized groups.
It certainly cannot be denied that in crime news reports the contentions
of primary definers are increasingly challenged, as is the case when the
media report on corruption, police incompetence and brutality, or institutional
racism, thereby undermining the credibility of the police and other criminal
justice agencies, or when politicians have to resign after being exposed in
a political, sex or economic scandal. However, Hall et al. contended that
although oppositional views offer some semblance of balance, the views
offered by primary definers still have a definitional advantage that frames
the parameters for debate. Less powerful, marginalized pressure groups (e.g.
penal reform or environmental groups) can, of course, gain access, but they
need to work harder to make their views heard. These constraints have real
consequences for the production and circulation of crime and criminal justice
issues and cannot be dismissed on the basis of equality of competition and
professional integrity (Greer, 2010).
In summary, one could argue that the power relations between journalists
and their sources may be more fluid than radical scholars would allow for, but
also more constraining than liberal pluralists have suggested (Greer, 2009). The
radical position could be said to overstate the dominance of official agencies
and sources, and to underestimate the ability of journalists to challenge the
status quo. It may also overlook the level of conflict between and within political
and economic elites, and it therefore needs to acknowledge that access to
the media by less powerful groups in society has considerably changed over
the past years. For example, radical political groups (such as Greenpeace) or
anti- capitalism movements have been very successful in this respect. Liberal
approaches, on the other hand, understate the institutional and professional
practices in newsrooms which severely limit journalists’ freedom to report
objectively and impartially.
With the proliferation of ever new media forms (online versions of
newspapers, satellite, digital and cable television, the internet, social
networking sites) and the dramatic transformation of the media landscape
in recent decades, the two main approaches to media production have been
criticized as too rigid and deterministic for capturing the often unpredictable
flow of media information (Greer, 2009). Because of the complexities of these
contemporary media forms and the means of disseminating them, some critics
maintain that the ‘old’ theories of media production have become obsolete,
and that in our media- saturated age it is no longer even possible to distinguish
between ‘image’ and ‘reality’. As Greer points out, the emergence of ‘a highly
INTRODUCTION 15
diversified, widely accessible, and ultimately chaotic media environment has

changed the terrain upon which struggles over media power and influence
are played out’ (2009: 185).
The twenty-first- century media sphere is also characterized by increased
market competition, the rapid rise of audience participation and the intense
commodification of (crime) news. A recent example from Britain of these
developments is the case of gunman Raoul Moat, who, after his release from a
six-week prison sentence for assault, shot his girlfriend and shot and killed her
new partner, whom he falsely believed to be a policeman. He then went on to
shoot a police officer in an unprovoked attack, blinding him, and went on the run.
In a world of 24-hour (globalized) news, blogs and Twitter, Moat became a public
commodity, his actions tracked by millions in Britain and abroad, as the police
hunt for him unfolded and ended in his suicide after a six-hour standoff with the
police. While he was on the run, Moat’s and the victims’ families and friends and
the wider public were actively encouraged to participate in the news production
process by giving interviews or by voicing their views to the media online or
on sites such as Twitter and Facebook. The unintended effect of this was that
a number of people were able to express their sympathy for Moat and even
admiration for his ability to evade capture for a week, despite the fact that the
police had mounted one of its biggest manhunts ever. Moat’s case therefore also
casts doubt over the ability of the police and the mainstream media to always act
as primary and secondary definers. Increasingly angered by the police and sectors
of the printed press labelling him a ‘nutter’, Moat himself actively intervened in
the news production process by leaving letters and recorded messages behind,
in which he threatened to kill more police and even members of the public should
the negative press coverage continue. As one tweeter said, ‘I see Raoul Moat
has got his own TV show. The News’ (Doward and Townsend, 2010).
Crime and violence have not just become commodified, according to cultural
criminologist Presdee, but also much desired, to be pleasurably consumed by
the public. As we read and watch, we become partners in the creation of
crime and willing consumers of the excitement it produces:
[t]o be involved in some way in the act of transgression is pleasure enough.

To watch, to be there yet absent, is enough. [. . .] A global multimedia
industry enables us to consume many of these forbidden pleasures [. . .]
without questioning how these commodities come into being or whether
there are victims involved. In a sense others do our crime for us and the
multimedia deliver the pleasures to us via the Internet and a growing
‘reality’ television. (Presdee, 2000: 30)
Perhaps also important in this context is the way in which, in recent years,
corporate capitalism has increasingly relied on ‘rebranding’ crime as a means
of selling products, from films to ’gangsta rap’ and clothing, presented in

stylized and aestheticized images in the mass media.
In this section, we have provided an overview of the two main models
of media production that have been used in media studies to explain media
representations of crime: radical/hegemonic and liberal pluralist. We have also
mentioned criticism from postmodernists who argue that because of dramatic
changes in the ‘mediascape’, these models are increasingly obsolete. The
hegemonic approach of media production, in particular, has been criticized for
overstating the intent of the media and other powerful institutions to deceive
the public. There is also the argument that the tendency of the media to
perpetuate consensual views and politics is not exactly deliberate or even
conscious, but the outcome of certain institutional practices that characterize
news organizations. We would nevertheless argue that the media continue
to be an ideological means in the ongoing struggle for hegemony about what
constitutes crime and deviance, who is most at risk and what needs to be
done about it. The hegemonic model of media production is therefore central
to our CDA approach to media power and discourse.
Far from being a random or personal process, editors and journalists
produce and select news according to a range of professional criteria that
determine a story’s newsworthiness and which are called ‘news values’. We
will turn to these next.
News values and newsworthiness

News values are the professional, yet also informal, imperatives that shape
the selection, presentation and reporting of (crime) news. They result from
two different but interrelated factors which determine what makes a story
newsworthy. First, news values are shaped by political, economic and
technological forces. Second, they cater to the perceived interests of the
audience (Jewkes, 2004). News values vary across countries, cultures and
audiences, and the ones we refer to here are relevant mainly to the UK media.
Many of these news values were first studied by Galtung and Ruge (1965), for
news in general, and by Chibnall (1977), in relation to crime reporting. Although
both remain influential today, Britain and its media have changed considerably
over the past 50 years. We have already pointed to the structures of ownership
and control and the market- driven nature of newsmaking. Another important
factor is that news outlets now report on offences that did not even exist 30
years ago (road rage, joyriding, carjacking, identity theft, grooming of children
on the internet, internet child pornography, etc.). The term ‘road rage’, for
example, first became used in the United Kingdom in the late 1980s. Best
and Furedi (2001) note that the term was adopted by industry for advertising
INTRODUCTION 17
purposes, by the therapeutic industry as an indication of societal rage, and

by environmental critics as a symbol of the evils of ‘car culture’. In the United
States, by contrast, it only appeared consistently in newspapers from 1996
onwards, and even then it was not elevated to the status of a social and
criminal problem, as in the United Kingdom.
Drawing on the two classical accounts of news values, Jewkes (2004) has
developed a set of more ‘up-to- date’ news values which shape crime news in
twenty-first- century Britain, and which she locates in a wider ideology of the
press and professional journalistic practice. We will now discuss these news
values as provided by Jewkes (2004), listed below, in more detail.
● Threshold
● Predictability
● Simplification
● Individualism
● Risk
● Sex
● Celebrity or high- status persons
● Proximity
● Violence
● Spectacle or graphic imagery
● Children
● Conservative ideology and political diversion (Jewkes, 2004: 40)
Threshold
Just like other events, crime events have to have a certain level of importance
in order to be covered. This means that petty crimes such as thefts, robberies
and vandalism tend to get reported more in the local press, whereas only more
serious offences would meet the threshold of national and international news.
Predictability
As with threshold, an event that is rare and un predictable will be regarded as
newsworthy and novel. At the same time, though, a predictable story may be
equally newsworthy, as it allows news organizations to plan their coverage
in advance.
Simplification
Media audiences are generally invited to a consensual conclusion about
a story. As for crime news, readers are invited to feel moral outrage and
condemn those who violate the moral and legal codes of society. To achieve
this, readers are presented with simplified accounts of crime and criminals in
binary opposites of ‘good’ vs. ‘evil’; ‘normal’ vs. ‘sick’ or ‘deviant’; ‘hero’ vs.
‘monster’; and so on, reducing complex events to simplistic and incontestable
messages. This tendency is closely connected to journalistic practice. The
popular news story must be easily digestible to readers with differing
intellectual abilities.
Individualism
Closely connected to simplification and risk (see below), the news value of
individualism refers to the tendency of the media to engage in representing
crime as an individual phenomenon rather than giving it a more complex
cultural and political explanation. The media simplify by personalizing crime
stories and describing offenders within an individualist framework, describing
them in terms of qualities ‘which allude to the offender’s autonomous status
and lack of normative social ties’ (Jewkes, 2004: 49).
Risk
In today’s risk- obsessed society, the media cultivate the misleading view
that crime is random, unpredictable and likely to strike at any given moment,
creating often unnecessary anxiety about levels of risk from serious crime and
exploiting public fears about personal safety. Discourses of risk in the media
typically focus on the likelihood of crimes committed by strangers and on
prevention strategies and personal safety for the citizen–consumer. Jewkes
notes that perceived vulnerability takes precedence over actual victimization.
Sex
Sex sells – particularly in the tabloid press, but increasingly also in the
broadsheets and other media. Studies of the press have shown that sex
crimes tend to be over- reported, cultivating a culture of fear (particularly
among women) of ‘stranger- danger’, although most sex crimes are in reality
committed by people known to the (female) victim. Importantly, crime stories
involving women – either as victims or perpetrators – are rarely without
reference to their sexual orientation and sexual histories, and often present
INTRODUCTION 19
highly sexualized narratives and images of female victims and offenders. We

will explore these issues in Chapter 5 on women and crime.
Celebrity or high-status persons

Crimes involving well- known people are often deemed more newsworthy
than those committed by ordinary citizens, whether they are victims (e.g. a
celebrity who gets mugged) or perpetrators (e.g. a politician who commits
perjury). Society’s fascination with celebrity also extends to convicted
criminals who have been practically turned into media celebrities by virtue
of their crimes and whose stories are endlessly recycled in newspaper
stories, TV documentaries and film (e.g. Jack the Ripper or, more recently,
the Yorkshire Ripper, the Suffolk Strangler and ‘nursery paedophile’ Vanessa
George). ‘Ordinary’ high- status people, such as politicians, teachers and
priests, are also welcome media targets.
Proximity
Proximity has both spatial and cultural dimensions. Spatial proximity refers to
the geographical nearness of a deviant act, while cultural proximity refers to
how relevant it is to an audience and its values, beliefs and interests. Proximity
varies between local and national news. For example, ordinary muggings will
tend to get reported only in the local press, as they are simply not newsworthy
enough to be covered by national papers. A national paper, though, might
cover the mugging of a celebrity. As for cultural proximity, Jewkes notes a
‘hierarchy of media interest’ in cases in which the victim is female and comes
from a respectable middle- class background (e.g. Madeleine McCann).
Violence
Violence has long been a staple of news reporting because of its potential to
shock and present events in ever more graphic images and language. Crime
and violence have become commodities and are distributed through a variety
of media to be consumed as entertainment. Examples of the commodification
of violence are reality-based crime shows, TV prison dramas and so on, all
offered to the consumer for ‘carnivalesque transgression’ (Jewkes, 2004: 54).
Spectacle and graphic imagery

Spectacle and graphic imagery are closely connected to violence, as it is acts
of violence with a strong visual impact that are most likely to be covered,
especially on TV. Television is often perceived to be more ‘objective’, as

images are believed to tell the ‘truth’ of a story. Jewkes stresses that such
representations limit public discourses and debates about crime, as it is
mostly ‘spectacular’ cases with arresting images that command the greatest
attention, accompanied by emotive language such as ‘drunken yobs’, ‘brutal
thugs’ and ‘feral youths’. Greer points to the defining influence of the image
on perceived newsworthiness, meaning that crime stories are increasingly
selected and produced as ‘media events’ on the basis of their visual potential
(2007: 29). The increasing use of CCTV or video camera footage by news
broadcasts of crimes as they unfold, has heightened the dramatic impact
of already newsworthy crime stories even more (e.g. toddler James Bulger
being led away from a shopping centre by his two 10-year- old killers).
Children
Crimes involving violence are eminently newsworthy, but crimes involving
children and adolescents – either as victims or perpetrators – are even
more so. Child victims in particular not only guarantee news coverage but
can enlist the media’s support for ‘morality campaigns’ (Jewkes, 2004: 57),
such as the infamous ‘naming and shaming’ campaign against convicted
paedophiles initiated by the News of the World. Jewkes points out that the
notion of childhood is essentially a social construct, and over time definitions
of childhood have veered between seeing children either as ‘tragic innocents’
and ‘evil monsters’.
Conservative ideology and political diversion

Jewkes argues that we now live in an age in which media discourses
and political process are indistinguishable and mutually constitutive. This
symbiotic relationship between mass media and politicians is evident in
the support of the media in relation to law and order, that is, support for
more police, more prisons, a tougher criminal justice system and for an ever
widening net of social control measures aimed at young people (‘hoodies’),
protesters, immigrants and the homeless. To Jewkes, the criminalization of
certain individuals and activities in the media, particularly the popular press,
is evidence of an essentially conservative agenda which is, in turn, promoted
by politicians.
The 12 news values outlined above are important for understanding
how various types of crime and criminal cases are presented according to
prevailing cultural assumptions and ideologies. Journalists themselves are
seldom aware of the above list of news values, although they develop and
INTRODUCTION 21
internalize a certain sense of news imperatives, which act as an assessment

of what is newsworthy and what is not. In interviews with journalists, Chibnall
(1977) identified at least five informal rules of relevance that guide journalists
in the reporting of violence: visible and spectacular acts; sexual and political
connotations; graphic presentation; individual pathology; and deterrence and
repression. These imperatives help explain why, for example, interpersonal
violence between strangers is far more attractive to report than domestic
violence. They also help us understand why news focuses on certain criminal
acts and much less on their causal contexts. This demonstrates that journalism
is, of necessity, a selective and partial account of reality.
A different explanation of newsworthiness, as developed by Jack Katz
(1987), also deserves mention. Whereas both Chibnall and Jewkes locate
crime news within the wider context of press ideology and the political
economy of news production, Katz considers newsworthiness from the
perspective of the citizen–consumer and is more interested in their symbolic
relevance to the reader/viewer. It is not novelty and unexpectedness that
are key determiners or newsworthiness, according to Katz. Crime is
newsworthy because it allows people to question and conform their own
moral frameworks. Katz argues that reading crime stories is a form of ‘moral
workout’ in which readers ‘work out individual perspectives on moral questions
of a quite general yet eminently personal relevance’ (1987: 67). Details about
offenders, victims and their families presented in crime narratives provoke
emotional responses by ‘encouraging readers to relate the events to their
own experience’ (Machado and Santos, 2009: 151), as was the case in the
abduction of Madeleine McCann, when various media invited their audiences
to a form of ‘distant suffering’ (Karstedt, 2002). This ‘emotionalization’ of
public and political discourse about crime is a characteristic of the public
sphere in late modernity (Machado and Santos, 2009).
While the relationship between news production, news reception and
people’s resulting fear of crime is difficult to demonstrate, many media
scholars and linguists working within the critical tradition would agree that the
media can have a profound influence on people at certain times. It is because
of this that we now turn to the sociological concept of media panic.
Moral and media panics in late modernity

The term ‘moral panic’, made famous by Cohen in 1972, refers to the
‘disproportionate and hostile social reaction to a group or condition perceived
as a threat to societal values’ (Greer, 2010: 192). This finds expression in
sensationalist media coverage, public outcry and demands for tougher
social sanctions. In Cohen’s original thesis about the Mods and Rockers
disturbances in 1964, he argued that the labelling of these two groups in

news reports as ‘folk devils’ created a ‘deviancy amplification spiral’, resulting
in ever more negative reporting and policing. According to Cohen, the five
defining features of moral panics are the presentation of the ordinary as
extraordinary, the amplifying role of authorities, definitions of morality, notions
of risk associated with social change, and the salience of youth. Moral panics
have mainly arisen around youth subcultures and the wider drug culture, but
also, more recently, around football hooliganism and (internet) paedophilia.
Since its creation more than 40 years ago, the concept has been widely
criticized for its perceived shortcomings, such as its inability to establish a link
between the scale of the moral panic and the scale of response to it, so that
it may be a ‘polemical rather than an analytical concept’ (Waddington, 1986:
258). These criticisms cluster around the following problems: the deviancy
amplification spiral is too deterministic; ‘morality’ is too ambiguous a term; in
today’s multimedia society, youth subcultures are no longer as spectacular,
with many subcultural styles being appropriated by mainstream consumer
culture; notions of ‘risks’ and the ‘fear of crime’ among the public may be
overstated; and the assumption in the model that there is a consensus on
certain issues and a gullibility on the part of audiences who do not know
when they are being manipulated (Jewkes, 2011: 85–95). The model’s
usefulness for understanding public responses to crime is therefore limited.
Jewkes suggests that the demonization by politicians of those who do not fit
the political, social and legal norms no longer necessarily results in public or
even media support, although this does not apply to the case of paedophilia,
which still has the potential to instigate moral panics, not least because of the
new threat coming from internet and cyber- paedophilia.
Despite these flaws and the often uncritical application of the model to
certain issues (e.g. health scares, dangerous dogs, gangsta rap), it can still
be useful for making sense of how morality, deviance and risk are perceived
in late modern society, particularly if we accept Cohen’s argument (Jewkes,
2011: 85–95) that moral panics may be the expression of genuine public (and
not just media- created) anxieties and that not all forms of public outrage result
in a fully blown moral panic. We will therefore revisit the concept of moral
panics in several chapters in this book.
The structure of the book

In this introductory chapter, we have provided an overview of some of the
theoretical debates that have informed media studies and criminology in the
modern period. We have also outlined the analytical model that informs our
multimodal analyses of media texts and images in subsequent chapters.
INTRODUCTION 23
In the chapters that follow, we will first provide the linguistic toolkits to
analyse mediated images of crime and deviance and then apply these in later
chapters.
In Chapter 2, we introduce a basic lexical analysis of a range of media
crime texts and explore the idea of ‘lexical fields’, which can be used to
signify meanings not made explicit, and how these can be used to foreground
and background different kinds of crime discourses. We use the language
of drug use in the media as a case study. We first provide an overview of
criminological and sociological research on the use of illicit drugs in Britain
and then analyse how some of the mainstream British news media represent
illegal drug use, and what choices are made in terms of individual words and
individual visual elements and features. We consider the extent to which
these recontextualize the findings described in the criminological research.
We also return to the concept of moral panics, which we briefly outlined
above, and ask whether the reporting of drugs and drug use can indeed be
usefully characterized in terms of a moral panic.
Chapter 3 deals with the linguistic resources for representing how the
actions of people can be portrayed. Analysis in this chapter is based on
Halliday’s concept of Transitivity or verb processes. The words and images
chosen to represent participants, events and circumstances can signify
discourses that can shape the way we perceive crime and deviance. How
we perceive people is not just shaped by the representational strategies we
look at in Chapter 2, but also by the portrayal of action. As we shall see,
there are a range of resources available for representing the same action in
very different ways and for either highlighting or concealing who is the agent,
who is responsible and who is the person affected by this action. This has
important implications for the portrayal of offenders and victims. We also
introduce Social Actor Analysis (van Leeuwen, 1996), an important linguistic
and visual inventory to describe the ideological effects that the representation
or classification of certain people can have. Certain naming strategies can
foreground aspects of a person’s identity and background others. This is
particularly significant in the naming of offenders and other people perceived
to be ‘deviant’.
In Chapter 4, we begin to apply some of the linguistic tools introduced
in Chapters 2 and 3 by conducting a multimodal analysis of some of the
discourses used in mainstream media to describe young people. We first
give an overview of more recent changes in criminal justice policies that
have paved the way for the creeping criminalization of an increasing number
of young people, showing also that dominant media discourses of young
people as a problem are by no means a recent phenomenon, but have in
fact existed for a long time. We then analyse a TV programme about knife
crime aimed at young people and demonstrate that even though it questions
some of the discourses on youth crime and mentions structural factors, such
as widespread deprivation as one contributing factor to the problem, it still
relies to a degree on the same stock discourses and images as do other
mainstream media.
In Chapter 5, we turn to media portrayals of female offenders, particularly
those who have committed crimes of a violent or sexual nature. Through
a multimodal case study analysis, we demonstrate how mainstream media
discourses rely on a limited number of stock narratives to portray the varying
figures of the female offender, which revolve mainly about criminal women
being either ‘mad’ or ‘bad’. Looking at two case studies, one from the national
and one from the regional press, our social actor and transitivity analysis not
only shows that much media discourse is constructed around ‘essentialist’
notions that cannot deal with women who violate culturally prescribed gender
norms, but also that the agency of criminal women is often denied, by either
portraying them as mythic evil and inhuman monsters or, at the other end of
the spectrum, as impotent victims.
In Chapter 6, we turn our attention to media representations of the criminal
justice system, focusing on fictional and factual portrayals of the police in
the printed news and on TV. We first conduct a linguistic analysis of a small
number of articles from the national and regional press about policing. We
then use a combined linguistic and visual analysis of Britain’s best- known
crime appeal programme, Crimewatch, to provide an example of its portrayal
within an individualist framework of offending and of the ‘image work’
the programme performs for the police by showing the force as a team of
dedicated crime-fighters with a ‘human’ face. We also show that Crimewatch
employs visual techniques that are common in fictional TV programmes and
films about the police.
Chapter 7 deals with yet another sector of the criminal justice system, prisons.
Here we demonstrate linguistically what criminologists and media scholars
have noted for a long time, namely, that the media, and the popular press in
particular, reflect and reinforce the current punitive approach to offenders, acting
out the prevailing political discourse of law and order in contemporary Britain.
Our linguistic case studies demonstrate how prisoners are constructed within
narrow discourses of fear and dangerousness, which support ever harsher
controls for offenders. We also focus on a recent TV prison documentary in
which these hegemonic discourses of dealing with prisoners are at least open
to challenge and contestation.
Chapter 8 is concerned with corporate or white- collar crime, a form of crime
that has been relatively neglected in the media despite it being widespread
in all contemporary societies. Usually described as the deviant activities of
respectable institutions, corporations and individuals, corporate crime has been
the focus of a substantial body of research that goes back to the nineteenth
INTRODUCTION 25
century and which points to the criminogenic features of capitalism. There

is, however, a lack of language to even describe corporate crime as ‘crime’,
and terms such as ‘accident’, ‘disaster’ or ‘tragedy’ are used instead for many
instances of corporate crime. Using London’s 1999 Paddington rail crash as
a case study, we explore, through a detailed linguistic analysis of newspaper
reporting of the case, the way the questions of responsibility and blame was
discussed and how these were indicative of the ritualized manner in which
the news media represent disasters.
In Chapter 9, we present our conclusions, summarizing the contribution the
present volume has made to the interdisciplinary study of crime and deviance
and making some suggestions for future work in the area.
2
Simple word choice

and the representation
of people and action
in crime
I n this chapter, we begin our investigation of the language of crime,

looking at how the mainstream British news media represent illegal drug
use. We carry out this analysis with one of the simplest forms of linguistic
analysis: lexical analysis. Here we are concerned with how authors make
choices in individual semiotic resources, in terms of individual words and
individual visual elements and features. We first introduce what it means
to carry out basic lexical analysis and how we can think about the specifi c
kinds of terms that are used to recontextualize social practice, in other
words, to transform social reality. We then look at criminological and
sociological research on the use of illicit drugs in Britain. This is followed
by a lexical analysis of news texts. We consider the extent to which these
recontextualize the drugs issue described in the previously considered
research. Finally, we return to the concept of ‘moral panics’ introduced in
Chapter 1. We ask whether the reporting of drugs can indeed be usefully
characterized as a moral panic.
The nature of lexical analysis

Lexical analysis means looking at what kinds of terms and expressions we find
in a text. In other words, we ask what vocabulary an author uses. Do they tend
to use certain kinds of words and avoid others? Do the words that they choose
‘load’ the text with particular kinds of meanings? Each of these choices can
allow the author to set up the basic shape of a social and natural world through
their choices in speech, text or image. It allows them to forground some kinds
of meanings and to background others.
A number of writers have described the significance of lexical analysis,
showing that different lexical, or word, choices can signify different discourses
or set up different ‘lexical fields’. A lexical field, Fowler (1991) points out, is like
the map an author is creating for us. A map is a symbolic representation of a
territory. The signs it uses indicate areas of interest or areas of salience where
on the actual terrain there may be none. Maps made for different purposes
will carry different features, so a geological map will differ from those made
for motorists. The mapmaker in each case is foregrounding some features and
suppressing others. And what is included and excluded, how areas are defined,
what is shaded and not, and where boundaries are placed is determined by the
interests of the mapmaker. The point is that ‘the meaning and structure of the
map are not governed by the physical characteristics of the landscape, but by
the structural conventions appropriate to figuring the territory for a specific social
purpose’ (Fowler 1991: 82). We can think of the lexical choices used by an author
or speaker in the same way, governed by certain types of preoccupations.
Lexical fields will signify certain kinds of identities, values and sequences
of activity which need not be made explicit. For example, if a text uses the
word ‘youth’ rather than ‘young people’, we immediately get a sense of the
lexical field that is being laid out for us. We are familiar with discourses that
involve the more troublesome category of ‘youth’ as opposed to the more
positive ‘young people’.
Through this process of creating a lexical field, those meanings an author
or speaker wishes to convey may not be communicated overtly but in a
more subtle way that requires careful analysis in order to reveal precisely
what those meanings are. We might find that calling young people ‘youth’
can bring about negative associations without this being made overt, or, if
the youthfulness of a particular group of criminals is greatly emphasized in a
text, we can ask what meaning is created by this. How does the author seek
to influence the way we might interpret these particular criminal acts?
Van Dijk (2001) describes CDA precisely as the study of ‘implicit or indirect
meanings’ in texts. These are the kinds of meanings that are alluded to
without being explicitly expressed. He explains that this implicit information
‘is part of the mental model of [. . .] a text, but not of the text itself. That is,
implicit meanings are related to underlying beliefs, but are not openly, directly,
completely or precisely asserted’ (van Dijk, 2001, 104). The study of simple
REPRESENTATION OF PEOPLE AND ACTION IN CRIME 29
word content, the highlighting of a lexical field, is one way we can begin to
reveal these underlying beliefs.
In this chapter, in addition to looking at the way authors make individual
lexical choices in language to set up lexical fields, we are also concerned
with the basic use of visual semiotic resources. One of the simplest
kinds of analysis carried out in Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis is
iconographical or iconological analysis. This means that we look at the
way that individual elements in images, such as objects and settings, are
able to signify discourses in ways that might not be obvious at an initial
viewing. What, for example, is the meaning conveyed by photographs, used
to depict particular kinds of crime, in which we find young people posing
in front of a brick wall? Such settings are often used to depict poorer urban
environments. A teenage boy might be depicted standing in front of a brick
wall rather that in a modern café or library space. As with lexical choices,
these iconographical elements help to map out the discursive terrain for us.
As with linguistic choices, the mapmaker is foregrounding some features
and suppressing others.
Van Leeuwen (2000), drawing on the work of Barthes (1977) and Panofsky
(1972), has shown the value of looking at images for the way that individual
elements and features can communicate implicit or indirect meanings. They,
too, can be thought of as mapping out a terrain driven by certain preoccupations.
Following Barthes (1977), we look for the associational meanings of things
such as settings and objects. Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) show how we
can assess levels of realism and abstraction in images, what they call ‘scales
of modality’. So we can ask to what extent elements and features in images
are as we would have seen them had we been there, and to what extent they
have been changed, having articulation of details reduced, colours, lighting
and tone modified. As with word choices, these can serve to map out the
social world for the viewer.
However, it is important to note that, in visual communication, semiotic
resources are used to communicate things that may be more difficult to
express through language, since images do not tend to have such fixed
meaning – or at least the producer can always claim that meaning is more
suggestive and open. In news reports, for example, it is possible to show
a photograph of a Muslim man in traditional clothing, next to an article on a
particular kind of crime. But it is not possible to say ‘All Muslim’s look like this’.
Visual communication by its nature tends to be more open to interpretation,
which gives the author a degree of manoeuvre not permitted through language
use. An image of a man in traditional clothing can be used to place the story
in a broader discourse about clashes of culture and values. But this is done
implicitly through visual semiotic resources. We explain this type of analysis

in greater detail later in the chapter.
Word connotations
To begin with, we can analyse the basic choice of words used by a text
producer, asking what kinds of words are used. Is there a predominance of
particular kinds of words, for example? In this process, we assume that since
language is an available set of options, certain choices have been made by
the author for their own motivated reasons. For example, if I choose to call
where I live a ‘building’, ‘an address’ or a ‘family home’, this immediately
evokes certain sets of associations. What if a news item headline was one of
the following?
Youths attack local buildings.

Youths attack local addresses.
Youths attack local family homes.
In the last of these sentences, the lexical choice suggests something

much more sacred than the first two, something much more personal.
Combined here with ‘home’, ‘family’ signifies a discourse of safety and
stability, something cherished and common to all of us. In advertisements,
families are generally represented in a perfect manner, around a fireside
at Christmas, skipping along the beach in summer and so on. ‘Family’
communicates something that should be protected and, therefore, attacks
on ‘family homes’ produce greater moral outrage than attacks on ‘local
buildings’. Without making the case overtly, the discourse created signifies
associated identities, values and likely sequences of action. The writer here
has not commented overtly on the morally outrageous behaviour of the
youths, but this is signified through the associations of family and home
which help to place these events into particular frameworks of reference or
discourses.
The lexis of crime: the recontextualization

of the British drug problem
The following newspaper headline is an excellent example of the way that a
journalist can use specific lexical choices in order to map out a lexical field. The
actual newspaper text is from the Independent on Sunday (28 July 2002) and
appeared on the front page. It was written in response to statistics released
by the Independent Drugs Monitoring Unit (IDMU) on the low price of the
drug ecstasy in Britain at the time:
Ecstasy as cheap as a bar of chocolate for children
The newspaper here has decided to use a reference to chocolate and children
in order to contextualize the price of the drug. None of this information was
in the original report made by the IDMU, which had stated that the drug was
now available for around £1.25 a tablet. What is happening here is that the
newspaper is setting up a lexical field in which drugs are a threat to children,
who in Western societies are viewed as representing the very essence of
innocence (James and Prout, 1990). This strategy immediately activates a
moral discourse. It is common for the mainstream British news media, as we
will explore shortly, to use a limited number of erroneous discourses when
representing the issue of drugs. Rather than presenting facts and transparent
information that reflect actual issues as have been recorded in research,
drugs are represented largely in a framework that emphasizes threats to
innocence.
In what follows, we use lexical analysis to look at the way that texts are
able to transform, or what in CDA is often referred to as recontextualize, social
reality. Lexical analysis can draw our attention to the details of individual
choices in language and image that allow this recontextualization to take place,
as we have seen in the case of ‘chocolate’ and ‘children’ above. What we do
below is look at the research from criminology and sociology on drug use in
Britain and then compare this with the way that one particular newspaper, the
Daily Mail, maps out the social practice of drug taking. First, we say a little
more about the process of recontextualization.
Lexical choices and the recontextualization

of social practice
One way to better understand the way that language is used in the media is
to look at actual social research that describes the concrete situation being
represented. Then we can look at how this is being transformed through
language. Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) offer a number of concepts that are
helpful for identifying the lexical choices that bring about recontextualization.
They suggest that the way this is done can be characterized under three
headings:
Substitution: The details and complexities of activities can be substituted

by generalizations or abstractions. Also, people can be represented in terms
of who they are, through appearance and feelings, rather than what they
actually do.
Addition: Recontextualization also involves adding elements. Three
important forms of addition that play an important role in representation are
legitimation, purpose and reactions.
Evaluation: In texts, recontextualization always also involves evaluation
of the social practice that is written about. Events and people in each
recontextualization are represented according to the goals, values and
priorities of the presenters. This can result in the delegitimization of certain
kinds of actors and actions that are not in harmony with the values of the
presenter.
In our example above regarding ecstasy being as cheap as chocolate for
children, we can say that there has been substitution. Although the report on
which the news item was based did not mention children, children replace
those who are the main users of ecstasy. Saying that ecstasy is as ‘cheap as
chocolate for children’ is an abstraction, as this does not help us to understand
the concrete economics of ecstasy. Actual persons, identities and events
have been abstracted, using this connotation of innocence being corrupted.
Van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) suggest that wherever actual details are
replaced by abstractions, we can assume that some kind of ideological work
is taking place.
We can also see that the reference to ‘chocolate’ and ‘children’ serves to
evaluate the social practice being written about. This is not done so explicitly
but implicitly through the connotations of these words. These lexical choices
serve to signify a discourse of the corruption of innocence in society, in which,
of course, there will be evildoers who are the corruptors. The question of what
the goals, values and priorities of the newspaper are here we will leave to the
end of the chapter, when we have looked in depth at a range of news items.
Criminological research on drugs

We can take these kinds of observations much further, and draw out more
clearly what patterns of recontextualization of drug use we find in the news
media, if we first look at the criminological and sociological research on drug
use. Through this, we can compare a number of news texts from a single
newspaper, showing the language strategies used to recontextualize them.
We can show what kinds of lexical fields are mapped out for readers, we can
point to which aspects are foregrounded and which backgrounded, where we
find substitution, abstraction and evaluation.
The news media tend to treat all drug use, whether of ecstasy, crack
cocaine, heroin or cannabis, as being essentially the same by using a limited
number of themes and discourses (Jewkes, 2004). But, in fact, these drugs
are very different and have different and specific use patterns, problems and
explanations for their presence in society. What we can see from the literature
is that much drug use is significantly more normalized than the mainstream
news media tend to suggest and that drug culture and crime appear, in the
first place, to be a result of poverty and unemployment rather than the drugs
themselves being a cause of problems.
Drug use as a normalized activity

In Britain, by the twenty-first century, experimentation with illegal drugs
had, many researchers were reporting, become a commonplace rather than
an abnormal activity (Shiner and Newburn 1997, 1999; Parker et al., 2002).
Seddon (2006), reviewing much of this research, points out that most of this
drug use was basically trouble-free and occurred during a relatively short-
lived period of experimentation. He points out that this involved use of drugs
like cannabis, ecstasy and amphetamines, whereas heroin use was rarer,
although certainly by no means always problematic (Allen 2005; Shewan and
Dalgarno 2005).
Much social policy and political discourse deals with those groups whose
drug use is considered to be highly problematic and who form only about
five per cent of the four million people who take drugs each year (Hough,
2001: 430). Some government estimates state that the amount spent on
drugs each year is equal to 33 per cent of the tobacco market and 41 per
cent of the alcohol market (Travis, 2007). However, recent British drug policy
has increasingly focused on the ‘problem drug user’, which sees the drug
problem mainly as a crime issue.
Hammersley et al. (1999) have stressed that there has to be greater focus
on drug use as a routinized activity rather than on drug addicts as pathologized
deviants. This latter view distorts the actual nature of drug use. In the case
of ecstasy use, they argue that half a million people would use ecstasy in
any one weekend with very few coming to harm, and in those cases that did
result in harm, this was for the most part due to the additional use of large
amounts of alcohol. They also question that ‘addiction’ is a meaningful term
regarding ecstasy use, whereas again, in public discourse, there is a strong
association of drug use with addiction.
Parker et al. (1998, 2002), drawing on extensive research with teenagers,
have argued that just as young people trying cigarettes has become normalized,
so has experimenting with recreational drugs. They see illicit drug use as now
well embedded in popular culture. Manning (2007a, 2007b) gives as an example
the British television series Skins, aimed at a young audience, in which there
is a scene that depicts one character going into a bar and buying beer and
ecstasy. This is a casual purchase and has no particular significance to the
story. Throughout the series, drugs appear, not as plot issues, but as a matter
of routine. Friends share cannabis as they accidentally meet at a bus stop or
as they sit in a café. Although, of course, in such a series, illicit drug use, along
with spontaneous sexual activities, can signify mildly transgressive behaviour.
In their 1998 study, Parker et al. show that even those who did not use
drugs did not condemn those who did. Media reports in which drugs are
associated with crime, suffering and social breakdown may therefore portray
a view that is inconsistent with the experiences of large sections of the
population. Parker (2005) also observes that seeing young people’s drug use
in terms of ‘pathology’ or ‘deviance’ no longer fits with their experiences in
late modern Britain, where the consumption of drugs has achieved ‘cultural
and economic centrality’ (Seddon et al., 2008: 823), hence normalization.
The first theme we find in the criminological and sociological research on
drugs is that many people use drugs recreationally without coming to harm
and without this necessarily being an addiction. There are more extreme and
difficult cases, yet these comprise only a minority of users. If the news media
obscure these differences under an umbrella of drugs as evil, to what extent
do they help to inform us as citizens? To what extent does telling us that
ecstasy is as ‘cheap and chocolate for children’ gloss over the actual social
practices involved? A social practice of recreation becomes recontextualized
through moralizing language. As Manning (2007a, 2007b) argues, this can
hamper proper public and political debate about drugs.
Regarding media representation of ecstasy in particular, there is
clear agreement in the literature that the media reporting of this drug is
disproportionate to both its use and to the number of people who come
to harm through its use (Redhead, 1993; Newcombe, 1995; Feuer, 2000;
Jewkes, 2004; Manning, 2006, 2007a, 2007b). The consensus is that the
nature of reporting has therefore generated confusion and been a hindrance
to more serious debates around harder drugs and enforcement in general.
For example, the news coverage on the death of Leah Betts from an ecstasy
tablet in 1995 made an informed debate about the possible dangers of the
drug impossible, When the Director of Glasgow Social Services wrote, in
a 1996 report, that ‘ecstasy is a relatively safe drug’ and that the ‘risk of
death has been calculated at one in 6.8 million (the risk of dying from an
ordinary dose of aspirin is very much greater)’, she was condemned as
irresponsible by Bett’s parents (quoted in Calcutt and Davenport, 1997: 2).
In a climate in which moral panics are fuelled and supported by the media,
the ‘correct’ information is almost always seen to be on the side of the anti-
drug activist.
Drugs as ‘edgework’
The widespread use of drugs in our society suggests that they provide
significant solutions to certain widespread problems. It is not that drugs per
se are condemned; after all, many take drugs to ease problems at work, to
be able to work under stress, or to be able to sleep. It is only when drug
use is seen as ‘unrelated to productivity, when it leads to “undeserved”
pleasures, when it gives rise to experiences which question the taken-for-
granted “reality”, that the forces of condemnation are brought into play’
(Young, 1971: 327).
It is, however, precisely these ‘undeserved pleasures’ that so many
people find attractive. The increased popularity of ‘voluntary risk taking’ or
‘edgework’ (Lyng, 1990), which includes drug use, mirrors the climate of late
modernity, with its contradictory demands for regulation on the one hand and
excessive consumption and self- indulgence on the other (Reith, 2005: 241).
Reith argues that consumer culture has almost tamed excess and turned it
into a commodity: in exchange for the purchase of an extreme experience,
the drug taker has to negotiate the boundaries of that experience and ensure
that he or she returns from the edge. Recreational drug users are experts
at negotiating this risk and are, therefore, the ‘ultimate edgeworkers’. What
is needed in order to understand the complexities of drug use, according
to Reith, is a far more detailed analysis of the experiences of the different
subcultural groups that take drugs.
Drugs as a cause of crime

Another key issue dealt with in the sociological and criminological literature
is the association of drugs as a cause of crime. This association links in with
the previous point, that the social construction of drug problems has tended
to focus on the most socially disadvantaged groups rather than on the much
larger numbers of recreational users who tend to come from across social
groups (Pearson, 1989: 311). However, in the case of drugs like heroin and
crack cocaine, there is certainly a link between crime and drugs. But research
shows that this cannot be characterized as a simple causal link.
Researchers have emphasized the fact that hard drugs have historically
tended to take hold in areas associated with greater unemployment, poverty,
housing decay and other social disadvantages (Pearson, 2001: 53). Seddon
(2006) points out that drug- related crime cannot be properly understood
without also grasping the underpinning issues of poverty and exclusion and
how these affect people and communities. Auld et al. (1986) show that in
poor areas, the exclusion of people from the formal economy increases
the likelihood of their involvement in the informal economy and in criminal

activity.
Seddon (2005) explains that when young people are faced with limited
opportunities to achieve material success within the legitimate economy, there
is an increased likelihood that they will become involved with the ‘irregular’
economy. Here drugs become an important commodity for exchange and
consumption, alongside stolen goods. And as Auld et al. (1986) point out, in
this culture heroin use tends to be episodic rather than driven by dependence
or addiction.
Echoing the classic sociological studies of gang culture and crime in
Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s (e.g. Thrasher, 1927), Seddon (2005)
observes that involvement in the irregular economy and drug lifestyle can
also provide important outlets for the frustrations and lack of status caused by
unemployment. MacDonald and Marsh (2002) have discussed the psychological
strain of existing in areas experiencing extreme socio- economic problems.
Young (2003) describes a world where young people live in frustration and
constant humiliation, which results in their anger and resentment, and that
for some, drugs offer a way out of their situation. Zinberg (1984) argued that
a life of unemployment and little prospects could become more bearable for
young people with involvement in the drug and crime networks. But without
the hope or means for alternative mainstream types of rewards, there was
little motivation to move away from this lifestyle. This problem has only been
exacerbated by the wider cultural and structural changes in Britain over the
last three decades – by the movement from modernity to late modernity, a
major feature of which has been the primacy of consumption and the greater
availability of drugs as commodities. According to Young (2003), socially
excluded people, rather than rejecting consumer culture, embrace it. They are
therefore culturally included in wanting a consumer lifestyle, but structurally
excluded from actually achieving it. Hence their involvement in the irregular
economy to resolve this conflict.
The research also challenges so- called pharmacological determinism,
according to which drugs are seen to be taken purely for a determined
physical experience and for reasons of physical addiction. Regarding the
link between drugs and crime, it appears, therefore, that this connection
must be understood in a context of existing social problems, bad housing
and poverty. When Britain first experienced its surge in heroin use in the
1980s, it was because cheap products entered the market and because new
global trade routes were making supply easier (Seddon, 2005). But its rapid
increase was also a result of transformations in society due to recession and
changing employment patterns. Users likely came from existing networks
of those closer to the irregular economy, but were also then drawn further
into this part of society. However, as Seddon (2005) also points out, not
all poorer areas will necessarily experience widespread drug issues, as an

established distribution network is necessary. This explains why some areas
have experienced much greater problems than others.
What the criminological and sociological research shows is that the majority
of illicit drug use is recreational and periodic. Users can be characterized as
neither addicts nor as necessarily coming to any harm. In terms of harder
drugs, such as heroin and crack, there is still a tendency for periodic use.
Research shows that drug use is driven less by physical addiction and more
by the culture associated with the deprived social environments where they
are taken.
Importantly, there is a strong challenge to the idea that drugs cause
crime and delinquency. Recreational drug users have lives largely indistinct
from non- users. Harder drug users tend to already be associated with the
irregular economy and criminal activity. But drugs and crime here form part
of a broader problem generated by poverty, the frustrations and humiliations
of long-term unemployment and the need to find personal worth. We will
now investigate selected examples from newspapers and a government
website to see how these represent and construct drug use and users.
We will look specifically at which aspects are highlighted and which are
supressed.
News media representations of

drugs and drug users
We begin with an analysis of a text from the Daily Mail (25 March 2006)
which deals with a government report on drugs:
One in five pupils has been lured into drugs
One in five secondary school pupils in England took drugs last year, a
Government report revealed last night.
It means that almost 620,000 youngsters aged between 11 and 15 risked
becoming hooked on illegal substances.
A shocking one in every 50 snorted cocaine, according to the Department
of Health survey.
It demonstrates that, despite Labour’s promise to clamp down on teenage
drug abuse, illegal substances are widely available and cocaine use in
particular is on the up.
Despite being too young to buy cigarettes, 300,000 of the 3.25 million
schoolchildren said they were offered the addictive drug last year.
Twenty-five per cent were offered cannabis, eight per cent crack cocaine
and Ecstasy, and seven per cent amphetamines. Twelve per cent said they
had smoked cannabis, up one per cent. Two per cent – double the previous
year – snorted cocaine, which costs up to £50 a gram.
The total taking illegal drugs was 19 per cent, up one per cent. In 1998,
shortly after Labour came to power, the figure stood at 11 per cent.
Campaigners said it is clear that cocaine and cannabis use is rampant.
Figures from the United Nations show that two per cent of adults are taking
cocaine – the same rate as in America.
Schoolchildren appear to have followed their lead, consuming the substance
at the same rate and confirming its status as the new drug of choice.
Metropolitan Police chief Sir Ian Blair has warned that cocaine is now seen
as acceptable among the middle- classes, with those caught taking the
drug including supermodel Kate Moss.
Experts warn that children following this lead risk doing grave damage to
their health.
Professor John Henry, a clinical toxicologist at St Mary’s Hospital, London,
said: ‘You cannot take coke and get away with it. Regular cocaine users
end up with little holes in their brain – little parts that don’t work as they
should any more.
What we can see in the first place is that this text contains a great deal of
statistical information. This in itself is one way that texts can signify factual
reporting, even when they are used alongside the kinds of evaluation that, as
we will show, are present in this text (Fairclough, 2005). Van Dijk (1991) has
discussed the use of statistics as a rhetorical device to connote neutrality and
objectivity. However, if we look more closely at the way these statistics are
used, we find clear use of evaluation:

While we find numbers here, given the nature of drugs such as ecstasy and
cannabis, it is somewhat erroneous to speak of youngsters being at risk of
being ‘hooked’. This is clearly incorrect information and an example of what
van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) would call ‘addition’, which here creates
a sense of young people becoming hopelessly addicted to drugs. We find
further addition and evaluation in the following use of statistics:
Despite being too young to buy cigarettes, 300,000 of the 3.25million

schoolchildren said they were offered the addictive drug last year.
The report itself does not mention cigarettes. This point has been added by
the paper to emphasize the level of threat to these youngsters, who are not yet
even allowed to smoke. Again, the use of statistics here signifies objectivity.
In fact, in this sentence, are we to believe that 3.25 million schoolchildren
have been interviewed, or is this something the newspaper has deduced
from the given figures?
Crucially, in this text we find many lexical items to represent young people.
We could therefore say that there is an ‘overlexicalization’ of these terms:
Pupils
Secondary school pupils
Youngsters
Teenage drug abuse
too young to buy cigarettes
Schoolchildren
Children
What is interesting here is that this particular newspaper frequently reports

on issues associated with young people – generally negative stories, such
as teenage pregnancies, binge drinking and antisocial behaviour. In such
cases, the terms ‘teenagers’ and ‘youths’ will be used. The word ‘youths’,
in particular, has negative connotations. In this text, however, terms that
connote innocence, such as ‘youngsters’ and ‘children’ are used. We would
not find a headline like the following:
Youngsters attack local family homes.
The term ‘schoolchildren’ is also an important way to connote innocence.

As opposed to ‘youth’, schoolchildren connote young people who are
otherwise part of mainstream society and who are not in any other sense a
social problem. Manning (2007a, 2007b) has discussed the way that news
representations of drugs often draw upon a discourse in which young people
with bright futures have their lives destroyed. There is not the same news
value with a marginalized ‘youth’ from a deprived area experiencing the same
problems. In this case, the drug use would most likely be attributed to the
‘youth’s’ problematic personality.
Here we have looked at only one text, but it can be said to be representative
of the way that mainstream and popular news coverage of drugs places an
emphasis on vulnerable young people. This places the topic in a discourse
of drugs as a danger to innocence. It maps out the social world for us by
foregrounding the association of well- behaved ordinary young people. These

drugs are therefore a threat to the foundations of society. The danger is
highlighted in the following sentence:

Here the term ‘hooked on’ draws on the discourse of pharmacological

determinism, which contradicts the research discussed above, which
emphasized the nature of drug use as part of everyday youth cultures and as
being associated with routine leisure activities. Much recreational drug use
does not lead to addiction, is sporadic and, as some criminologists argue,
even normalized. And certainly much of this drug use is experimental and not
part of a longer-term process.
In the text, we find no sense that the young people who take drugs have
any agency in this drug taking. They may simply become addicted, which is
conveyed through lexical choices and grammatical structures regarding young
people, such as the following:
Lured into drugs

Offered the drugs
Follow their lead
The lexis used is clearly very important to the overall message of the text.
So is the use of the passive. It is not that young people choose to take drugs
because they are exciting or one way to be part of a culture that can signify
non- mainstream activities, they are simply ‘lured’; drugs are ‘offered’ and
they ‘follow’. Therefore, we can say that the agency of the young people has
been backgrounded in this text.
This language of being ‘lured’ and ‘offered’ drugs connotes a dark and
seedy world into which ordinary schoolchildren are being drawn. What is
interesting here is, of course, that we are not actually told who is luring these
children nor who is offering them the drugs. When certain participants in a
social practice are omitted, we have to ask why. In terms of the criminological
and sociological research on recreational drugs, it is not so much that users
are lured by dealers, but that they have contacts, often in the form of friends,
who they will ask for supply. But the news item glosses over this in order to
maintain the sense of shady dealings and vulnerable schoolchildren. Here
drugs and drug dealers are represented as being independent of the routine
social world of young people.
In the item we also find language of evaluation and hyperbole:
A shocking one in every 50 snorted cocaine, according to the Department

of Health survey.
Campaigners said it is clear that cocaine and cannabis use is rampant.
The Department of Health document does not describe the figures as

‘shocking’; this has been added as an evaluation by the newspaper. The use of
the word ‘rampant’ suggests something out of control and aggressive. Rather
than simply describing the situation in terms of processes and social actors,
we have a shift to evaluation through the addition of terms to emphasize
innocent young people and wild increases in the numbers of those who may
become ‘hooked’.
The item also introduces the notion that drugs cause health problems, citing
a toxicologist. Again, criminological research emphasizes that the majority of
recreational drug use is undertaken with little harm, especially since much of
it is periodic rather than sustained. So we can say that health- related issues
are foregrounded through these lexical choices.
Overall, this news item presents a view that confuses recreational drug
use with addiction, a sleazy world of drug dealing and health dangers
which, as the criminological research shows, is associated with the taking
of hard drugs like crack and heroin. A number of researchers (e.g. Blackman,
2004; Cross, 2007) have pointed to the roots of this blurring of boundaries
between hard and soft drugs with the regulatory regime that emerged in
the 1920s, when Britain accepted international law on cannabis when it
was still a relatively unknown substance. It was thereafter, as an unknown
substance, treated alongside opiates, which resulted in its association
with criminality. Since that time and with a range of drug legislation, the
situation became one which was ‘indifferent to accuracy’ and had a ‘fear
of complexity’ (Parker et al., 1998: 1). Parker et al. state that, in terms of
government policy, we have a situation in which ‘cannabis may as well be
heroin, a weekend amphetamine user a crazed addict, a young woman who
gives a friend an ecstasy tablet a drugs baron’ (Parker et al., 1998: 10). Many
commentators feel these perceptions have led to inappropriate public policy
responses (McGregor, 1999).
To some extent, this news item accepts the normalization of recreational
drug use, in that it reports that many young people now appear to have
contact with drugs. But it recontextualizes this social practice by connoting
a traditional image of ‘schoolchildren’, who a reader might imagine with a
school uniform and a school bag, complete with books and a lunchbox, who
are lured into addiction. Therefore, the normalization is not part of a changing
lifestyle culture but evidence of a growing threat to regular society.
The following newspaper text is from the Daily Mail Online (17 June
2006).
Figure 2.1 ‘Disturbing: in broad daylight, a woman smokes a crack pipe’ (Source:
Daily Mail; image: Getty)
In broad daylight, a junkie smokes crack cocaine . . . just another day in

Drug Britain
Shamelessly ignoring the stares of shocked passers- by, a ravaged junkie

smokes deadly drugs in broad daylight.
Gaunt-faced and painfully thin, the woman lights a rock of highly- addictive
crack cocaine and inhales the fumes from a home- made pipe.
The gruesome picture is a sickening illustration of the drugs menace facing
modern Britain.
Despite repeated pledges by the Labour Government to tackle the problem,
the image exposes the bleak truth of how addicts are unafraid of flaunting
their habit in public.
An appalled passer- by took the photographs in a busy car park in Camden,
north London – one of the capital’s drugs hotspots.
He said: ‘You see people taking drugs in the open on a daily basis but it is
still shocking to see’.
‘The woman tried to make a little hideaway out of dustbins but she was so
desperate to smoke her drugs you could see everything.’
‘You regularly find needles and drugs paraphernalia in doorways. It must
be hell for people who live in the area.’
The photographs show a haggared-faced woman wearing a pink jumper
and miniskirt sitting on a flight of steps and trying to conceal herself behind
a row of wheelie bins.
Lighting the crack cocaine, a Class A drug, she inhales the smoke deeply.
Moments later she is joined by a man in a baseball cap – thought to be a dealer –
and, desperate for another fix, pulls another lump from her underwear.
She balances the rock on her left leg and takes another drag on her crack
pipe.
Crack use rocketing in Britain
Official statistics show that use of crack cocaine is rocketing in Britain.
Latest Home Office figures show the number of crack users caught by
police has risen from 370 in 1994 to 2,440 in 2004 – up 660 per cent.
Meanwhile, the number of seizures of crack by police in 2004 was 4,896 –
up 3 per cent on the previous year.
At the same time the price of the drug has tumbled – it now costs just £25
for a rock the size of a raisin, according to drugs charity Drugscope.
The spread of crack cocaine has also been blamed for an increase in violent
crime.
Each junkie’s habit costs an average of about £11,000 a year, meaning they
need to rob and steal to fuel their addictions.
Much of the antisocial behaviour which makes ordinary people’s lives a misery
is drug- related, says the Government. This news item deals with the harder
drugs, the 5 per cent referred to in the criminological research, which says
that those involved will most likely come from very deprived social contexts
that will already have brought them into contact with the irregular economy
and with criminal activity. Even this drug/crime culture will have been one
way for them to find meaning in their lives. The woman seen smoking drugs
(shown in Figure 2.1 above) must therefore be understood in this context.
We can now look at the extent to which the reporting is congruent with this
research and consider the extent to which we find recontextualization through
addition, abstraction and evaluation. We therefore look at what kind of lexical
field is mapped out for us.
In the first place, we find lexical choices that point to the horror of the
situation:
Disturbing
Gruesome picture
A sickening illustration
Drugs menace
Bleak truth
Clearly, the article is offering a very clear map of the social practice. This is the
very squalid world of which the schoolchildren were in danger of being lured
into in the previous text.
A number of linguists (e.g. Iedema et al., 1994; Martin and White, 2005)
have sought to provide a framework for the analysis of the evaluative aspect
of news reporting which describes the use of just such a kind of lexis. These
authors were interested in identifying the variation in the mechanisms by
which attitudinal positions can be conveyed and by which the reader can
be positioned to favour or disfavour a particular viewpoint. One aspect of
language they deal with is the lexis used to assess things, states of affairs
and processes. They were concerned with the way that journalists seek to
represent these issues not in a neutral fashion but in a way which assigns
value socially in terms of things such as their aesthetic qualities, their potential
for harm or benefit and their social significance. We can think of the lexical
content of this news item in these terms. We find aesthetic evaluation in the
expressions ‘a sickening illustration’, ‘a gruesome picture’, ‘bleak truth’ and
so on and their potential for harm and social significance in ‘drugs menace’.
These terms are purely evaluative rather than descriptive. In the context of
the criminological and sociological research, what value could there be in
calling people’s hopeless lives of poverty ‘sickening’? Clearly, such language
seeks not to help the reader to understand a situation but to judge it on a
moral level.
As discussed above, van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999) show that one
important part of the recontextualization of social practice is ‘substitution’.
Here the details and complexities of activities are substituted. For example,
people can be represented in terms of who they are, by describing their
appearance rather than what their actual activities are and the reasons for
this behaviour. What we find in this text is extensive description of what the
woman and the man look like and what they are wearing:
Ravaged junkie
Gaunt-faced and painfully thin
Haggared-faced woman
Wearing a pink jumper and miniskirt
Man in a baseball cap – thought to be a dealer
We find no corresponding account of appearances and clothing for the

passers- by. This means that we are not encouraged to understand this
woman as part of a set of social circumstances but only through her
appearance. For van Leeuwen and Wodak (1999), this kind of substitution
is one way in which we can identify the ideological work going on in a text.
What is foregrounded here is the image of the woman as a spectacle on

the streets. Would it have been different if the man had been wearing a
suit and had a healthy appearance? One would imagine that a person who
takes drugs in this manner has lost any sense of perspective or pride or even
connection with wider social values, at least at this moment. But the text
does not promote understanding of such wider issues, as its aim appears to
be to paint a vivid picture of this woman in order to foreground the appalling
sight greeting the passers- by.
Van Leeuwen (1999) also points to the addition of ‘reactions’ in texts as
a strategy to recontextualize social practice. Iedema et al. (1994) and Martin
and White (2005) likewise stress the importance of identifying the emotional
reactions attributed to social actors by journalists, as these will always be
interpretations. For example, compare the following:
The demonstrators pushed forwards aggressively when confronted by the

police.
The demonstrators pushed forwards passionately when confronted by the
police.
These two different evaluations of the emotional reactions of the demonstrators

create completely different meanings regarding both who they are and what
they do, although in neither case is an overt evaluation made.
In the Mail text, we are given evaluations of the reactions of the woman
taking drugs:
Shamelessly ignoring
Flaunting the habit
So desperate to smoke her drugs
Trying to conceal herself
On the one hand, this woman appears to have what the journalists represent
as an inappropriate response. It is not so much that she is taking the drugs,
but that she is doing so in public. And the journalist at first represents this
through expressions such as ‘flaunting’, although later we are told that she
was ‘trying to conceal herself’. Such inconsistencies seem unimportant once
the squalor of her presence and the shameless nature of her behaviour have
been established.
The sheer level of the woman’s outrageous and inappropriate behaviour is
signalled by the overlexicalization in the following sentence:
Lighting the crack cocaine, a Class A drug, she inhales the smoke deeply.
We can ask why it is necessary to state ‘crack cocaine’ and ‘Class A drug’ in
this way. Overlexicalization has been associated with contentious issues. Teo
(2000: 20) explains that overlexicalization ‘results when a surfeit of repetitious,
quasi- synonymous terms is woven into the fabric of news discourse, giving
rise to a sense of overcompletenes. Overlexicalization then gives a sense
of over- persuasion and is normally evidence that something is problematic
or of ideological contention. We would find overlexicalization in any text in
which there is an abundance of particular words and their synonyms. This
would point to the area in which persuasion was taking place and the area of
ideological contention. A simple example is offered by Achugar (2007) of the
way that enemies can be overlexicalized:
Certainly our Armed Forces victorious in the battle against the unpatriotic
forces of Marxist subversion were accused of supposed violations to
human rights. (El Soldado, April 1989)
Here the armed forces are battling against ‘the unpatriotic forces of Marxist
subversion’. Such overlexicalization, or over- description, indicates some anxiety
by the author or paper. Here it appears necessary to attempt to justify the
‘supposed violations of human rights’. In our text above, the overlexicalization
of ‘crack cocaine’ and ‘a Class A drug’ indicates over- persuasiveness regarding
the sheer affront to ordinary decent society.
The woman’s state of mind is also indicated in the following word
choices:
In broad daylight, a junkie smokes crack cocaine

People taking drugs in the open
Here it is emphasized that the problem is the attitude of the drug user – that
she takes drugs in ‘broad daylight’ and ‘in the open’. Again we are dealing with
reactions rather than actual concrete sequences of activity, causes and effects.
Of course, the reactions of the passers- by in the text are also important:
Shocked passers- by
Appalled passer- by
Shocked to see
‘It must be hell for the people who live here’.
The item itself is presented from the point of view of a passer- by who is
‘appalled’ and ‘shocked’. Of course, it could be the case that they were
appalled and shocked by the nature of a society which leaves people in such
a life situation. But this strategy of including reactions in this way specifically
shifts focus away from structural issues and serves to personalize the
situation. Fairclough (2000) has discussed the ideological nature of such
discourses that foreground individual matters while suppressing the actual
structural factors in a society of which they are a part. This newspaper is not
interested in raising matters regarding the effects of poverty and inequalities
in society. The message here is that the government must deal with these
individuals in order to protect the needs of the ordinary respectable citizen, as
is indicated by the passers- by being appalled and the statement ‘it must be
hell for the people who live here’.
We find specific reference to the government addressing the problem:
Despite repeated pledges by the Labour Government to tackle the problem,

the image exposes the bleak truth of how addicts are unafraid of flaunting
their habit in public.
However, the problem that requires addressing is not that addicts are ‘unafraid
of flaunting their habit in public’ but is, specifically, the structural problems
that lead to this kind of hard drug use. What the text is calling for, clearly, is a
tougher stance on law and order. These drug addicts are flaunting what they
do in public – such is the decadence that is permitted in society. And clearly
the government is not acting.
In the second half of this text, there is a change of genre to present some
statistics on police arrests for drugs offences. As in the text analysed above,
this use of numbers helps to connote a language of objectivity.
Describing drug use as ‘rocketing’ and prices as ‘tumbling’ is clearly
hyperbolic. Again, in this part of the text we find the use of statistics to
connote objective reporting. We also find a clear statement that it is not so
much that drugs are part of a culture of crime and delinquency, as we know
from some of the research, but that
Much of the antisocial behaviour which makes ordinary people’s lives a
misery is drug- related.
So here a pattern of causality is implied rather than clearly stated: Much
antisocial behaviour is drugs- related. But what is omitted is the fact that
this kind of behaviour and drug use are all part of a culture of poverty and
marginalization.
Overall, we can say that this news item recontextualizes what we know
about hard drug use from the available research. The item foregrounds
people’s appearances and reactions in order to create a discourse in which
the problem is that shameless drug users feel that they can use drugs in the
open, which causes a problem for ordinary passers- by and residents. We
would not want to claim that having drug users present on the streets would
not be difficult. One of the authors lived for a while in South London and also
in an area in Valencia, Spain, where drug users would often be found using
on doorsteps throughout the day and night. Most of these drug users lived a
dangerous and pitiful life. What we want to point to here is that the burden
on the ordinary respectable citizen is foregrounded, along with the attitudes
and appearances of the users. Issues of poverty and exactly what structural
issues need to be addressed are excluded.
The language of drug education

The final text we examine is from DirectGov, the UK government’s online
service information for people in England and Wales. The content is developed
by government departments, working with a central Directgov team. The
website we look at is entitled ‘Helping Your Children Avoid the Dangers
of Drugs’. What is of interest in this text is the way that its language and
the visual information draw on the discourses of drugs that we have so far
encountered in this chapter.
The short videoclip on the website, which is provided by Parent Channel TV,
offers additional advice to parents. In one scene we see how two teenagers,
one male, one female, acquire drugs in a seedy urban environment. The
‘dealer’ waits, semi- concealed behind a rubbish bin, wearing a hooded top.
The male teenager also wearing a hooded top, approaches him furtively
to buy the drugs. The scene is given a blurred effect. On the one hand,
such visual techniques are used to indicate that this is symbolic rather than
documentary footage. But they also serve to create a sense of obscurity
and menace. What is important here is that the more normalized world of
recreational drug use, which evidence tells us does not tend to be associated
with sleazy pushers and an underground crime culture, is merged with the
hard drug scene that does.
On the site we find the following text:
What to do if your child is taking drugs

If you do find out your child is taking drugs, your natural reaction may be
to panic. However, it’s important you stay calm, talk to them and reassure
them. You should:
● let them explain in their own words what they’ve done

● avoid asking them why they’ve taken drugs as it will make them
defensive
● not get hung up on blame

● let them know exactly how you feel about the situation
If your child does have a drug problem it’s important for them to know
that you will be there for them. This could be in the form of answering
simple questions or helping them through the difficult process of kicking
the habit. Let them know you trust them, but at the same time feel free to
show disappointment if this trust is broken.
The key lexical items here are found in the following phrases:
If your child does have a drug problem
The difficult process of kicking the habit
In the first line, drug use is described as a ‘problem’. Given the criminological
and sociological literature, it would be more accurate to tell parents in the first
place that many millions of people take recreational drugs at the weekend
without coming to harm and that this kind of drug use is generally periodic
and not regular. And they could tell them that experimentation with such
drugs can be thought of as a relatively normalized activity.
In the second line, we are told about the ‘difficult process of kicking the
habit’. Again, unless the child is using hard drugs, it is unlikely that physical
addiction will be an issue.
Parents are told about legal issues, but not that hard drugs and crime normally
come together in areas of poverty and unemployment. The text addresses a
middle- class parent, similar to those addressed by the news texts above, a parent
of schoolchildren who might see all drugs as part of a shady underworld.
Conclusion
While there is extensive and revealing literature from criminology, sociology
and media studies on drugs and media representations of drugs and crime,
we have begun to show that a critical linguistic analysis can also play an
important part in extending our understanding of these representations. In
this chapter, we have looked at the kinds of lexical fields that map out the
people, actions and settings that are foregrounded in the representation of
drugs. The research quoted in this chapter shows that much drug use is
recreational and for the most part mainstream and non–criminal. Where hard
drug use is connected to poverty and social exclusion, media representations
tend to use a language that emphasizes the difference between the seedy
world of drugs and the ordinary everyday world.
In Chapter 3, we go on to break down the categories of language analysis,
in order to show that careful investigation of the specific linguistic and
grammatical structures used to represent participants and their activities is
a further step towards a more systematic treatment of media texts and their
potentially ideological meanings.
3
Concealment and
evasion in crime
reporting through
grammar
I n Chapter 2, we looked at how participants are represented through

lexical choices and at how the words chosen to do this can signify
discourses that influence the way we perceive (deviant) participants,
events and circumstances. In this chapter, we analyse how we perceive
criminals and those dealing with them can be shaped not only by word
choices but also by grammar, in terms of their representation through
‘transitivity’. Again, this can play a part in promoting certain crime
discourses and ideologies that are not overtly stated. We also explore
how our perception of criminals can be influenced not only in terms of
what they do but also by who or what they are or how they are named.
As we will see, the nature and gravity of what they have actually done can
be completely transformed by this process. Later in the chapter, we look
at the strategies in language for representing social actors and how to
analyse these. We end by showing how our linguistic social actor analysis
can also be applied visually.
Transitivity
Transitivity is the study of what people are depicted as doing and refers, broadly,
to who does what to whom, and how. This allows us to reveal who plays
an important role in a particular clause and who receives the consequences
of their action. A transitivity analysis of clause structure shows us who is
mainly given a subject (agent/participant) or object (affected/patient) position.
Deriving from the work of Halliday (1994), transitivity in this sense goes
beyond traditional grammatical notions, which distinguish between verbs that
take objects (‘The burglar hit the resident’) and verbs that do not (‘The burglar
fled’). For Halliday, the grammar of a language is a system of ‘options’ from
which speakers and writers choose according to social circumstances, with
transitivity playing a key role in ‘meaning making’ in language. This means
that the choice of certain linguistic forms always has significance, and is
arguably often ideological. Language is always part of an intervention in the
world, and we have stressed the importance of print media, in particular,
in constructing our everyday world and our expectations of it through the
patterns of its representation. For example, in media accounts of important
political events, such as demonstrations and other acts of civil unrest, the
responsibility of authorities and police may be systematically backgrounded or
omitted; agency and responsibility for actions may be left implicit. As we have
seen so far, news does not simply reflect reality, but is shaped by political,
economic and cultural forces. This makes transitivity analysis not only a useful
tool for finding out what is in texts, but also for what is absent from them. We
can therefore ask ourselves why some information is omitted from a text –
information which logically should have been there.
In an analysis of a text, we can therefore ask which kinds of participants are
foregrounded and which ones are backgrounded, such as through the use of
passive verb sentences. For example, van Dijk (2000) has demonstrated that
ethnic minorities are mostly shown as active agents when they do something
‘bad’. When things are done for or against them, they are represented in a
passive role:
Muslims prisoners sue for millions after they were offered ham sandwiches
for Ramadan (London Evening Standard, 26 October 2007)
Muslim prisoners get their own cells after sharing row (Daily Mail, 21 June
2009)
In the first headline, Muslims are the active participants in ‘suing’ the
prison, whereas in the second, they are the passive recipients of a privilege.
Both headlines construct this as something negative, because prisoners
CONCEALMENT AND EVASION IN CRIME 53
should neither sue nor be given privileges. Both headlines also ‘other’ the
participants in terms of their ethnicity (‘Muslims’) and in terms of their status
as prisoners. Hoey (2000) points out that evaluative words that are placed at
the beginning of sentences are more difficult to challenge, as the reader is
not positioned to decide whether to agree or disagree with these evaluations.
That does not mean, of course, that readers do not resist information they are
presented with.
When analysing agency (who does what to whom) and action (what gets
done), we are interested in describing three aspects of meaning:
● participants (this includes both the ‘doers’ of the process as well as the
‘done-tos’ who are at the receiving end of action; participants may be
people, things or abstract concepts)
● processes (represented by verbs and verbal groups)
● circumstances (adverbial groups or prepositional phrases, detailing
where, when and how something has happened). (Simpson and Mayr,
2010: 66)
For example, in the sentence ‘Three jobless hoodies attacked a pensioner

yesterday’, the Actor element is the ‘three jobless hoodies’ who carry out
the process of attacking. The Goal i s the ‘pensioner’ who has been attacked,
and the Circumstance is ‘yesterday’, which locates the process in a temporal
context. So in a transitivity analysis, we first have to identify the participants in
a clause and then the process types used. Halliday distinguishes six process
types: material, mental, behavioural, verbal, relational and existential. Let us
now take a closer look at each of these in turn.
Material Processes. Material processes describe processes of doing.
Usually, these are concrete actions that have a material result or consequence,
such as ‘The police arrested the burglar’, although they may also represent
abstract processes, such as ‘The crime rate has fallen’, or metaphorical
processes, such as ‘She demolished his argument about crime reduction’.
The two key participants in material processes are the Actor and the Goal. The
Actor is the part which performs the action, and the Goal is the participant
at whom the process is directed (the direct object in traditional grammar).
Some material processes have one participant only, the Actor, as in ‘The
burglar ran away’. This is called a non- goal- directed material process or a
‘non-transactional’ process (van Leeuwen, 2008).
Mental Processes. Mental processes are processes of sensing and can
be divided into three classes: ‘cognition’ (verbs of thinking, knowing or
understanding), ‘affection’ (verbs of liking, disliking or fearing) and ‘perception’
(verbs of seeing, hearing or perceiving). Examples of the three classes of
cognition, affection and perception are, respectively, ‘I understood the story’,
‘He feared he might be attacked again’ and ‘The police woman saw them’.
Mental processes allow us to gain an insight into the feelings or states of mind
of certain participants (‘People worry about the recent spate of burglaries in
their area’).
Behavioural Processes. Behavioural processes denote psychological or
physical behaviour, like watch, taste, stare, dream, breathe, cough, smile, and
laugh. Semantically, they are in between material and mental processes. For
example, ‘look at’ and ‘listen to’ are behavioural processes, but ‘see’ and
‘hear’ are mental processes. Behavioural processes are also in part about
action, but, unlike material processes, the action has to be experienced by
a single conscious being, that is, a person (‘The pensioner heard suspicious
noises’).
Verbal Processes. Verbal processes are expressed through the verb ‘to
say’ and its many synonyms. A verbal process typically consists of three
participants: Sayer, Receiver and Verbiage. The Sayer can be a human or
human- like speaker, as in ‘The police spokeswoman explained the situation’,
but it can also be an inanimate item, as in ‘The paper says he is guilty’. The
Receiver is the one at whom the verbal process is directed (‘They told me to
leave at once’), while the Verbiage is a nominalized statement of the verbal
process (‘The paper gave a detailed account ’ or ‘The defendant said that this
wasn’t true ’).
Relational Processes. These are processes that encode meanings about
states of being, in which things are stated to exist in relation to other things.
They are often expressed through the verb ‘to be’, which is the most frequent,
but synonyms such as ‘become’, ‘mean’, ‘define’, ‘symbolize’, ‘represent’,
‘stand for’, ‘refer to’, ‘mark’ and ‘exemplify’ are also classed as relational
processes. To ‘have’ in the sense of possessing something is another
relational process (‘She has a criminal record’). Relational processes allow us
to present as ‘facts’ what could be classed as opinion (‘Many offenders have
cognitive deficits’).
Existential Processes. Existential processes represent something that exists
or happens, as in ‘There has been an increase in property crime ’. Existential
processes typically use the verb ‘to be’ or synonyms, such as ‘exist’, ‘arise’ or
‘occur’, and they only have one participant, as in ‘There was an assault ’. This
participant, which is usually preceded by there is/there are, may be any kind of
phenomenon and often denotes a nominalized action. In the above example,
the verb ‘to assault’ has been turned into a nominalization. This can have the
effect of obscuring agency and responsibility.
When we look at these processes and participants out of context, as in
the examples presented above, they have no particular ideological function
as such. However, things are very different when transitivity is embodied
as discourse. For example, the relationship between Actor and Goal can
be ideologically significant if agency is supressed through the use of the

passive voice. In passives, the positions of Actor and Goal are reversed
(‘One demonstrator was killed by police in riot gear’), and the Actor may
even be omitted completely (‘One demonstrator was killed’). Even more
backgrounding is achieved through the use of a one- participant process such
as ‘One demonstrator died’, in which the action appears not to be caused by
the police at all. As van Dijk has shown, ‘negative acts of in-group members,
such as the authorities or the police, may be reduced in effect by placing
them later in the sentence or by keeping the agency implicit, for instance in
passive sentences’ (1991: 215–16).
As we will demonstrate, transitivity patterns, especially in the manipulation
of agency at the grammatical level, can be significant in media representations
of people in terms of power. According to van Leeuwen (2008: 60–1), material
processes can be ‘transactive’ and ‘non-transactive’. Transactive processes
involve a Goal (as in ‘Police finally apprehended the criminal ’), whereas non-
transactive processes have only one participant, the Actor (as in ‘The criminal
fled’). Van Leeuwen points out that the ability to transact ‘requires a certain
power, and the greater that power, the greater the range of “goals” that may
be affected’. This may be important in discourses in which the police need to
be seen as affecting the actions of certain Goals, that is criminals.
Another important transitivity feature is the use of nominalization, where
verb processes are converted into noun constructions, thereby removing any
explicit expression of agency. Thus, in ‘The introduction of ASBOs marked
a new era in Youth justice’, the Actor responsible (the government) is only
implied. Elsewhere, relational processes (‘be’, ‘have’, ‘represent’, ‘mark’
and so on) are often used in discourse to present information as ‘facts’, as
they suggest an unqualified sense of certainty. They are also very clear in
apportioning blame and expressing explicit opinion and, as Conboy observes,
can be ‘a strong indicator of the position of a news institution’ (2007: 52). We
can see this in a headline from the British tabloid News of the World (13 April
2008), taken from a story in which a mother was found to have organized her
own daughter’s kidnapping:
Shannon Matthew’s mum is a violent, foul- mouthed, chain- smoking,

boozy slob
Here the relational process ‘is’ describes Matthews in terms of her

supposed identity, as a woman who has violated the traditional role of the
‘caring’ mother. This is also achieved by casting her with the noun ‘slob’,
which makes it possible to put any number of adjectives in front, in this case
‘violent, foul- mouthed, chain- smoking’ and ‘boozy’, which further add to her
negative evaluation. Headlines and stories like this one are symptomatic of a
broader political agenda in the popular press, which obsessively focuses on

criminal women who do not conform to traditional notions of femininity or
‘motherhood’. In Chapter 5, we will focus on precisely this issue by looking at
the often stereotypical coverage of criminal women in some sections of the
media and illustrate how transitivity can play an important part in this.
Transitivity and the representation of

social action in the media
A number of feminist criminologists and media scholars have found
that the press significantly contributes to the construction of gendered
discourses about male and female criminals, particularly through features
such as naming or labelling, thereby perpetuating powerful gender
stereotypes (see Wykes, 1998; Jewkes, 2004). As we saw in Chapter 2,
naming is a significant ideological tool, because different names for objects
or people represent different ways of perceiving them. But alongside the
powerful connotations these lexical items may have, transitivity also plays
an important part in gendered representations. Kate Clark’s (1992) analysis
of both naming practices and transitivity patterns in news coverage in the
Sun of violent crimes and sex crimes perpetrated against women found
that the paper often used linguistic patterns that suggested that women,
even when they were victims of violent assaults, were partly to blame
for what happened to them. Blame, lack of responsibility, foregrounding
or backgrounding of a participant can all be expressed through transitivity
choices. Here is an example from the Sun quoted by Clark (1992: 213),
which demonstrates this:
Girl, 7, murdered while Mum drank at the pub

Little Nicola Spencer was strangled in her bedsit home – while her Mum
was out drinking and playing pool in local pubs (Sun, 20 December 1986)
Both the headline and the lead have two clauses, a main clause describing
the murder and a subordinate one stating what the mother was doing at the
time of the daughter’s killing, implying that she is not blameless in the girl’s
death. The only Actor here is the mother, for whom the paper uses active
material processes (‘drank’ and ‘was out drinking’ and ‘playing pool’). The Sun
therefore passes judgement on the mother’s ‘irresponsible’ behaviour rather
than on the murderer, who has been completely omitted. This may not have
been an intentional strategy, as it is common to use the passive (‘murdered’)
when the killer is not yet known. But the effect is still that the murderer is
backgrounded and the mother foregrounded.
A more recent example from the Sun (8 October 2010) actually makes
agency very explicit:
Monster rapes same woman twice

A SCARRED sex monster who raped a woman twice in separate late- night
attacks was being hunted last night.
This headline and lead show how language can be used to make it perfectly
clear who is to blame for an act. The ‘monster’ is shown as an Actor acting
upon the ‘woman’, who is the Goal. Both the active material process (‘rape’)
and the way the participants are named (the demonization or ‘othering’ through
the use of ‘monster’ versus the neutral expression ‘woman’ to denote that
she is one of ‘us’) also leaves no doubt as to who is to blame for the crime.
The above headline is also a good example of Clark’s (1992: 224) concept
of ‘fiend naming’, in which the criminal is referred to as a ‘monster’ and a
‘SCARRED sex monster’. Such strong condemnation, while apparently blaming
attackers, also suggests that they are so evil and alien that they are outside
humankind and society. By positioning ‘monsters’ in this way, a discussion
of why society produces men who commit violent acts against women and
children is sidelined. A consequence of this dehumanizing strategy is that it
glosses over those very aspects of the patriarchal system that need to be
challenged. No ‘normal’ man, it is implied, would be capable of such an act.
The Sun online article came with an ‘e-fit’ of the suspected rapist, depicting
a black man with a scar above his lip, biologically categorized by means of
stereotypical features, such as the big lips and the tightly curled hair. Two
readers provided the following online comments:
pls get this animal in human skin off the streets pls . . . .
This is why DNA should be taken at birth or on entry to the UK, eventually
rape would be almost unheard of
The first one, referring to the rapist as an ‘animal in human skin’, shows that
this reader sees rapists as basically subhuman creatures, whereas the second
one contains a racial element, suggesting that many rapes would stop if only
foreigners had their DNA taken ‘on entry to the UK’. A number of feminist
and criminological studies, however, have demonstrated that many rapes are
committed by people known to the victims, such as relatives, partners and
parents (see Jewkes, 2004).
Clark also suggests that the Sun distinguishes between ‘genuine’ victims
and ‘non- genuine’ ones. For example, when a violent crime is committed
against a ‘respectable’ or sexually unavailable victim, labelling will be neutral,
as in ‘a woman ’ or ‘his daughter ’. Naming can, however, be different when
the crime is committed against a victim that is deemed ‘unrespectable’, as
we shall see now.
The third example is from an article about the ‘Suffolk Strangler’, who killed
five women within a short period of time in 2006. The murdered women had
worked as prostitutes, and the following extract describes the situation of
one of the five victims:
Tragic Mother called Crackhead Annie

Anneli Alderton met her violent death after being sucked into a life of
prostitution. The Ipswich- born 24-year- old’s cravings were so bad that
other hookers described her as ‘crackhead Annie’. Tragic Annie, whose
naked body was found dumped near Nacton, Suffolk, only began walking
the streets of Ipswich in recent weeks. (Sun, 13 December 2006)
In terms of transitivity, through the use of passive constructions, the

woman is cast as a victim (‘. . . after being sucked into a life of prostitution),
but the text also underscores her active role in it by using two material
processes (‘. . . met her violent death’, ‘. . . began walking the streets’) as
if she was not completely blameless in her death. She is also identified
and labelled through a number of personal details, such as her name, age
and appearance (the article shows a black- and- white photograph of her
face, and she is also unnecessarily described as a ‘blonde’, whose body
was found ‘naked’. We also learn that she is a mother. According to Clark,
personal details, instead of individualizing and personalizing victims, often
do the opposite, and in doing so often create ‘a voyeuristic rather than
sympathetic reading of events’ (1992: 222). Some of the labels used here
appear to be sympathetic to the victim (‘tragic mother’ and ‘tragic Annie’),
but others focus on the fact that she was a drug addict (‘crackhead Annie’)
and a prostitute, although she is not labelled in this way by the paper,
which only quotes ‘other hookers’ as calling her a ‘crackhead’. Quoting
is an important ideological strategy, as it allows papers to write down
statements but at the same time to distance themselves from them, as
they were made by other people.
Clark’s (1992) conclusion to her study was that ‘under its veneer of moral
indignation against fiends’ the Sun actually shifts blame subtly onto the
victims of violent sex crimes, depending on how ‘respectable’ they are. We
can detect the same process in the example quoted above.
This discussion of transitivity and naming patterns has highlighted the

fact that much media discourse is constructed around ‘essentialist’ notions
of male and female offenders (Jewkes, 2004); the notion, in other words,
is that men are biologically prone to (sexual) violence, whereas women are
biologically predisposed to caring and nurturing and not to violence. Women
who fail to conform to the cultural stereotypes of the maternal, caring and
monogamous woman often receive particularly vicious coverage in the
popular press, as we shall see in one of our case studies below. We will
come back to this very issue in Chapter 5, which focuses on women and
crime.
Moving on to other verb processes that can also play an important role in
shaping how we perceive participants, we have to discuss mental and verbal
processes. This is important, as texts not only tell us what people do or what
has happened but also how people feel about things. Van Leeuwen (2008: 56)
points out that social roles, as reinforced in texts, prescribe not only actions
and identities but also feelings.
Starting with mental processes, it is often the case that participants
who are made the subjects of mental processes are constructed as the
‘focalizers’ or ‘reflectors’ of action. These actors are allowed an internal view
of themselves. This can be one device through which listeners and readers
can be encouraged to have empathy with that person. For example:
James Bulger’s mother still suffers 15 years later. (Daily Mail, 3 March 2008)
Here the reader is encouraged to sympathize with the mother by being informed
of her suffering. We are reminded of the murder of a two-year- old boy by two
youngsters who were only ten at the time of the murder. But newspapers
covering the case by and large did not offer corresponding details of the
feelings of these two boys and their parents. So we learn nothing of the mental
processes of the two boys nor the concerns and sufferings of their parents.
This serves to alienate us from these participants and, in a wider sense, to
justify the way the criminal justice and penal system dealt with them.
Since mental processes are mainly about sensing and reacting, they can
also convey passivity. Consider the following newspaper headline:
Prison officers fear that Muslim inmates are turning to extremism (Times,
10 October 2008)
On the one hand, in the sentence above, we are allowed an internal view of
the prison officers. But the impression is that they are passive and helpless
against Muslim inmates, which in the case of running a prison may worry
readers.
Reactions
Very often in official mediated discourses on crime, officials, experts, citizens
and victims of crime are represented not only through their actions but also
through their ‘reactions’ (van Leeuwen, 2008). Citizens, for example, may
‘fear’, ‘have legitimate fears’, ‘be afraid’ or ‘feel besieged’, so the question of
who is reacting to whom or what can be relevant for a critical analysis. Many
reactions are not expressed ‘dynamically’, as in the mental process ‘they
fear’, but more statically, as in ‘they are afraid’. Van Leeuwen’s category of
‘reactions’ is an important complement to Halliday’s, as the category ‘mental
process’ does not fully cover the category ‘reaction’. In our case study below
of a text on Muslim prisoners, we will see that the actions of the prison staff
are mere reactions to the actions of the Muslim prisoners.
Abstractions
Abstrations describe actions which are generalized and non- specific and
abstract away from the more specific micro- processes that make up actions
(van Leeuwen, 2008: 69). For example, in the sentence
It is important for staff to engage with Muslim prisoners
the details of what is done are obscured. In such cases, what is done may be
less important than that staff appear to do something with the prisoners.
As another example of abstraction, the following extract is taken from the
website of the Labour party in Rochester and Stroode, entitled
Stamp out antisocial behaviour

Medway Labour is committed to combating anti-social behaviour, kerb
crawling, drug usage and alcoholism that blights communities in Medway.
We can see here that relational processes such as ‘is committed’, a phrase that
has become a staple in the rebranding of political discourse, is used to abstract
what Labour actually do in this respect. Being ‘committed’ is not the same
as actually combatting something. The website then explains in bullet points
what Labour intends to do in this respect. Here we quote three of these:
● Promote neighbourhood watch schemes and the Special Constable

programme Medway-wide
● Support basic community policing and voluntarism. Empowering local
people to campaign against crime
● Opposing kerb- crawling with tough action on offenders and tighten up

rules on street prostitution.
All these are examples of abstractions, which do not make it clear what exactly
is being done against ‘antisocial’ behaviour. When we find such abstractions
at the level of social action, we have to ask why they are being used and what
is being concealed.
Grammatical positioning of actions

Prepositional phrases and subordinate clauses
Another important strategy of representing social action is through a
circumstance, such as a prepositional phrase or subordinate clause. Both
can be useful strategies in backgrounding certain acts. Prepositional phrases
begin with a preposition, such as ‘for’, ‘at’ or ‘after’. A newspaper headline
might use a main clause and a prepositional clause, as in ‘Boy stabbed at
school ’; the prepositional phrase tells us where the stabbing happened. A
subordinate clause will begin with a conjunction, such as ‘while, ‘after’ or ‘as’,
or a relative pronoun, such as ‘which’ or ‘whose’. Grammatical structures like
these can have an ideological effect. For example, in the sentence
Violent protests as Britain pushes through student fee hike
the reason behind the violent protest – the actions of the British government, that
is, their decision to raise study fees – are de- emphasized by being embedded
in a subordinate clause through a nominalization (‘student fee hikes’). Van Dijk
(1991: 216) points out that ‘[e]vents may be strategically played down by the
syntactic structure of the sentences, for example, by referring to the event in
a lower (later, less prominent) embedded clause, or conversely by putting it in
the first position when the events need extra prominence’ (1991: 216). In our
example, the ‘violent protests’ are made to stand out while the actions of the
government are totally backgrounded.
When analysing newspaper headlines, Richardson (2007: 207) found that
prepositional phrases can be used to provide context for dominant clauses, but
they thereby also reduce responsibility for an action, as it is de- emphasized.
This can be seen in the following headline and lead below:
12 dead in attack on Hamas

Seven children killed as Israelis assassinate military chief (Guardian, 23
July 2002)
The headline does not reveal who is behind the killing. Although this can
probably be inferred, the prepositional phrase ‘in attack on Hamas’ requires some
extra effort on part of the reader to work out that the ’12 dead’ is the result of an
attack by the Israelis. The subordinate clause in the lead, (‘. . . as Israelis assassinate
military chief’) almost reads as if it the assassination was a separate incident,
although, again, the reader would be able to make the connection. However, the
lead could have stated that ‘Israelis kill seven children in assassination of military
chief’, which would have made it clearer that the Israelis were responsible.
As we have seen so far, attributing agency through Halliday’s list of verb
process types can be complex. We must be careful to see who is activated
and also look for ways how this can be concealed or downplayed through a
number of grammatical strategies.
In our case study, we conduct a transitivity analysis of a newspaper text
from the Times (10 October 2008) which reports on the danger posed by
radical Muslims at a ‘top security jail’. There are a number of important language
choices found in this text which help to shape the story ideologically. In a later
section, we look at the way in which the participants are represented plays
one important role in this ideological construction. Here we are interested
specifically in transitivity. The important instances of transitivity used for the
prison officers have therefore been put in italics.
Prison officers fear that Muslim inmates are turning to extremism

Staff at a top security jail fear Muslim inmates are pressurising other Muslim
prisoners to adopt extremist views and encouraging other offenders to
convert to Islam, according to an inspection report published today.
Prison officers at Whitemoor jail also feared growing radicalisation and
conversions among the 395 inmates, of whom almost one third were
Muslims.
On one wing at the jail staff admitted that Muslim inmates ‘policed
themselves’, the report said.
One inmate claimed to inspectors that inmates are converting to Islam
because they want protection and that Muslim gangs in the jail provide it.
Anne Owers, the chief inspector of prisons, urges the prison service to do
more to provide staff throughout the jail system but particularly in the top
security prisons with help to deal with increasing Muslim numbers.
The number of Muslim prisoners in jails doubled in the ten years to 2006
to reach 8,243 – 11 per cent of the total prison population.
Ms Owers said the top security prisons are facing increased risks involving
more gang activity, more young men serving long sentences and a small
number of men convicted of terrorist offences.
She said Whitemoor jail at March in Cambridgeshire had faced a sudden

expansion in black and ethnic minority prisoners to reach 150, of whom
120 were Muslims.
A committee had been created to advise on action to deal with possible
gang, terrorist or extremist activity at the prison even though only 8 of the
Muslim prisoners had been convicted of terrorist offences.
Despite these strong central systems, residential staff were mostly unaware
of these initiatives. They expressed a fea r of what they saw as a rising
problem of prisoner radicalisation and an increase in Muslim conversion’,
the chief inspector’s report said.
Staff were unsure about how to treat Muslim inmates other than as
potential security risks. The report said officers were reluctant to engage
with inmates and deliberately kept their distance from them because they
feared they would be ‘conditioned’ by prisoners.
‘Some staff appeared reluctant to engage with Muslim prisoners, and the
little information and training they had received about Muslim prisoners
was related to monitoring them as potential threats to national security,
which inevitably impinged on the way they interacted with them’, the
report said.
It added: ‘Prisoners said that staff attitudes towards them changed
markedly for the worse if they chose to, or happened to, associate with
those prisoners.
‘There was a perception among officers that some Muslim prisoners
operated as a gang and put pressures on non- Muslim prisoners to
convert, and on other Muslim prisoners to conform to a strict and extreme
interpretation of Islamic practice.
‘However, there was a reluctance to engage with Muslim prisoners and
challenge inappropriate behaviour. An officer on one wing said that Muslim
prisoners ‘policed themselves’ and that others in the staff group agreed ’.
Describing the gang culture at the jail, one inmate said: ‘On the main wing
it is Muslim vs whites. Staff are worried as what will they do when it all
goes mainstream. They are beginning to outnumber everyone and don’t
care – all this radicalisation and they’re extremely violent slashing people’.
Another prisoner said: ‘The new gang are the Muslims. The Muslim group
is the big group and others are looking for protection. Those who are
isolated are looking for protection and so are the ones converting as they
won’t get help from screws (prison officers).
Ms Owers report said resettlement work had improved along with activities
available to prisoners but she said the jail still faced challenges.
Phil Wheatley, director general of the National Offender Management

Service, said: ‘The Chief Inspector is right to highlight the challenges and
risks Whitemoor is facing. It is also important to recognise the action being
taken to manage challenging prisoner profiles.
‘A more sophisticated approach to addressing bullying and the management
of bullies and their victims is now in place and is bringing improvements.
‘Work to improve the relationships between staff and prisoners is a priority
and measures have been implemented to tackle this, including training to
develop staff understanding of the growing Muslim population’.
Starting with the transitivity patterns for the prison officers, we can see that
they are represented through a high incidence of the mental process ‘to fear’:
Prison officers fear ; staff at a top security jail fea r; prison officers [. . .]
also feared growing radicalization; feared they would be ‘conditioned’ by
prisoners.
Then there are several relational processes:
staff were unsure; appeared reluctant to engage; ar e worried; were mostly

unaware; are worried.
We also find three verbal processes in which officers express or even ‘admit
to’ their fears.
staff admitted ; An officer on one wing said . . . others in the staff group
agreed; expressed a fear.
And finally two existential processes:
There was a perception among officers

There was a reluctance to engage with . . .
These noun constructions are nominalized processes, one of which is mental

(‘to perceive’) and one relational (‘to be reluctant’), and which further add to
the general impression of inactivity on the part of the officers.
All these processes are basically what van Leeuwen (2008) calls ‘reactive’
and add to an overall tone of passivity on part of the prison officers. All they
do is ‘deliberately keep their distance’ from Muslim prisoners.
The transitivity patterns for the Muslim prisoners are entirely different.
They are mostly engaged in ‘transactive’ actions:
are pressurizing other Muslim prisoners; encouraging other offenders to

convert to Islam; operated as a gang; put pressure on non- Muslim prisoners
to convert; are beginning to outnumber everyone; they are extremely
violent slashing people.
All except one of these processes have Goals (‘other Muslim prisoners’, ‘other
offenders’, ‘non- Muslim prisoners’, ‘everyone’, ‘people’) who are affected by
the actions of the Muslims. Only one mental process describes their attitude
(they don’t care ), and one relational process presents as a fact that they are
extremely violent.
Looking at how the prison authorities are represented, we encounter many
verbal processes, particularly for the chief inspector of prisons, whose report
is also quoted. These processes can also be seen as reactions:
urges the prison service to do more; said ; the chief inspector’s report said ;
the report said ; it added ; Ms Owers report said.
Here we find that the prison authorities, the ‘experts’ make authoritative
statements by using the neutral verbal process ‘said’, addressing the problem
in a professional way. Only once does the chief inspector ‘urge’.
We also learn that
A committee had been created to advise on action to deal with possible

gang, terrorist or extremist activity at the prison . . .
Phil Wheatley, director general of the National Offender Management Service

is quoted as saying:
It is also important to recognize the action being taken to manage challenging

prisoner profiles.
The italicized bits in these two sentences are examples of abstraction.

We do not really know what exactly is done to address the situation in the
prison, but the reader may feel assured as long as the authorities appear
to do something. Edelman (1977) reminds us that one of the functions of
crime- control discourse is to convey rational decisions, change and progress,
even if this is not the case. The fact that there is an ‘Offender Management
Service’ through which prisoners and their ‘profiles’ can be ‘managed’
demonstrates this strategy on behalf of the prison service to do something
about the problem. It is also an example of the influence of managerialism
and its language on the prison system, the overall concern of which is the
‘efficient enhancement of social control’ (Garland, 2001: 176).
Apart from the Muslim prisoners, other anonymized prisoners are also
present in the text who are represented in terms of verbal processes:
One inmate claimed to inspectors that Muslims are converting to Islam;

prisoners said ; Describing the gang culture at the jail, one inmate said ;
another prisoner said.
We assume these prisoners are non- Muslim, although this is not stated
explicitly all the time. Apart from ‘claim’, which suggests that a statement
should perhaps not be believed, the neutral ‘say’ is used. This would probably
not have been the case if the article had been about prisoners protesting
against their conditions. In the quote below by one (non- Muslim) prisoner,
in which he describes the Muslims as the dangerous ‘other’ in ‘us’ versus
‘them’ terms, it may be significant that the neutral ‘say’ is used and not the
doubtful ‘claim’ or ‘allege’:
Describing the gang culture at the jail, one inmate said : ‘On the main wing
it is Muslim vs whites.
To sum up, in any text, we can ask how many process terms describe
actions and how many reactions. Just as with many newspaper texts
on immigrants (who usually provoke reactions) in which there may be a
predominance of reactions attributed to those portrayed as ‘us’ (see van
Leeuwen, 2008), the Muslim prisoners in this text are also depicted as
producing reactions from prison officers, who ‘fear’ them, and from the
prison authorities, who react with reasonable measures. Although the
main focus in this text is on the prison officers and the authorities, and the
actions of the Muslim prisoners are backgrounded in subordinate clauses,
the text still manages to convey an overall sense of threat emanating from
Muslims who impose their religion on British culture, even behind prison
walls.
The representation of participants

in crime reporting
One other important language feature employed in the text analysed above
is its use of representational strategies. It is probably fair to say that there is
no neutral way to represent a person. All choices will serve to draw attention
to certain aspects of identity that will be associated with certain kinds of
discourses. For example, take the following sentences:
Three jobless hoodies attacked a pensioner yesterday.

Three unemployed men attacked a man yesterday.
Three Muslim men attacked a war veteran yesterday.
Three young men attacked an ex- soldier yesterday.
All of these sentences are used to describe the same event and the same
participants. But in each case, the participants have been represented by
different naming choices, each of which serve to signify a different set of
associations. In each case, certain aspects of identity have been emphasized
and others de- emphasized. Some of these serve to heighten the severity or
immorality of the event, and others to diminish it. The expression ‘jobless
hoodies’ places the attackers in the discourse of ‘feral youth’ undermining
decent society. In a tabloid news article, it would be no surprise to the reader
to find them attacking a pensioner, and he or she may immediately dismiss
them, not as part of a symptom of a broader issue of social exclusion but of
immoral behaviour and disrespect and society on the verge of collapse.
In the next line, ‘unemployed men’ makes them appear less of a ‘burden’
and appears more ‘objective’. But this is helped by the victim now no longer
being a vulnerable ‘pensioner’, but simply a ‘man’.
The third sentence foregrounds the religious beliefs of the attackers and
the ‘decency’ of the victim by foregrounding his established membership in
society because he is a ‘war veteran’. Here the discourse signified could be the
disrespect to cherished British cultural values by those who are ‘other’.
Finally, the meaning of the last sentence becomes ambiguous, as we are
told of the actions of ‘three young men’, which has fairly positive connotations,
and the ‘ex- soldier’ is less emotive than the ‘war veteran’.
In these sentences, all of the naming strategies could in some ways
describe the participants accurately. The attackers were Muslim, wearing
hoodies, unemployed and young men. They could also be many other things,
relating to different aspects of their lives. They might be members of a football
team, residents of a particular street, former school poetry prize winners,
someone’s child. But choosing to foreground one aspect of their identity has
an ideological effect. It can serve to legitimize or delegitimize. We can see this
in the following sentences:
Muslim man arrested for fraudulently claiming benefits.

Father of two daughters arrested for fraudulently claiming benefits.
In fact, there could have been many other possibilities that could have been
used to characterize this man. It could have been foregrounded that he was a
British man, an amateur dancer, a local office worker, and so forth. But in the
first place, it is his official religion that has been chosen. Again, we find the
discourse of those from ‘outside’, who are a burden on the British taxpayer. In
the second sentence, by foregrounding the fact that he is a father, the crime
appears more forgivable, as this humanizes him. In this sense, the same act
is presented in a very different way for the reader. Crime reporting usually
involves creating moral others, so that the perpetrator is not like us (e.g. Wykes,
2001). In the second case, he is ‘one of us’. The effect here is that possibly the
fraud was justified, as he was struggling to look after his children. In the case
of the attack on the pensioner above, some of the representational strategies
are more useful for creating moral others.
Classification of social actors

Van Leeuwen (1996) offers a comprehensive inventory of the ways that
we can classify people and the ideological effects that these classifications
may have. This inventory helps us to take a more systematic approach to
analysing representational strategies in texts. We first provide an overview of
van Leewen’s categories before returning to the article from the Times above
on the Muslim prisoners (pp. 62–63).
Inclusion and exclusion

In the first place, we can simply consider who is excluded from a text. What
kinds of participants are missing or suppressed?
Demonstrators were taken into custody throughout the day.
Here, the action has been included, but the agents of that action, in this case
the police, have been excluded. It may be the case that in this text it was the
actions of the demonstrators that were to be foregrounded for ideological
reasons. In the following example, we can see that the police are absent from
the text, as they wish to background their inability to develop a case, as is
made clear in the second sentence:
Certain facts in the case were difficult to establish.

The police were unable to establish any facts.
In the following, we can see suppression rather than exclusion, as it is harder

to tell who the actual agent is:
Concerns are being widely expressed in Britain that tougher measures on

crime are needed.
In this sentence, who is actually expressing the concerns is suppressed

through passive agent deletion. Nevertheless, someone is expressing concerns.
In texts, we may find that some social actors are completely absent. A text
or video game on war may include no civilians. One of the authors conducted
a short study with a group of students on WWI literature for British schools.
Apart from the Home Front, there was nothing included on the lives of civilians
in the areas in and around the combat zones. Anyone who has read novels
by frontline soldiers will be confronted by the appalling effects of war, in the
first place, on civilians, who will not be provided with supplies in the same
way that the soldiers of each side are. In such cases, we can ask why such
suppression has occurred.
Personalization and impersonalization

When participants are included, we can ask to what extent they are
personalized or impersonalized. This simply means the difference between
terms that describe participants through proper names or nouns, or even
humanizing adjectives, and those that dehumanize and objectify, such as
calling people ‘the rich’ or ‘the overweight’ or simply ‘problems’. This can be
seen in the following two sentences:
Detective superintendant Paul Cobley thanked the public for their support
during this demanding investigation.
A police representative thanked the public for their support during this
demanding investigation.
In the first case, the police appear much more human due to the use of
names. In the second sentence, impersonalization gives much less of the
sense that the police are actually engaging personally with the public. Later
in the book (Chapter 6) we will be looking at strategies used by the police in
personalizing the image of the force and in fomenting the sense that they are
acting in and alongside the community.
On the other hand, impersonalization can be used to make a more official
statement or to obscure the actual source of information:
The Kent police force will not be accepting strike action by officers in the
face of the threatened cuts.
In this case, we could argue that it is the officers who are the police force. So
we can ask here who this viewpoint actually represents. Of course here, too,
we find suppression of the actual agent.
Impersonalization can be carried out by objectification and abstraction. In the

following sentences we can see that young men have been objectivated by being
represented through a single feature or thing with which they are associated:
Hoodies are to be banned from the shopping centres.
This means that participants can be reduced to this feature. A tabloid newspaper
might refer to a group of youths as ‘hoodies’ throughout an article. This can
distract attention from exactly who these people are, for example, young
people who have experienced poor education, have had few opportunities
and have little to gain from mainstream society in terms of self- esteem.
Individualization and collectivization

It is also useful to consider how participants are described as individuals or as
part of a collectivity, as is shown in the following sentences:
It was announced that police officers had been injured during the
demonstration.
It was announced that police officer Crispin Thurlow, ten years with the
force, had been injured during the demonstration.
In the individualization found in the second sentence, we are more likely

to align ourselves with the participant. We can imagine a text in which
it is the demonstrators who are all individualized, giving details of their
names, ages, job, family status and so on, and in which the police are all
collectivized. In this case, we would be most likely be more aligned with
the demonstrators.
Specification and genericization

We can also look at whether participants are represented as specific individuals
or as a generic type. In our earlier example, we saw that the person accused
of benefits fraud could either be named or identified as a type. Consider the
following two sentences:
A man, Mazar Hussein, a local shop owner, challenged police today.

A Muslim man challenged police today.
In the second case, the man who challenged the police is represented as a
type (‘a Muslim man’). This is used here to place the story in a particular news
frame. In this case, the generic category of ‘Muslim’ can place this story into
a news frame in which Muslims are a contemporary problem in Britain, either
due to their extremism or their complaining about their situation. In fact, the
man may not have been a practising Muslim. It could be like saying, ‘Christian
John Smith challenged police today’. It is the use of such generic terms that
can be used to give a racist angle to a story even when the newspaper takes
a stance that it is not racist.
In the following example, we see how a specific naming strategy can make
us much more likely to align ourselves with an offender:
One demonstrator was sentenced by Judge Smidgely- Smithely.

The demonstrator Joan Judd, 43, mother of three and local librarian, was
sentenced by Judge Smidgely- Smithely.
In the second sentence, naming strategies are used to foreground the way
this woman may have been ordinary, decent or gentle. Such people would
not demonstrate unless there was good reason. In the first sentence, this is
suppressed in favour of a generic term in order to background the possibility
that there could easily be widespread support for the demonstration.
Functionalization and identification

Participants can be identified or nominated in terms of who they are or
functionalized by being depicted in terms of what they do. Functionalized
terms often end in -or, - er, - ant, - ian, - ist or - eer. So we can have ‘police
interviewer’, ‘rapist’, defendant’, etc. For example,
The demonstrator was injured outside the embassy.

The defendant was warned by Judge Peter Smidgely- Smidthely.
In these cases, the demonstrator and defendant are partially dehumanized

by referring to them with functionalizations that highlight only their roles. Had
both of these been named and identified by mention of them being mothers,
for example, we would have evaluated them differently.
Functionalization can also connote legitimacy:
The local shop owner said that he needed greater police protection.
Here the functionalization positively evaluates the speaker as a legitimate,

decent member of a local community. He could have been nominated as ‘a
local’ which may not have had the same effect.
Representation of people through what they do can also be achieved with

the use of ‘functional honorifics’. These are terms that suggest a degree
of seniority or a role that requires a degree of respect. These will normally
involve official roles, such as ‘President’, ‘Lord’ or ‘Judge’. These can be used
to foreground the fact that they are important and official. We might find that
different ideological accounts of the same set of events will see honorifics
ascribed or withheld. In a press release, the police may want to emphasize
that the spokesperson is very important, a chief superintendent’, but also
nominate them to provide personalization.
Identification means that people are described in terms of who they are.
This could include how they are classified by sex, age, race and so forth. This
can also be accomplished with physical identification, such as ‘small’, ‘tall’ or
‘pretty’. How people are classified can tell us a lot about the ideology of the
definer and the social climate in which this is considered relevant. Identification
can also be accomplished by relationality, such as ‘an aunt’, ‘a mother’ or ‘a
colleague’. Relational identification was formerly more important in Western
cultures, in which individuals were asked about their family connections, as
compared to more contemporary times, in which we tend to be asked what it
is that we do.
It is of ideological importance whether a person is functionalized or identified
in a text and, if both, in which order this is done. When the innocence of
a victim is required, relational identification and classification may be more
important than functionalization, as in, for example,
The petite, pretty, mother of two was attacked on her way home.
The solicitor was attacked on her way home.
In terms of order of functionalization and identification, we find that what

is placed first can provide clues as to the ideological defining of identity
and its history. For example, we can have a ‘woman doctor’ but not a
‘doctor woman’. In this case ‘woman’ is clearly of paramount importance.
In other cases, we can have ‘policewoman’ as the term ‘policeman’ already
existed.
Anonymization
Participants can also be anonymized:
A police source said today that there was no further information on

the case.
Many people believe that criminals should receive harsher sentences.
The term ‘a police source’ is very common in newspapers. On the one

hand, we rely on journalists to have legitimate sources, but this conceals
which social groups and organizations actually provide these sources. In the
second case, we can see how a politician could use such a representational
strategy (‘Many people’) to avoid specification and the development of
detailed arguments. It allows him or her to conveniently summon up
arguments that are then easy to dismiss.
Aggregation
Aggregation means that participants are quantified and treated as ‘statistics’:
Many thousands of criminals are going unpunished through soft

sentencing.
Van Dijk (1992) shows that this use of statistics can be used to give the
impression of research, of scientific credibility, when in fact we are not given
specific figures. Is ‘many thousands’ 3,000 or 10,000, for example. Below,
we see this in a news agency feed:
One of the few suspects to express remorse over his alleged involvement
in last year’s bombings on Indonesia’s Bali island arrived at court on
Thursday.
In this case, how many is a few? Exactly how many have shown remorse
and how many have not? And if we are not told, then why not? So in cases of
aggregation, in which actual numbers are replaced by such abstractions, we
can always ask what work this does for the author.
Drawing on this tool kit for considering the meanings of representational
strategies, we can now think about the way these strategies work in the
text from the Times (10 October 2008) above (pp. 62–4) about the Muslim
prisoners
In this text, there are four categories of participant: Muslim prisoners,
non- Muslim prisoners, prison staff and prison service officials (the chief
inspector of prisons, and the director general of the National Offender
Management Service). The members of the first category are always
represented through the word ‘Muslim’. We find extensive overlexicalization,
with the term ‘Muslim’ being repeated 20 times. Every time a prisoner is
mentioned, even in collectivized form, such as ‘Muslim prisoners’, ’Muslim
inmates’, ‘the Muslim population’ or ‘Muslim gangs’, the generic category
‘Muslim’ is used. Whenever we find such overlexicalization of characteristics
to represent people, we can assume that some kind of over- persuasion is
taking place, which is normally evidence that something is of ideological

contestation. These prisoners are never individualized, which has the effect
of saying that they are all the same. In only one case do we get a longer
nominal group, describing some of these prisoners in more detail as ‘more
young men serving long sentences and a small number of men convicted of
terrorist offences’. Here the word ‘Muslim’ is left implicit through the use of
the term ‘terrorist offences’. We do not hear any of these Muslim prisoners’
views about the supposed radicalization that is taking place in some English
prisons.
The other, ‘non- Muslim prisoners’ are collectivized through terms such as
‘other offenders’ and individualized twice through the use of ‘one inmate’
and ‘another prisoner’, which is when they tell the reader that ‘inmates are
converting to Islam because they want protection’, that on ‘the main wing it
is Muslim vs whites’ and that ‘the new gang are the Muslims’. Although they
remain anonymized, they are allowed to speak about their sense of alarm
regarding what is going on.
The people who work for the prison are collectivized and functionalized as
‘prison officers’, ‘staff’, ‘some staff’, ‘officers’, ‘residential staff’ and ‘screws’,
but are never individualized or allowed to speak. This further enhances the
sense that they are non- active, as the transitivity analysis above (pp. 64–66)
has shown, and that they are ‘overwhelmed’ by the Muslims. It is odd, though,
that the reader is not informed about their views. Instead, we learn that they
‘fear’ that Muslim inmates are turning to extremism.
The other two people working for the prison service, the officials, are both
individualized through nomination and functionalization, and they provide the
official assessment of the situation. The chief inspector of prison, Ann Owers,
is quoted at length.
A further key part of the representational strategies in this text is the
extensive use of aggregation, which is provided mostly through the quotes
given by Ann Owers. We learn that
The number of Muslim prisoners in jails doubled in the ten years to 2006
to reach 8,243 – 11 per cent of the total prison population.
. . .Whitemoor jail at March in Cambridgeshire had faced a sudden
expansion in black and ethnic minority prisoners to reach 150, of whom
120 were Muslims.
Apart from these figures, we also find that there are ‘increasing Muslim
numbers’, ‘the growing Muslim population’, ‘more gang activity’, ‘growing
radicalization’ and a ‘rising problem of prisoner radicalization and an increase
in Muslim conversion’, all terms that add to a more diffuse sense of an
overwhelming threat emanating from these prisoners.
The story analysed here uses representational strategies to overlexicalize

the word ‘Muslim’ and also makes extensive use of aggregation, such as
‘increasing Muslim numbers’. Those representing the prison authorities are
individualized and functionalized to foreground their professional roles, whereas
the prison officers remain the anonymized and functionalized group who ‘fear
growing radicalization’ and ‘appear reluctant to engage with Muslim prisoners
and challenge inappropriate behaviour’. The Muslims are represented as the
dangerous ‘other’, operating in ‘gangs’ and seeking to impose their religious
views on other (Muslim) prisoners. Whereas the authorities are represented
as neutral and official, and some prisoners are allowed to speak, the prison
officers, through their anonymization, appear largely overwhelmed by the
Muslim prisoners.
In summary, the transitivity and representational strategies in this text
add up to the sense that a significant number of Muslims are posing a
threat to prisoners, prison staff, the prison system and, in a wider sense, to
British society’s values. The story could have been written very differently,
emphasizing the constant overcrowding with which some UK prisons are
struggling to cope. But the ‘increasing numbers’ of prisoners, Muslim or non-
Muslim, remain unproblematized. Instead, we find a very different focus on
‘Muslim’ prisoners threatening and bullying both staff and inmates to adopt
their religion.
The visual representation of

transitivity and social actors
The categories for the representation of social actors and social action
presented in this chapter can also be applied visually. This is something we
will be doing in later chapters as part of our analysis of sample texts. This is an
important step, as, of course, many texts about crime carry images. In terms
of visual transitivity, we can consider the extent to which social actors are
represented as acting through material processes or shown in moments of
reflection. Visually, in photographs accompanying a story on a demonstration,
we may find the police represented as still and thoughtful, through behavioural
and mental processes, simply watching the demonstration, rather than in
material acts of ‘intimidation’ and ‘enforcement’. In contrast, demonstrators,
who have taken to the streets out of concern for their jobs, future, or nature of
the society they live in, are represented in the material acts of destruction and
violence. Linguistically, texts might tell us of the police, ‘accompanying’ the
demonstration rather that restricting it. Together, visually and linguistically,
the police are represented as more thoughtful, measured and certainly not
threatening.
In terms of social actors analysis, we could ask to what extent the police are
named and individualized. We might find the police named through honorifics,
such as ‘officers’, but at the same time personalized through naming. These
individuals will then be represented through their ‘concerns’. In contrast, the
demonstrators might be collectivized and anonymized as ‘rioters’.
Also important in this process are basic issues of how far the social actors
are positioned from the viewer and how they engage with the viewer. In the first
case, is the social actor positioned in close shot or in the distance? This is an
old and well- documented technique in film editing to bring viewers closer to the
mental world of some participants than to that of others. Kress and van Leeuwen
(1996) relate this to social space. Proximity in photography and film carries the
same associations as proximity in everyday social settings. Closer proximities are
associated with greater intimacy. So if we see individual, named police officers
positioned in medium close shot, this increases their individualization. If a crowd
of demonstrators is shown in long shot, then this further anonymizes them.
Of course, extreme proximity in some cases can be inappropriate. In Chapter
4, we find a (posed) photograph of a ‘hoodie’ with a knife in extreme close up
to emphasize the threat and intimidation. Journalists like to film themselves in
close proximity in crowd scenes to connote ‘on the spot’ reporting, even when
this leaves the broader social context completely unexplored.
We can also consider whether the social actors are depicted as looking at
the viewer or not. Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) argue that when participants
look out at the viewer, this is a ‘demand’ image, as they ‘demand’ a response
from us, if only on an imaginary level whereas if they do not meet our gaze,
we are invited to simply contemplate and observe them. This is referred to as
an ‘offer’ image. Both personalize and individualize the social actors depicted,
as they encourage us to engage with them, particularly ‘demand’ images.
We will be using these observations on visual transitivity and visual social
actor analysis throughout the book. As with the linguistic analysis, we can
observe the patterns that are found for different sets of social actors.
Conclusion
In Chapter 2, we looked at lexical analysis; we discussed how we can look
for patterns in word choices and how these are laid out in lexical fields. In
this chapter, we have shown how we can refine our analysis by looking at
particular kinds of lexical and grammatical choices related to identity and
action. On the one hand, criminals may not necessarily be evaluated in terms
of what they do but rather in terms of who they are. In later chapters, we will
show that it may even be difficult to establish from a text what a criminal has
actually done. What is more important is who they are and how this makes
the immorality of any criminal act greater. We also show that some kinds of
criminals, such as those involved in corporate crime, tend to resist certain
types of naming strategies, so that their actions more easily escape definition
as ‘crime’.
We have also shown the value in looking at what participants are
represented as doing in a text. This allows us to more carefully think about
agency, blame and responsibility. In later chapters, we will use this form of
analysis to consider, for example, instances in which the details of what is
done are obscured, in which certain participants are represented as very
active and in which others are represented more through mental processes,
all of which can have considerable ideological motives and consequences.
4
Young people and

crime
I n Chapters 1–3, we introduced various toolkits for analysing the ways in

which the media make choices regarding language and visuals in order to
achieve their communicative aims. In this chapter, we will start applying some
of these by considering how young offenders are portrayed in the media. In
particular, we look at the popular media’s tendency to construct young people
as a problem. They do so through applying stock stereotypes and placing
them on a continuum from ‘innocent’ to ‘evil’. In order to demonstrate this,
we carry out Multimodal Critical Discourse Analyses of newspaper articles
and of a BBC programme that deals with the issue of knife crime and is aimed
specifically at young people.
Before we start our analysis and in order to understand present
reactions by the state and the media to young offenders, we will give a
brief review of historical and more recent developments in British youth
crime and youth justice (see Marsh and Melville, 2009). This review
provides the context for many of today’s media representations on young
people.
From welfare to punitiveness

With regard to media portrayals of young offenders, the age of criminal
responsibility is a major issue. Compared to other European countries and
other parts of the United Kingdom, England and Wales have traditionally
adopted a more punitive and less welfare- centred approach to youth
justice. The age of criminal responsibility for children in England, Wales and
Northern Ireland is 10, which makes it one of the lowest in Europe, together
with Switzerland. Ireland raised it from 7 to 12 in 2006 for all offences

except murder, manslaughter and rape, and in Scotland, where it is 8, the
government plans to raise it to 12. Whereas other European countries might
foreground the effects of social context on the deviant behaviour of young
people, in Britain this is less so. In cases in which young offenders are from
social backgrounds associated with ‘broken’ families, educational failure
and unemployment, this may be presented in the news media as further
evidence of their immorality.
The legal and justice systems treat young offenders differently to older
ones, in that there are separate youth courts, which are less formal and not
open to the public, and specific young offenders’ institutions. This separate
treatment began in the mid-nineteenth century with the Young Offenders Act
of 1854, which established reformatory institutions for children between 7 and
14. It was at that time that the idea of child welfare came to the fore. The 1908
Children Act introduced juvenile courts, and ‘Borstals’ for offenders between
the ages of 16 and 21 began to be set up around that time, too. Since World
War II, government policy towards young offenders has veered between an
emphasis on care/welfare and control/punishment, depending on the political
climate (Marsh and Melville, 2009).
In the 1960s, the focus was predominantly on welfare, and the Children
and Young Persons Act of 1969 explicitly stated the welfare and care for
young offenders, as opposed to their punishment. Eventually this approach
gave way to Conservative ‘law and order’ policies, such as the introduction
of the ‘short, sharp shock’ initiative in the early 1980s. The early 1990s saw
a marked shift towards a far more punitive approach to juvenile offending
(see Newburn, 2007; Marsh and Melville, 2009). This change in approach
was also accompanied by a change in political rhetoric and in the media
portrayal of young offenders. Newburn (2007) points to two reasons for
the punitive turn: the urban disturbances of 1990 and a developing moral
concern about ‘persistent’ young offenders. The popular press at that time
was full of stories about joyriding and other offences, such as drug- and
gang- related activities, apparently committed by young people on a regular
basis. On 10 September 1992, for example, the Daily Mail ran the headline
‘One- boy crime wave’, telling a story of a boy who ‘was only 11 when his
life of crime began with the theft of chocolate bars from a corner shop
[. . .] within two years he had become a one- boy crime wave’ (quoted in
Newburn, 2007: 729 ). The term ‘one- boy crime wave’ has since entered
popular usage and crops up from time to time in newspapers, as for
example,
One- boy crimewave runs amok in small town (Daily Record, 20 December
2007)
YOUNG PEOPLE AND CRIME 81
Locked up: the one- boy crime wave. Lad of 12 commits 45 offences (Daily
Mirror, 20 November 2008)
Sociologists James and Prout (1990) have identified these ideas about wild and
feral youth as key notions in British constructions of the nature of childhood.
These authors challenged biological reductionist notions of childhood with
a socio- cultural one, showing that in Britain and other Western societies,
there is a dominant view of children as innocent and vulnerable connected
to Romantic notions of them being closer to nature and, in terms of religious
notions of purity and absence of sin, to images of the Garden of Eden (Jenks,
1996). In the latter part of the eighteenth century, manifest in the poetry of
Blake and Wordsworth and the philosophy of Rousseau, we find emerging
ideas of childhood as a symbol of humanity and spiritual development,
aligned with a rejection of the arrival of industrialization and mechanization
and associated forms of social organization. Qvortrup (1994) argues that what
we think of as childhood and youth has little to do with any intrinsic nature
of children themselves, but reflects broader social concerns and anxieties,
which in turn inform how we deal with young people.
One manifestation of these views is that children are seen as untainted and
in need of protection. The other is that they are as yet untamed by culture and
prone to temptation and therefore in need of firm guidance. These attitudes
can still be seen, although not fully articulated, in the discourses used in
media representations of young people and crime.
Among all the popular and media concern about petty youth crime, there
was one case in the early 1990s that became a watershed in future reporting
and dealing with young offenders: the abduction and subsequent murder of
2-year- old James Bulger by two 10-year- old boys in Liverpool. The shock
expressed about the crime of these two boys did not point to the nature of
their deprived social backgrounds but to the way that such acts fly in the face
of people’s romanticized view of childhood innocence.
The case encouraged a media- led panic about ‘feral’ youths in Britain.
Media coverage of the two child killers, who were tried in an adult court,
was massive and overwhelmingly hostile, despite their young age, with
the Daily Mail providing almost 40 stories shortly after the boys’ trial, the
Daily Telegraph 23 and the Guardian 22 (Newburn, 2007). Although the
then Conservative government was responsible for the initial turn towards
‘populist punitiveness’ (Bottoms, 1995), famously expressed in the statement
by the then Home Secretary Michael Howard that ‘prison works’, it was the
incoming Labour government that overhauled the youth justice systems with
new criminal measures, including parental orders, and child safety and curfew
orders. In its Crime and Disorder Act 1998, Labour also abolished the principle
of doli incapax, the presumption that a child under the age of 14 cannot be
held accountable for his or her criminal actions. This cleared the way for all
children aged 10 years and over to be tried as adults. As then Labour Home
Secretary Jack Straw put it in 1998,
The presumption that children aged 10 to 13 do not know the difference

between serious wrong- doing and simple naughtiness flies in the face
of common sense and is long overdue for reform. (Quoted in Newburn,
2007: 733)
This is an example of a politician embracing ‘populist punitiveness’, the notion

of ‘politicians tapping into, and using for their own purposes, what they believe
to be the public’s generally punitive stance’ (Bottoms, 1995: 40).
Predictably, the outcome of Labour’s new ‘law and order’ policies in the
wake of the Bulger case was an increase in the number of young people being
sent into custody. Between 1992 and 1998 the number of 15- to 17-year- olds
given custodial sentences rose by 79 per cent. These measures were largely
unsupported in criminological research on youth justice (Newburn, 2007).
Below, we look in a little more detail at one ‘One- boy crimewave’ story
from the Express (1 April 2011). Here we can see the lack of concern for the
welfare of young people. What kind of life the boy has experienced and in what
social context is not considered. We also see the discourse of ‘feral’ youth
in need of control, and blame for the mother who is unable to provide it. The
boy’s deviant status is highlighted by comparing him to his list of vulnerable
and innocent victims. His agency is foregrounded, while the social forces that
are likely to have shaped his behaviour are not even mentioned.
One- boy crimewave told: Another offence and you’ll get 5 years
TEENAGE yob Josh Edmans has been branded Britain’s biggest brat after
waging a five-year reign of terror in his neighbourhood.
In a final bid to bring him under control, the 14-year- old has been given one
of the toughest- ever ASBOs with the threat of five years behind bars if he
commits another offence.
The lout’s unemployed mother Julie Edmans, 40, received a 12- month
parenting order for failing to keep him in check.
But last night she protested there was nothing she could do – and expects him
to be locked up ‘within days’, claiming he has already breached the ASBO.
Since he was nine, Edmans has wreaked havoc across Thurnscoe and
Mexborough, near Barnsley.
His roll- call of shame includes punching other boys and girls, hurling racist
abuse, and targeting the disabled.
He attacked a man who caught him trespassing in his garden, knocking

out two of his teeth, and terrorized a blind woman by threatening to break
her windows.
He also robbed a boy with special needs, vandalised cars and shops and
intimidated witnesses.
Staff and residents at an old people’s care home were not spared either,
when he climbed on their roof to shout and swear.
Edmans was named and shamed by District Judge Michael Rosenberg
at Barnsley Magistrates’ Court because he said victims needed to see
‘justice’. The court heard Edmans had committed 39 separate acts of
criminal and antisocial behaviour.
Adrian Phillips, prosecuting for Barnsley Council and South Yorkshire
Police’s Neighbourhood Safety Unit, told how the lout had repeatedly been
racist, abusive, threatening and violent.
The ASBO lasts until 2014 and bans Edmans from entering many local
village shops and prohibits him from committing any antisocial act.
In this article, there is clearly no sense that this is a boy with serious
problems. Nor is there any indication of the social context that has fostered
this behaviour. Of course, to have a troublesome young man like this in
one’s neighbourhood would be unpleasant. One of the authors of this book
lived in a village where there were four such teenagers, well known to the
local police, who would destroy property during the night at regular intervals
and could often be found sitting on the wall of the local retirement home
intimidating the residents. These young men, however, were not from
homes distributed around the village but from the bleak state housing area
and were clearly highly disadvantaged. None of their fathers had ever been
in employment and the boys went (if ever) to a failing school. Their lives
held little sense of the opportunities that a middle- class boy might take
for granted. They would often target the residents of a local private school
and any other vulnerable people who would provide an easy target for their
resentment and boredom. Of course, something should be done about this
issue, but maybe it has to be addressed more as a social problem and not
so much as individual pathology. Sometimes we do see critical reports in
the news media. For, example we found the following headlines on the BBC
website:
Youth unemployment: A smouldering fuse? (11 February 2011)

Youth service cuts ‘could lead to social unrest’ (22 October 2010)
The question of how a society deals with large sections of its population who
do not work and are largely exluded from many of its benefits and opportunities,
especially given the enormous emphasis on consumer pleasures, is a serious
one. In Britain at the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century,
the whole economy, formerly mostly dependent on industry, has completely
changed as production has shifted overseas. Reductions in and privatization
of public services are rife, which has huge effects on schools and health
services. In the 15 years of its government, the New Labour largely failed in its
attempts to deal with what it described as the high level of ‘social exclusion’
across the country (Newman, 2001; Levitas, 2005). These very issues are at
the root of the phenomenon described in the Express news item, but they
are not discussed.
The Express text achieves this in part, by setting up structural oppositions.
In terms of Halliday’s (1978) theory of language as a social semiotic, we
must understand words as not only having meaning in their own right, but as
part of a network of meanings. In the work of those who carry out analysis
more closely based on Halliday, it is common to find attempts to map out
the network of possible language choices. For example, van Leeuwen (1996)
maps out the lexical possibilities for the representation of social actors. We
find oppositions in words that allow for distinction between collectivization
and individualization, or specification and genericization. An analysis of these
structural oppositions forms an important part of critical language research.
Linguistically, oppositions can be expressed through concepts such as
young–old, capitalism–communism, normal–deviant. Often, only one of
these may be mentioned, without the opposite being stated overtly. Or
one particular word can bring with it associations from its related clusters
of concepts. So if a particular participant in a news text is described as a
‘militant’ or an ‘extremist’, we can fathom that s/he acts in a manner opposite
to that expected of a ‘citizen’ or ‘member of a community’. As in the case of
‘youths attack local family homes’, a set of ideas around what the ‘youths’ are
and are not can be activated. Likewise, if we use the term ‘school children’,
this sets up associations of innocence.
The more overt inclusion of such structural oppositions in a text has been
described by van Dijk (1998) as ‘ideological squaring’, which means that opposing
classes of concepts are built up around participants. This may not necessarily
mean that the participants are overtly labelled as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but rather that
this is implied through the use of structuring concepts. We can see how this use
of oppositions, both overt and implicit, works in the Express news item.
The structural oppositions here are found especially at the level of social
actors – between the rampant yob behaviour of the perpetrator and the long
list of vulnerable people who are his victims. The boy’s mother is also on the
‘guilty’ side of the opposition, her ‘unemployed’ status being evidence, in
part, for her own immorality, as she is also given a parenting order for failing
to control him. We can see the positioning from Table 4.1:
Table 4.1 Social Actors in Express article (1 April 2011)

Perpetrator Victims Mother Authorities
Josh Edmans Boys Unemployed Adrian Phillips

Mother
Teenage Yob Girls She (2x) District Judge

Michael
Rosenberg
Biggest Brat Disabled He
Lout Blind Woman
One Boy Boy with Special

Crimewave Needs
Edmans (3x) Residents
The 14-Year- Old Victims
He (6x) Staff
A Man
We find the non- legal terms ‘lout’, ‘brat’ and ‘yob’ used to describe Josh
Edmans, all of which are typical terms used in the populist news media to
represent ‘deviant’ young people. There is also extensive use of his surname.
Had he been a victim, he would have been humanized much more as ‘Josh’.
In the list of his victims are those established as vulnerable (hence enhancing
Edman’s deviance), and ‘boys’ and ‘girls’, terms which sound more innocent
than the generic ‘youth’ or ‘teenagers’. The are all collectivized. The authority
figures are both nominated and functionalized through the use of honorifics,
as in ‘District Judge Michael Rosenberg’ and ‘Adrian Phillips, prosecuting for
Barnsley Council and South Yorkshire Police’s Neighbourhood Safety Unit’.
Also notable in this table is that Edmans is represented as ‘he’ six times.
One reason for this is the long list of mostly transactive material processes
in which he is the actor. Key in this text is the representation of Edmans as
being rampantly out of control. Looking at the transitivity patterns in the text,
we find Edmans the agent in the following processes:
Waging a five-year reign of terror

Wreaked havoc
Punching other boys and girls
Hurling racist abuse

Targeting the disabled
Attacked a man
Knocking out two of his teeth
Terrorized a blind woman
Threatening to break her windows
Robbed a boy
Vandalized cars
Intimidated witnesses
Climbed on the roof
Apart from ‘hurling racist abuse’ ‘threatening to break her window’ and
‘intimidated witnesses’ which can be classed as verbal processes, the
remaining processes are material, many with a Goal (e.g. robbed a boy ), which
clearly cast Edman as the Actor. In some of these the lexis increases drama,
such as in ‘hurling racist abuse’, ‘waging a reign of terror’ and ‘wreaking havoc’.
The verb ‘targeting’ also sounds strategic and intentional. Importantly, these
are all what Fairclough (2003) would call ‘abstractions’, which means that
the micro- processes of what went on are not clear. What micro- processes
exactly do ‘terrorized’ and ‘intimidated’ consist of? Fairclough points to such
instances as being evidence of some ideological work taking place. In this case,
these verbs point to the dramatization taking place, highlighting the deviance
of Edman. The text could have taken the form of an actual concrete list of
recorded offences he committed over the past five years. Instead the author
of the text seeks to amplify the boy’s deviance through the use of the phrase
‘the list includes’. This is a typical rhetorical move using a presupposition, in
this case that ‘there are more offences and here are just a few’.
Also notably missing from this text are any mental verb processes attributed
to Edman which would tell us about his mental state and his feelings. We
get an inkling of how victims feel through the verb ‘intimidated’. On the one
hand, this is to be expected, as mental verb processes can tend to humanize
a participant by giving us access to their mental worlds. But on the other,
why does Edman act in the way he does? What is he thinking or feeling?
Is it bitterness or anger? Are his motives, as some sociologists of deviance
(e.g. Matza, 1964, 1969) have argued, perhaps not so different from those of
‘conventional’ youth – that is, a sense of power, achievement, self-respect and
status among his peers? Has he perhaps fewer opportunities for legitimate
activities to express these? Of course, in a discourse in which he is simply
‘feral’ and ‘immoral’, these considerations are not relevant.
What the text foregrounds instead is the agency of the criminal. Implied in
such discourses, which are often found in populist news media, is the notion
that society has gone soft on criminals and must act dramatically to stem such
behaviour. The structural reasons why such behaviour take place, given that it
is not not uncommon in certain impoverished areas of Britain, are suppressed.
We could imagine a text in which the political decisions that have led to the
decay of many regions of Britain and the social exclusion of their inhabitants
were listed in the same fashion as the deviant activities of the boy.
In the Express text, the boy’s mother is also blamed for her son’s behaviour.
When her guilt is pointed out, we find she ‘protested there was nothing she
could do’. The quoting verb ‘protested’ is telling of the ideology and discourses
being drawn on by the paper. Caldas- Couthard (1994) demonstrates how
verbs used to represent the way people speak can be highly revealing of the
interpretations and ideology of authors and newspapers. We can draw this
out if we replace ‘protested’ with a verb like ‘lamented’. ‘Lamented’ conveys
a sense of the mother’s regret, while ‘protested’ suggests a certain denial of
responsibility. In fact, we can imagine this single parent living in a fairly soul-
destroying environment, in which many forces render her influence over her
son minimal.
On the same day, we find an editorial in the Sun (1 April 2011) on the same
case, in which the mother is overtly criticized for her supposed failings:
THEY call 14-year- old tearaway Josh Edmans ‘Bratboy’.

He’s vicious, foul- mouthed and out of control. He has terrorized his South
Yorkshire neighbourhood since he was nine.
Yesterday Judge Michael Rosenberg named and shamed him and
threatened to lock him up if he breaches his Asbo.
But the judge did something else sensible. He ordered the lout’s single
mother to be a better parent or face a £1,000 fine. Edmans’s mother Julie
reckons she’s done her best.
We don’t believe it. Feral yobs are the product of feeble parenting.
Yet Mrs Edmans throws her hands in the air and says her son will only stop
offending if he’s locked up.
Not good enough. He’s still only a boy of 14. She has a responsibility to try
to turn him around.
So, judge – if he still doesn’t behave, lock him up.
Then put his mother in the dock too.
This text makes the clear case that ‘feral yobs are the product of feeble
parenting’ and that the mother, too, should be equally punished if the situation
does not improve. What is noteworthy in the treatment of the mother is that
she is an example of the demonization not just of ‘proper’ criminals but also
sections of the urban poor and the marginalized, which has been identified
as a feature of late modernity by some criminologists (e.g. Young, 2002).
We could argue that this, too, is one process whereby the actions and
responsibilities of authorities are glossed over.
What our small- scale linguistic analysis suggests is that while some of the
mainstream media do raise the structural issues that influence levels of youth
crime, the more populist newspapers do not, although they shape public
perceptions of crime the most (see Gillespie and Mclaughlin 2002, 2003).
These popular crime discourses also place constraints on politicians who may
wish to take a less populist and punitive stance towards (youth) crime and
provide an excuse for those who do not.
The populist crime discourses that developed in the early 1990s, first under
the Conservatives and then Labour, were also characterized by a managerialist
turn. Managerialism in crime control and its discourses rests upon the
assumption that modern managerial techniques, such as those used in private
sector businesses, can be successfully applied to the problem of crime and
punishment (see Garland, 2001; Mayr, 2004; 2008). This managerialist
agenda sat uneasily with the modernization of youth justice under Labour.
In the words of Crawford and Newburn, managerialism and its concern with
cost reduction, performance measure and efficiency gains ‘allows little space
for the human, expressive and emotive aspects of criminal justice’ (2002:
492).Managerialism has also encroached on non- profit organizations, such as
charities. At the time of writing this book, the children’s charity Barnardo’s,
was running an online campaign to have the age of criminal intent in England
raised from 10 to 12, although it still proposed retaining the age of 10 for
young people accused of murder, manslaughter or rape.
The following excerpt from the Barnardo’s ‘Campaign Documents and
Briefings’ website page (italics added) shows how economic thinking has
become part of their campaign:
From playground to prison: the conveyor belt to crime.

This report examines the latest available data for 10 and 11 year olds in
the criminal justice system and finds that the current process is not the
most effective and cost- efficient way of dealing with their offending. The
evidence shows that about half of the children of that age sentenced in
court in 2008 will have reoffended within a year and that their experience
within the criminal justice system increases the likelihood that they will
go on to commit further crimes. We are calling on the Government to
consider raising the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 12 for all
crimes except the most serious, such as rape, manslaughter and murder;
and are urging them to spend money more wisely on effective ways to
stop youth crime, for instance through family intervention.
It is striking that Barnardo’s should feel compelled to couch its appeal to the
government to raise the age of criminal intent for young people in managerialist
rhetoric, such as ‘effective’, ‘cost- efficient’ and ‘spend money more wisely’
rather than in more humanitarian terms, as befits a charity. Other expressions
found on the website are ‘cost effective system of tackling child crime’, and
that ‘a reduction in youth crime would lead to savings of £45 million from
public funds’. Barnardo’s also stresses that its suggested measures would
not be ‘a soft option’, mindful of the general punitive sentiment towards
young people in Britain.
New Labour’s policies differed from those of previous governments in that it
was not only crime but also ‘antisocial behaviour’ that was an important focus
of intervention, resulting in an ever widening net of social control. The Crime
and Disorder Act 1998 introduced the controversial Anti- Social Behaviour
Orders (ASBOs), paving the way for ever more state intervention. In 2011, the
new Coalition Government replaced ASBOs with ‘Criminal Behaviour Orders’,
under which the Police will have a mandatory duty to investigate incidents
of antisocial behaviour when reported by a minimum of five people. This is
referred to as a ‘community trigger’. Police are now also allowed to confiscate
property from young people, such as ipods and mobile phones.
To sum up, although New Labour’s more restorative justice reforms, such
as its referral orders, were a radical departure from previous legislation,
offering the possibility of a more participatory youth justice, this has been
offset by the high numbers of young people being sent into custody. New
Labour’s concern has been more with capturing headlines and competing
with the Conservatives, so as to be seen as ‘tough on crime’. It is within this
context that current developments in youth justice and their representation in
some media have to be understood.
Media portrayal of youth as a problem

Children and youth have been perceived as a social problem in Britain for a long
time. The popular press has played a crucial role in this respect, contributing
considerably to the public’s negative perception of young people. Linguistically,
this construction can be achieved through ‘overlexicalization’, that is, the use
of excessive labelling of young people and the (deviant) activities they are
involved in. Cultural criminologists Hayward and Yar (2006) have referred to this
the ‘semantics of exclusion’, and they point to the high number of derogatory
expressions that emerged in various parts of the United Kingdom during the
1990s to label the behaviour of young people and its associated conventions of
meaning, symbolism, and style. Out of these, ‘hoodies’ and ‘chavs’ became the
dominant terms, but they also have their regional variations, such as ‘scallies’
(Merseyside), ‘neds’ (Glasgow), ‘Townies’ (Oxford/Cambridge and most
university towns), ‘rarfies’, ‘charvers’ (Newcastle/North East), ‘kevs’ (London/
Bristol), ‘janners’ (Plymouth) and ‘spides’ and ‘millies’ (Belfast). Hayward and Yar
locate the media constructions of ‘chavs’ within the broader socio-economic
processes of the marginalization of working- class youth. Late modern consumer
capitalism may offer a great number of ‘life choices’, but these tend to be rather
limited for disadvantaged young people. As Cohen (1999: 425) points out,
there are increasing numbers of young people, unable, through no fault

of their own, to make the transition of the kinds of mobile individualism
demanded by the new career culture, and whose sense of frustration leads
to antisocial or self- destructive behaviour.
Largely lacking the material means to fully participate in this culture, some
young people may respond with crime- related acts of transgression or more
mundane activities, such as milling about in town or city centres (‘loitering’)
and expressing themselves through distinctive dress styles, which can be
seen in the chav’s appropriation and subversion of the Burberry designer
label. Important in this respect is that, as Hayward (2004: 152) points out,
these acts of transgression should not be seen as only structurally motivated
but also as ‘seductive ’ and as ‘a way of seizing control of one’s destiny’, if
only symbolically. The ‘seductions’ of crime (Katz, 1988) are not only linked
to the excitement some of these criminal acts bring but also to ‘a general
feeling of self- realization and self- expression to which they give rise’ (Fenwick
and Hayward, 2000: 49). This observation is nothing new. Researchers have
long pointed out that young people often engage in deviant and criminal
behaviour just for fun or to relieve boredom in an attempt to escape their
often oppressive and alienating social milieu (e.g. Cohen, 1955; Ferdinand,
1966; Miller, 2005). In Chapter 2, we found that the criminological literature
on hard drug use and the drug culture points conclusively to the influence of
a range of factors, such as social exclusion, lack of direction and self- esteem,
that can lead to individuals becoming involved in hard drugs.
Whereas ‘chav’ is usually a term for lower- class disaffected youth, the
term ‘hoodie’ has been used in the media to refer to a more sinister youthful
folk devil. News coverage of ‘hoodie culture’ has been both hostile and
scaremongering, demonstrating the increasing demonization of young people
and a style of dressing (which, coincidentally, is sold very successfully by
companies such as Nike, Gap and Adidas). One example of this demonization
was a Kent shopping centre’s decision in 2005 to ban young people wearing
baseball hats and ‘hoodies’ from its premises. Rod Morgan, chairman of the
Youth Justice Board, has warned that bans like this are counterproductive and
may make certain forms of dress and behaviour more attractive rather than
less so (Barkham, 2005). At the same time, major corporations increasingly
use allusions to crime and transgression to give their products ‘edgy appeal’.
Muzzatti (2011) points out that the the same racialized and class- biased
images of the new underclass (i.e. chavs and hoodies) that appear in the
corporately owned, capitalist media and are meant to frighten the public are
also employed to entertain us and sell many products and services.
Broadsheets usually offer a more nuanced coverage on the ‘hoodie’, as
can be seen from the following two headlines and leads:
How a top can turn a teen into a hoodlum

Tough talk about troublemakers masks an age- old question: What’s wrong
with kids today? (Guardian, 14 May 2005)
In the Hood
It is the slouchy, unisex garment of choice for a generation. But who hasn’t
quickened their step when faced with an unknown figure wearing one?
Now a shopping centre even wants to ban them. (Guardian, 15 May 2005)
More seriously, recent murder cases reported in popular newspapers have

referred to ‘hoodies’ in their headlines, irrespective of whether this was a
key aspect of the crime in question. The following two headlines and leads
demonstrate this:
Soldier killed by hoodies for £ 5

A FORMER soldier was battered to death by four jobless hoodies – for £5
(Sun, 24 April 2008)
Bailed to murder: Gang of teenage hoodies kicked former soldier to death
for £5 they wanted to spend on booze and drugs
A former soldier was beaten to death in a drink and drug-fuelled attack by
a gang of teenagers who were on bail or serving community punishments
for violent robberies. (Daily Mail, 24 April 2008)
These two newspapers headlines report on the same crime. They refer to
the young men as ‘hoodies’, ‘ jobless hoodies’, ‘teenage hoodies’ and a ‘gang
of teenagers’. They could simply have been named ‘teenagers’, but that term
Figure 4.1 Criminal responsibility (Source: BBC; Image: Getty)
would not have the same symbolic weight that ‘hoodie’ and ‘gang’ carries. The
man killed is functionalized as a former ‘soldier’, someone who commands our
respect, whereas the young killers are categorized as ‘jobless’. The lead from
the Mail also implies that the offenders have been dealt with far too leniently
by the criminal justice system (‘on bail or serving community service for
violent robberies’), thereby tapping into the ‘soft on crime’ discourse routinely
employed by the popular press.
In terms of pictorial representation in newspapers (and TV programmes),
we might find a generic representation of youth as ‘hoodies’ in the form of
a Getty image accompanying a newspaper article on some aspect of youth
crime or youth justice. We include one such example taken from the BBC
website (13 June 2009). The article refers to the BBC ‘Law in Action’ series,
a Radio 4 programme featuring reports and discussions on matters relating to
law. One of the issues it covered was raising the age of criminal responsibility
for young people from 10 to 12 years.
Criminal responsibility
In England, Wales and Northern Ireland the age of criminal responsibility is

10 – but should it be raised?
In the first of a new series of Law in Action Clive Coleman examines one
of the most contentious issues in criminal justice.
England, Wales and Northern Ireland have one of the lowest ages of
criminal responsibility in Europe.
In Scotland, the age is 8, but the government plans to raise it to 12.
The issue became controversial following the killing of James Bulger in
1993.
Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, who were convicted of the toddler’s
murder, were 10 at the time of the attack.
But since then, there has been new research, which some argue means
the issue should be revisited.
Dr Eileen Vizard is a child psychiatrist with the NSPCC’s Child Offender
Service.
‘There’s a very substantial evidence base to show that children aged 10 are
not fully mature’, she says.
‘They show developmental immaturity in terms of their physical, intellectual,
emotional, and social development.’
Dr Vizard believes that 14 or 15 should be the bare minimum age for
criminal responsibility.
Laurence Lee, the solicitor who represented Jon Venables, takes issue
with this view.
‘For society’s own protection there should be the potential and the
possibility of a 10-year- old being prosecuted’, he argues.
‘I think the crime rate would rocket if that sword of Damocles didn’t exist
over a young defendant’s head.’
What is of particular interest here is the choice of images in this text. It is

significant that when discussing a controversial issue such as this, a Getty
image (Figure 4.1) portraying stereotypical ‘hoodies’ on what appears to
be a housing estate is chosen. This image is not mean to document, but to
symbolize a certain breed of young people. This means it can be used for
any news item on ‘hoodies’. It is also significant that these young people are
shown walking away from us with their hooded tops up. We cannot see their
faces, so we are therefore not meant to get close to them. We do not find out
about their thoughts and feelings about the issue.
In Britain, the age of criminal intent is often discussed in terms of the
James Bulger case, and on the BBC website below the Getty image (Figure
4.1) there is a grainy and unsettling image taken from CCTV footage of James
Bulger’s young killers, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. Entirely different
images of young people could have been chosen, and the visual reference
to Venables and Thomson could have been left out completely. So while the
text is supposedly neutral, presenting the voices of two ‘experts’ – a child

psychiatrist who is in favour of raising the age of criminal intent for young
people and John Venables’ former solicitor, who is against it – the pictures
portray a misleading and ideological view of young people that may encourage
a dominant reading against lowering the age of criminal responsibility.
As we have attempted to show so far, the constant repetition of certain
terms and images in media texts creates the impression of youth crime
being totally out of control and is indicative of a certain (ideological) moral
preoccupation with young people as a problem. However, as Pearson (1983)
reminds us in his historical study of (youth) street crime in Britain, youth crime
has been a source of popular anxiety for hundreds of years. Focusing on
journalistic and popular media interpretations of youth crime, Pearson found
that youth subcultures, such as the Teddy Boys in the 1950s and the Mods
and Rockers in the 1960s, also provoked sensationalist, panic-stricken and
moralistic coverage remarkably similar to what we get today, constructing
various groups of young people as ‘folk devils’ (Cohen, 1972). But the media
focused on football hooliganism and an ever increasing crime rate as early
as the 1920s and 1930s. During the Victorian area, around the 1860s, an
apparently ‘new’ offence, ‘garrotting’, which involved choking the victim while
robbing him or her, was the crime that struck fear into the respectable citizen.
The press reacted in familiar style, as the following examples demonstrate:
HOOLIGANS: Street fights in Chelsea (The Daily Graphic, 8 August 1898;

quoted in Pearson, 1983: 257)
What are to do with the “hooligan”? Who or what is responsible for his
growth? (The Times, 30 October 1900; quoted in Pearson, 1983: 76)
The terms ‘hooligan’ and ‘hooliganism’ are of uncertain origin and were first
used in the late 1890s in regular news reports on young people committing
vandalism and robbing old women. Pearson suggests that just like ‘Teddy
Boy’, ‘Mod’ and ‘Skinhead’, ‘hooligan’ was a word that came out of the
popular culture of working- class London and was adopted by youth to
describe themselves. Like today’s ‘chavs’ and ‘hoodies’, ‘hooligans’ were
recognizable by a distinct way of dressing, which was also covered extensively
in the press. The term then became used by the media and the public as
the generic word for troublesome young people, who had previously been
known as ‘street Arabs’, ‘roughs’ or ‘ruffians’. Whole gangs of hooligans were
a widely reported phenomenon, and even girl gangs existed in those days,
variously described as ‘girl hooligans’ or ‘female hooligans’, who displayed
‘hooliganesque behaviour’ (Pearson, 1983: 90). Although the press described
hooliganism solely in terms of random acts of violence, this violence was
often sparked off by arbitrary use of police power in working- class areas,
suggesting that resistance to the law and the police was remarkably strong
and cohesive, and that respect for ‘law and order’ in those days was not any
greater than it is today. Only the radical and socialist press placed a different
emphasis on the crime question by taking into account the social and material
circumstances of many poor people at that time (Pearson, 1983).
What Pearson’s study demonstrates is that youth crime and the
criminalization of young people is in no way a unique or new pheneomenon
and that media coverage has been preoccupied with the same themes for a
very long time. While more than 65 per cent of people feel that youth crime is
rising, and many experts agree there can be a connection between antisocial
behaviour and serious youth crime, statistically, youth offending is falling. The
number of 10- to-17-year- olds convicted or cautioned fell from 143,600 to
105,700 between 1992 and 2002, a drop of almost 26 per cent. Government
research has found the most mentioned antisocial behaviour is speeding,
which is an adult problem (Barkham, 2005). Part of the reason the public are
so concerned about youth crime has to do with the role of the mass media
and the state in creating recurrent moral panics over various forms of youth
culture whose behaviour is considered deviant or delinquent. From time to
time there is media talk about ‘new’ crimes, whether that was ‘garrotting’
in the Victorian era or ‘mugging’ in the 1970s to describe street robberies.
Hall et al. (1978) highlighted the intensification of police control measures,
subsequent public fear and panic around the ‘black mugger, which added a
racialized element to public concern. More recently, there has been concern
about ‘joyriding’ and ‘twocking’ (taking a car without the owner’s consent),
among others, and the general menace emanating from ‘hoodies’.
Bearing in mind that the term ‘moral panic’ should not be applied
indiscriminately to all media and public reactions to deviant youth behaviour,
examples that could be classed as having produced media and moral panics
were the concern about ‘video nasties’ in the 1980s and 1990s (used as one
explanation for the murder of James Bulger) and, more recently, gang culture
and knife crime. We will now look at one type of mediated response to the
knife crime problem in more detail.
For our analysis, we have selected a number of visual and linguistic samples
from the BBC Switch documentary- style programme Revealed . . . How
worried should you be about knife crime? (21 February 2009). Revealed is a
programme for young people and is presented by Anthony Baxter, a former
radio reporter and producer for the BBC, and Charlotte Ashton, a newspaper
journalist who has also worked for Radio 4. The BBC Switch ‘Shows &
Schedules’ website says, ‘Anthony and Charlotte get to the heart of the things
that affect you most. THIS is the news . . .’ The Revealed webpage itself
reads, ‘A look at the issues and headlines affecting the lives of teenagers’.
The BBC Switch website ‘What is Switch?’ informs their target audience
in the following way:
Switch is basically a bunch of stuff on TV, Radio, online and your mobile.
It’s for people that like funny, random, cool shows and who want to get
involved.
The use of colloquial expressions such as ‘a bunch of stuff’, ‘random’ and

‘cool’ shows that the programme is made with young people in mind, who
may not want to come across as ‘uncool’. The capitalized ‘THIS is the news’
suggests that young people will get a different story and a no-nonsense true
report on the knife crime problem unlike in other mainstream media.
The programme’s first scene shows Anthony (A) and Charlotte (C) walking
side by side through a tunnel towards the camera in mid-shot distance. They
walk fairly briskly and energetically, complete with hand gestures, not in the
musing fashion of the mainstream, on- location, news presenter. The tunnel
walls are of old red brick, which suggests an older ‘gritty’ urban area. There
are no moving cars in the tunnel, which gives the impression of stillness. The
tunnel could be in any British town or city. The exact location is not identified,
and the presenters do not explain why they are there. This location provides
the context for the report. For Barthes (1977), settings can be key connotors
of broader cultural ideas. In this case, the setting connotes the gritty, real,
urban environment that forms the backdrop both for knife crime and for
the programme. Even though Revealed takes the stance of challenging
mainstream sensationalist coverage of knife crime, it itself draws on many of
the same discourses, as we shall see.
Both presenters wear trendy casual clothes associated with young people.
The faster pace of their walk connotes urgency, directness and energy rather
than distanced contemplation. They take turns in addressing the viewer and
also provide the voice- over (VO) throughout the programme.
C: Another knife another attack another young person dead it’s a story
we hear all the time.
A: But most of you will never carry a knife see an attack or be a victim.
C: So why does it feel like everyone’s panicking?
A: Revealed this week . . . how worried should you be about knife crime?
[. . .]
C: Last year 34 young people were stabbed to death in the UK . . . one
of them right here.
A: The problem is getting worse . . . more people are being caught

carrying knives . . . and last year more people than ever were murdered
with one.
C: But 80 per cent of knife crime is happening in just a few hotspot
areas . . . big cities like London Glasgow Birmingham Leeds.
A: So why does it feel like the media politicians and the police make it out
to be a massive national problem?
When Charlotte says that one young person was killed in a knife attack
‘right here’, this means that the two are actually in a place where a lethal
stabbing took place, which is meant to have an additional, more ‘realistic’,
visual impact on viewers. These are not two reporters who just rely on official
statistics to cover a problem; they go out to where these crimes happen and
interview young people in the community. They may want to come across
as ‘investigative journalists’. However, much of the information they provide
above, though kept informal, comes from official sources.
Presenter Anthony draws a link between the sensationalist news coverage
about knife crime and ‘major surveys’ which indicate that the problem is over-
reported:
A: [VO] Would you believe reading THESE that major surveys show only
4 per cent, 4 per cent of young people admitted to carrying a
knife in the last 12 months.
At the same time, the following headlines appear on the screen:
One teen killed every five days on our streets

TEEN’S FACE CARVED UP LIKE SPIROGRAPH
Pupils wear stab- proof vests as gang wars start at school gates
The Sun says Grim Milestone: ANOTHER Terrible day for Broken Britain.
These headlines are superimposed over an image of a small group of

teenagers walking away from the viewer in a park rather than a tunnel or gritty
urban area. These appear to be ‘normal’ teens with rucksacks on their backs,
perhaps walking home from school. They do not wear any hooded garments,
so are not threatening to us. There is low articulation of detail in the footage,
as we appear to see it through a mist, which indicates that this is meant to
be a symbolic rather than documentary representation (Machin, 2007). These
scenes appear to typify ‘ordinary’ young people who do not commit crimes
but are potential victims.
This is also suggested in the headlines appearing in the foreground, three

of which talk of ‘teens’ and ‘pupils’. Only one headline, ‘The Sun says Grim
Milestone: ANOTHER terrible day for Broken Britain’, lets the viewer know
which paper the headline is from and also links in with the next part of the
programme, the interview with the political editor of the Sun, George Pascoe-
Watson. ‘Broken Britain’ is a popular theme in the tabloid press to describe a
perceived widespread state of social decay in Britain and is associated with
the Conservative party. The Sun has run frequent ‘Broken Britain’ stories
since 2007.
The following is the transcript of the interview between Charlotte (C)
and the political editor of the Sun, George Pascoe-Watson (P- W), about the
paper’s ‘No to Knives’ campaign:
1 C: Often the ‘No to Knives’ articles will be accompanied by a picture

of a teenager in a hoodie and yielding [sic] a knife don’t you think
it kinda creates the illusion that all teenagers are like that?
2 P- W: Well there’s a problem with all these sorts of stories and eh

I I completely see that many many kids will feel that they are
being sort of tarred with the same brush . . . but the reality is
. . . you know the people who are watching this programme
know full well that in their own communities many of them
there are kids prepared to carry a knife . . . uh and it’s important
for newspapers like the Sun to tackle that uh eh you know on
behalf of society.
3 C: Do you think it blows the problem out of proportion?
4 P- W: It slightly does but part of the . . . thing that the media does and
particularly papers like my own with mass circulation . . . is to
have an impact you really have to make a drama out of things so
that people actually stop what they’re doing . . . and are arrested
by the real you know shock value of what is going on
5 C: So you admit that you are deliberately making more of a drama of

it than it is?
6 P- W: What I’m saying is the way that we carry the story is we put it on
page one . . . we give it big impact.
7 C: Only 4 per cent of teenagers only 4 per cent of our audience has
admitted to carrying a knife.
8 P- W: Most of our readers know through their own families that most
kids are not carrying knives and that’s a great thing. News is not
something which is expected and ordinary news is something
which makes you go wow that’s shocking that shouldn’t be

happening uh and that’s why we draw attention to the knives
thing.
As Charlotte introduces Pascoe- Watson, the scene cuts to a mid- shot of

the two standing inside an official- looking building between two carpeted
staircases. Charlotte is positioned to the left, Pascoe-Watson to the
right; they face each other, but not the viewer, as is common in televized
interviews, so that we are simply witnesses to a scene. According to Bell
and van Leeuwen (1994), it is usual for the person with whom we are to
associate to be positioned to the left. Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) explain
this in terms of the tradition in Western cultures, stemming from writing, of
placing what is established or ‘given’ on the left of any composition and the
‘new’ information on the right. We see this on ‘before and after’ slimming
or bodybuilding photographs and historical timelines in school books. In this
case, therefore, Charlotte represents the established viewpoint that is ‘given’
and Pascoe- Watson the ‘new’ and contested.
Charlotte’s hand gestures underline her comments and questions. When
she says ‘yielding [sic] a knife’, she mimes holding a knife towards Pescoe-
Watson in order to demonstrate the stereotypical portrayal of young people
carrying knives. We have included one such image from an article in the
Sun about its knife crime petition, which we will look at later (Figure 4.3)
The way the camera moves increases the viewer’s proximity to Charlotte,
creating a sense of intimacy with her (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996). We
also see her speaking from slightly over her shoulder to align the viewer
with her point of view, whereas we tend to look directly at Pascoe- Watson.
The questions she asks are presented as the kinds of questions young
people might want to ask Pascoe- Watson. Pascoe- Watson admits that the
Sun ‘slightly’ blows the problem out of proportion, but resists Charlotte’s
reformulation (‘So you admit that you are deliberately making more of a
drama of it than it is?’).
Pascoe- Watson’s answers confirm some of news values that Chibnall
(1977) and Jewkes (2004) have identified as important in making crime
stories newsworthy (see Chapter 1). He uses words such as ‘impact’ and
‘drama’, which are reminiscent of one of the cardinal crime news values
identified by Chibnall (1977), ‘dramatization’. Chibnall points out that
newspapers’ imperative of dramatization has the effect of ‘trivializing dissent
and focusing public attention on the symptoms rather than the causes of
social problems. Importantly, dramatization also ‘directs attention away
from the meaning of the event for its participants’ and transforms it into
a ‘spectacle for passive consumers of news’ (Greer, 2010: 206; emphasis
added)
In another scene from Revealed, Anthony does what the Sun would never
do –he interviews somebody who carries a knife The transcript below is a
slightly shortened version of this interview:
C: [VO] This is ‘Sam’ . . . he’s someone the Sun would find shocking.
A: [VO] We changed his name to protect his identity . . . he’s 16 lives in

London goes to a private school, is planning to go to university
so why does he carry a knife?
1 A: How old were you when you decided to start carrying a knife?
2 S: Probably about 14 got a knife.
3 A: Ok and d’you carry it all the time?
4 S: No no only if I’m out at night, like if I’m going to a party like a
house party I’d take it with me . . . cos I know there’s always
gonna be someone there tryin to start something
5 A: Right so you wouldn’t carry it to school?
6 S: No never . . . I’m not stupid to bring it to school.
13 A: If you carry a knife, you’re more likely to be . . . stabbed

yourself?
14 S: Yeah
15 A: You know that don’t you.
16 S: Yeah . . . if you’re a weak target then obviously you’re gonna get

stabbed, but if you’re with a big group . . . I’m always with big
groups nowadays like big people no one can do anything.
20 S: If I’m going out at night then I’ll be with at least ten people.
21 A: Would you say it’s a gang?
22 S: I’d say being in a gang is sort of a baby stuff like . . . in year eight,
year nine, but . . . when you get like to this age it’s more like it’s
not just a gang it’s like other stuff (?)
[. . .]
25 A: Would you ever use your knife?
26 S: If someone was . . . if my friend was getting hurt or something

and I was out had a knife I would use it.
27 A: So you’d stab someone?

28 S: If I had to I would. I I wouldn’t like willingly want to do it but if

I had to, if I was in a situation which I had to I would. It’s their
fault for trying to trouble me . . .I didn’t start the trouble they
started it.
29 A: You’re the one who goes away a- as a murderer potentially.
30 S: Yeah, but it wasn’t my fault if they’re, if they’re trying to hassle

me. I’m just protecting myself . . . I wouldn’t want to kill someone
. . . I’d just want to get away that’s the only thing I’d use it for . . .
near my house three guys approached me three quite big guys
. . . and they wanted to take my goods so I just {puts his hand
towards Anthony’s stomach as if holding a knife} . . . put my knife
. . . to one of them to their stomach . . . and they just ran.
31 A: {mirrors Sam’s knife gesture} So you pressed it up against them?
32 S: {repeats his knife gesture} Pressed it against their skin like that,
yeah.
33 A: What would make you stop . . . carrying a knife?
34 S: Feeling secure . . . like in my area . . . but I don’t s– if you need it,

you need it . . . it’s all about survival isn’t it.
35 A: And you need it?
36 S: Yeah.
Figure 4.2 An interviewing scene from Revealed (line drawing by Jake Scamell
and Joseph Paul; Source: BBC)
‘Sam’ is introduced as an a-typical ‘knife carrier’, as he goes to a private

school and plans to go to university. He wants to remain anonymous,
therefore we only see him from behind with his hood up, although his
voice has not been disguised. Social actors who remain anonymous often
represent an ‘anti- establishment’ view. Anthony’s dress style in Figure 4.2
seems to mirror that of ‘Sam’s’ – he wears a beanie hat and hooded coat,
which he does not wear at any other point in the programme. This perhaps
is an example of Bell’s (1991) concept of ‘audience design’, which refers to
the way that presenters adjust their speech primarily towards that of their
addressee or audience in order to express solidarity or intimacy with them.
Here this is extended to dress code. Playing in the background is a track
by non- mainstream band ‘Massive Attack’, suggesting a certain edginess.
Sometimes the shots in the scene start out of focus and then come into
focus. In one shot, Sam and Anthony are backgrounded, whereas part of
the brick wall and the concrete are foregrounded, conveying a ‘gritty’ and
illicit sense that this is a secret meeting. When Sam demonstrates how he
used his knife, there is a close- up shot of the re- enactment. We can see
that language, image and music add to the ‘urban- gritty’ atmosphere of the
interview.
In terms of the actual interview, two points are worth drawing attention
to. In line 21, Anthony attempts to ‘reformulate’ (Fairclough, 1992) or
summarize what Sam has said by suggesting that Sam is in a ‘gang’. This
reformulation is, however, contested by Sam, who replies that being in a
gang is ‘baby stuff’. We can see the same attempt at reformulation on the
part of the interviewer failing when Sam indicates that he would ‘use’ his
knife in certain situations. Anthony reformulates this as ‘stab’ someone,
which arguably sounds more dramatic (line 27). Sam, however, is careful not
to use ‘stab’ in his response, which is an indication that he is not comfortable
with this reformulation.
Over the past years, ‘gangs’ and ‘gang- related’ crimes have featured
extensively in the media, capturing political and popular imagination, so that
‘the gang’ has become a ‘contemporary urban legend’ (Alexander, 2008: 7).
Revealed appears to reflect this. Alexander (2008) points out that the gang
has been part of the British psyche for centuries and was a potent source
of the fear of the ‘dangerous classes’ in the Victorian age. Sociological
research on gangs began in early-twentieth- century America with the work
of the Chicago School. These ‘classic’ gang studies (e.g. Thrasher, 1927),
saw the gang mainly as providing social support, self- esteem and purpose
for young, disadvantaged people who had little chance to participate in the
wider society.
We can see that a programme such as Revealed appears to be giving
young people a voice, although this is then subject to the decisions of the
BBC production and editorial team. Time and money constraints mean
that editing is necessary, and editors can show as much ‘as is considered
artistically or logically necessary’ (Iedema, 2001: 187). Although Revealed is
different in that it does not depend on a quick and easy sound bite and obtains
interviews from young people who represent ‘oppositional’ views, thereby
providing an insight into how young people perceive the knife crime problem,
it ultimately presents this issue within a simplistic framework, lacking any real
discussion of the socio- economic issues behind it, of the kind that provided
the explanatory power in the Chicago School studies. Towards the end of the
programme, three questions appear on- screen: (1) Is it about image?; (2) Is it a
black issue?; and (3) What is the answer? These are then discussed by young
people who come from cities that have been identified by the government
as ‘knife crime hotspots’. These are some of the views Charlotte elicits from
the young people:
C: Is carrying a knife an image thing?
Aron: Most defnly I think carryin’ a knife . . . boys used to carryin’ knives
or anyone who carry knives is to have that sense that when
someone sees you they look up to you.
C: So it’s a status [Aron: yeah] image? And would you say it’s more
image than it is defence then?
Mona: Yeah I would say it’s more image than defence cos you’ve got to
impress people sort of think an like . . . you’ve got to look like the
big person.
Alex: It’s like when when someone’s carryin’ a knife it’s like the
equivalent of havin’ superman’s S on his like his suit like that S on
his chest sort of thing.
[. . .]
Jade: Ah think it’s mostly all down the gangs well, I don’t know if it’s ah
think it might be just be in Glasgow but definitely in gangs it’s all
that’s ma territory.
C: Phil you’ve . . . carried a knife and see- and been stabbed yourself.
Was that postcode kind of rivalry? What was that was that
gangs?
Phil: I’d say it was yeah. A lot of the people I know that carry knives
. . . want to try an’ rob people an’ stuff like that an’ it’s just a claim
for territory really [C: really] Yeah so it’s like ‘I’ve got a knife I walk
around this area this is my area dude don’t come in.
C: Over . . . two-thirds of the young people that were stabbed and

died last year were black . . . is it a black problem?
Aron: I don’t think it’s a colour issue I think it’s a lifestyle issue . . . the
jeans the hoodies an’ that all associates with the rap music the
gangster music.
Mona: I wouldn’t like sa- like pinpoint it on black people, but like Aron
said, like, it’s like the music that you listen to and where you come
from the area that you live in
[. . .]
C: What do you think the answer is. Is it more punishment or is it

more more opportunity?
Jade: Ah think it should be more opportunity Ah think they should have

. . . more youth facilities more sports facilities.
C: What’s the link here . . . between having nothing to do and picking

up a knife?
Aron: Boredom=
Mona: =Boredom
C: Boredom
Aron: The time that they’re doin’ in something else that’s less time for their
brain to get corrupted by so- someone [C: okay] or by something
or ge- or be in a situation where they feel they might have to carry
a knife it’s a minority of people that carry knives . . . a r- small
minority it’s about job . . . money . . . education . . . housin’
Alex: Education’s the key . . . in terms of like investin’ time in your

interests and abilities . . . and that needs to be promoted.
The young people who were interviewed for Revealed do point out that
poverty and lack of opportunities have to be among the main factors that
are behind the problem of knife crime. They also stress that it is an ‘image
thing’ and mention associations of ‘style’, such as ‘the jeans, the hoodies
an’ all that associates with the rap music the gangster music’. They appear
to confirm what some cultural criminologists have pointed out: that crime
is ‘aestheticized’ in consumer capitalism, for example in the way in which
‘gangster’ rap combines images of criminality with street gang iconography
and designer chic to create a product that is seductive to young people. As
Katz (1988) reminds us, display and performance are an essential part of ‘cool’
criminality. The market therefore is complicit in the process of promoting
(youthful) transgression. According to Hayward (2002) and other cultural

criminologists, a lot of youth crime is also about the exertion of control in
an uncontrollable environment (‘when someone’s carryin’ a knife is like the
equivalent of havin’ Superman’s S . . . on his chest’) as well as the thrill of
transgression and the pursuit of the limit.
Most media discussion of knife crime, however, focuses on the role
of young people as perpetrators of knife crime and rarely investigates the
structural and emotional reasons behind much of knife crime. Jewkes (2011)
points out that in the United Kingdom in 2001 there were 21 ‘gangster-style’
murders and 67 attempted murders; yet the link between these and a wider
culture that glamorizes gang life and gun crime is rarely explored in the media
and poorly researched in criminology; nor is investigated how these factors
interrelate with poverty and lack of opportunity.
Above, we looked at how the political editor of the Sun, George Pascoe-
Watson, frames the role of his paper in combating knife crime. Let us now
take a look at a short item in the Sun (27 May 2008) about its online campaign
against knife crime:
Sign our No To Knives petition

THE Sun wants to stamp out the epidemic of knife crime that is gripping
Britain.
We want you, the readers, to sign up to our petition to have the law
changed on knives.
Currently, people caught with knives in their possession can escape with
a caution.
But we demand a change in the law that will see any yob caught brandishing
a knife automatically prosecuted.
The Sun describes the knife crime problem as an ‘epidemic’ and a ‘scourge’
that ‘grips’ Britain and has to be ‘stamped out’. This is an example of how
ideology can be expressed through metaphors, that is, through a figurative
use of language. Fairclough (1989: 120) points out that the use of of ‘disease
metaphors’ in the press to describe and enhance social problem is very
common (e.g. ‘Anti- social behaviour amongst pupils has spread like cancer in
our schools’). Pronoun use is also significant here. By using the pronouns ‘we’
and ‘you’, the Sun presents itself as the voice of the people. It is with ‘our’
voice that the paper claims to speak (‘But we demand a change in the law
. . .) to express ‘our’ silenced anxieties about knife crime. The aim is to force
politicians to create a society ‘we’ want to live in. At the same time, action is
demanded from its readers (‘We want you, the reader to sign . . .’).
Figure 4.3 ‘Scourge of the street . . . sign our petition to prosecute knife thugs’
(Source: Sun, 27 May 2008; Image: Photofusion)
The negative labelling or categorization of young people as ‘yobs’ and ‘knife

thugs’ amounts to a symbolic ‘expurgation of the other’ (Thompson, 1990:
65). They, who are the ‘other’, do not simply ‘carry’ but ‘brandish’ knives,
which sounds far more threatening, a threat that is mirrored in the image
accompanying the text through the way the knife is held and foregrounded
(Figure 4.3).
The image comes with the caption ‘Scourge of the streets . . . sign
our petition to prosecute knife thugs’. Captions can either name people
or describe them as social types (‘knife thugs’). Even in the absence of a
caption, the image still represents a social type rather than an individual. This
typification is achieved through the use of visual stereotypes, in this case

the baseball cap the boy is wearing and the hood on top. According to van
Leeuwen (2001), headwear is commonly used as a cultural attribute (e.g. the
workman’s cap), although in this image, the knife is clearly more salient than
the actual stereotypical ‘hoodie’, whose image is blurred.
These kinds of images play an especially important role in the representation
of perpetrators of crime. Here we see the young man objectified, as he is
reduced to certain attributes: the hood and the knife. He is also functionalized
through what he does. Important here is the modality of the image with
the reduced articulation of detail in the background which consists of the
young man himself. He is shown not in a particular social context but in
extreme close shot, with its associations of uncomfortable social proximity.
The problem here is that a small number of symbolic representations
come to be regularly used in the news media and can serve to become the
visual language of particular domains. Such images will be purchased from
commercial image suppliers, such as Getty (Machin, 2004); other kinds of
crime will also be represented through a limited number of stock persons,
attributes and settings.
The Sun’s media campaign and the articles we have analysed here are
part of wider media discourses on crime that are ideological ‘in as much
as they sustain and exacerbate existing relations of domination through the
reproduction and, indeed, generation of patterns of inclusion and exclusion
by attributing deviance to particular social categories’ (Hay, 1995: 211). In
the Sun campaign, these patterns of inclusion and exclusion are linguistically
created through the ‘othering’ strategies we have just described: use of ‘we’
and ‘they’, and terms such as ‘yobs’ and ‘knife thugs’. The imagery – the
symbolic picture of the threatening young man ‘brandishing’ the knife – come
to foreground and background specific kinds of meanings of exactly what the
problem is and how it should be dealt with. The emphasis is on the symptoms
rather than the causes of the problem.
Through the ‘No to Knives’ camapaign, newspapers such as the Sun strive
to develop a relationship with their readers. These campaigns are launched
because ‘reader- paper identification of this kind encourages brand loyalty and
hence will buoy up flagging sales’ (Richardson, 2007: 121). The Sun also may
want to come across as an agent of change, although newspapers can never
actually reduce crime. Here are two of the readers’ responses that came with
the Sun ’s ‘No to Knifes’ article we have just looked at:
Time to get tough, caught carrying a knife, No courts needed, straight

inside for a years hard labour, drawing blood, a minimum of five years,
no courts needed, maiming or the killing of a person, Bring back capital
punishment and hang them, again, . . .
My friend is from Leyounne in Western Saharah. If you go out carrying a

knife you get 5 years in jail, no let offs, just jail. Jail over there is hell on
earth, no comfy bed, tv, playstation, drugs, mobile phones, gyms, snooker
tables, ****, sweets
These two comments are clearly in support of tougher measures to combat

knife crime, one even going as far as to suggest the re-introduction of capital
punishment. What these comments show is that campaigns such as the
Sun ’s are deeply problematic, as they divorce antisocial behaviour and knife
crime from their material and structural antecedents.
It is nothing new that media discourses of ‘feral’ males and youth in crisis
have been fused with notions of urban alienation and warfare. More recently,
however girls’ ‘bad’ behaviour has also attracted much popular attention, with
girls’ violence and girl gangs commonly constructed as urgent and growing
social problems. The following headline from the Daily Mail Online (5 March
2011) is a case in point:
Bad girls: An investigation into a new breed of young women every bit as
alienated, violent and brutally sexualized as the worst male yob
This headline contains an allusion to the popular prison TV programme ‘Bad

Girls’. References like this one to popular films and TV series on crime are
common in the press. This ‘new breed’ of young women is described not
only ‘as alienated’ and ‘violent’ as ‘the worst male yob’, but also ‘as brutally
sexualized’. Although references to male yobs’ sexuality are rare in the
press, they do feature here. This appears to support the claim by (feminist)
criminologists (e.g. Jewkes, 2004) that female deviants are often evaluated
negatively in terms of their sexuality (see Chapter 5).
The article itself informs us that ‘while criminal offences by young men have
fallen, those committed by girls aged 10 to 17 have increased by 25 per cent
over the past three years’. The article comes with several images – one shows
two girls in hooded tops, their faces partially covered by scarves, looking
menacingly at the viewer and holding up their knives. Unlike the image above
from the Sun (Figure 4.3), here the knives are blurred, whereas the two girls are
in focus, perhaps to make them appear more threatening or to show that girl
knife crime is a new phenomenon. The other two pictures in the article are also
of note: one showing a group of three young males and one female, smoking
and drinking; and one of three male ‘hoodies’. The captions for these two
images inform us that models have been used, not ‘real’ hoodies. This serves
to underscore our point above that pictures such as these are often meant to
represent generic types in place of real people, in this case troublesome youth.
However, we also find images of two ‘real’ female teenage criminals who have
gained notoriety for their ‘Clockwork Orange’ style violence. This reference to
the film Clockwork Orange is yet another example of how our understanding of
crime is shaped by popular culture. Finally, there is the stock image of the inner-
city housing estate, with its associations of urban grittiness and decay.
The accuracy of the media image of a ‘rising tide’ of new violent females
is open to question. Evidence drawn from official statistics suggests some
upward shifts in the pattern of convictions for young women for robbery,
burglary and, more markedly, drug and violent offences; however, closer
scrutiny by criminologists (e.g. Sharpe, 2009) reveals that the increases tend
to be in the less serious offence categories. At the same time, the number
of young women entering the youth justice system, including youth custody,
has increased dramatically since its ‘modernization’ over ten years ago
under New Labour. Sharpe’s (forthcoming) research, based on young female
offenders’ accounts, challenges simplistic and demonizing representations
of ‘bad’ girls in the twenty- first century and argues that the interventionist
thrust of the contemporary youth justice system has had a particularly
negative impact on girls.
Conclusion
While much sociological and criminological literature cites structural reasons
for the involvement of young people in crime, media scholars have pointed
to their demonization and criminalization in many mainstream media in ways
which ignore social reality. This points to the media’s centrality in the social
production of crime and of moral panics concerning young people. In this
chapter, we have shown how a closer look at the language of reporting on
youth crime reveals a reliance on a limited lexis of moral scaremongering
and a constant use of a standard repertoire of symbolic images such as
hoodies and gritty urban settings. Even when news media claim to give
the view from the streets, the same limited lexical fields and discourses
dominate. While we do find more analytical representations in some of the
news media, such as the BBC’s Switch programme on knife crime, there
is a predominance of populist discourses. Much of the mainstream media
appears reluctant to discuss concrete issues relating to youth crime, such
as social marginalization and exclusion from mainstream opportunities. Nor
is there appreciation of the role of excitement and emotionality in many acts
of youthful transgressive behaviour and the way that youth culture is heavily
influenced by consumer and popular culture with its glamorization of ‘cool’
criminality and gangster chic.
5
Women and crime
I n this chapter, we will examine media portrayals of female criminals and

reflect on the ways in which notions of gender intersect with the coverage
they receive. As we saw in Chapter 4 on youth and crime, not only is there is a
relation between age and crime, there is also a strong link between gender and
crime. The stereotypical picture of criminals is of young males, and according
to crime statistics it is men who continue to commit the vast majority of
(recorded) crime – in England and Wales men account for about 80 per cent of
those convicted of serious offenses. In spite of this, about one-third of violent
crime stories in the media focus on female offenders (Marsh and Melville,
2009). Violence is a leading topic, with British newspapers devoting about
65 per cent of their coverage of crime news to news of personal violence
(Naylor, 2001). This, of course, is related to the issue of newsworthiness,
with newspapers more keen on covering crimes committed by women,
especially of a violent nature, as they are seen as rare and therefore more
appealing. Violent female offenders are therefore deemed more newsworthy
than violent men and are sometimes also treated more harshly by sectors of
the media for their crimes.
Through a combined linguistic and visual analysis of several recent cases
of female criminals from Britain, we will analyse some of the stock motifs and
stereotypes that are employed in conveying deviant women as ‘other’ and
look at how their agency (or lack thereof) is constructed. We examine the way
in which images of criminal women are used to convey society’s abhorrence,
particularly of those women who violate society’s expected gender norms
by committing crimes of a violent and/or sexual nature. We will also explore
the question of why we, as a society, find it so difficult to accept that women
can intentionally abuse and kill. In so doing, we first need to provide a brief
overview of some of the theories and views that have been put forward to
explain female criminality, some of which still hold sway in today’s media (and
legal) discourses.
Women as ‘other’ and

as the enigma of criminology
In traditional criminology, views of why women turn to or refrain from crime
have been rooted in biological and psychological explanations that focus on
women’s nature, which is supposedly different from men’s. More recently,
feminist criminologists and media scholars have begun to challenge these
perspectives because of their tendency to perpetuate sexist perceptions of
female criminal behaviour. Traditionally and historically, women have been
perceived essentially as ‘other’: less rational and more emotional than men,
passive and demure by nature, and yet deceitful and basically unstable
because of their biology and emotionality. Criminology has constructed
femininity as a paradox and an enigma, and as an ‘analytical opacity’ (Young,
1996: 27). This process is commonly taken to have begun with Lombroso,
the founder of anthropological criminology, according to which there are links
between the nature of a crime and the personality or physical appearance of
the offender. Based on painstaking measurements of women’s body parts,
such as their heads, anklebones and middle fingers, the sound of their voices,
number of grey hairs, wrinkles and tattoos, Lombroso divided women into
three categories: the ‘normal woman’, the ‘occasional offender’ and the ‘born
criminal’, the latter being ‘more terrible than any man’ (Lombroso and Ferrero,
1895: 151).
Lombroso’s approach was based on the conceptualization of women as
docile, reserved and sexually apathetic; in the absence of these qualities,
which ‘normal’ women should display, it was to be suspected that a ‘born
criminal’ was present. The born criminal lacked femininity, exuded savagery
and was altogether closer to the male sex, according to Lombroso. He
perceived her to be ‘doubly exceptional as a woman, and as a criminal’,
since criminals are ‘an exception among civilized people, and women are an
exception among criminals’. Therefore, ‘as a double exception, the criminal
woman is consequently a monster ’ (Lombroso and Ferrero, 1895: 152; our
emphasis).
Lombroso’s description of the (born) female criminal as monstrous is
significant and has cast a long shadow in criminology, the media and popular
culture. The degree to which media discourses are still stuck in a Lombrosian
view of female criminality can be seen in the continued ‘monsterization’
(Morrissey, 2003) of certain female offenders and the media’s focus on their
physical attributes, which are often interpreted as evidence of their evil nature.
We can illustrate this by giving just two examples from press headlines about
two well-known British female criminals from recent years: Tracie Andrews,
who was found guilty of the murder of her boyfriend in 1997, after initially
WOMEN AND CRIME 113
claiming he was stabbed in a ‘road rage’ incident; and Rosemarie West, who
was convicted of the torture and murder of ten young women (one of whom
was her own daughter) together with her husband Fred West in 1995. Whereas
news coverage on Andrews, who was conventionally pretty, described her as
‘former model Tracie Adams’ and ‘blonde Tracie Andrews’, West was described
in terms of her ‘frumpiness’ (e.g. ‘toad on a stone ’). In West’s case, some
tabloids argued that she took part in the killings of young women because she
was insecure about her looks. A comparison of headlines at the time of the
women’s convictions and more recent headlines demonstrates the popular
press’s ongoing concern with these women’s appearance:
The Blonde from hell (Daily Star, 30 July 1997)

Road rage murderer Tracie Andrews gets £5,000 of plastic surgery at
taxpayers’ expense. (Daily Mail Online, 11 November 2009)
Rose just looks like an ordinary housewife, but she is the most evil woman
in Britain.
Rose West, the dowdy housewife who became one of the worst killers
in history, was last night beginning 10 life sentences. (Daily Record, 23
November 1995)
Gross West’s diet of beans
FLABBY House of Horrors Monster Rose West has been put on a crash
diet – of BEANS (Sun, 7 March 2008)
These headlines perfectly illustrate the dichotomy of the ugly duckling (the
‘dowdy housewife’ who is ‘gross ’ and ‘flabby ’) and the femme fatal (‘the
Blonde from hell ’), which is pervasive in the reporting of criminal women,
especially in the popular press, although the so-called quality press is not
always immune to representations of this kind either, as we shall see later in
this chapter. West is ‘monsterized’ by being labelled ‘the most evil woman in
Britain’, ‘one of the worst killers in history’ and the ‘House of Horrors Monster ’.
The term ‘House of Horrors’ is taken from a 1946 low-budget horror film of
the same name and has become associated with the West case. This shows
how popular culture and media shape our understanding of who our current
(female) ‘monsters’ are.
In the 1970s, feminist criminologists began to criticize criminal justice for
seeing female offenders as more pathological than their male counterparts,
arguing instead for ‘positing an equivalence of deviation for all individuals
who break the law’ (Young, 1996). Smart’s (1977: 34) influential critique of
Lombroso’s view of female offenders was that such women are ‘doubly
damned for not only are they legally sanctioned for their offences, they are
socially condemned for being biologically or sexually abnormal’. The idea that
‘abnormal’ female sexuality and criminality are connected is prominent in some
sectors of the media, which often draw a link between sexual promiscuity,
lesbianism and female deviance (see Birch, 1993; Wykes, 1998).
Feminist and media scholars have also taken issue with common-sense
assumptions about what constitutes ‘appropriate behaviour for women (and
men) and with the ways these are reflected in media reports on crime. Initially,
feminist commentators explored constructions of gender in studies of women
who became the victim of male violence. A strong tradition of victimology
theses operates in feminist theory, and feminist media and legal theorists
are not exempt from it. Feminist work has almost exclusively focused on
women’s experiences as victims (Daly, 1994). This is why the use of the
victim stereotype has been particularly prevalent in feminist discussions of
battered women who kill their abusive partners or women who abuse or kill
children in collusion with their male partners (e.g. Myra Hindley, Rose West).
But, as Allen (1998: 66) has observed, it appears that if women who abuse
and kill (children) cannot be made to fit the stereotype of the victim, feminists
have remained silent. It is much easier to defend the actions of a battered
woman than it is to talk on behalf of a woman who has abused a child of her
own volition. Female violence remains intrinsically shocking, even to feminist
commentators, although some studies of women who have committed
premeditated and malicious acts of violence have been undertaken (e.g.
Daly; 1994; Allen, 1998; Matravers, 2001; Morrissey, 2003). Cultural theorist
Belinda Morrissey (2003) points out that in their portrayals of violent female
criminals, the mainstream media, legal and feminist discourses are similar in
that they frequently deny the women’s agency, something which she feels
has important ramifications for the representation of women in general as
active human subjects.
Feminist scholars have more recently addressed the following interrelated
issues: whether criminal women are treated more harshly or more leniently
than men in court; whether women who commit crimes in partnership with
a man or against a man are victims of male oppression or active lawbreakers
acting out of choice; and, in relation to the previous two questions, how
women who abuse or kill are portrayed in the media. We will now report
some of their findings and illustrate these with two case studies we have
selected from the British national and regional print media.
Female crime, gender and the news

As previously stated, much mainstream media discourse about offending
women is still constructed around ‘essentialist’ notions of women and
WOMEN AND CRIME 115
conservative attitudes about marriage and family which remain ‘curiously

embedded in the Victorian age’ (Jewkes, 2004: 109). In essence, society’s
predominant view is that women are biologically predisposed to caring and
nurturing and not to violence. As Cameron and Frazer observe, ‘femininity as
our society constructs it, is incompatible with transgressive behaviour’ (1987:
50). This is why women who fail to conform to the cultural stereotypes of
the maternal, caring and monogamous female often face especially vitriolic
treatment by the media, particularly the popular press.
Morrissey argues that when men offend, their crimes will often be ‘both
imaginable and possibly even seen as human’ (2003: 16). Unlike crime
committed by females, she argues ‘male crime in all forms, from fictional
to factual, is frequently articulated, debated, portrayed, glorified, even
fantasized’. Some male criminals inspire sympathy and even celebration,
especially when they act as avenging underdogs, as could be seen in the
case of Raoul Moat, who, after being released from an English prison for a
six-week sentence for assault, shot three people: his ex-girlfriend, her new
partner (fatally), and a police officer, whom he targeted simply for being a
police officer and who is now blind as a result. After six days on the run, Moat
was contained in the open by the police, which led to a standoff, during which
he shot himself. Moat attracted some sympathy from sectors of the public
not least because he managed to evade capture for a week and ‘got one over’
on the police. He was also variously described in some media as having a
‘hulking physique’ and being a ‘notorious hardman’, expressions which glorify
more than they condemn (Hari, 2010). After he shot himself, a Raoul Moat
RIP memorial website was created on Facebook, which attracted more than
35,000 members.
Female offenders, in contrast, tend to described in rather different terms
and seem to confirm people’s worst fears about society falling apart. Naylor
(2001), for example, in a study of four British newspapers, observed significant
differences in the nature and intensity of reporting on violence by men
and women. Different explanatory frameworks were employed; women’s
violence was more likely to be reported as irrational, emotional or ‘wicked’,
while men’s violence tended to be presented as ‘normal’ and rational. Naylor
also found that news producers treated violent female criminality as the most
deviant and transgressive of all crime scenarios.
It has also been shown that when women are involved or implicated in a
very serious crime, they tend to be punished more harshly and, in addition,
‘punished symbolically by the media’ (Jewkes, 2004: 114). However, the
reverse is also true in certain cases. Recent research carried out by Grabe
et al. (2006) on journalistic representations of female offenders in a local US
newspaper tested the so-called chivalry hypothesis, according to which female
offenders receive more lenient coverage than men. They did find support
for the hypothesis, although it applied only in cases in which the women
did not violate gender stereotypes, and that, in fact, women who commit
violent crimes or crimes against children receive the harshest treatment of all,
especially if they act together with a man.
In Britain, the archetypal male–female partnerships in recent crime history
are those of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, and Fred and Rosemarie West.
Hindley and Brady were convicted of a number of child murders between
1963 and 1965. Although Brady was the dominant force behind the killings,
Hindley’s infamy far outweighed Brady’s. Hindley’s status as an ‘iniquitous
criminal’ (Penfold-Mounce, 2009) was further enhanced and immortalized in
the now iconic police mug shot of her as a blonde with dark roots, taken at
the time of her arrest in 1965, in which she stares out defiantly at the viewer
from under her fringe. The image has been used effectively in the ‘othering’
of her as a particularly unnatural killer, owing to her gender, connoting evil in
a way Brady’s photograph never has. Even though she died in 2002, Hindley
remains powerfully present in the British psyche and continues to be used as
a point of comparison for other female criminals, even those who did not kill.
For example, a woman whose toddler was abused by ‘nursery paedophile’
Vanessa George described the latter in the Daily Mail (12 October 2009) as
follows:
She did everything he (Blanchard) told her to do in a similar way to Hindley

and it all went from there. It seems he had some sort of spell over her.
The demonization of Hindley and West and other, less well-known cases
as evil ‘monsters’, can be explained through Jenks’s (2003: 185) notion
that they represent ‘frightening possibilities’ that need to be rejected from
the category of ‘women’. Lexical choices such as ‘House of Horrors killer’,
‘monster’, ‘black widow’, ‘lesbian vampire killer’ and so on are obvious ways
of linguistic othering, which works to remove (female) offenders from their
society, thereby avoiding the uncomfortable truth that they were produced
by that society.
The consistent public and media abhorrence expressed towards these
women shows that they are a particularly potent image of the embodiment of
evil, which is related to their gender. These images or discourses are conveyed
in the mainstream media through a number of stock stories or narratives.
Jewkes has identified eight standard narratives used by the mainstream
media for women who commit serious offences:
Sexuality and sexual deviance (e.g. promiscuity, lesbianism, frigidity)

(Absence of) physical attractiveness (e.g. frumps or femmes fatales )
WOMEN AND CRIME 117
Bad wives
Bad mothers
Mythical monsters (e.g. Medea and Medusa from Greek mythology,
vampires)
Mad cows (criminal women at the mercy of their hormones or biology)
Evil manipulators
Non-agents (women who are denied agency in their criminal acts).
(2004: 113)
Often these stock narratives come in the form of binary classifications arising
from popular stories or myths, such as the Virgin or the Vamp. Naylor points
out that while ‘male deviance is seen on a continuum, female deviance is
polarized: madonna/whore, the gentler sex or the more deadly species’
(1990: 5). Women are either Lady Macbeth figures or dupes who will abuse
or kill in order to secure their relationship with a man (see Cameron and Frazer,
1987). Some of these narratives focus on women’s biology and psychology,
drawing a link between femininity and madness. The ‘evil manipulator’
narrative has been applied to infamous British criminals Myra Hindley, Rose
West, and more recently, Maxine Carr, among others, and presents these
women as particularly wicked because it suggests that they are somehow to
blame for their male partners’ descent into depravity. This image has many
historical precedents that may even go back to the biblical Eve. Finally, the
narrative of non-agency is significant in that it can be found in media and
legal, as well as feminist, discourses. It therefore deserves closer attention.
Female criminals and the denial of agency

Non-agentive media narratives confirm that female aggression has no place
in our culture, particularly with reference to the notion that women can abuse
and kill as women – hence the portrayal of these women as ‘mannish’ or the
appearance of headlines such as ‘When women are as evil as men’, as was
the case with ‘nursery paedophile’ Vanessa George (see below, p. 130 in
this book). Morrissey has identified three techniques to achieve non-agency:
vilification/monsterization, mythification and victimism (2003: 25). Vilification/
monsterization denies agency by representing the female criminal as essentially
evil and beyond redemption. What is denied here is the woman’s human
agency, although she is clearly represented as having acted. This negates the
need for serious consideration of her acts ‘in the context of her society and her
experience as a human subject’ (Morrissey, 2003: 104). We have already given
two headlines as examples of this strategy, at the start of this chapter, and
below are two more:
Monstrous abuse by two evil mothers

Evil incarnate
An evil mother who inflicted appalling injuries on her toddler son as she
battered him to death was jailed for life yesterday. (Sun, 15 May 2010)
Nursery monster Vanessa George to enjoy life of anonymity at taxpayers’
expense as furious parents call for her ‘to be skinned and rolled in salt’.
(Mail Online, 3 October 2009)
In the two examples above the women are sub-human creatures (‘evil
incarnate’, ‘nursery monster’). In the first case the woman is clearly cast
as agent (‘inflicted appalling injuries . . .’) but her abuse is regarded as
‘monstrous’, so not the action of a human being.
Mythification relates the criminal woman to frightening mythic characters,
such as Medea or the ‘Black widow’. Like monsterization, it is a very effective
distancing strategy and can be found mainly in the popular media:
Black widow: Japan’s ‘Black widow’ killer accused of killing six men’ (Daily
Telegraph, 10 November 2009)
Victimism, in turn, relies on the depiction of women as powerless and

oppressed, which can function to deny their responsibility, culpability and
even rationality:
Black widows: two women driven to kill by years of violent abuse

Women driven to kill by years of violent abuse
Physical, verbal and emotional torment blighted lives of slayers. (Belfast
Telegraph, 11 December 2010)
Here the women retain their humanity only because they are believed to have
acted in self-defence against abusive husbands/partners. The headline and
lead imply that the women are non-agentic or not fully responsible for the
killings (‘driven to kill’), although they are still referred to as ‘black widows’
and ‘slayers’, two potent labels for women killers. In contrast, through the use
of nominalizations such as ‘abuse’ and ‘torment’, the agency of the women’s
violent partners remains implicit.
The following headline and lead may also be seen as an example of the
victimism strategy:
Maxine Carr is one more Huntley victim: Why do we demonize her?

WOMEN AND CRIME 119
After serving half the sentence imposed for covering up for her killer
boyfriend, Maxine Carr is expected to be released on Friday. She has
already been demonized, says our correspondent, and is a victim of a deep-
rooted misogyny in British society that means higher moral standards are
expected of women. (Sunday Times Online, 11 May 2004)
Here the commentator, Joan Smith, argues that Carr’s vilification is unjust
given the mundane character of her crime (perjury) compared to Huntley’s
(murder of two schoolgirls). Although Carr’s demonization by the media
certainly was unjust and misogynistic, one could still argue that labelling her
a victim of Huntley to explain her perjury is simplistic.
Some feminist media commentators argue that women who commit crimes
with men have fallen under their spell and that battered women who kill their
abusive partners should be exculpated. Other feminist scholars (e.g. Birch,
1993; Morrissey, 2003; Jewkes, 2004) argue that society has to come to terms
with the less palatable idea that women have free will and that they, like men,
can be cruel, sadistic and violent. There can be no denying that women have
been and continue to be oppressed because of power differentials between
the sexes, long-term structural inequalities and gender-related poverty.
But female victims never seem to be aggressors, bearing little or even no
responsibility for their acts (Allen, 1998). When men commit a crime, the link
between victimization and criminalization is not so readily drawn, which makes
victim-centred explanations of female crimes a gendered one.
Narratives similar to those we have just outlined can also be found in legal
interpretations of female criminality. Winter (2002) found that when women
commit acts of violence, their representation in legal reports falls into three
distinct categories. The offender is either a lunatic (hysterical or suffering
from premenstrual or battered woman syndrome), a monster (the ‘bad’
mother, the lesbian, the just plain evil) or an idiot (the dupe, the tool carrier, the
confidante). Rarely are women’s crimes seen as a rational response to social,
political or physical inequalities, as is often the case with men (Wilczynski,
1991). On the other hand, sympathetic media and legal treatment based
on these narratives has been successful in securing some women shorter
sentences in cases ranging from shoplifting to murder. Morrissey, however,
argues that, ultimately, the strategy of victimism is disadvantageous to
women, as it stands in the way of challenging negative stereotypes and
myths about them. The media have helped in the dissemination of these
legal discourses about female criminality, which points to the symbiotic
relationship between the media and legal institutions in presenting crime
stories (Morrissey, 2003).
We will now move on to analysing and comparing two case studies on
media representations of criminal women, taken from the regional and national
press, which exemplify the use of the standard narrative techniques identified
by Jewkes (2004) and Morrissey (2003) to explain their deviant behaviour.
Our first case study concerns a case from Northern Ireland, where in 2008,
a 27-year-old woman, Roisin Doyle, fatally stabbed her estranged husband,
Kevin Doyle, for which she received a three-year sentence, followed by two
years probation. Here we compare Doyle’s portrayal in Sunday Life with an
Ulster Television (UTV ) online article. Sunday Life is a Northern Irish Sunday
tabloid newspaper which is also sold in the rest of Ireland and Britain. It is
published by Belfast Telegraph Newspapers Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary
of Independent News and Media. UTV is a broadcasting and New Media
company based in Belfast. We first compare the lexical choices in the two
headlines and leads:
Black widow duped friend

Roisin fooled her pal into washing the lethal weapon. (Sunday Life, 28
March 2010)
Wife jailed for husband killing
A Belfast mother of four who killed her husband by stabbing him in the
chest during a heated row has been jailed for three years (UTV News, 26
March 2010)
We can see that in Sunday Life Doyle is constructed as a mythical ‘black

widow’, whereas in the UTV text she is a ‘wife’ and ‘mother of four’ who was
jailed for killing her husband. The ways in which journalists name people in the
events they report on always involve choices. Reisigl and Wodak (2001) call
these naming options ‘referential strategies’. These not only ‘project meaning
onto the referent, they also establish coherence relations with the way that
other social actors are referred to and represented’ (Richardson, 2007: 50).
Because Sunday Life blames Doyle for her actions, she is described in terms
which suggest depravity and sub-humanity. The UTV headline, in contrast, is
far more measured in tone.
Let us first look at the social actor categories employed in Sunday Life for
Roisin Doyle, Kevin Doyle and the other two participants, Carol Ann McLurg,
Roisin Doyle’s close friend, and the prosecuting barrister, Gordon Kerr:
Roisin Doyle: black widow; Roisin; a black widow killer; evil Roisin Doyle,
27; the killer; sneaky Roisin; the jealous wife; the defendant; callous Roisin;
the wicked wife.
Kevin Doyle: husband Kevin Doyle; her husband; Kevin Doyle, 30; her
hubby; dad-of-four Kevin; Kevin; a dying Kevin
WOMEN AND CRIME 121
Figure 5.1 Black widow duped friend (Source: Sunday Life, 28 March 2010)
Carol Ann McLurg: friend; her pal; her best friend; close pal Carol Ann;
Carol Ann; an unsuspecting Carol Ann; her best mate; Carol Ann McLurg;
the witness.
Prosecuting barrister Gordon Kerr QC: Prosecuting barrister Gordon Kerr
QC; Mr Kerr; the Crown barrister.
In keeping with (red-hot) tabloid style, Roisin Doyle is nominated mostly

informally (‘Roisin’) and classified once as ‘the defendant’. When she is named
informally, she is also called ‘sneaky ’, ‘evil ’, ‘dangerous ’, ‘ jealous ’, ‘callous ’

and ‘wicked ’, all negatively evaluative adjectives. Kevin Doyle, on the other
hand, is merely described as ‘dying Kevin’. He is identified both semi-formally
(‘Kevin Doyle’) and informally (‘Kevin’). He is also identified relationally, that is,
in terms of his kinship relations, as ‘husband Kevin Doyle’, ‘her hubby ’, ‘dad-
of-four Kevin’, all terms that essentially humanize him, whereas the same
does not apply to Roisin Doyle, who is not referred to as a ‘mother-of-four’.
The third participant, Roisin Doyle’s friend, Carol Ann McLurg, is also mainly
identified relationally as ‘her pal ’, ‘her best friend ’, ‘close pal Carol Ann’, ‘her
best mate ’ and informally as ‘an unsuspecting Carol Ann ’. She is classified as
a ‘witness’ once. Predictably, the prosecuting barrister is nominated formally
(‘prosecuting barrister Gordon Kerr QC’; ‘Mr Kerr’) and identified functionally
(‘the Crown barrister’).
The actions of the social actors are described as follows:
Roisin Doyle: duped friend; fooled her pal; tricked her best friend; the knife
that she used to stab her husband; stabbed Kevin Doyle, 30, in a violent
rage; after knifing her husband, Roisin rang close pal; began to casually
clean the living room; lifted a steak knife off the sofa and handed it to Carol
Ann, telling her to put it into the kitchen sink; had plunged the same knife
into the chest of her husband causing him to bleed to death; tried to dupe
her best mate; appeared in court; rang Carol McClurg, had changed out of
her blood-stained clothes before ringing Carol Ann; was screaming; was no
longer wearing the clothes she had gone out in; had changed into a T-shirt;
tried to pick Kevin up; pushed him onto his back; tidied up the living room;
lifted a steak knife from the sofa and handed it to Carol Ann and asked her
to put it into the kitchen; held the hand of his heart-broken mother; kept up
the pretence that she had found Kevin already stabbed outside the house;
changed her story, claiming that she had thrown the knife at him; admitted
to stabbing her husband; pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
Kevin Doyle: fighting for his life, bled to death; sitting on a kerb outside
the house; was on his knees; said; lay dying; took his last breath.
Carol Ann McLurg: Believing the lies; rushed over to Roisin’s house;
did as she was asked; got a taxi and went to Summerhill Grange; saw
Kevin Doyle sitting on a kerb outside the house in what she thought was a
drunken state; approached the house; spoke to Roisin; said that Kevin was
outside; urged Roisin to phone an ambulance.
Prosecuting barrister Gordon Kerr QC: explained; said; added.
In terms of the transitivity patterns used to describe Roisin Doyle’s actions,

we can see a preponderance of active material processes, which semantically
WOMEN AND CRIME 123
denote negative activities and which grammatically are all in the active voice
and, therefore, clearly cast Roisin Doyle as a callous killer and culpable agent
(e.g. ‘stabbed Kevin Doyle, 30, in a violent rage’; ‘kept up the pretence that she
had found Kevin already stabbed outside the house’). However, by insisting
on the evil nature of the murderess, the article deprives her of her humanity,
and agency denial takes place: she is cast as having acted, but not as a human
woman.
There is also a smaller number of mental processes, which portray her as
a devious manipulator, who deceives even her best friend (‘duped’; ‘fooled’;
‘tricked’; ‘tried to dupe’). The actions of her friend, Carol Ann McLurg, are
the result of Doyle’s manipulation (‘ did as she was told’) and she at least
tried to help Kevin Doyle (‘urged Roisin to phone an ambulance’). In terms of
verbal processes, Doyle ‘was screaming’, ‘changed her story’, ‘admitted’ and
‘pleaded guilty’, whereas the prosecuting barrister merely ‘explained’, ‘said’
and ‘added’.
As we saw in Chapter 2 on lexis, vocabulary is one of the most obvious
means through which ideological meanings can be expressed about people
and events. Another important function of lexis is that it enhances lexical
cohesion, which in the above text is achieved through the repetition of words
that are linked in meaning, particularly synonyms and near-synonyms, to refer
to Roisin Doyle and her actions, such as ‘black widow’/’black widow killer’/‘the
killer’; ‘evil’/’wicked’; duped/fooled/tricked; ‘stabbed’/’knifing’/’plunged the
knife into’; ‘the lethal weapon’/‘the knife’/‘the same knife’/‘a steak knife’.
The function of this excessive repetition or ‘overlexicalization’ (Fowler et al.,
1979) is to intensify meaning. Doyle’s friend is also overlexicalized as ‘friend/
pal’/‘best friend’/‘close pal’/‘her best mate’, which reinforces the notion that
Doyle did not even stop at the deception of her best friend. Her ‘callous’
nature is further underlined through some of the comments made by the
prosecuting barrister:
‘Whilst awaiting the ambulance Roisin Doyle tidied up the living room,’
added the Crown barrister.
‘She lifted a steak knife from the sofa and handed it to Carol Ann and asked
her to put it in the kitchen.’
Together with the evaluative terms to describe Doyle, these quotes by

the Prosecution add up to a picture of her as a calm and calculating killer
who cleans up after she murdered her husband. Doyle’s vilification through
lexis also leads to her mythification: by being called a ‘black widow’, she is
transformed into the embodiment of one of the most frightening of mythic
characters in the popular press. Her agency is no longer that of a ‘normal’
human being.
Visually, the page is dominated by a large photograph of Roisin Doyle, in

which she wears a low-cut, black halter-neck top, hoop earrings and a white
pearly bracelet, and looks at the viewer (a ‘demand’ picture) with her tongue
stuck out and her right hand raised in an ‘up yours’ gesture (Figure 5.1). The
picture may have been taken by a friend at a party, in a pub or at home. There
is nothing in the image as such that would suggest anything sinister, but in
combination with the text we have just analysed and the caption on the top
right-hand side of the photograph, ‘DANGEROUS: Roisin Doyle’, it may be
interpreted by the reader rather differently. The image also adds to Doyle’s
negative evaluation in terms of her physical appearance.
The second, much smaller photograph shows Roisin looking off-frame in what
is an ‘offer’ image. She is shown positioned close behind what appear to be two
men whose faces have been cropped out. There is no background to provide
any information about location. In this context, a reasonable interpretation by the
reader is that she appears to be being escorted by police. The expression on her
face is hard to read and could be anything from bewilderment to fear. That she
looks off to the side could suggest a degree of ‘shiftiness’. The close-shot effect
created by the cropping takes the viewer closer to her emotions, which in this
case are given an interpretation by the added caption, which reads, ‘CALLOUS:
Roisin admitted stabbing’.
According to Barthes, images are ‘polysemous’, that is, they have many
meaning potentials: ‘they imply, underlying their signifiers, a “floating chain”
of signifieds, the reader able to choose some and ignore others’ (1977: 39).
This is why words are needed to ‘anchor’ this floating chain of signifieds,
thereby selecting for them a single specific meaning. The meaning we are
meant to glean is that of Roisin Doyle as a ‘dangerous’ and ‘callous’, but
also sexually attractive killer. The power of photographs lies in their ability to
denote and connote. So while the photographs of Roisin Doyle in isolation
may denote rather innocuous events in her life, connotatively they suggest
something altogether different, particularly as they are juxtaposed with text
that already constructs her as ‘evil’ and ‘wicked’. In contrast, Kevin Doyle’s
cropped photograph shows him smiling amiably at the viewer, taking us close
to him. In combination with the caption, ‘STABBED: Husband Kevin Doyle’,
he is humanized as the tragic victim who has fallen prey to his ‘evil’ wife.
Barthes also points out that the photograph ‘is an object that has been
worked on, chosen, composed, constructed, treated according to professional,
aesthetic or ideological norms which are so many factors of connotation’ (1977:
19). We can see that this ideological process took place with the newspapers’
choice of the images of Roisin and Kevin Doyle and with the editing process,
during which the images were cropped or otherwise manipulated by zooming
in on their faces, and finally with the choice of their size; all of these features
influence the ‘preferred’ reading, in this case of Roisin Doyle as a callous killer
and her husband as a helpless victim.
WOMEN AND CRIME 125
As for the narratives identified by Jewkes (2004), it is obvious that the

article draws mainly on the ‘bad wife’, ‘evil manipulator’ and ‘mythical monster’
motifs. The ‘bad mother’ narrative can be said to be present implicitly also, as
no ‘good’ mother kills the father of her children. Roisin Doyle is vilified, and
there is nothing in the article that would exculpate her even in the slightest;
there is no information as to what may have led to her stabbing her husband,
except the suggestion that she was ‘jealous’. We learn nothing about the two
main participants’ backgrounds, except that a ‘jealous’ and ‘callous’ wife has
murdered her husband ‘in a violent rage’. There is no sense that the husband
might have behaved in a way so as to provoke an argument. He is described
merely in terms of a small number of behavioural processes: ‘fighting for his
life’, ‘bled to death’, ‘lay dying’, ‘took his last breath’. There is also no information
about the pressures of social and personal problems, mental health issues and
so on. One of the authors formerly worked in the Home Office as a researcher
on cases in which those suffering from mental health issues committed violent
offences. Many of these offenders, especially the women, would have long
histories of abuse and tragic life circumstances.
We now use the text from the UTV News website on the same case for
comparison (the italicized bits are in the original newspaper text and are
quotes taken from the Belfast Crown Court Judgement Report).
Figure 5.2 Wife jailed for husband killing (Source: UTV News, 26 March 2010)
Wife jailed for husband killing
A Belfast mother of four who killed her husband by stabbing him in the
chest during a heated row has been jailed for three years.
[. . .]
Roisin Doyle originally charged with murder pleaded guilty to manslaughter
on the morning her trial was due to start.
‘Tragic’
The Crown said that while she intended to harm her husband, there was
no evidence she had intended to kill him.
The judge Mr Justice Treacy said it was one of the most ‘tragic’ cases he
had ever encountered.
The court was told that after she returned from a night out with friends,
Roisin Doyle discovered that her husband from whom she was separated
had come to the house and sent a babysitter home.
The couple started to argue and Mrs Doyle got a steak knife from the
kitchen and tried to cut her own wrist.
She then claimed she threw the knife at her husband but later admitted to
police that she struck him in the chest with it. He died in hospital several
hours later.
The judge said it was of those cases ‘which posed a significant challenge
in seeking to reach a disposal which does justice to everyone in this sad
situation’.
The judge said the couple’s relationship which had initially been a happy
one had become ‘destructive and turbulent’.
‘The reports in this case paint a picture of a truly tragic mismatch of two
people each of whom had flaws,’ he added.
Mr Justice Treacy said the Doyles had both suffered grievously from their
destructive relationship and he added: ‘The relationship was consistently
and, I suspect, mutually abusive’.
He said that Kevin Doyle had a tendency to suffer depressive episodes and
had engaged in self-harm.
He said that Roisin Doyle had also tried to take her own life. ‘But towards
the end of this relationship she was a woman on the edge,’ he added.
The judge said Mr Doyle’s death had been ‘unexpectedly tragic ’ because
the knife had entered his body at a precise point where it severed his
mammary artery and if the wound had been half an inch to either side he
would almost certainly have survived.
Turning to the force used by Mrs Doyle with the knife, Mr Justice Treacy
said medical reports had suggested it was extremely unlikely that ‘a blow
of this level of force would cause the death of a mature healthy man’.
A comparison between the Sunday Life article and the UTV News text
above reveals that Roisin Doyle is named rather differently:
Roisin Doyle: wife; a Belfast mother of four; Roisin Doyle; Mrs Doyle
Kevin Doyle: husband; her 30-year-old husband Kevin; Kevin Doyle;
Mr Doyle
Justice Treacy: The judge Mr Justice Treacy; the judge; Mr Justice Treacy.
WOMEN AND CRIME 127
As we can see, Doyle is identified relationally as a ‘Belfast mother of

four ’, which immediately humanizes her, and as a ‘wife’. The remainder of
the article describes her formally as ‘Mrs Doyle’ or semi-formally as ‘Roisin
Doyle, 27’. Kevin Doyle is also identified relationally and informally as ‘her
husband ’ and ‘her 30-year-old husband Kevin ’, ‘her husband from whom
she was separated’, and semi-formally (‘Kevin Doyle’). The judge is named
formally, which is to be expected. Roisin Doyle’s friend and witness to the
prosecution, Carol Ann McLurg, gets no mention at all.
The actions of the social actors are described thus:
Roisin Doyle: killed her husband by stabbing him; pleaded guilty to

manslaughter; intended to harm her husband; returned from a night with
friends; discovered that her husband had come to the house; got a steak
knife; started to cut her own wrist; claimed she threw knife at her husband;
later admitted she struck him in the chest; tried to take her own life; was a
woman on the edge; agreed to complete two years on probation
Kevin Doyle: died; had a tendency to suffer depressive episodes; had
come to house and sent babysitter home; engaged in self-harm
Judge Mr Justice Treacy: said; added.
Looking at the transitivity patterns, it again becomes clear, through the

material processes used to describe her actions (‘killed her husband by
stabbing him’), that Roisin Doyle is made responsible for killing her husband.
However, the UTV News article also states that ‘the Crown said that while
she intended to harm her husband, ‘there is no evidence she had intended
to kill him ’. We also learn that she ‘tried to cut her own wrist ’ and to ‘take
her own life ’. Her estranged husband is not completely constructed as the
passive and helpless victim, but as somebody who ‘engaged in self-harm’,
which put aconsiderable strain on the relationship. This is confirmed in the
Belfast Crown Court Judgement report (26 March 2010): ‘[. . .] from the start
there were difficulties arising particularly from the deceased’s tendency to
suffer depressive episodes and to engage in self-harm’. The report further
states that the husband ‘had come to the house and sent the babysitter
home’, which are actions which may have provoked the argument between
him and his wife.
Whereas Sunday Life quotes the prosecuting barrister Gordon Kerr QC,
UTV News cites from Judge Justice Treacy’s comments in the Belfast Crown
Court Judgement report. These statements by Justice Treacy about the
case, which he refers to as ‘tragic’, paint a far more sympathetic picture of
Roisin Doyle, and the blame is put on both parties (‘the couple started to
argue’). Doyle is also said to have killed her husband ‘during a heated row’,
which implies that both parties where involved in an argument, unlike in the
Sunday Life article, where she is said to have stabbed him ‘in a violent rage’,
which puts the blame solely on her. Justice Treacy is also quoted as saying
that the relationship had become ‘ destructive and turbulent ’, and that it was
‘consistently and, I suspect, mutually abusive ’.
As for the visual representation in the UTV News text, only the victim,
Kevin Doyle, is shown, in a small picture placed between the headline and
lead, in which he can be seen smiling at the reader. The cropping again gives
the impression of an extreme close shot which has the effect of creating a
sense of intimacy. It is in fact the same picture as in Sunday Life, although it
has been tilted. In film editing and photography, there has been a tradition of
these ‘cantered’ shots being used to bring more energy and vibrance to an
image. So unlike the straight shot used in Sunday Life, this one brings more
sense of ‘life’ and energy to Doyle. And through the cropping, the viewer is
given an added sense of insight into to this ‘life’. As in actual social situations,
in which social distance/proximity has meanings of intimacy or a lack of
intimacy the same set of associations apply to images.
As we saw in the two articles we have just compared, legal narratives of
both offender and victim given in court are copied into the two newspaper
articles. These two articles therefore illustrate the close relationship
between the media and legal institutions, which means that mainstream
media depictions often mirror courtroom portrayals. The Sunday Life article
quotes and paraphrases the statements of the Prosecution in support of its
construction of Roisin Doyle as a callous killer (e.g. ‘Details of how Roisin
tried to dupe her best mate were made public when she appeared in court’;
‘It was also revealed that she had changed out of her bloodstained clothes
before ringing Carol Ann’). The actions and statements of the witness for
the Prosecution, Carol Ann McLurg, are also reported. Morrissey (2003:
19) points out that media reports of criminal trials centre around transcripts
of legal rhetoric and evidence given by witnesses who have been called to
support particular sides of the legal debate, something which the reader is
rarely informed about, and whose evidence is treated as neutral and objective
rather than partisan, particularly in the case of expert witnesses.
In the UTV News article, Doyle is far more humanized and contextualized
by being placed within her social world and culture, which is made partly
responsible for her predicament. The quotes from the Belfast Crown Court
Judgement report (26 March 2010) serve to acknowledge that Doyle was
at the mercy of societal inequities. It remarks on Roisin and Kevin Doyle’s
marriage as ‘truly destructive for both people’and states that neither ‘seemed
to have the emotional tools to either improve their relationship or disengage
from it’. There is also the suggestion that Roisin Doyle may have been too
young to enter into a relationship with a man almost five years her senior:
‘[. . .] she had a miscarriage before her 16th birthday followed by several
WOMEN AND CRIME 129
pregnancies in quick succession. There can be no denying the fact that the
defendant’s early involvement with a man significantly older than her had the
effect of changing her course in life and materially altering her prospects for
the future’. From these statements in the Belfast Crown Court Judgement
report it can be inferred that Doyle’s status as a victim and as somebody who
has been more ‘sinned against than sinning’ is confirmed.
These background factors were crucial to the outcome of the case and
need to feature in newspaper reporting for a more balanced understanding.
However, Allen, in her study of psychiatrists’ and probation officers’ reports
in Britain, takes issue with the way that female offenders tend to be
represented as having no control over what they were doing at the time
and that their crimes are often recast as a natural disaster or tragedy. These
reports, she says
acknowledge the trajectory of objects in space – the knife in the hand,

the thrust of the blade into the heart – but progressively delete from that
trajectory all that would mark it as an action by an intentional and culpable
subject. (1987: 83)
The following excerpt from the UTV News article (quoting Judge Mr Justice
Treacy) perhaps exemplifies this:
The judge said that Mr Doyle’s death had been ‘unexpectedly tragic’
because the knife had entered his body at a precise point where it severed
his mammary artery . . .
[. . . ] medical reports had suggested that a blow of this level of force would
cause the death of a mature healthy man.
In the first excerpt, ‘the knife’ is turned into the actor which ‘enters’ the
victim’s body, and in the second it is the ‘blow’ which ‘causes’ the victim’s
death, rather than Doyle herself. Allen goes on to say that ‘even at the very
moment of their victimization and coercion’ women can still be ‘conscious,
intentional, responsible, and potentially dangerous and culpable subjects of
the law’ (1987: 94). The question is, when media and legal discourses portray
women such as Roisin Doyle as victims of their circumstances, does that
mean that in a way they preserve female oppression? While it is of course
important to recognize elements other than individual volition when people
commit a crime and to place them within their social and cultural milieu
(as was done in the UTV News article with Roisin Doyle), the question is
whether the portrayal of criminal women in terms of impotent victimhood (or
madness – ‘a woman on edge’) undermines a concept of women in general
‘as fully fledged moral subjects and responsible agents’ (Morrissey, 2003: 35).
According to Jewkes, both media and legal institutions play a vital role ‘in
maintaining notions of female wickedness in cases where women offend,
just as they preserve ideas of feminine oppression in cases where women are
portrayed as victims’ (2004: 111).
To sum up, both articles can be said to deny the agency of the female
offender. Whereas the narratives in Sunday Life restrict Roisin Doyle’s portrayal
to that of mythic evil, the UTV News article draws mainly on narratives of
women as non-agents and victims.
Our second case study concerns Vanessa George, a child nursery worker
from Plymouth who was involved in an internet paedophile ring with a convicted
child sex offender, Colin Blanchard, whom she met on the social networking
site Facebook. Another woman, Angela Allen, was also involved in the case.
George took indecent images on her mobile of some of the small children in
her care and posted them to Blanchard. They never met in person, but recorded
their attacks on mobile phones and swapped the images through emails. In this
case, all three pleaded guilty to a string of child sex offences. George pleaded
guilty to seven counts of sexual assault, and six of making and distributing
indecent pictures of children. In December 2009, both George and Allen were
given indeterminate sentences, with George having to serve at least seven and
Allen at least five years. Blanchard, who pleaded guilty to 17 child pornography
counts and two child sex assaults, and admitted a further charge of possessing
extreme pornography, also received an indeterminate sentence, having to serve
a minimum of nine years. Although it later emerged that two other women were
also involved, the main focus has always been on George, because she was the
one who took the images. Initially, Blanchard, already a convicted paedophile, did
not receive the same amount of coverage. It was only at the sentencing stage
that some newspapers began to see them as equally guilty. This could also be
seen in some of the visual representations, which showed them as a trio.
The demonization of George was a current throughout the press
representations. The fact that she was herself a mother caused even more
outrage. This can be seen in the following headline, where the word ‘mother’
is in capitals:
How could a MOTHER abuse these kids? (Sun, 3 October 2009)
Just like the previous text from Sunday Life about Roisin Doyle, this article
uses a ‘monsterization’ discourse to condemn George. She is even compared
to archetypal child killers Myra Hindley and Rosmarie West (‘in the malevolent
club of vile and evil female monsters’). The most important additional aspect
of this story was the hostile reaction to George being inflamed by her
transgression of expectations of female behaviour. Rather than nurturing the
children in her care (and her own), she actively procured child victims for
Blanchard, if only in the form of internet images.
WOMEN AND CRIME 131
George is described as ‘even more disgusting than even Blanchard’

because her acts go ‘against every possible maternal instinct’. Therefore, the
nature of her crime, that is, passing on images of children intended for sexual
purposes, is placed equally alongside the violent murders of Hindley and
West. The same comparison is not found in the representation of Blanchard.
While described as a pervert, he is not placed in the same category of child
murderers Ian Brady or Fred West.
We find something different in the next news item (from the Daily Mail
Online, 3 October 2009). Here there is an acknowledgement that women do
form a significant percentage of those convicted of this type of charges and
that therefore George is not an anomalous case. But this fact is, in itself, used
not as evidence to reconsider the nature of female paedophiles but as cause
for further moral outrage.
When women are as evil as men

It is still difficult to take in: that the catalogue of sexual abuse of very
young children revealed in this week’s paedophile court case was
carried out by a 39-year-old female classroom assistant, at a nursery
called Little Ted’s.
In a sordid three-way exchange, Vanessa George swapped pictures of
children in her care with another woman and a convicted sex offender
businessman.
The fact that two of these paedophiles were female – and also mothers – is
sickening enough without the fact that the victims had been entrusted into
this sick woman’s care by parents who were unaware of her true nature.
But what was even more upsetting about this case is that it subsequently
emerged that 20 per cent of all sexual offences against children are now
committed by women.
And far from the traditional image of these women being vulnerable
individuals manipulated by evil men, experts say most are driven by their
own perversions.
The second woman in this abominable triangle of ‘Facebook friends’,
a prostitute living on welfare benefits in a squalid flat where she sent
pornography from her computer, more easily fits the profile of a woman
paedophile.
But Vanessa George was different – described as ‘an angel’ and a ‘second
mother’ by some parents who used her nursery. She was in a position of
trust. Hers, therefore, was a far worse abuse of innocence.
Apart from this depraved trio, this case shows how frighteningly easy it is
for the internet to bring together perverts like this twisted nursery teacher,
the cunning sex-obsessed mother and a known sex offender.
Along with the usual ‘monsterizing’ language and evaluative terms such as
‘sordid ’, ‘shocking ’, ‘sick ’ and ‘abominable ’, we find additional outrage at the
fact hat George was a female and a mother. Her actions are regarded as even
more ‘sickening’ due to the way she had betrayed trust put in her as a nursery
worker:
The fact that two of these paedophiles were female – and also mothers – is
sickening enough without the fact that the victims had been entrusted into
this sick woman’s care by parents who were unaware of her true nature.
It is odd, on the one hand, to point out that parents were unaware of her
true nature. If they had known, they would have removed their children and
informed the authorities. But on the other hand, this plays an important role
in emphasizing parents’ vulnerability in situations like this. It also allows the
writer to emphasize the abuse of trust.
The text then goes on like this:
But what was even more upsetting about this case is that it subsequently
emerged that 20 per cent of all sexual offences against children are now
committed by women. And far from the traditional image of these women
being vulnerable individuals manipulated by evil men, experts say most are
driven by their own perversions.
The first sentence is phrased in a way that suggests that more women are
now carrying out sexual offences against children, which is important in the
moralization of any issue: it is getting worse! There could have been reflection
on the nature of women as offenders. The statement about this crime being
‘sickening’ as the perpetrators were women and mothers, could have been
questioned. Why is it considered more sickening when women commit
crimes like this one than when men and fathers are the perpetrators?
Finally, in this item, we also find evaluation of the character of the women:
The second woman in this abominable triangle of ‘Facebook friends’,

a prostitute living on welfare benefits in a squalid flat where she sent
pornography from her computer, more easily fits the profile of a woman
paedophile.
But Vanessa George was different – described as ‘an angel’ and a ‘second
mother’ by some parents who used her nursery. She was in a position of
trust. Hers, therefore, was a far worse abuse of innocence.
We are not told why ‘a prostitute living on welfare benefits in a squalid flat’
would fit the profile of a woman paedophile more easily, perhaps what is meant
is that it better corresponds to society’s stereotype of a female paedophile.
WOMEN AND CRIME 133
What we see here again are the structural oppositions of sordidness and
perversion versus innocence and victimhood, which preclude a more informed
debate of the case. The reference to George as an ‘angel’ is represented as
evidence that she was masquerading as someone on the other side of the
structural boundary between good and evil. In terms of Jewkes’ (2004) list
of narratives, we find a very strong theme of the ‘bad mother’, the ‘sexual
deviant’ and the ‘evil manipulator’ (e.g. ‘the cunning sex-obsessed mother’).
In the following text from the Times Online (16 December 2009), we find
just the level of analysis that is missing from the Sun and Daily Mail articles.
Here the fact that women were responsible for a significant proportion of
child sex offences is considered as a reason for society to reconsider some of
its prejudices. However, we still find a number of the usual features used to
evaluate women perpetrators of crime.
Vanessa George and the evil that women do
Yesterday Vanessa George, a nursery worker from Plymouth, was jailed for
an indeterminate period for her part in an internet paedophile ring. George,
an innocuous, overweight woman, just shy of 40, who occasionally liked to
wear her hair in teenage-style plaits, had sexually abused young children in
her care and posted photographs of them taken with her mobile phone on
an online networking site. Whether or not George had done all this for the
benefit of Colin Blanchard, a man she had never physically met but with
whom she shared many of the images on the internet, remains for many
people a key aspect of the case.
For the public, the most obviously shocking aspect of the case was the fact
that George was a woman, a mother, and had therefore behaved in every way
contrary to the instinctive nurturing role with which it is generally assumed
most women are born. There was further disbelief and outrage when it
transpired that George had also posted naked images of her own 14-year-old
daughter online, together with a handful of smutty, sexual comments.
As often happens in such cases, it was hoped that she represented some
sort of monstrous anomaly. But then came the news that George was one
of four women investigated in connection with the case who had allegedly
posted or swapped photographs of children (one of them, Angela Allen, was
also sentenced yesterday). Did they do so for their own sexual titillation?
Or were these sexually vicarious acts, fomented by a man, Blanchard?
Does it matter? And is the sexual abuse of children by women new?
Certainly, as a phenomenon, it feels unfamiliar, something the media didn’t
report until recently and whose existence was denied even in psychiatric
circles until the 1980s – in the same way that incest was denied until 20
years before that. But even now, when similar cases surface all the time,
there is a public reluctance to get to grips with the underlying meaning of
such crimes. It is a reluctance which, say the female psychiatrists who

have done the most to understand such cases, not only gets in the way
of effective treatment and implementing preventative measures but is at
heart a denial of female agency, sexuality and capacity for violence.
In this item, we find a level of reflection on women’s roles in child sex

offences not found in the Sun or the Daily Mail. This is shown in the lexis,
which is much less informal in nature than in our earlier articles. There are no
morally evaluating terms such as ‘shocking’, ‘pervert’ or ‘evil’. This is dealt
with as a ‘phenomenon’ which is connected to ‘psychiatric’ interests. We are
pointed to ‘the underlying meaning of such crimes’ and the implementation
of ‘effective treatment’ and ‘preventative measures’. We are told of a public
reluctance to consider this underlying meaning, although what this might be is
not discussed. Importantly, the text points to the denial of female agency and
women’s ‘capacity for violence’, which needs to be addressed by society.
This more measured approach also suggests that the moral panic
model may be problematic in some cases (Garland, 2008). There are many
mainstream news outlets that will report on such stories using a language of
good vs evil, but we will also find more moderate and informed reactions in
others. The problem with the moral panic model is that it tends to understate
the diversity of voices available in society and to overemphasize the nature of
public and political agreement as to the meaning of social problems.
However, although the Times article is more reflective towards the end,
it still begins with one of the usual narratives associated with female crime
(Jewkes, 2004): we find George being represented in terms of her level of
attractiveness. We are told she is
innocuous
overweight
just shy of 40
occasionally liked to wear her hair in teenage-style plaits.
So on the one hand, she is placed in a discourse that includes psychiatric and
social issues, but on the other, she is still evaluated in terms of her appearance.
She is an ‘overweight’, middle-aged woman who inappropriately wears her
hair ‘in teenage-style plaits’. Further, we find the kind of question being asked
that we would not find in the case of male offenders – that they might be
doing it for the benefit of a woman and not their own sexual gratification
(perversion):
Whether or not George had done all this for the benefit of Colin Blanchard,
a man she had never physically met but with whom she shared many
WOMEN AND CRIME 135
of the images on the internet, remains for many people a key aspect of
the case.
While male sex offenders are usually seen as operating on their own, with
female sex offenders this is sometimes questioned, not least because some
of these women themselves state male influence or coercion as a reason for
becoming abusers. Matravers’s (2010) study of female sex offenders in England
and Wales, whose offences ranged from indecent photography to sexual murder,
revealed that while some of these women did not fit the popular stereotype
of the sexually obsessed, male paedophile, neither were they the coerced
accomplices of predatory men. Some women out of the 30 she interviewed
did claim they were coerced by males to take part in sexual abuse, and did not
consider themselves sex offenders. Matravers concluded that society’s inability
to acknowledge women as ‘real’ sex offenders may actually stop these women
from developing a sense of responsibility for their crimes.
Conclusion
The case studies analysed in this chapter have demonstrated the tendency
of British mainstream media to depict female criminals in terms of a few
standard narrative frameworks. Those revolve mainly around the ‘mad’ and
‘bad’ categories that emphasize either irrationality, plain wickedness or a lack
of human agency. Although women who are violent and/or (sexually) abusive
are generally ostracized in mainstream media discourses, which clearly
state that they have committed ‘evil’ acts, this does not mean that they are
presented as agentive. We have shown that the human agency of the women
in our case studies is denied by portraying them either as mythic, evil and
inhuman monsters or impotent victims.
The visual analysis has suggested that newspaper formatting, particularly
the juxtaposition of images with the headlines and text, can lead to
representations which encourage the reader to draw misleading conclusions
about (female) offenders and limit critical enquiry of the story through which
they are presented. Graphic, explicit and personalized accounts of violent
women function as entertainment, particularly in the popular press, providing
not only human drama and emotion, but sexualized drama and emotion.
Female criminals, it appears, are not only ‘doubly deviant and doubly damned’,
they also hold a ‘double fascination’ for the public, as they horrify and titillate
at the same time. Even more measured and critical media accounts, which
acknowledge female criminality, such as the one provided in the Times above,
still resort to Lombrosian-type descriptions of female offenders’ physical
attributes.
6
The criminal justice

system in the media:
the police
I n this chapter, we focus on media images of the police in the press and
on television that contribute to what Hurd (1979: 121) has called the
public’s ‘half-formed picture’ of policing. The police are represented with
great frequency in the mainstream media, partly due to the dramatic nature
of much of their work, which has great appeal for drama and entertainment,
and also due to their use value to news outlets in terms of their ability to
provide a ready supply of newsworthy events. But what kind of information
about the police and police work is represented? What is not represented?
To what extent do the media present an accurate, coherent and fair view
of what actually constitutes policing and crime detection? In this chapter,
we consider the existing literature on media representations of the police
and then analyse examples that include a range of newspaper reports and
also Britain’s best- known television crime appeal programme, Crimewatch.
In the context of some of the trends identified in the literature, we reveal
that it is clear that there are a number of key discourses of policing that
dominate media representations but, in support of Hurd (1979), show that
these are spectacularly unconnected and may do little to contribute to public
understanding of the police and crime fighting.
Media portrayals of the police

The way the criminal justice system, including the police, have dealt with
offenders has always been of great interest and use to both factual and
entertainment media. At the same time, the police have been concerned with
how they are represented in these media and have attempted to create an
image of themselves as an efficient and effective force, as this ensures public
support. Image making and news management has therefore been a central
concern of the police, who have professionalized their media management
strategies over the years, some of which are borrowed from the corporate
sphere (Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994; Mawby, 2002). Mason (2003) points
out that in a media ecology in which style supersedes content, and in which
personalities supplant policies and photo opportunities replace news, it is
hardly surprising that the police have begun to resort to these strategies.
Recent technological advances have also meant that the police have become
far more accountable.
Two views exist about media images of policing, which Reiner (2007) has
categorized as either ‘hegemonic’ or ‘subversive’. The first sees the police
as controlling media output and promoting a favourable image of itself,
whereas according to the second, the media pose a certain threat to the
police because of their capacity to expose police malpractice and corruption.
The police are now almost routinely filmed during demonstrations on hand-
held cameras, mobile phones and blackberries by technology- savvy ‘citizen
journalists’, who post photographic evidence of police behaviour on internet
sites such as youTube and youTube direct, challenging ‘official’ versions given
by the police. Greer and McLaughlin (2010) note that ‘citizen journalists’
increasingly challenge the role of the police as ‘primary definers’, as they
become part of the news production process itself. This was the case during
the G20 protests in London in 2009, when ordinary people provided ‘proof’ of
police misconduct, and news coverage subsequently turned from a focus on
‘protester violence’ to ‘police violence’.
Yet even in this climate of much greater surveillance of police activities,
the mainstream news media rarely question the legitimacy of the wider
institution of the police, as they are organizationally and structurally oriented
to exaggerate its effectiveness (Reiner, 2010). One medium that has generally
portrayed police officers as central and ‘heroic’ characters has been television,
as Reiner et al.’s (2001) study of the changing representations of the police in
film, literature and television has shown. It is this medium we now turn to.
Representations of the police and policing on TV

TV portrayals of the police and policing cover a range of programmes, from
the fictional police drama, such as The Bill, to more factual shows that
include investigative documentaries, ‘docu- soaps’ and predominantly factual
programmes with dramatic reconstructions, such as Crimewatch. More
CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM IN THE MEDIA: THE POLICE 139
recently, there has been an increase in the blending of the documentary

with infotainment and ‘reality’ TV elements to produce the ‘reality TV cop
show’ (e.g. Police, Camera, Action ) and the ‘media ride- along’ (e.g. COPS )
that either use CCTV surveillance footage or follow the police with hand-
held cameras (Mason, 2003). In the following sections, we consider the main
themes regarding the representation of police and crime-fighting identified
by researchers.
Fictional portrayals
Fictional portrayals of the police in the form of police dramas have attracted
high viewing numbers for many years. Traditionally, they have been ‘television’s
heroic genre’ (Robards, 1985: 24), in which the policeman is the arbiter of right
and wrong, although this image has changed dramatically over the years.
Since the formation of the modern police force in the nineteenth century,
the police have always been concerned with presenting a positive image
of themselves, and they have been portrayed in two main ways, or two
‘mediated ideals’ (Jewkes, 2004), which have continued to the present day:
the approachable bobby on the street who prevents crime, and the detective
who works hard to solve major crime (Leishman and Mason, 2003). Reiner’s
(1994) account of the shifting representations of the police in the postwar
era, The Changing Image of the TV Cop, identifies three key ‘moments’ in
the countless TV representations of the police, in which the police shift from
community carers, to uncompromising macho crime controllers, to a later
combination of both, in a world of crime that has become morally far more
complex and ambivalent. These themes can be identified across the history
of British television drama, although as we shall see, they also run in slightly
distinct ways through news and factual television representations.
The first of Reiner’s categories of fictional representations of policing can
be found in the 1960s series Dixon of Dock Green and its hero, PC George
Dixon, who has come to represent the quintessential traditional British bobby
on the beat in a low- crime, consensual society. Crime was presented as having
roots in social problems, and Dixon was as much a carer as a controller. This
image of the police officer persisted with the advent of Z Cars (BBC 1962–78),
which, however, brought a much grittier edge to the Dixon style of policing
and showed the police as ‘real’ people with failings. Crime, however, was still
seen as a product of social problems and not as unequivocal evil.
In the 1970s, The Sweeney and similar series (such as The Professionals,
Special Branch, Target, and Dempsey and Makepeace ) coincided with the
emergence of ‘law and order’ politics in Britain advocated by the Conservatives
and the police itself before Margaret Thatcher’s election victory in 1979. Reiner
points out that these law and order campaigns featured the same conception
of crime as a product of evil that the TV shows had. The Sweeney portrayed
policemen as vigilantes and tough crusaders against crime. Criminals were
no longer rooted in the wider community but were ruthless ‘villains’ who had
to be stamped out by an equally ruthless police force. In the pursuit of true
justice, rule bending was allowed, as long as it produced the desired result of
keeping the public safe.
The same theme was to continue in Britain’s longest- running police series,
The Bill (ITV, 1984–2010), although the show did highlight seriously corrupt
police characters and ‘ordinary’ policemen with serious moral failings, rather
than portraying the moral certainties of Dixon. Crime was presented in a
complex and ambivalent way, either as a social problem or as acts of pure
villainy. The series also explored issues such as racism and sexism within
the force, as did Prime Suspect (ITV, 1991–96). Two other police dramas that
focused more on issues than entertainment were Between the Lines (BBC,
1992–94) and The Cops (BBC, 1998–); these programmes show officers in
deviant behaviour as part of their work, questioning the legitimacy of policing
at the end of the twentieth century.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, police drama had begun to
represent an even more contestable moral status of policing. For example,
Spooks (BBC, 2002–) reflects the nature of policing in the late- modern ‘risk’
society, with controversial storylines on Muslim suicide bombers and episodes
that focus on the complex relationship between the United Kingdom, Iran and
America. Here policing extends outwards into broader issues of public safety
in which the public itself becomes a more ambiguous concept.
Alongside these more complex representations of the police came
‘forensic science’ police dramas such as Cracker (ITV, 1993–96) and Silent
Witness, (BBC, 1996–), which restored some integrity and certainty to crime
investigation through the application of science and forensic realism. This
trend then went global with the emergence of CSI and its spin- offs, CSI:
NY and CSI: Miami. The CSI programmes may have brought a new moral
authority to TV police series, as they appear particularly authentic. However,
the detectives in these series do not often deal with hardened criminals, but
with acts of crime that might be based on everyday emotional situations
that have got out control, as in the fashion of Columbo in the 1970s and
the Inspector Morse (1987–2000) dramas, which are more in line with the
tradition of the crime mysteries of Agatha Christie.
Finally, one last TV series that needs mentioning is Life on Mars (BBC,
2006–07) and its successor, Ashes to Ashes (BBC, 2008–10), the ‘time-warp
TV cop show’ in which a police officer from the twenty-first century, Sam
Tyler, is transported back to the 1970s to work alongside the unreconstructed,
macho and sexist DC Gene Hunt. Given the great popularity of Hunt among
viewers, it appears that they preferred not the politically correct detective
Tyler from the twenty-first century but Hunt, with his more ruthless approach
to lawbreakers.
Factual portrayals
Since fictional representations of the police have become more complex, it is
police infotainment or reality TV programmes such as Police, Camera, Action,
COPS or America’s Most Wanted that have begun to represent the moral
certitude and police effectiveness formerly provided by the police drama.
Now CCTV footage of suspects being arrested has become ‘the embodiment
of uncomplicated “bite- sized” justice for the mass audiences of the MTV
generation’ (Mason, 2003: 2). With the camera following officers about,
American shows like COPS and Cops in Crisis have the effect of presenting
the ‘underworld’ as the cop sees it. In line with the conventions of reality TV,
there is no narrator; individual cops introduce themselves in close- up and
provide the narrative, which immediately individualizes them and invites the
audience to sympathize with them. The criminals remain anonymous, are
given no voice and are sometimes referred to by the cops simply as ‘the bad
guys’, so that the viewer is encouraged to see police work as a heroic fight
of good versus evil (Valverde, 2006). The producers of these programmes
depend on the police’s cooperation and therefore cannot and will not be
critical of them (Cavender and Fishman, 1998).
The number of factual programmes on the police increased between
1989 and 1999 and can be divided into information- based documentaries,
supportive of the police and made with their cooperation, and investigative
critical programmes, which question police practices and integrity,
highlighting the failures and shortcomings of the institution (Mawby,
2003). The best- known example of the latter is Police (BBC, 1982), a
fly- on-the- wall documentary about Reading police station, which also
challenged the fictional stereotypes that had dominated television police
drama, not least through its technique of long takes over fast editing and
lack of commentary, background music or interviews. Consent came from
senior officers and the Home Office itself, who were anxious to stem a
growing mistrust of the police, particularly among Britain’s inner- city ethnic
minorities. Although initially perceived as damaging to the reputation of the
police, the documentary won acclaim for contributing to changing police
procedures for rape allegations. The follow- up to the first documentary,
Police 2001 (BBC, 2001), was an ‘essentially sympathetic’ portrayal of the
police as overburdened by bureaucracy, with failure being ‘built into the job
description’ (Mawby, 2003: 227).
On balance, while many fictional and factual representations of the police
and policing have been rather favourable and sympathetic, there have been
those that have challenged official discourses and have held the police
accountable. We see roughly the same patterns in the news articles we have
selected, to which we now turn.
The police in the news media

The police as we find them represented factually in the news media must
be understood as part of these changing fictional and factual representations
in the broadcast media and the wider social changes of which they are part.
Here we analyse five news texts to ask what kinds of representations of
police and policing we find and reflect on these in the context of existing
literature on policing. Little has in fact been written on the representation of
the police in the news media. Before doing this, we need to explain precisely
why we find the police so frequently represented in the news media.
A number of pioneering studies in journalism and news production in
sociology and media studies revealed that news about crime and other
aspects of society was not simply discovered by reporters who had a ‘nose’
for a story, but that, for the most part, it came from official sources who could
be relied upon to generate regular supplies of newsworthy material about
crime and crime fighting (Fishman, 1980; Ericson et al., 1987).
Journalists are faced with the daily task of filling space in their news outlet
with stories. To solve this problem, journalists could not simply wander
around a town hoping to come into contact with a good story for each day,
as this would be too time- consuming, although fictional representations of
journalists often depict their roles in this way. The solution is the ‘news beat’.
This simply means that journalists will expose themselves to a few sources
that process many potential news events rapidly. In every city, there will be a
number of such sources, such as the police and the courts, where crimes are
regularly recorded, and council offices, where politicians and officials regularly
make public decisions and statements about issues such as crime. What we
encounter as crime news, therefore, comes in the first place not from the
experiences of the victims of crime, although sometimes a reporter might be
able to include ‘eyewitness’ and victim comments, but from the bureaucratic
process of the police, the courts and the local authorities.
As with news organizations themselves, the police, the courts and councils
must operate as well- oiled bureaucratic systems. So they all process and
present information in a predictable and systematic form. Missing are the
actual micro- processes of how crime is experienced, and how and for what
reasons it is committed, as part of that set of social processes. In Chapter 2,
we looked at the evidence in criminology that connects increases in crime
and hard drug use with poverty and unemployment. But the police and the
courts have no need to process such information, crime will generally appear
as decontextualized and defined only in the terms of the interests of these
organizations.
This method for finding news is important for a second reason. News
requires official sources. It would not be good to have a news story that
was sourced only on the words of a single victim. Fishman (1980), giving
an example of the way a typical crime story gets reported, described how
the reporter first obtained information by calling a police contact and then by
looking at court proceedings. In many of these cases, the news story would
appear in the news outlet as a straightforward report on what was recorded at
the police station or at the court. Those who actually experienced the events
would not be contacted. Fishman explains that this means that what appears
in the media regarding crime and police work is the view of the police and the
courts from reports that are recorded for bureaucratic purposes.
On the one hand, this process is very useful for the reporter, who gets
a regular supply of news. Area police will have people working specifically
to interact with journalists. In turn, this has an important role for the police,
whose actions are given a presence in the news. The police are able to
promote their role, making themselves appear to be clearly carrying out their
role as protectors of the public. Ericson et al. (1987) described this police–
reporter relationship as a symbiotic one which could be used to characterize
all reporter–source relationships. Reporters are reluctant to alienate sources
through negative coverage, as this would lose them their ready supply of
news. Official sources are keen to provide access to suitable material, since
this helps to maintain their public image. Since these authors conducted
their research, there have been a number of important changes in the news
industry involving reductions in staffing and the heightened emphasis on PR
in many organizations, especially the police (Bennett, 2005). As news outlets
operate with fewer reporters, they become more reliant on PR material, which
is increasingly written by their former colleagues who now work to promote
the public view of both public and private institutions. However, the same
principles govern the way we find the police represented in the news.
We now turn our attention to news texts about the police. We have
identified five key themes that are characteristic of news reporting about
police work and have chosen five texts to represent them.
1. Local news and community policing:

the police as ‘watchman’
In our local newspapers, we find routine crime stories in which the police
are defenders of the community. These are useful for the reporter, as it
is important that the local newspaper appears not only to be providing
information about the community but also that it is part of that community,
as the eyes and ears of the public – which is why local titles are often filled
with photographs of local football teams and charity events and will include
any story about ‘plucky’ local people in crime stories. These stories can be
understood as being important for the police, as they allow them to appear
active in the community. As we have seen, there has been a broad trend in
the public perception that small- level community policing, involving patrolling
the streets, has much political import (Jewkes, 2011). We find this in the
following example from the Coventry Evening Telegraph (8 February 2011):
Police warning after string of bike thefts

POLICE in Rugby are warning owners of motorbikes and mopeds to remain
vigilant following an increase of thefts in the area.
On two days last week, three bikes were stolen from driveways in the
town – two of which were secured by disc locks.
Rugby Inspector Paul Judson said: ‘Motorbikes and mopeds are popular
targets for thieves as they can be sold easily or broken up for parts, which
are harder to trace. In addition to this, we believe low- powered motorbikes
are also being stolen to be used as off- road vehicles. These are often
discovered discarded nearby’.
This story is about a ‘string’ of bike thefts which took place over two days.
The police do not actually catch the thieves. What they do in terms of
transitivity is ‘warn’ and ‘believe’. So while no one has been apprehended for
these crimes, the police are performing their role correctly in the community.
They are ‘warning’ the public, and the mental process ‘believe’, like all mental
verb processes, can have a humanizing effect, as it gives access to the
mental world of the social actor. It also suggests that the police are confident
about what they know. This sense would not have been so strong if, instead
of ‘believe’, the story had stated, ‘it may be the case that low- powered
motorbikes are also being stolen to be used as off- road vehicles’ or even ‘we
think ’. This access to the mental world of the police is significant and is also
a particularly strong feature of fictional detective work, which involves the
running of scenarios and predictions.
It is also important here that the Inspector uses two relational verbal
processes that express certainty, as in ‘are popular targets for thieves’ and
‘to be used as off- road vehicles’. While the police may have no idea who the
thieves are, nor how to catch them, these allow them to communicate some
degree of certainty, thereby reassuring the public.
The phrase ‘In addition to this’, is also important. It is a device, often found
in political speeches, that signposts a sense of quantity. The police, therefore,
clearly have a good amount of information and knowledge. Here we get the
sense of a confident police force, who know what to do in such instances of
crime.
Other lexical choices are also important in this text. The inclusion of
‘driveways in the town’ is important, as it signifies the details of the community
setting. Importantly, the police officer who provides the information is
represented through honorifics, as in ‘Inspector’, which helps increase the
sense that the police take this seriously. Had it been simply ‘policeman’,
this would have had a different effect. The officer is also nominated as ‘Paul
Judson’, which means he is also personalized.
As we will see in later examples, it appears that the police, even when they
are unsure about how to solve a case, will provide dense information about
their work and seek to emphasize both their officialdom and their human
face.
We can see here that the police draw on the older ‘watchman’ discourse
of their role in the community. What is rarely found are stories about actual
community policing, discourses of the police as carers, which would involve
specialized officers developing links in areas of high unemployment and
poverty, areas where those involved in crime are known to live.
2. National news and the importance of

police procedures
The next two texts are taken from a national newspaper. Both were generated
by local police in the first place and taken up by national reporters from news
wire services to which their news organizations subscribe. In the first, from
the Daily Mirror (6 March 2011), we find that there are few actual details
about the identities of the accused or the victims or even what exactly the
crime was. It is sufficient to know that we are dealing with a specific kind of
sex offence. Here, as is usually the case, detectives represent themselves
through the jargon of official procedure.
Arrest over hospital sex claims

A hospital worker has been arrested by detectives investigating allegations
that patients were sexually assaulted, police have confirmed.
Bedfordshire Police said the member of staff at Luton and Dunstable
Hospital had been released on bail pending further inquiries into a number
of alleged serious sexual offences against former patients at the site.
The employee, whose age and gender have not been disclosed, has been
suspended by the NHS foundation trust which runs the hospital after
allegations were made about staff conduct on an adult ward.
A police spokesman said: ‘Bedfordshire Police are conducting an

investigation into a number of alleged serious sexual offences on former
patients of ward 17 at the Luton and Dunstable Hospital.
‘A member of staff from the hospital has been arrested, questioned and
released on police bail.’
This event is newsworthy because it is a sex- related story and particularly

because it involves a perpetrator who was in a position of trust over the
vulnerable. In Chapter 5 we saw how this perceived betrayal of trust
overrides the nature of the actual concrete offences through the process of
‘monsterization’. In the case of Vanessa George, we saw how a woman’s
sexual offences were represented as far worse on a moral level when there is
a matter of trust at issue, as she abused children in her care. The same applies
in the hospital, when responsibility for those who are considered vulnerable
is abused. It is not so much the act itself that makes it newsworthy, but the
broader moral issues that can be loaded onto it.
What is most important in this text lies in what is not represented, what
is excluded. We can compare this to what is foregrounded. To begin with,
the identity of the accused remains unspecific and generic. He or she is
represented as ‘The employee’, ‘A member of staff’ and ‘A hospital worker’.
We do not know this person’s exact job, gender or age. We could even say
that there is an overlexicalization of these terms for ‘employee’. Further, the
actual nature of the crime of which he or she is accused is not included.
We are told only that these are ‘alleged serious sexual offences’, which is
repeated twice, and that patients ‘were sexually assaulted’. It is in fact usual,
and intriguing, in cases of sex- related crimes, that what has actually been done
by the offender is often left unspecified in news texts. Non- legal terms such
as ‘serious’ or even ‘perverted’ are often used. What appears to be of primary
importance is simply that the evil- doer has overstepped a moral boundary,
beyond which such details are rendered unimportant. What is represented in
news in terms like ‘gravely serious offences of sexual predators’ can range
from actual physical rape of children to cycling past women in the street and
touching them while doing so. We do not intend to pass any assessment on
the relative gravity of these offences nor of the effects on victims, only to
point out that, for the news media, such differences can be irrelevant.
Finally, we are not told specifically who these patients are nor the
situations in which the incidents are alleged to have taken place, but only that
this occurred on an adult ward. Just as the actual actions of the accused are
not important, it appears that the actual identities of the victims are also not
important. It is sufficient that they were patients and therefore ‘vulnerable’.
The actual details of the setting and circumstances of the events are not as
important as the fact that this is a hospital, where patients should be cared for
and not sexually assaulted. This story signifies a potential ‘monster’ act that
makes all this information unnecessary.
In contrast, what is foregrounded in this text is the official police procedural
jargon. This appears to have an important role in the way that the police seek
to represent themselves. We find police are ‘investigating allegations’ and
‘conducting an investigation’. We learn that the accused ‘has been arrested,
questioned and released on police bail’ and has ‘been released on bail pending
further inquiries’. This is, therefore, a situation that is under control, and the
police are dealing with it thoroughly. In this text, the police themselves are
represented only through ‘functionalization’ (their role in society) and through
honorifics, such as ‘Bedfordshire police’, ‘detectives’ and ‘A police spokesman’.
For this national newspaper, the naming of individual officers is not necessary.
3. Police PR work where no progress has been made

The following text is from the Sun (12 January 2011). This text is different
from those considered above, as it deals with an on ongoing event – the
murder of a young woman whose body was found on Christmas day, 2010,
and the search for her killer, who still has not been identified. This text has
been formed from a police press release. In such cases, when reporters are
seeking more information, it is important that the police are able to provide
something for them, and for the police’s own benefit, it is important that they
appear to be busy and to be providing fresh information. The pattern appears
to be that even if the information provided is later found to be irrelevant or
completely wrong, it will never be mentioned again and will not be addressed
by reporters, provided there is further new information. Crime reporting of
ongoing events is not about evaluating and assessing information nor about
continuity, but is about new information or at least material that can be
presented as new.
WE SAW CAR PROWLING JO DEATH ROAD; COUPLE’S VITAL LEAD

TO POLICE
A MYSTERY car was seen prowling up and down the road where Jo
Yeates’s body was dumped just hours after she vanished, police revealed
yesterday.
A couple walking along Longwood Lane, watched the car make several
passes along the quiet country road.
And they thought it was so suspicious they contacted police – two days
before detectives announced Jo, 25, was missing.
The couple noticed the car on the morning of Saturday December 18. Jo
was last seen alive as she headed home to her flat in Clifton, Bristol, at
around 8.30pm the previous night.
Her body was found on Christmas Day on a verge next to a quarry wall in
Longwood Lane.
Detectives say the mystery car could be a vital lead.
A source said: ‘This could well be highly significant’.
‘The couple were suspicious of the way the car was being driven up and
down the same road.’
They reported it even though Jo’s disappearance had not yet been reported
and was not being treated as a murder case.
‘Police only issued a missing person alert after Jo’s boyfriend Greg Reardon
returned from a weekend away to find her missing.’
Detectives have already appealed for information after a light- coloured 4x4
was sighted in the same road around the time Jo went missing.
Detour Police have not issued a description of the new car or its driver and
have not said if they are linking the two vehicle sightings. A spokesman
said: ‘We take every piece of information we receive from the public
seriously and this is one of many lines of inquiry we’ve pursued’.
Detectives also fear Jo’s killer may have driven her body to Longwood
Lane using a roundabout route to deliberately avoid CCTV cameras.
He could have taken a five minute detour to the lane from Jo’s flat in
Canynge Road that cuts out the main route across the Clifton Suspension
Bridge.
Instead he would have driven via the Ashton Swing Bridge and the Ashton
Court estate.
It is a trip regularly made by locals to avoid the suspension bridge’s 50p
charge. If the killer did use the detour it suggests he has good local
knowledge – and police may be scouring hundreds of hours of CCTV
footage in vain.
This text presents no new concrete evidence that might lead to solving the
crime. It is used to maintain attention on the story on behalf of the news
outlet due to its public profile at the time. The text reports on a couple who
reported that they saw a car making repeated passes of the address where
the murder took place on the evening of the woman’s death. In fact, while
the story is billed as ‘vital lead to police’, and the police communicate its
significance with low levels of certainty using the modal ‘could’:
Detectives say the mystery car could be a vital lead.

A source said: ‘This could well be highly significant’.
In fact, much of this text presents guesswork on behalf of the police who
are represented as ‘detectives’ rather than police as in lines such as:
Detectives also fear Jo’s killer may have driven her body to Longwood
Lane using a roundabout route to deliberately avoid CCTV cameras.
After this point in the text, we find only a series of guesswork by the police.
This clearly has an important role for both the news outlet and the police: the
newspaper is able to give the impression of providing new insights into the
ongoing investigation, and the police, through the quantity of information that
is provided, are represented as active.
The story is presented, and made newsworthy in the text, using a number
of key lexical items. In the headline, we find,
WE SAW CAR PROWLING JO DEATH ROAD; COUPLE’S VITAL LEAD

TO POLICE
And in the first line of the text we read,
A mystery car was seen prowling up and down the road where Jo Yeates’
body was dumped.
The use of the verb ‘prowling’ in the headline and the term ‘mystery car’ in
the lead and text make this sound like a ‘mystery’ to be solved, in the order of
the traditional crime thriller.
In summary, in both the above texts we find discourses of the busy,
attentive police, who present themselves as professional, deliberate and
procedural. This second text can also be seen to draw on the discourses
of crime fiction, in which detective work is often shown as the process of
thinking through likely scenarios and double guessing the intentions and
moves of a killer.
4. Concern for reductions in policing

One common theme in British news outlets regarding the representation of
policing is financial cuts. There is a broader discourse in Britain, discussed
above, regarding the need for ‘traditional’ police tactics to combat crime,
involving single police officers patrolling streets. The text below has been
taken from a local newspaper, The Scunthorpe Telegraph (11 March 2011),
in which a reader has commented on recent news that the local police force
could be reduced through government financial cuts. But the only area for
which the reader identifies the likely consequences of these cuts is in relation
to the kind of policing described in the first text, involving the theft of bicycles,
which is the ‘watchman’ role of the police. They have nothing to say about the
effects on more modern policing methods designed to meet the needs of a
modern society.
Frontline police jobs to go. So what?

WHEN I read of the possibility that 139 police jobs could be lost locally, my
first thought was: ‘Oh dear . . . who is going to make the tea?’ Joking aside
(you thought I was joking?), this could not have happened 20 years ago.
There would have been a public outcry, such was the depth of respect we
all had for the police.
Unfortunately the policies of a succession of left wing chief constables
has left many people with a feeling not of respect for the police but of one
bordering on contempt.
They talk about ‘fewer bobbies on the beat’. Do me a favour – how can you
have less than none?
Here we find the job reductions being attributed to a succession of left-wing

chief constables rather than the funding policies of the central government
themselves. The logic appears to be that the public would have supported the
police had they been generally more effective. In this discourse of ‘left- wing’
police philosophy, we usually find criticism of police roles such as ‘community
support officers’. Such methods, which involve creating relationships with
members of communities in order to stem crime and get to know likely
perpetrators, are generally rejected as ‘soft’ within this discourse. Rather,
the police should walk the streets with a zero tolerance attitude, ‘enforcing
the law’. While such police methods have been criticized as ineffective, they
continue to be widely supported by the public.
Letters such as the one above point to an understanding of crime based
on evil- doing and villainy, rather than the more complex and ambivalent world
of crime and social order that we often find even in police television dramas,
such as The Bill, or in the discourse of the police as carer.
5. Criticisms of the police

In the British news media, we often find stories that point to the shortcomings
of the police. For example, in the Daily Telegraph (15 December 2010), the
story ‘Police failures led to girl’s abduction’ tells of the police handing over a
child to the wrong guardian. What is interesting is that such stories are never
linked to issues of police resourcing raised in the previous item. Rather, they
imply only incompetence and point to issues of leadership and broader political
promises to get police back on the streets or to simplify police procedure. In
the text below, from the Daily Telegraph (12 November 2011), we see how a
police failure is typically raised without overt discussion of the exact problem
or the nature of the solution.
Anarchists had threatened violence week before protests

POLICE FAILURES
SCOTLAND Yard was condemned yesterday for an ‘intelligence’ failure
after it emerged that anarchist groups had been openly threatening violence
at the tuition fees protests eight days before the march in London.
The Radical Workers’ and Students’ Bloc boasted on several known
anarchist websites, chatrooms and Facebook that it would be taking ‘direct
action’ and encouraged the ‘occupation’ of key sites.
A unit at Scotland Yard routinely scans the ‘chatter’ on the internet before
protests, but there are questions over how it either missed or ignored the
suggestion of violence and the involvement of known anarchist groups.
It meant the planning process was flawed and the force was caught short
when trouble flared at the Conservative Party headquarters on Millbank in
central London.
Kit Malthouse, the head of the Metropolitan Police’s watchdog, admitted
yesterday: ‘The problem seems to be a gap in the intelligence. From the
large amount of work they did before the event, did police have the right
intelligence? And what assessment did they put behind that, which meant
they put 250 people on the streets to police it?’
The Radical Workers’ and Students’ Bloc, identified by red and black
flags flown from the roof of 30 Millbank, was organised by the Anarchist
Federation, along with the London Solidarity Foundation. The Leeds Class
War group and the Whitechapel Anarchist Group also confirmed yesterday
that they were involved in the trouble.
The demonstrators mocked the police operation, saying that ‘the few
rozzers who had managed to turn up looked utterly helpless against the
mass that was facing them’.
This text can be seen as part of the trend towards accusations against the
police made possible due to the abundance of amateur film footage of
such events, now easily accessible, along with debates on blogs and social
media which themselves can now become resources for mainstream news
reporters. In the above case, the police were outmanoeuvred by students
who used social media to organize themselves and to alter their movements
to counter police positioning.
In this text, the police are represented as simply carrying out a public interest
role, in which they failed, as ‘it either missed or ignored the suggestion of
violence and the involvement of known anarchist groups’ through ‘a gap in the
intelligence’. In this case, the police were dealing with student demonstrations
against government plans to substantially raise university tuition fees. This
issue is itself omitted from the text. What is foregrounded is the naming of
the demonstrators: ‘The Radical Workers’ and Students’ Bloc’, ‘the Anarchist
Federation’, ‘the London Solidarity Foundation’, ‘The Leeds Class War group’
and ‘the Whitechapel Anarchist Group’.
Represented as the actions not of concerned students but of ‘extremist’
political factions, the motives for this behaviour can easily be sidelined. In fact,
the broader news coverage of the events, in the tradition of news framing
(Bennett, 2005), is one based on conflict rather than the root political issues.
What is also interesting about this text is the fact that precisely who has
made the accusations is not clear and is obscured through the use of passive
verb constructs:
SCOTLAND Yard was condemned yesterday for an ‘intelligence’ failure

but there are questions over how it either missed or ignored the suggestion
of violence.
But when problems occur, they are never linked to the idea that cuts have
made it more difficult to carry out good policing. Nor are changing socio-
economic factors ever linked to making policing more difficult or ambiguous.
This is left to fictional representations, as we saw above. The police never
represent themselves in this broader context, although it is clear that their
actual work in many ways considers these – police seek to present themselves
as dealing procedurally and busily with a villain- based understanding of
crime.
So while there are different discourses about cuts and inefficiencies,
these are never connected to police work, except in the form of an older
notion of the police officer who operates on the streets. Errors in police
work go unexplained in terms of root causes and point only to matters
of management and broader political themes. Problems are tackled by
appointing new chiefs of police and by political promises of being harsher
on criminals.
In summary, in the news media, there are a number of key themes regarding
representations of the police. We find remnants of continued support for old-
style community policing, both in terms of the way the police seek to represent
themselves and in the way the public wants to see policing being carried out.
We find a division between everyday police work and public protection, and the
busy procedural work of the detective. When they are able to do so, the police
seek to represent themselves as busy and highly procedural professionals who
are in control of matters. They might be more personalized in local matters,
and the fictional references to detectives thinking through scenarios in terms
of the possible motives of suspects and of ‘links’ and ‘clues’ is popular. New
information is supplied to reporters with no later reflection on or assessment
of this information. There appears to be broad support for the sheer number
of police, especially those who have a visible presence on the beat. News
reporting offers no detailed insights into police procedures and how these
might be required to respond to actual social contexts. The public is given
no assessments of what kind of strategy works and what does not or why.
Police procedure is criticized only in isolated cases, such as when they fail to
deal with ‘intelligence’. Interestingly, in the same newspaper, public letters still
appear to have faith in the idea of the integrity and moral worth of the lone,
faithful ‘bobby’ patrolling the local neighbourhood.
We find extensive criticism of the police especially due to the use of mobile
phone film footage and the internet, which, however, fails to take the step of
asking broader questions about the role of the police in society. Finally, we
encounter concerns about cuts in police funding, but this is not connected to
other criticisms of the ability of the police to carry out their roles across a range
of contexts, only to the issue of the numbers of police walking the streets.
In the following section, we return to factual TV programming, to Britain’s
best- known crime appeal programme, Crimewatch.
The ‘crimescarer’
During the 1980s, a factual programme format, called the ‘crimescarer’,
gained in popularity, its most prominent exponent being Crimewatch, (BBC
1984–). Focusing on real, unsolved crimes that are dramatically reconstructed
so that viewers can assist with detection, the programme initially aroused the
suspicion of the police, but has since come to represent and symbolize the
close cooperation and ‘natural symbiosis of interest for both the media and
the police in respectively providing and obtaining extensive media coverage’
(Innes, 1999: 258). Here we take a close look at one case as it was presented
on Crimewatch.
Modelled on the German equivalent, Aktenzeichen XY (Case XY . . .
unsolved; 1974–), Crimewatch has been running on a monthly basis since
1984, which was a time when political focus on law and order and public
concern about victims’ rights came to the fore. As Peter Chafer, the founder
of the programme once said: ‘we were concerned as a society about what it
was we were doing to people to make them criminal [. . .] we’ve suddenly said
to ourselves, “To hell with the criminal, what about the poor bloody victim?” ’
(quoted in Schlesinger and Tumber, 1993: 22).
The format of the programme has stayed essentially the same over the
years, with three or four reconstructions of serious crimes and appeals to the
general public for information about criminals and suspects and updates on
previous cases in which the police have made progress. This helps to make
the audience feel integral to the show and gives the (somewhat inaccurate)
impression that Crimewatch succeeds in solving many serious crime cases
in the United Kingdom. For example, on listings guide tv.com, (www.tv.com/
crimewatch- uk/show/19990/summary.html ) the programme is described as
follows:
In the 26 years, Crimewatch UK has been airing it has featured over 2500
cases and as a result of viewers calls providing information many arrests/
convictions have been made.
Crimewatch has a clear reality-television element, and like all reality

programmes, it combines fact and fiction. It was one of the first television
programmes to use dramatic reconstructions, CCTV, amateur camcorder
footage and audience participation. Programme editors are aware that there
has to be some visual impact, while at the same time they are at pains to
draw a firm line between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’. In the words of Peter Chafer,
‘Crimewatch is about [. . .] a rather unpleasant reality [. . .] that is not cops
and robbers a la Dempsey and Makepeace, Cagney and Lacey, The Bill [or]
The Sweeney ’ (quoted in Schlesinger and Tumber, 1993: 24). This claim of
representing ‘reality’ is significant in order to convince the audience of the
authenticity of a crime portrayed. This ‘authenticity’ is provided by the police,
who act as the authoritative source taking the testimony of witnesses, using
forensic evidence and allowing the programme unusual access to cases
under investigation. In return, the programme has been helpful in projecting
the best possible image of the police, particularly in the area of sex crimes,
an area in which relations between the police and (female) public tend to be
fraught, and accusations of sexism, neglect and incompetence are rife.
Schlesinger et al. (1991: 416) found that Crimewatch was more likely to be
watched by tabloid and mid- market newspaper readers, which suggests that
its entertainment element and its emphasis on serious crime, such as murder
and rape, ‘might resonate with and partially reinforce the world of crime as
presented in the “popular” press’. Another problem is the way Crimewatch
pre- publicizes murder cases as a means of gaining the audience’s interest for
the rest of the programme, thereby reinforcing the media’s tendency to cover
a small number of serious but rare crimes (Innes, 1999). ‘White- collar crime’,
such as fraud and embezzlement, and corporate crime (the subject of Chapter
8) which is generally judged by the mainstream media to have less appeal in
terms of its newsworthiness due to its lack of visual appeal, rarely features
on Crimewatch. The same goes for political crime (especially in the case of
Northern Ireland), which is regarded as too sensitive.
The following clip that we have chosen for analysis is taken from a
Crimewatch episode aired on 26 January 2011 on BBC1 and concerns the
successful apprehension and conviction of a sex offender (Glen Tranter) with
the help of the programme and a member of the public. The police turned to
Crimewatch for help after they were unable to charge Tranter because of lack
of evidence. Tranter, who had jumped bail and fled to Spain, featured on the
programme’s ‘Most Wanted’ list (BBC1, 29 March 2010).
According to the programme, a British ex- pat, Michelle Mackenzie, who
happened to watch this Crimewatch episode in Spain, recognized Tranter
as the man who offered his services as a taxi driver in the bar where she
worked. After phoning Tranter on the pretext that she needed a taxi, she
overpowered him in the bar. He was arrested by the Spanish police who,
however, had to release him after 24 hours. By that time, Tranter knew that
‘the game was up’, and he handed himself in. He was flown back to the
United Kingdom, charged and sentenced to six years’ imprisonment. In fact,
other news outlets reported the story slightly differently. Mackenzie’s home
town newspaper, the Bracknell News, took up the story as a report about
a ‘plucky’ local woman. She was reported as someone who took matters
into her own hands, as she was unable to get through to Crimewatch. Blogs
discussing the event in Spain suggested that it was Tranter’s landlord who
persuaded him to finally give himself up. Of course, neither of these details
diminish Crimewatch ’s role in publicizing Tranter’s case. But they hint at the
way that the programme is concerned with self- presentation, in that it omitted
the fact that Mackenzie was unable to get through to the switchboard, and
the requirement for an engaging narrative, as is indicated by the need to omit
others involved in persuading Tranter to give himself up.
What is most striking about researching this story is that it is very hard
to find out what Tranter was actually accused of and tried for. Crimewatch
describes him as one of ‘Britain’s Most Wanted’, as a ‘predator’ and as a
danger to children, that ‘serious allegations of a sexual nature’ have been made
against him. Throughout the clip, we are told that he had to be caught quickly
as he might have reoffended. Yet his actual offences are never specified.
This, too, offers an important clue as to how Crimewatch works ideologically.
Through our analysis of the representation of participants and their actions
in the clip, we will be able to demonstrate exactly how this works. What we
show is that what Tranter has done is of secondary interest. It seems to be of

greater importance who he is, and what it is that the police do.
The ten minute clip (‘How you caught Glen Tranter’) starts with images of
the actor playing Tranter being placed in a prison cell and the cell hatch being
put up, which is shown again at the end of the clip (Figure 6.1 below).
We hear confined, remote- sounding music. The clip then shows how events
unfolded, using a series of reconstructions, some of which use split screens,
as in the American counterterrorism-themed TV series 24 , juxtaposing the
detective team at work and a range of frames showing different shots of
the elusive Tranter first being interviewed at the police station and then on
the run, accompanied by fast- paced music. We see interviews with the real
Lancashire detectives talking about their extensive and systematic efforts to
catch Tranter and their frustration, but also about the dedicated steps they
undertook to apprehend him, and Michelle Mackenzie recounting her story
of how she overpowered Tranter. The clip also features a small part of the
Crimewatch episode from 29 March 2010, in which presenter Rav makes an
appeal to the public to phone with information about Tranter. We also see
authentic arrest footage with the real Tranter being led off the plane in the
United Kingom and being put in a prison van. The clip ends with the same
footage seen at the beginning, in which Tranter’s actor is locked in his cell,
the two real- life detectives praising the efforts of Crimewatch, and Michelle
Mackenzie stating that she was glad she could assist the police.
Figure 6.1 Crimewatch (Source: BBC1; paedophile in prison cell; line drawing by
Jake Scamell and Joseph Paul)
Table 6.1 Social actors in Crimewatch clip

Tranter The police The public Michelle
Mackenzie
Suspect Police (3x) People (2x) Michelle

Mackenzie
Predator Detectives (4x) The Public Michelle (2x)
Dangerous sexual We (9x) Children (3x)

predator
Nasty piece of I (3x) Staff

work
Glen Tranter (10x) DC Irving Holiday Makers
Tranter (8x) Darren Expats
Glen Local Police Spanish

Authorities
He (6x) Lancashire Police You
Mr Tranter Team
Him (5x) Dave

Groombridge (2x)
Man (2x) Darren Irving (2x)
We begin our analysis by looking at the representation of social actors (van

Leeuwen, 1996), both linguistically ( Table 6.1) and visually. We then move on
to look at how these social actors are represented as acting.
In terms of the representation of social actors, it is useful to ask whether
the participants are represented in ways that individualize or collectivize them,
portray them as a generic category of person, or represent them as what
they are (i.e. nomination) and/or what they do (i.e. functionalization). These
choices allow a speaker or writer to implicitly map out a set of identities for
an audience.
To begin with, we can see in Table 6.1 that Tranter is represented as a
generic ‘monsterized’ offender through the use of terms such as ‘dangerous
predator’ and ‘nasty piece of work’. These lexical choices are produced by the
Crimewatch presenter and, in support of the comments of Schesinger and
Tumber, suggest that the material is presented with the same kind of crime
language found in tabloid news. But strikingly, the narration and the police
themselves use a very different set of representational strategies. They do

not use any tabloid- style language. We find extensive use of personalization
and nomination. Tranter is repeatedly called ‘Glen Tranter’ rather than the
more generic ‘offender’ or ‘suspect’. He is also called, almost respectfully,
‘Mr Tranter’ and once even ‘Glen’. Personalization and individualization,
according to van Leeuwen, can be used for a number of effects. On the one
hand, they serve to personalize a story. Van Leeuwen (1996) argues that
one characteristic of tabloid papers is the extensive use of personalization.
For example, politicians in tabloid news are often evaluated not so much
in terms of their policies, that is, what they do and think, but in terms of
their personalities and appearance. As we will show, exactly what Tranter
is accused of appears to be of little importance in the Crimewatch clip. In
the case of the report, the police also describe Tranter as ‘Glen Tranter’,
‘Mr Tranter’ and even as ‘Glen’. They could, of course, have referred to him
simply as ‘Tranter’ throughout. We are given, therefore a sense that they
are very measured in their approach to him. As we will see as we develop
our analysis, one important part of the self- presentation of the police in
Crimewatch is their portrayal as objective and dedicated public guardians,
but also as ‘ordinary’ people.
In terms of representational strategies, the police are mainly functionalized
in the narration through their occupation, as ‘police’ and ‘detectives’, but also,
importantly, they are personalized and individualized, which is done visually
by showing them in close- ups. This brings them close to the public. At the
start of the report, we are introduced to the two detectives in charge of the
case – an older detective seen sipping tea and a younger detective who tells
of this being his first case as a detective. These two shots are in black and
white and played by actors. Then the narrator names the senior detective,
who refers to his younger colleague as ‘Darren’. Both are also named twice
on the screen, once when the actor appears and once when the actual officer
is seen. Importantly, the police are also collectivized as a ‘team’, and the
pronoun ‘we’ is the most frequent representation strategy, used nine times.
Central to police self- representation in the item is the portrayal of a tightly
operating team.
The public are represented as being under threat from Tranter, as ‘people’
and directly addressed as ‘you’ who have caught Tranter. ‘Children’ are
mentioned three times, as evidence of the danger posed by Tranter. Michelle
Mackenzie is nominated and personalized by telling her story of how she
assisted the police.
The visual representation of social actors follows a very similar pattern.
Representations of Tranter frequently show him in extreme close- up. Once he
is seen smirking as the Spanish Police are unable to hold him. His mug shot
also appears throughout the report, sometimes pinned to the wall in the police
station, with the team of detectives busily working on the case in the foreground.
His mug shot reappears when Michelle Mackenzie gives her account. It
appears that both linguistically and visually Tranter is highly personalized.
Crime in Crimewatch is not about patterns of crime and their causes, but about
dangerous personalities. Research into media representations of child abuse
notes that this is one of the key patterns, which results in a highly misleading
picture of the perpetrators. Kitzinger points out that
journalists often promote stock images of child abusers, perpetuating

unhelpful stereotypes which highlight the threat from ‘psychotic’ strangers
and obscure the more common form of abuse; by known, trusted and
‘well- adjusted’ adults. (2004: 125)
As the analysis here continues, we see that it is Tranter’s abnormality that is

emphasized.
A further important point can be made regarding the use of extreme close-
ups of Tranter. In advertising or lifestyle magazines, extreme close- ups are
often used to draw the viewer into the thoughts of the person depicted. As
Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) point out, social distance in images can be
interpreted by the viewer in much the same way as social distance in everyday
situations. Extreme close- ups mean intimacy. The implied closeness with
regard to Tranter, however, can create a sense of danger and oppression for
the viewer. We have more to say about the close shots of Tranter when we
consider what he is depicted as doing.
We find the police represented together in close shot. When they are
collectivized as part of the investigating team, they are shown in medium shot.
When individualized, we see them in close shot, but not in extreme close shot
like Glen Tranter. So in addition to being represented as named individuals, the
police are shown as busy teams working together (Figure 6.2).
The public are not represented visually. Michelle Mackenzie, on the other
hand, is represented visually in close shot when she recounts her experience,
and in medium close and medium shot in the reconstruction. She, too, is
personalized.
We now move to the representation of social action in the Crimewatch
clip. Here we are interested in what people do (van Leeuwen, 1996). Again,
this is one important way in which we can shed light on the ideology that
is implicit in representations. Van Leeuwen draws on Halliday’s (1985) six
categories of verb processes (material, behavioural, verbal, mental, relational
and existential), which we outlined in Chapter 3. These can be used to give
participants different kinds of agency and character.
Verb processes most associated with agency are material processes.
These are verbs which usually denote some kind of material outcome.
Figure 6.2 Crimewatch (Source: BBC1; Police team at work; line drawing by
Jake Scamell and Joseph Paul)
Regarding Tranter, we find that he ‘committed offences against children’.

What is interesting here is that we are not told exactly what his offences
are nor the exact ages of his victims, although it becomes clear from
articles in two local newspapers that reported on the case (see below) that
these offences included touching women in public. We are not told what
relationship he had to the underage girls he targeted and who are mentioned
in the news articles, although we are told twice in Crimewatch what he may
do in the future:
Pose a risk to attack children

Could reoffend
The two news outlets close to where both Tranter and Mackenzie were from
provided a few more details about Tranter’s offences, although the exact
nature of these was never divulged. The Bracknell News (17 December 2010)
explained that
Tranter, of Keighley Road, Colne, pleaded guilty on November 9 to four

offences of indecent assault and another four of sexual activity with a
child.
[. . .]
At Preston Crown Court on Thursday Judge Jonathan Gibson sentenced

Tranter to six years’ imprisonment, put him on the sex offenders’ register
indefinitely, banned him from working with children and made him subject
to a sexual offences prevention order barring him from any unsupervised
contact with children under 16, or allowing them unsupervised into his
home or vehicle.
An earlier article in the Bracknell News (9 April 2010) informed the reader that
Tranter’s offences were
made against girls under the age of 16, ranged from touching to indecent
assault and dated back to 1992.
The Citizen (11 November 2010) included the same information, but added that
he confessed to riding up to a number of women on a bike and fondling

their bottoms.
What is of interest here, and especially in the Crimewatch programme, is the

difficulty we have in ascertaining the exact nature of Tranter’s crimes, for
example, whether the girls he attacked were strangers or known to him. What
we do find in the Crimewatch clip are many more verb processes that point to
his character and mental condition:
Was not fazed

Was calm
Was relaxed
Was defensive
Knew the game was up
Thought he was above the law
Treated the police with contempt
Thought he was untouchable.
Here we find the relational verb processes ‘ he was not fazed; was defensive/
calm/relaxed ’, and mental verb processes, ‘ knew the game was up; thought
he was above the law; treated the police with contempt ; and thought he was
untouchable’, used as evidence of his criminal mind. ‘Calm’ and ‘relaxed’
appear as inappropriate states for someone in such a position. We are told
of his arrogance, for example, when the SIO says that ‘he thought he was
untouchable’, although what this means is not explained. It would appear
that Tranter would have offended on some kind of impulse and then fled
out of fear of imprisonment rather than out of some kind of contempt for
the law.
Verb processes are used to overtly state that he was certainly not a normal
individual:
Is a strange individual
Left a big impression on people.
It is clear that we are being told how atypical the offender is and how easily
identifiable he is as a criminal.
We also find many non-transactional material processes, which are used
to give a sense of Tranter’s movements. These represent actions which have
no material outcome (e.g. the man walked):
Disappeared
Didn’t hang about
Seizing his chance
Went on the run
Fled Lancashire
Fled the country
Handed himself in
Spending months on the run
Could flee.
These verb processes are an important part of the narrative. Much of the drama
of the narrative is created by the representation of Tranter going on the run. This
is important for the corresponding, careful coordination of efforts by the police
that we come to next. In these faster paced scenes, accompanied by ‘action’
music, we find the use of the split screen for dramatic effect. The clip shows
three different shots of Tranter loading the car and going on the run.
In summary, Tranter is represented more in terms of what he is rather
than what he has done. Crimewatch is not so concerned with the details of
what Tranter has done. The verb processes used to describe him are used as
testimony to his criminal mind and to his role as a fugitive in the narrative.
The verb processes used to represent the police are of two kinds. For
the most part, the actions of the police are represented through material
processes. As is to be expected, they are the agents in this report. The clip
begins with more tabloid- style language used in the Crimewatch voice- over:
Conduct a manhunt
Snare
But then there is a systematic list of procedural-type verb processes:
Routine investigation (a nominalization)

Brought into custody
Interview
Charge
Bail
Build a case
Try and locate
Circulate information
Work with insurance company
Concentrated their efforts
Contacted local police
Exhausted all their leads
Coordinated months of extensive enquiries
Most of these are transactional verb processes with a clear material outcome,
which throw up clues and evidence. Clearly, police work on this investigation is
busy, thorough and constant. Perhaps most importantly, the account is given
as part of typical police procedure. This is not a kind of work that involves
internal bureaucracy or individual initiatives, but rather is like a machine that
operates in an ‘exhaustive’ way, ‘concentrating efforts’ and so on. Even when
the police are described as being unable to find Tranter, they are represented
as being ‘unable to track ’ him. Police work is about carefully co-ordinated
procedures that involve tracking and following leads and certainly not about
personal motives, vindictiveness, or prejudice.
We also find this sense of busy activity and carefully honed teamwork
in the visual representation of social action (see Figure 6.2). When Tranter
goes on the run and the police are shown preparing for public calls from
Crimewatch, we see focused and dedicated teams at work. While Tranter
is on the run, they consult maps and point at computer screens. While they
are taking calls, we see split screens to signify massive co-ordinated activity
collecting information. In fact, as noted earlier, Michelle Mackenzie, who saw
Tranter on Crimewatch, was unable to get through to the switchboard, so the
police first knew of his arrest some time afterwards. But this representation of
massive amounts of calls being taken and of police/Crimewatch coordination

is an important part of the way that the programme communicates its public
interest role, through which the police are able to show themselves as
uncompromising in their allocation of resources and efforts.
The other notable category of verbs representing police action are mental
and relational processes:
Knew he had connections

Suspected he was working in Slough
Concerned about
Feel nervous
Fear he could offend again
Were delighted
Some of these serve to indicate that the viewer is being given access to the
inside details of police procedure, as in ‘we suspected’. But others importantly,
by giving access to the internal world of the police, indicate that they are also
highly human. The younger detective tells the viewer that he ‘feels nervous’
before Crimewatch is aired, whereas the more senior detective states he is
‘concerned’ about Tranter being on the run. So on the one hand, the police are
objective, driven, organized and thorough, but on the other, they are human
and approachable. For example, when the first detective is introduced, we
see him sipping tea and looking out of a window thoughtfully. Later we see
him awake in bed at home when he receives the news of Tranter’s arrest in
Spain. Both these shots are played by actors, whereas the interviews are with
the real detectives.
Music and sound in the Crimewatch clip

There is another important aspect to the representation in the clip that
plays a significant semiotic role: the use of sounds and music. These are
also important in the communication of discourses. Gorbman (1987) has
suggested that music can be used for four purposes in film: to communicate
emotion, providing insights into the inner world of actors; to communicate
about the nature of settings; to create continuity, linking characters, actions
and scenes; and to represent action, suggesting speed, motion, confusion
and so on.
In the Tranter clip, music is used to represent action. When we first see
Tranter in prison, we hear regularly struck, dragging, largely discordant piano
or guitar notes being played heavily, with little melodic expansion. The
pace and articulation of the notes suggests something grave and menacing
(Machin, 2010). The limited nature of the melodic movement suggests
confinement. The slight reverb that can be heard suggests isolation (van
Leeuwen, 1999). The notes sound slightly ‘dirty’, as opposed to a clean,
warmly ringing instrument, connoting something unclean. Together, these
semiotic choices suggest that something unpleasant is taking place.
In this scene, and throughout the report, we hear different ‘diagetic’
sounds. These are those sounds that are generated from within the scenes,
not those placed in from outside, such as the music. Just as in linguistic-
based discourse analysis, in which we ask what kind of lexical choices serve
to foreground and background discourses, we can do the same for sound. We
can ask what kinds of sounds have been altered by being amplified, expanded
in terms of duration, or given reverb; we can ask if there is true perspectival
depth or if some sounds have been suppressed or removed.
In the first scene, along with the menacing isolated piano notes, we hear
highly amplified footsteps in the corridor, the jangling of keys and the locking
of the cell door. These sounds are naturalistic and diagetic, but are very loud.
When we soon afterwards cut to a scene in the police station where Tranter
has been brought in for questioning, we do not hear sounds such as footsteps
and doors closing. Clearly, the use of these sounds in the first scene has the
effect of making the prison appear harsh and jarring. Over this part sequence,
the viewer is told, ‘this is how you caught Glen Tranter’. The loudness of
these sounds, we might suggest, also help to foreground the qualities of
crime-fighting and punishment.
Throughout much of the clip, diagetic sound is heightened in dramatic
moments. When a sound recorder is switched on in the police interview
room, it makes a loud sound as if sign- posting an important element in police
procedure and evidence gathering. Later, the sound of an aircraft is heard
loudly when we are told that Tranter was in Spain. There is also increased
sound in the scene in which Tranter is apprehended by Mackenzie, increasing
the dramatic effect.
Other music we hear in the report consists of the ‘something about to
happen’ music while the police explain the investigation and then the up-
paced action music when Tranter goes on the run and when the police later
coordinate to gain a European arrest warrant to have him returned to Britain.
To sum up, this Crimewatch clip uses a range of dramatic devices, including
those borrowed from the fiction of crime- fighting and detection, editing
such as split screens, music and sound. The fast- moving style and visually
varied presentation, by means of split screens, adds to the drama and acts
as a suspense- building device for the audience. Certain events have been
removed to foreground Crimewatch ’s role and to create a tight narrative. The
offender, Glen Tranter, is personalized, and his criminal nature is emphasized.
The police are represented as a tightly run, well- organized and thorough
organization that also has a personal face. While Crimewatch uses tabloid-
style crime categories, the police are respectful and foreground procedural
matters. What is of note in this representation is that there is little information
about what offences Tranter has committed. In the tradition of the reporting of
sex crime, these details are unimportant. The Crimewatch reconstruction clip
encourages us, through intensive personalization, to think only about a single
evil- doer who thinks he is above the law, who is relaxed when interviewed
about his crimes, who smirks to himself when being released from custody
and who is ‘a strange individual’. The viewer is told on three occasions that
Tranter must be caught, as there is a danger he will reoffend. This falls into
the discourse of the stranger sex attacker. We are not told if Tranter’s victims
were known to him. Newspapers mentioned he had touched women in the
street, which suggests that he may approach strangers, but this was never
clarified.
What is clear is that this clip draws attention to extreme crimes; while
Tranter was described as one of ‘Britain’s Most Wanted’, it seemed unclear
what his offenses were. The clip also, by emphasizing the fact that Tranter
could reoffend, encourages the view of the stranger sex criminal. The viewer
is constantly shown Tranter’s menacing image, either in the background or in
close- up, for example, when Michelle says she has children herself and that
‘something had to be done’. These ‘mug shots’ of criminals are usually shown
in the round- up Photocall and have been referred to by Crimewatch presenters
Ross and Cook as ‘television’s answer to the wanted poster’ (1987: 111).
Crimewatch gains its legitimacy through its public service remit and the fact
that it has been instrumental in solving a number of criminal cases. In 2000,
the Crimewatch team claimed that since 1984 there had been 582 arrests
directly resulting from the programme (Marsh and Melville, 2009). This also
works as a defence against critics who have accused the programme of using
gratuitous violence and provoking public fear of crime, particularly through its
dramatic re- enactment of crimes in the reconstructions (e.g. Sparks, 1992;
Schlesinger and Tumber, 1993; Leishman and Mason, 2003; Jewkes, 2004).
Reconstructions are obviously a very important part of Crimewatch. Although
there is an argument in favour of these reconstructions, there are also some
ethical concerns in using this method. Sparks, for example, points out that it is
‘not a trivial matter that “crime scarers” such as Crimewatch [. . .] employ the
same syntax of depiction, narration and editing as crime fictions’ (1992: 156).
The influence from these popular representations of crime detection is clearly
visible in Crimewatch and can be seen in the use of split screens, which,
as in popular TV programmes (e.g. Spooks; 24 ), are used to heighten the
‘drama’ and to demonstrate the concerted efforts of the police to apprehend
criminals.
If these are all critiques of the programme from the point of view of
criminologists and media studies scholars, members of the public have also
expressed concern about Crimewatch and accused it of ‘moving away from
its traditional roots of helping the police with their inquiries’ and being ‘in
danger of turning into a morbid form of entertainment’ (Revoir, 2007). Revoir
quotes one viewer in the Mail online as saying that
[e]ach reconstruction seems to be less about imparting important facts and

details that may help solve a crime and more about the director, producer
and editor trying to enhance their CVs by making homilies to Guy Ritchie or
24 or whichever American drama they have been watching.
The idea that Crimewatch generally mobilizes viewers to help the police has
also been challenged by some viewers, especially by ethnic minorities, whose
experience of violence had resulted in negative encounters with the police and
who were therefore sceptical about the force’s effectiveness and its public
relations efforts. (Schlesinger et al., 1992). Women with lived experience of
violence who have used the police and those from ethnic minorities are most
critical of the programme’s presentation of the police (Dobash et al., 1998:
57). It appears that gender, ethnicity, and social and personal experience all
impact on how viewers interpret Crimewatch.
In this chapter, we have first given an overview of the changing fictional
representations of the police on TV, which have varied, portraying images of
the police as heroic, reliable and efficient, but also as inefficient, corrupt and
deviant. We then analysed a number of newspaper texts from the regional and
national press, pointing to five key discourses typical of news reporting about
police work. We finally explored police depiction on Crimewatch, conducting
a detailed multimodal analysis to do so. This analysis has shown that through
a number of linguistic and visual strategies, the programme unambiguously
portrays the police and the public as working in a successful partnership in
the fight against crime and presents the police as efficient and effective yet
also human and caring. For the police as an institution, image is a crucial
component in our late- modern mediated society, in which contentious and
conflicting images of its work exist.
Conclusion
The academic literature on crime fighting and the media presents us with a
number of key ideas. Representations of crime fighting have been popular
in both entertainment and factual media due to their dramatic nature. These
have changed over the past decades, with a shift from simplicity to ambiguity
and complexity, as the nature of policing and villainy has also become more
complex, although there has been a more recent return to certainty through
the introduction of high technology and science into forensic police dramas.
Other academic work shows how the police seek to present themselves
positively, as bobbies on the beat or as hard working detectives, although
there is also a tendency to criticize the police for incompetence. We also
considered the central role of the police as crime definers in their close
relationship with the news media. In this chapter, we have demonstrated that
a detailed linguistic and visual analysis allows us to draw attention to the finer
details of how these processes work. We looked at the strategies the police
use in press releases to gloss over actual lack of concrete actions, in order
to signify ‘activity’ and to align themselves alongside, and include, the public,
either through the use of pronouns or through a lexis that connotes ‘locality’.
We showed how stories about police action background actual offenders,
and even the nature of victims and circumstances as they foreground police
procedure and simple connotations of evil. It is indeed fascinating that
in Crimewatch in the case of one of Britain’s ‘Most Wanted’ the alleged
crime of the offender is not specified and that his actions may have been
misrepresented by the programme, as our research has shown. Only analysis
at the detailed level provided by a critical multimodal analysis can provide
this level of information. When we watch crime programmes and read crime
news, we may get an idea that what is being communicated is rather vague
but the kind of analysis we have conducted here allows us to identify exactly
how this is done.
7
The criminal justice

system in the media:
the prison
I n Chapter 6, we began our analysis of media representations of the criminal

justice system, focusing on the police. In this chapter, we turn to yet another
major criminal justice sector, the prison. Media discourses and images around
prison abound, although very few people seem to be aware of the actual
realities and routines of prison. This is odd given the fact that England and
Wales have one of the highest incarceration rates in Western Europe (154
per 100,000 head of population). But people’s familiarity appears to be
based more on the ‘symbolism of the prison’ (Levenson, 2001: 14), which
is provided by portrayals of prisons and prisoners in newspapers, broadcast
news, television and film. In the news media, the sensationalist nature of
prison- related stories, particularly in the popular press, demonizes offenders
and labels prisons as too ‘soft’. Criminologists and media scholars have noted
how the news media in particular reflect and reinforce the current punitive
approach to offenders, acting out the prevailing political discourse of law and
order in contemporary Britain.
We first consider the existing literature on media representations of prison
and then analyse examples of newspaper reports, aiming to show how these
reflect and promote the populist and punitive penal policy of the government.
We then move on to popular and factual portrayals of prison on TV, conducting
a multimodal analysis of a prison documentary. We also explore the question
of whether these representations, which form an important counterpoint to
newspaper reporting of prisons and prisoners, can stimulate public awareness
and debate about penal reform.
The prison
The practice of imprisoning people as a form of penal sanction began only
about 200 years ago. Before that, prisons had the sole function of holding
people before trial. Punishment itself tended to be public and harsh,
depending on the severity of the crime. With the decline of public corporal
punishments in the second half of the eighteenth century, and with the end of
penal transportations to America and Australia in the mid- nineteenth century,
imprisonment became the normal form of punishment. One important
commentator on these changes in punishment was Michel Foucault. In
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault (1977) investigates
the shift from corporal to carceral punishment. His explanation for the prison
was that it became understood in the new industrial order that placing people
under surveillance was more efficient and profitable than subjecting them to
an exemplary form of punishment.
This emergence of punishment behind prison walls meant that it became
‘wrapped in an impenetrable veil of secrecy’ (Cohen, 1985: 57) and that the
public since then has had to rely on the media for its understanding of prisons
and how they function. This understanding, however, is rather limited. Fed on
a constant diet of media sensationalism, which covers only the most extreme
incidents in prisons, such as riots or deaths, the general public knows very
little of what actually goes on in them. For example, newspaper readers may
only be aware of the suicides of ‘high- profile’ cases, such as Fred West and
Harold Shipman and the attempted suicide of Ian Huntley, as prison suicides
tend to go largely unreported. Prisoners are constructed within a discourse
of fear, dangerousness and brutality (either from other prisoners or staff), and
prisons are presented as little more than ‘holiday camps’ (see, e.g. Mason,
2006a). But people who work with prisoners, such as prison governors, point
out that daily life in prison is far removed from either of these extremes (e.g.
Coyle, 2005). These distorted media representations have the capacity to
shape people’s opinions about prisons, so much so that they not only take
prisons for granted, but are also reluctant ‘to face the realities hidden within
them’ (Davis, 2003: 15). Most press coverage of prisoners therefore ‘merely
serves to inflame the readers’ moral outrage and confirms their prejudices’
(Jewkes, 2005: 26). One reader’s comment to an article in the Daily Mail
Online about a prison ‘riot’ at Ford open prison in January 2011 (‘Ministers
were told riot jail was understaffed weeks before it was torn apart’, 14 January
2011) is perhaps illustrative of this:
Dear Mr Clark, Please listen to a few honest and well tried suggestions.
A prisoner should be allowed 1. (one) straw filled mattress (such as the
CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM IN THE MEDIA: THE PRISON 171
soldiers were issues with in the last war) 1 (one) bucket. 1 (one) iron bowl,
to wash in and feed from. 1 (one) spoon. 1 (one) ten minute slop out all
on his own. Food, just to preserve existence and as much exercise as he
wants in his 6’x 8’ cell. NOT the Savoy treatment now dished out
Many criminologists (e.g. Mathiesen, 2000; Jewkes, 2004; Mason, 2006a, 2006b)
have commented on the media’s contribution to the rise of this penal populism.
Mathiesen (2000) argues that the nature of the public debate around crime and
punishment is no longer based on the prison’s legitimation but driven by political
opportunity in which the media construct the prison as the only solution:
In the newspapers, on television, in the whole range of media, the prison

is simply not recognized as a fiasco, but as a necessary if not always fully
successful method of reaching its purported goals. The prison solution is
taken as paradigmatic, so that a rising crime rate is viewed as still another
sign that prison is needed. (Mathiesen, 2000: 144)
The majority of the mainstream media in Britain create support for the penal
system through their constant over- reporting of violent and sex crime and
their representing offenders as the dangerous ‘other’, which is something we
have observed throughout this book. Criminologists Scraton and McCulloch
(2009: 16) note that sensationalist media coverage combined with political
opportunism are behind the contemporary ‘war on crime’, in which the
language of criminal justice has become ‘infused with military metaphor’
and those who were previously defined as ‘at risk’ have now become ‘the
risk’ to be monitored, controlled and imprisoned for the sake of the law-
abiding citizen. They regard these shifts in contemporary criminal justice
and a more general ‘genealogy of violence and incarceration’ as having their
historical roots in the colonial past of England and other European countries
and the violent treatment of indigenous people in Australia and America.
The massive increases in imprisonment in these states – particularly in the
United States, but also in England and Wales – since the 1990s evidences an
over- representation of the poorest and most marginalized, which according
to Scraton and Mculloch works ‘to maintain social hierarchies and hide the
structural violence of global and domestic capitalism by “disappearing” its
victims’ (2009: 15). Prison abolitionist Davis goes as far as saying that the
prison has become ‘a black hole into which the detritus of contemporary
capitalism is deposited’ (2003: 16).
We will now illustrate our argument with an analysis of several examples
of mediated discourses on prison. Three are taken from national newspapers
and one from a TV documentary about an English prison. A study by
Mason (2006a) revealed two main discourses through which prisons and
prisoners are constructed: one, prison as a soft option, and two, prisoners
as an uncontrollable danger to a fearful society. Alongside representations
of this kind, Mason also noted an absence of reporting in both print and
broadcast media of major prison issues, such as the underlying reasons for
overcrowding, that is, more recent criminal justice policies introduced by the
Conservative and Labour governments. As a result of these, the number
of people given a custodial sentence at magistrates’ courts has risen from
25,016 to 63,396 between 1995 and 2006, with the number of incarcerated
women doubling over the same period (Mason, 2006a: 261).
Below, we provide an analysis of two newspaper articles which have these
two dominant discourses as their theme.
Prison as a soft option

The first dominant media discourse about prisons is their construction as
‘liberal’ regimes, lacking any real punishment and as places where prisoners’
rights are given precedence over victims’ rights. The following article from
the Daily Mail Online (3 August 2008) can be seen is a typical example of this
discursive construction of prisoners:
Pampered prisoners supplied with £221,726 of PlayStations

Prisoners across the country are being supplied with computer games
consoles costing thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money.
The Prison Service has spent £221,726 on PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo
systems and software to keep jailed criminals entertained. Ministers have
previously admitted spending only £10,000 on the machines.
An audit carried out last month on Justice Secretary Jack Straw’s orders
turned up 12,948 game consoles in prisons and young- offender institutions
in England and Wales, showing how widespread their use is among the
83,600 prison population.
While most of them were bought by inmates themselves, a total of
1,715, costing between £100 and £300 each, was provided by the Prison
Service.
The Ministry of Justice recently announced restrictions on the use of the
games but critics said this was because the extent of their use was going
to be made public.
Officials at the department admitted that there was nothing to stop
violent 18- rated games being played on taxpayer-funded machines and
Figure 7.1 Pampered: a prisoner plays a PlayStation game in his cell (Source:
Mail Online, 3 August 2008; Image: Rexfeatures)
conceded that prison authorities may have purchased violent titles for
some inmates.
Tory MP Nigel Evans, to whom Mr Straw disclosed the figures in a letter,
said: ‘Does being sent down for five years of hard PlayStation playing serve
as rehabilitation or punishment?
‘This is rewarding criminal behaviour with equipment which many victims
of crime could only dream of affording for their children. People will be
outraged by this revelation.’
Shadow Justice Secretary Nick Herbert said: ‘While Ministers protest that
there is no money for prison places or rehabilitation schemes, they waste
taxpayers’ funds on luxuries which prisoners shouldn’t have’.
‘Offenders should be learning and preparing for the world of work, not idly
playing Grand Theft Auto and preparing to return to crime.’
It was disclosed recently that thousands of inmates have access to Sky TV
and computers, and last week it was revealed that more money is spent
on food for prisoners in police cells than for NHS patients.
Prisoners are allowed to play 18- rated games such as Grand Theft Auto
and Manhunt, which are notorious for their extreme violence.
However, from October, 18- rated titles will be banned in prisons altogether
and the use of consoles will be restricted to only the best behaved prisoners
or those on suicide watch.
In his letter to Mr Evans, Mr Straw claimed he had not known of the

arrangement until recently. He wrote: ‘I was unhappy when I first heard [in
April] that public money was being spent on games consoles, and ordered
a review of this policy’.
‘I have now decided that, with immediate effect, no public money will be
spent on games consoles.’
A Ministry of Justice spokesman said decisions about purchasing consoles
for inmates had been made on ‘a prison- by- prison basis’.
The article above is clearly highly critical of prisoners having access to game
consoles in prison. However, as Jewkes (2002) points out, privileges such
as in- cell TVs are normally part of strict incentives schemes designed to
ensure good behaviour and they are at least as beneficial to the prison regime
as to the inmates themselves. However, the article does not consider the
consoles as part of managing prisoners in overcrowded conditions, in which
many will be spending 23 hours a day in cells. Training and rehabilitation are
mentioned in passing but without consideration as to what, exactly, these
mean. The content of the article itself is based on a letter to the newspaper by
a conservative MP that describes and comments on a report commissioned
by the Labour Justice Secretary Jack Straw.
This article uses a number of linguistic strategies that convey the
discourse of prison as a soft option and implies that prisoners should
be subjected to a stricter regime. In the first place, we can see how the
text works ideologically at the level of social actor analysis. These social
actors fall into three categories: the recipients of the consoles, that is, the
prisoners, the public and the officials. We must recall here that discourses
are comprised of a number of components: participants, settings, times,
values, ideas and sequences of activity (van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999)
and, crucially, that any one of these can signify other components in a
discourse. So choices in the representational strategies of social actors
alone will in itself signify a particular set of association of ideas, values and
sequences of activity.
The dominant social actors in this article are the officials. As Table 7.1
shows, they are both nominated, as in ‘Nigel Evans’, ‘Nick Herbert’ and
‘Jack Straw’, and collectivized as ‘ministers’ and ‘officials’. They are also
functionalized, as in ‘MP’, ‘Shadow Justice Secretary Ministry’ or ‘Justice
Spokesman’, using honorifics. The information in this article is represented
through the viewpoint of the authorities and officialdom. The main social
actors in this article are therefore both anonymous and individualized
government and political authorities. This helps to communicate a discourse
of facticity. We can ask what kinds of officials are absent, for example, social
Table 7.1 Social actors in Daily Mail article (13 August 2008)
Recipients of consoles Public Authorities
Prisoners Taxpayers The Prison Service
Prison population Taxpayers Ministers
Offenders Taxpayers Secretary Jack Straw
Criminals People Ministry of Justice
Inmates Officials
Prison Authorities
Tory MP Nigel Evans
Shadow Justice Secretary

Nick Herbert
Ministry of Justice Spokesman
workers, prison officers and prison reform workers, who are also involved in
the supervision of prisoners, and who may also have been able to explain the
reasons for some people being given game consoles. Van Leeuwen (2008)
draws our attention to those areas in which micro- processes are glossed over
by broader concepts and abstractions. ‘The Prison Service’ is personified as
an agent, as in ‘The Prison Service has spent £221,726’, although it is not
an individual agent, but a broad and diverse set of institutions, with people
performing different roles.
The next set of social actors are the recipients of the consoles. These are
collectivized as ‘prisoners’, ‘offenders’, ‘criminals’, ‘inmates’ and the ‘prison
population’. None are individualized or nominated, and it is worth noting that
three different terms are used. Why not simply use one of these terms, such
as ‘offenders’?. The story could have informed the reader about particular
cases in which consoles were given to particular prisoners and why this is
considered important and useful by the prison managers.
In these representational strategies, we find only the generic category
of ‘criminal’. There are no longer nominal groups used to specify types of
offenders and sentences. We are not told if it is mainly young offenders in low
security prisons who are given consoles or if this applies equally to violent
offenders in high security facilities. As such, the article encourages the reader
to think about all people in such institutions as being the same. There are
no differences and certainly no explanations, such as that young offenders,
caught selling drugs, are now in low security, preparing for probation, during
which time it may be best for them to be more integrated into normal, daily
life activities. The discourse in this article is one in which prisoners are
constructed as feral criminals who are being ‘pampered’.
Important in the discourses communicated by this article is the image of
a prisoner playing on a console (Figure 7.1). Although he is represented as an
individual, in that there is only one person in the photo, he is also anonymized
through the cropping of the top of his head. He is also made generic through
the presence of the tattoo on his upper arm, which is reminiscent of the
stereotypical representations of prisoners we sometimes see in films and
which visually represents the barrier that separates ‘them’ from ‘us’. Just
as with the stereotypical images of young people (‘hoodies’) we discussed
in Chapter 4, this image does not so much document than symbolize a
prisoner. It is odd that he is represented as posing without his shirt. On the
one hand, this could be so that the tattoo is displayed. But this could also
connote an atmosphere of relaxation rather than strict discipline, portrayed
through the presence of personal belongings, including a TV, and the bright
setting with a curtained window. This does not connote a particularly harsh
prison life.
The last social actor category is the public. Here, too, we find
overlexicalization, with ‘taxpayer’ being used three times: in ‘taxpayer-funded
machines’, ‘thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money’ and ‘taxpayers’ funds’.
The public are not represented as a society that is concerned about the future
of these inmates but only as ‘taxpayers’ who might be outraged to find their
money being misused by the government to ‘pamper’ prisoners.
Finally, the absence of a social actor through the use of a passive verb
construction in the following sentence is also significant: ‘Prisoners across
the country are being supplied with computer games’. We are not told
who is doing the supplying, although the article states that most of the
consoles were bought by the prisoners themselves. We learn that the
Prison Service spent the money, but not who specifically gave the consoles
to the prisoners. This is an important omission. Are they being given the
consoles by prison guards, by social workers, by psychologists? We are
later told that ‘The Prison Service has spent £221, 726’, but we could have
been informed who exactly is responsible for this. Was it those involved in
rehabilitation or some other kind of management? And what exactly was
this strategy?
The representation of social actors in this article signifies a discourse
in which criminals, having an easy life, waste taxpayers’ money and are all
presented from an official point of view involving information about the actions
or comments of the ‘Prison Service’, the ‘Prison Authorities’ and the ‘Ministry
of Justice’, along with important political actors, who are nominated (‘Justice
Secretary Jack Straw’, ’Tory MP Nigel Evans’, ‘Shadow Justice Secretary

Nick Herbert’). It is around this discourse that other details are placed.
In the first place, much effort is put into creating a sense of how out of
control this phenomenon is. We are told that it involves ‘Prisoners across the
country ’, that it is taking place ‘in prisons and young offender institutions in
England and Wales’. What is omitted is the extent to which types of prisons
this applies most. We are told that their use is ‘widespread’ among the
83,600 prison population, that ‘the extent of their use was going to be made
public’ and that ‘thousands of inmates have access to Sky TV and computers’.
Here we find what van Leeuwen (1996) calls ‘aggregation’, the representation
of social actors in terms of numbers and statistics, which is again meant
to demonstrate the sheer numbers of prisoners having access to these
‘luxuries’. Van Leeuwen notes that aggregation is often used to manufacture
consent opinion, in this case that too many prisoners enjoy amenities they do
not deserve.
Importantly, the information in this text is presented as something that
has been deliberately concealed from us. We can see this in the first place in
the use of quoting verbs, which are an important device through which the
utterances of social actors can be evaluated by an author:
Officials at the department admitted

Officials at the department conceded that prison authorities may have
purchased
Mr Straw claimed he had not known of the arrangement.
Quoting verbs such as ‘admitted’ and ‘conceded’ suggest that the information
was given unwillingly and had been previously hidden. The quoting verb ‘claimed’
suggests that Straw is most likely not telling the truth. We can illustrate this if
we replace them for other more neutral or assertive quoting verbs:
Officials at the department said there was nothing to stop violent 18- rated
games being played.
Mr Straw announced he had not known of the arrangement.
This choice completely removes any sense of something being hidden. On

the one hand, journalists must strive to make their information unique, or of
special interest, and present it as being revealed to the reader through the
skills of the reporter. But here the concealment is evidence, in the first place,
of the inadequacy and untrustworthiness of the government, who are clearly
not acting in the interests of the taxpayer. In contrast, the opposition politicians
do show their concern. In each case, their comments are represented through
the neutral quoting verb ‘said’.
We also find this sense of deceiving the taxpayer in the following

sentences:
Last week it was revealed that more money is spent on food for prisoners
in police cells than for NHS patients.
The report turned up 12,948 game consoles.
In the first sentence, food costs are ‘revealed’ and the report ‘turned up’
the consoles, as if all had been concealed. It is of note that in the first
instance, costs associated with the upkeep of prisoners are often used as
one justification for non- custodial sentencing.
Finally, later in the article, we do find reference to what actually should
happen to people when they are in prison:
Tory MP Nigel Evans said ‘Offenders should be learning and preparing for
the world of work, not idly playing Grand Theft Auto and preparing to return
to crime’.
In fact, those who have served custodial sentences are highly likely to
re-offend, and it appears that they are generally given little in terms of
improved possibilities. In this article, a link appears to be made between
playing a video game and criminal behaviour.
What the article could have informed us about is the use of consoles in
the management of the behaviour and morale of those in prison. It could
have related this to kinds of prisoners, institutions and sentences. It could
also have included different kinds of official sources, such as social workers
or prison teachers. It could have referred to the broader social interest of
rehabilitation and the running of prisons and use of resources rather than
only the interests of the taxpayer. The article demonstrates no interest at all
in these very important issues. The production of a discourse about ‘feral’
prisoners who live at the expense of the taxpayer, is the aim of this piece, as
can be seen from the evidence of its linguistic and visual choices.
Prisoners as a danger to a fearful public

Mason (2006a) found that the prisoner is consistently constructed as a social
threat in three principal ways: by employing lexical choices such as ‘thug’,
‘lag’, ‘beast’ and ‘killer’; by highlighting the most dangerous offenders; and
by creating a fearful public with stories of escapes, lax security and early
release.
The article below from the Daily Mail Online (13 March 2007) reports on
the possibility that women’s prisons might be shut down in the future. We
find this is presented in terms of the most dangerous female offenders in

the country and an insufficiently harsh approach to them. The story is based
on the suggestions made by Labour MP Baroness Corston in a Home Office
report, informed by criminological research on women prisoners. According
to this research, two in three women prisoners have mental health problems,
at least half report being victims of childhood abuse or domestic violence,
and 40 per cent have tried to kill themselves. When Labour came to power
in 1997, the female prison population in England and Wales stood at 2,675.
In 2006, it had risen to 4,392, although there was no corresponding rise in
the number of women committing more serious crimes. Nine out of ten
women are convicted of non-violent offences, and most women in prison are
mothers (Benjamin, 2006). Most of these women will have left school before
the age of 16 and will have no formal qualifications, and many will have been
diagnosed with mental illness (Sim, 2009). Corston’s suggestions follow
from a tradition of thought that sees women’s prisons as destructive and
serving to punish women who have already experienced abusive and difficult
lives. What we see is that the article, while dealing with some of Corston’s
reasons, recontextualizes the events by focusing on dangerous offenders and
criminals escaping punishment.
Women’s prisons ‘should all close within a decade’.

Only the most dangerous female criminals should be kept behind bars, a
controversial Government report has said.
Thousands of women currently sentenced to two years or less would
escape jail.
And those who are such a threat to the public that they must be sentenced
to custody would no longer go to one of the country’s 15 women’s prisons
which would all close.
Instead, killers such as Rose West serving life for the murder of ten young
women and girls would be sent to ‘homely’ local custody units.
There they would be allowed to live as a ‘family unit’ with between 20 and
30 other women prisoners, organizing their own shopping, budgets and
cooking.
The units would also allow them to stay close to their families.
The radical proposals are made by Labour peer Baroness Corston, in a
report commissioned by the Home Office.
She said there are far too many vulnerable women in jail, many serving
short sentences.
Instead of being imprisoned, the vast majority of the 4,300 behind bars
would be ordered to attend new community centres during the day.
They would be given help to kick any addictions they have, and to stop
committing crimes such as shoplifting, before returning home at night.
All the women’s jails would shut within the next decade, and could instead
be converted into prisons for men.
John Reid is facing chronic overcrowding in men’s prisons, forcing him to
take the drastic step of begging the courts to jail only the worst offenders.
Closing the women’s jails would help the Home Secretary to hit his target
of finding 10,000 extra prisons places over the next five years, which is
expected to cost £1.5 billion.
But allowing thousands of women criminals to walk free would also be
politically awkward for Mr Reid, who is desperate not to appear ‘soft’ on
crime.
Lady Corston, formerly chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party, sought
to justify the shake- up by claiming custody is ‘disproportionately harsher’
on women.
Many female criminals are victims of abuse such as domestic violence,
she said. Sending them to jail means they lose their home and children.
The report claims: ‘Women and men are different. Equal treatment of men
and women does not result in equal outcomes’.
Lady Corston said that as a starting point only women given two years or
more should be kept behind bars with community punishments ‘the norm’
for non-violent offenders.
Women should also never be sent to jail to ‘teach them a lesson’.
Lady Corston said small custody units were already operating in the US
and Canada.
Other proposals include an end to the routine strip- searching of women in
prison, and better jail sanitation.
The report, commissioned following the deaths of six women at Styal Prison,
Cheshire, called for action on its findings within the next six months.
It was seized on by penal campaigners, who have long insisted too many
women are jailed.
But Home Office officials privately questioned whether the political will
exists to adopt some of its most controversial ideas, or whether cash is
available to build the new community centres and custody units.
Home Office Minister Baroness Scotland said: ‘I very much welcome
this report and have given an undertaking that the Government will look
carefully at the issues it raises and the recommendations it makes’.
Vulnerable women who are not a danger to society should not be going
to prison.
At first glance, the headline ‘women’s prisons “should all close”’ could be
understood as this suggestion being supported by the Daily Mail. However,
the inverted commas indicate that the paper actually distances itself from the
proposal and is merely quoting Baroness Corston. And while the latter part
of the article does reveal some of the actual issues regarding the vulnerable
nature of most women who find their way into prison, this is relegated to the
end of the article after a number of strategies have been used that serve to
recontextualize these suggestions into the discourses described by Mason
(2006a).
Below the headline, the first thing the reader sees is an image of smiling
child killer Rose West and, further below, a picture of Baroness Corston,
also smiling, accompanied by the caption ‘Killers like Rose West would
be sent to a “homely” local unit according to radical proposals made by
Baroness Corston’. Although neither the report nor Corston mentions Rose
West, the article uses her as a way to frame the item. That the image of
Rose West is placed above the one of Corston, and that it features at all in
an article on what is a very serious prison issue, is significant. It serves as
an immediate delegitimation of Corston’s proposal, which is called ‘radical’,
because ‘thousands of women currently sentenced to two years’ would
‘escape’ jail.
The article also mentions ‘overcrowding in men’s prisons’ but remains
uncritical about recent criminal justice policies under New Labour which have
caused this very increase in the prison population:
John Reid is facing chronic overcrowding in men’s prisons, forcing

him to take the drastic step of begging the courts to jail only the worst
offenders.
This statement appears to be in support of a discourse which advocates the

building of more prisons, otherwise the Home Secretary would have to release
all but the very worst offenders. The outrage here is emphasized by the fact
that he would have to be ‘begging’ courts to carry out this request. As Home
Secretary, Reid would, in fact, have power over the courts and not have to
beg them. Rather than question the current trend of increased incarceration
for both women and men, the article above constructs the topic through a
‘victim- driven discourse of dangerousness’ (Mason, 2006a: 255) which runs
through the whole text. This is underscored by the language choices that help
to emphasize the danger to the public. To begin with, we find that
[. . .] the vast majority of the 4,300 behind bars would be ordered to attend
new community centres during the day
Thousands of women currently sentenced to two years or less would

escape jail.
But allowing thousands of women criminals to walk free [. . .]
Here again we find the strategy of ‘aggregation’. The exact number is not
given; the aggregation gives the impression of dealing with facts, while the
numbers are, in fact, vague. Is it two thousand or four thousand women?
Stating that it will be a ‘vast’ majority of incarcerated women who will be sent
to those units, also sounds like an overwhelming number.
Any oppositional and anti- prison discourse is smothered by the (visual)
suggestion that high profile prisoners such as Rose West would pose
a security risk and social threat, should the suggestions be turned into
practice. The narrative not only draws on the ‘public fear’ motive but is
also infused with the ‘prison as soft option’ agenda, since women would
be allowed to live as ‘a family unit’, even ‘killers such as Rose West’. The
same message is communicated early in the article, when we are less than
helpfully told,
Killers such as Rose West serving life for the murder of ten young women
and girls would be sent to ‘homely’ local custody units, ‘allowed to live as
a family’, ‘stay close to their families’.
What we can see here is that a serious issue is recontextualized in terms of a

notorious mass killer rather than in terms of the vulnerable women who would
benefit from the government’s change to its prison policy. In fact, what we
find here is exactly the opposite of what the government report is arguing.
We also find the use of ‘structural oppositions’ (van Dijk,1998), where
opposing classes of concepts are built up around participants. As we have
pointed out in previous chapters, one concept may imply its opposites without
them being overtly stated. Here, ‘killers’ are described as going to ‘homely
units’, ‘families’ and ‘community centres’. The word ‘killers’ sit in opposition
to ‘homes’ and ‘families’, with their connotations of safety and comfort. Killers
should not be placed in ‘community centres’.
We are also told that the women prisoners would ‘escape jail’ and ‘walk free’.
The government report, in fact, recommends that vulnerable and mentally ill
women should not be sent to prison at all. But the verbs ‘escape’ and ‘walk
free’ suggest a lenient prison regime and laxity on behalf of the authorities.
As with the previous article on pampered prisoners, we find a discourse of
society being soft on criminals. This is given away immediately in the article,
when Corston’s proposal is delegitimized as ‘radical’. One could argue that

most controversial and radical is the policy of sending such vulnerable women
to prison in the first place. While working on a project on mental illness for the
Home Office, one of the authors of this book interviewed women ‘offenders’
in Holloway prison, in police stations and courtrooms in London. It appeared
as unjust and unproductive that people who had such difficult and tragic lives,
who had through abuse and poverty fallen into patterns of minor offending,
should be given prison sentences. This fact is mentioned in the news article
itself:
She said there are far too many vulnerable women in jail, many serving
short sentences.
Many female criminals are victims of abuse such as domestic violence.
But crucially, this appears only after the recontextualization through mentioning
‘Rose West’, ‘killers’ and that ‘thousands of women’ would ‘escape jail’.
Of note in the article is the way that certain facts which could have been
used in support of Corston’s proposal are mentioned only in passing. The
article refers to ‘the deaths of six women at Styal prison’ as the reason behind
the Home Office reports, but remains silent on the cause of their deaths, which
was suicide. This is typical of the way that nouns (‘deaths’) and nominalizations
can be used to silence agents, causality and temporality. Instead of ‘deaths’,
a verbal constructions such as ‘. . . after six women committed suicide’
could have been used. And there could have been discussion of the fact that
because of understaffing and poor training of officers the prison failed not
only these women, but also their families. Instead we are informed that the
Home Office report ‘was seized on by penal campaigners, who have long
insisted too many women are jailed’.
To sum up, our analysis of these two articles appears to confirm Mason’s
(2006a) argument that the popular press rarely report on prison issues in
an informed way. Instead, its coverage often serves to further stigmatize a
population that is already at the margins.
It would, however, be inaccurate to state that all mainstream UK
newspapers have a ‘pro- prison agenda’. Generally, the ‘quality’ press tends
to bring ‘unpopular’ prison problems to the fore. Jewkes (2002) points to the
Guardian in particular for bringing issues such as overcrowding, drug addiction,
mental illness, suicide and racism among inmates and staff to the public’s
attention. We have therefore decided to look at one newspaper article from
the Guardian (14 January 2011) about the ‘riot’ in Ford prison in January 2011.
Ford is a category D open prison which prepares prisoners who have moved
there from higher category prisons to be prepared for their eventual release.
We consider only the first few paragraphs of the article below, which was on
the Guardian ’s front page, and then move on to its ‘special report’ about Ford
inside the paper.
Ministers were warned about riot prison

Security shortcomings exposed days before inmates went on £3m
rampage
Justice ministers were warned of serious security shortcomings at Ford
open prison just two weeks before balaclava- clad inmates reduced parts
of the jail to ashes in a drunken New Year rampage.
A report delivered to the justice secretary, Kenneth Clark, on 16 December
warned that a ‘minimal number’ of junior staff were left to patrol the jail at
night, even though they had only limited training.
In the early hours of New Year ’s Day, 40 of the 500 prisoners at Ford, near
Arundel, West Sussex, caused £3m damage after staff tried to breathalyse
some of them. The level of violence was unprecedented for a minimum-
security jail.
The report by the prison’s Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) showed
that searches of the prison using sniffer dogs over the past three years had
found an extraordinary amount of illicit goods, including mobile phones,
drug paraphernalia and 51 litres of alcohol.
At first glance, some of the lexical items chosen to report on the ‘riot’, such as
‘balaclava- clad inmates’ and ‘drunken New Year rampage’ look like examples
of the language commonly used in the popular press. The article also
presents only the official view, provided by the IMB. However, the Guardian ’s
special report in the same issue provides a far more critical account told by
ex- prisoner Erwin James, who visited open prison North Sea Camp to
interview some of its inmates, and the Governor about North Sea Camp,
Ford and open prisons in general. Below we quote excerpts from this article
(Guardian, 14 January 2011, p. 17):
Rebuilding trust, or getting off lightly? The truth about life in an open
prison
In the wake of the Ford riots, ex- convict Erwin James visits North Sea
Camp
[. . .]
Distorted media reporting of open prison life often gives the impression
that such places offer little punishment. Lurid stories of parties with
smuggled- in booze and other headline- grabbing regulation breaches feed
images of open prisons as holiday camps and call into question their
relevance or necessity. Though without precedent, the riot at Ford open

prison in Arundel on New Year’s Day, which caused about £3m damage,
was indeed directly linked to smuggled- in alcohol.
[. . .]
I asked Paul for his thoughts on the Ford riot. I’m not going to lie to you.
Open jails have a mixed clientele, if you like. You’ve got long-term prisoners
who have a serious perspective of jail because they know what is at stake.
[. . .] For me, open jails should just be for people who need to be resettled
and need help to get used to the idea of getting out. The people who
started the riot at Ford probably just had a few weeks or months to do and
just didn’t care.
Ali, serving four- and- a- half years, was transferred from Ford to North Sea
Camp a few weeks before the riot. I asked him what life was like at Ford.
Was it really awash with alcohol? ‘To be honest there were lots of drugs
and lots of alcohol there – excessive amounts’, he said. ‘But I think it was
that, coupled with staff attitudes, that probably what caused the riot.
[That] their attitude was despicable is the nicest way I can put it. Hardly
any prisoners were allowed out to do community work and only a very
small number were actively being resettled. The system wasn’t geared
to getting people back out and functioning in the community. I wasn’t
surprised about the riot.’
[. . .]
In his office I meet the governor, Graham Batchford, who began his career
as a prison officer and over 26 years worked his way through the Prison
Service ranks. [. . .] ‘If you think how much the world changes in 10, 15
or 20 years, we’ve got many people who have been inside longer than
that. Those are the prisoners that open prisons serve best. It’s about
reintegrating them back into the community, breaking them back into
society gently.’
The Guardian ’s special report is a far cry from the usual misinformation that
is spread about (open) prisons. For a start, it is critical of ‘distorted media
reporting’ of prison as a soft option. It then privileges the views of an
ex- prisoner and several other prisoners about conditions in open prisons and
their experiences with them. We also learn that staff attitudes may have
been one reason behind the ‘riot’ at Ford. While Ali, a former inmate at Ford,
concedes that there were ‘excessive amounts’ of drugs and alcohol in the
prison, he also states that ‘staff attitudes towards inmates were despicable’
and that only a minority of prisoners were allowed into the community,
which after all forms an important step in the process of their reintegration
into society. Another important feature mentioned by inmate Paul is that
the problem might have been short-term prisoners who have no ‘stake’ in
behaving well and that prisons like Ford should only be for prisoners nearing
the end of a longer sentence. These are all important considerations which
the public should know about. It is perhaps significant that the ‘official’ views
given by Ian, the gate officer, and Governor Graham Batchford are placed at
the end of the article and echo the views of the prisoners who are allowed
to speak out first. In this article, the ‘hierarchy of credibility’ (Becker, 1967),
that is, the likelihood that professionals’ opinions on controversial issues
are given prominence, appears reversed. In mainstream media coverage on
‘riots’, the views and comments of prisoners are not necessarily believed and
the prevailing argument is one of prisoners out of control (see Scraton et al.,
1991). As Scraton et al. point out, although the prison ‘riot’ is ‘manifestly an
expression of violence, usually directed towards the fabric of the prison’, it
also carries ‘a rational, conscious dimension. It is intended as a vehicle of
change’ (1991: 67; our emphasis).
The analysis we have provided here is but a ‘snapshot’ of the news coverage
on prisons, and the evidence we present of the mainstream papers’ ‘pro-
prison’ agenda (with the exception of the Guardian ) is therefore slim. It would
take a far more extended qualitative and quantitative analysis to corroborate
our small- scale qualitative linguistic analysis. However, our view is supported
by research conducted by the Prison Media Monitoring Unit (PMMU) in
the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies [JOMEC]) at Cardiff
University. The aim of PMMU and their monthly bulletin is to ‘highlight errors,
misinformation and distortion about prison issues’ which it believes ‘may
have a significant effect on government policy and public attitudes towards
prison, punishment and social control’ (PMMU, 2006: 2). The findings of the
Unit’s analysis of 19 UK national newspapers in February 2005 were that
87 per cent of stories about prison did not offer any criticism of the penal
estate in the United Kingdom, except for some, half of which appeared in
the Guardian and only one in a tabloid newspaper, the Daily Mirror, which
together with the Daily Telegraph reported on a report by the Howard League
of Penal Reform calling for an end to strip- searching for children in prison. The
PMMU February 2006 Bulletin concludes:
It is predictable that the tabloid newspapers, given their pro- prison agenda
as this bulletin shows, should choose not to offer any criticism of the prison
system but it is of great concern just how Britain’s newspapers choose
to report penal issues. This bulletin has illustrated both quantitatively
and qualitatively how British prison and its prisoners are constructed as
largely dangerous and a constant threat to the tax- paying public, enjoying
soft regimes with privileges their crimes and suffering victims dictate
they should not have. The reliance on government, criminal justice and
punitive- minded sources simply serve to reinforce this partial, and often
false, media- constructed landscape of what prison is and who prisoners
are. (PMMU, 2006: 24; emphasis in original)
At the outset of Chapter 7 and Chapter 6, we pointed out that the public’s
perception of the criminal justice system is just as much influenced by its
representation on television and film, and even literature, as it is by news
reporting. These factual and fictional representations in the broadcast
media form an important counterpoint to newspaper reporting of prisons,
and there has been some discussion among criminologists about whether
they may have a role to play in advancing penal reform (e.g. Mason, 2003;
Wilson and O’Sullivan, 2004; Jewkes, 2006). Prisoner autobiographies may
have a similar potential, although they reach a much smaller audience (see
Nellis, 2002). Before we analyse the TV prison documentary Wormwood
Scrubs (May 2010), we consider criminological and media studies research
that has dealt with the contents and possible reform functions of these
programmes.
The prison in the popular media

The world of prisons and prisoners has featured extensively in most television
genres, such as the sitcom (Porridge ), entertainment dramas (Bad Girls, Within
These Walls, Prisoner Cell Block H ), more ‘serious’ prison dramas (Buried,
Oz ), reality TV programmes (The Experiment, The Real Bad Girls ) and the
prison documentary (e.g. Strangeways, Lifer: Living with Murder, Jailbirds,
Holloway ). Prisons have also featured extensively in film (e.g. The Shawshank
Redemption ). While some (e.g. Wilson and O’Sullivan, 2004) have argued
that the role of these popular TV programmes and films is to educate as well
as entertain and to advance the cause of penal reform, others (e.g. Mason,
2003; Jewkes, 2006; Jarvis, 2006) are more sceptical. Jewkes does not
question that some of the TV prison programmes (e.g. Bad Girls ) have the
potential to raise the audience’s awareness of the grim realities of prison, but
she doubts that they can actually set an agenda for penal reform and change
people’s perceptions about prisoners and prison. If we take a look at the
Bad Girls website we can see that the programme producers do take prison
issues seriously, but also that they straddle fact and fiction:
Bad Girls has set out since its first series to raise awareness of what
happens in women’s prisons and to highlight the issues women in prison
face. Those involved in its production have gone to great lengths to try to
make it as accurate as possible, but it is a drama series and life in prison is
not always so exciting, so it would not be fair to think that everything Bad
Girls shows us actually happens on a regular basis. (www.badgirls.co.uk/

library/wip-1.html)
The series’ story lines have included the same issues and problems that
beset the Prison Service in real life, such as drugs and alcohol abuse, self-
harm, protest, bullying, AIDS and suicides, and broader political issues such
as prison privatization and the rising number of female prisoners and mothers
in prison. The website offers information not only on the episodes themselves
but also on ‘real’ women’s prisons, which is provided by criminologists and
psychologists at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, King’s College
London. We learn that 47 per cent of women prisoners have no educational
qualifications; that 25 per cent have been put in public care; that 75 per cent
have mental problems and illnesses; that half have been the victims of
domestic violence; and that at least a third have suffered sexual abuse.
Despite the very commendable efforts to reflect on these issues in dramatic
form and to attempt to inform the public, the question remains as to whether
programmes such as these can actually change people’s perceptions of
prisoners. We come back to this point below.
The prison film

Despite the best efforts of prison reformers to convince the public that
prison is inhumane and expensive, the prison population in Britain and
across the Atlantic continues to grow. Wilson and Sullivan (2004, 2005)
argue that it is precisely because the prison film frequently depicts prison
as a brutal institution that it has the potential to raise public awareness and
debates about penal reform, perhaps more so than academic criminology
ever could. They suggest that Hollywood prisons films (e.g. the Birdman
of Alcatraz ) have always sought to humanize the offender, but do concede
that, for example, the Shawshank Redemption, a film many Americans cite
as their favourite, has done little to raise their awareness of and empathy
for ‘real’ prisoners.
A number of critical filmic accounts of British penal institutions produced
in the late 1970s and early 1980s ( A Sense of Freedom, Scum, McVicar )
which are anchored in prisoner autobiographies, certainly signalled the need
for prison reform. More recent films based on prisoner autobiographies,
such as Chopper (Australia) and Bronson (Britain), trade more on the prison
‘hardman’, glamorizing the ‘celebrity criminal’ as a cool popular culture icon,
yet still manage to present prison as an insane, inhumane and damaging
institution and their protagonists’ life of crime as ultimately futile (see Mayr,
forthcoming). Ultimately, however, the reform functions of the prison film may
be rather limited (e.g. Nellis, 1982; Mason, 2003b, 2006b; Jewkes, 2011).
The prison documentary

It appears that the prison documentary, with its more explicit agenda
to depict prison experience, may be more successful in informing the
public about the ‘pains of imprisonment’ (Sykes, 1958) and possibly
changing their perception. Although some prison documentaries are
simply voyeuristic, there have been a number of critical and thoughtful
British prison portrayals (e.g. Strangeways , Lifer: Living with Murder,
Jailbirds , Holloway ). However, as Jewkes (2011) cautions, like any
other media form, the documentary has a mission to entertain as well
as inform. We can see these two conflicting aims at work in the prison
documentary Wormwood Scrubs (ITV1, May 2010), which we have
chosen for analysis. What we see is that prisoners and prison officers are
treated as individuals with personal concerns and problems. However, the
prisoners in particular tend to be represented at the same time as generic
types, such as the ‘prison hardman’, and the entertainment requirement
intersperses more reflective moments with those of relentless violence,
restraint of inmates and other disturbances – which may not be entirely
reflective of the everyday extreme tedium and pointlessness of prison
life. Subtle interpersonal dynamics are less present than high emotion
and conflict. Most notable, in the documentary tradition of Direct Cinema,
is the reliance on lingering shots of inmates reflecting, even in silence.
While these connote veracity and the fearlessness of the camera, they are
able to gloss over actual sociological- type truths. While the documentary
certainly appears successful in representing the lives of inmates as tragic,
it is questionable how much sociological insight is actually conveyed. We
get a sense of these individuals simply existing in this context, which is,
in fact, a result of specific political and legal decisions, many of which
have their origins in populist discourses and fly against evidence provided
by government research itself.
The documentary was made by Wild Pictures, who also produced an
acclaimed ITV1 documentary series on the women’s prison Holloway.
Wormwood Scrubs was shown in two hour- long episodes on 10 and 17 May
2010. It was watched by 4.98 million people, or a 21.7 per cent share of the
9 to 10 p.m. audience (www.digitalspy.co.uk). Here we analyse excerpts from
the second episode (17 May 2010).
The aim of the documentary is to show what life inside this particular prison
is like, presenting the views of both inmates and staff. Wormwood Scrubs
(locally known as ‘the Scrubs’) is an inner west London category B men’s
prison which accepts men over 21 years of age from the courts within its
catchment area. The voice- over informs us that it is ‘one of Europe’s largest
jails holding up to 1280 prisoners’, whose ‘main function is to hold inmates on
remand or until they move on to other jails’ and that ‘repeat offenders pass in
and out of these gates with an alarming regularity’.
The second episode (parts of which are transcribed and analysed below)
focuses mainly on the accounts of three prisoners (seen in the opening
scenes) and several prison officers. A great deal of the footage was shot in
the segregation unit (‘Seg’) of the prison.
The first few minutes of the episode have no comment, but consist of a
compilation of images of prison life interspersed with images of two female
opera singers performing to inmates in the prison chapel. Some of these
images reappear later in the episode. This constant shifting between the
‘sublime’ world of art and the ‘dark’ world of the prison makes for arresting
viewing. The operatic music is used to communicate a sense of tragic pain to
the otherwise brutal sequence.
During this opening sequence, we see a close- up of part of a handcuffed
prisoner’s back; a prisoner being restrained and carried away by four officers;
officers running across the prison yard; a close- up of two prisoners in the
chapel listening to the singers; another blurred close- up of a prisoner looking
through a cell door window; a prisoner being wrestled to the ground by four
officers; a female officer cuddling and comforting an inmate who has just
self- harmed; and officers in riot gear. Life in prison is introduced in the first
place not as one characterized by tedium, stillness and emptiness but as
relentlessly eventful.
This sequence is followed by close- ups of the three prisoners who later
talk about themselves: the first one looking slightly ‘lost’ off frame; the
second one in a side shot smoking, looking thoughtfully out of window;
and the third one looking into a mirror. At this stage we do not yet know
their names, but by showing them in medium and close shots, they are
visually individualized. We also see them in intimate moments of self-
reflection which, like mental processes in linguistic representation, help
to give a sense that we are being offered access to the mental world of
the participant. These are different from the close- ups of an offender we
described in Chapter 6, in which the repeated showing of a sex- offender’s
mug shot in a Crimewatch reconstruction was used to create a sense of
menace and threat in the viewer.
Before they are allowed to speak, all three prisoners are introduced by
their full names through the voice- over, and the nature of their offences and
their names appear as a caption on-screen as the prisoners begin to speak:
they are ‘42 year old recovering drug addict ’ Neil McCarthy’, whose sentence
is for burglary; ‘prison hardman ’ Jason Cox, in prison for GBH; and ‘first-
timer ’ Jason Rock, who is a ‘dangerous driver ’. They are therefore nominated
semi-formally and categorized. Categorizations like these, according to van
Leeuwen (1996), label people not in terms of being an individual but as a
generic type. In this sense, these people may never really become more than
prison types.
We then learn about what are presented as these men’s life histories and
daily existence in prison. They are allowed to speak with little interruption from
the interviewer, who is never seen and who avoids morally loaded questions.
We are informed about the first two prisoners’ problematic upbringing. Neil
McCarthy, who ‘was born and bred on a council estate in West London’, was
left by his mother and brought up by his grandmother, whose death may have
contributed to his descent into criminal behaviour, as the voice- over implies
(‘McCarthy started thieving soon after his grandmother died’).
McCarthy: The longest I’ve been out in 20 years is 11 months. I had a great
childhood as far as I am concerned. My granny she washed me
she fed me I loved her dearly still do she died in 84 it seems like
yesterday it’s still very touchy.
The voice- over then introduces ‘prison hardman’ Jason Cox as McCarthy’s
‘best mate’, who ‘like McCarthy, has spent most of his adult life in jail’. This is
his account, interspersed with the voice- over:
Cox: I’ve been coming here fucking years and years and years. All my
life I’ve never had family . . . in and out of care and the from the age
of 16–17 I’ve been in and out of prison. This is my family. All these
people here are my family I don’t have no other family except for
them this is my home.
VO: Cox has found it almost impossible to survive outside prison, but
inside his hardman image has earned the respect of other inmates
Cox: I feel comfortable to be here at this present moment I’ve got a
nice life in prison. Safe, got a roof over my head you know I came
to prison weighing 10 stone now I am nearly 14 stone I ain’t got
nothing to worry about.
The voice- over then comments on ‘24-year- old first timer Jason Rock who
seems to be deeply traumatized by having caused the death of his best friend
through dangerous driving’ (‘that’s a sentence in itself losing my best friend’).
He tells the viewer:
Rock: I crashed a car and my best friend died and eh I got a five-year
sentence for him death by dangerous driving. I know it is down to my
actions really and I . . . but that’s just . . . that’s a sentence in itself
losing my best friend like. He was my best mate so that’s hard.
Giving prisoners uninterrupted conversational space allows the viewers

to feel empathy for them, as they reveal tensions in their lives which can
be seen as extenuating circumstances, although the voice- over still provides
the overall frame for the prisoners’ autobiographical stories. However, these
accounts are interspersed with dramatic scenes of violence and mayhem that
create the impression of prison life as relentlessly explosive and unpredictable.,
which may mitigate against a sympathetic understanding of prisoners.
One criticism of the use of ‘conversational space’ in this way, through long
takes in which inmates reflect, is that it suggests, through the lingering space
and the lack of urgency, that nothing is concealed, and therefore that this is
‘actuality’ that we are experiencing (Nichols, 1991). This use of longer takes
was a tradition pioneered in documentary by Frederick Wiseman in his ‘Direct
Cinema’, which has been criticized for its supposed voyeurism and selective
edit. In the documentary, these lingering takes play an important part in the
representation of the vulnerability and tragic circumstances of the inmates.
Later in the episode, prison officers speak about their daily work and
the problems they face. We learn from Dina Officer, the senior segregation
officer seen in the opening scene comforting a self- harmer, that she has a
son who is brain- damaged after an attempted suicide. Here she tells us about
her frustration with the problems she faces in the segregation unit:
Dina: We’re having a lot of problematic prisoners. It’s all drug- related gang-
related they’re flooding in kicking doors ehm behaving like idiots.
As the audience witnesses the restraint of an inmate by four officers, one

prison officer offers his reasons for restraining the inmate:
Officer: You wouldn’t be human not to feel ehm intimidated at times in that
sort of situations. He invaded my space ever so closely shouting at
me. For my own safety I took the decision to restrain him at that point
because I felt it was imminent that I was about to be assaulted.
Another, younger segregation officer, Garry Hurst, explains the problems in

the segregation unit on one day:
Garry Hurst: [. . .] seven prisoners we’ve got down here [?] so there was
obviously a lot of tension and this has carried on till this
morning.
Like the prisoners, the prison officers are shown in mid- and close- shot, again
allowing the audience to get closer to them. And like the prisoners, we get an
insight into their mental world. But as one watches the documentary there is
a frustrating sense that the constant restraining by officers of inmates who
appear to be in prison for non-violent offences is not dealt with. It is here
that the Direct Cinema approach falters and calls for commentary. Neither
the prisoners nor the staff provide any comment on these coercive control
measures. There is an overwhelming sense that we are watching a collection
of tragic individuals in a situation that is out of the control of any particular
agent. The prisoners are ‘damaged’ characters who act only in an emotional
and unpredictable way, to which the officers react with professionalism. The
politics and ideology of imprisonment are therefore backgrounded. On the
one hand, we might say that the film implies such injustice without giving
commentary. But the Direct Cinema editing and the dramatizing techniques
work to mitigate such readings. For example, as we watch three male officers
restraining a prisoner, Governor Phil Taylor offers the following comment:
Violent action can erupt at any time it can be quite extreme and it can
be perpetrated towards anybody . . . the officers have to be highly
trained they have to be adaptable they have to be flexible they have
to be prepared to put up with a lot from individuals who are damaged
who are difficult who are vulnerable and deal with that in a responsive
professional way.
The point, however, is that violence in prison does not just ‘erupt’ but very
often happens with a reason. Although many violent incidents in prison are
cases of prisoner on prisoner violence, caused and sustained by a culture
of masculinity which idealizes physical dominance, prisoners also react in
this way because of the many injustices imposed upon them by the prison
system (Scraton et al. 1991). In this documentary, however, both the voice-
over and the Governor use the metaphor of prison as a ‘smouldering’ or
‘erupting volcano’, where problems are simply ‘brewing’ and need to be
tackled by ‘highly trained’, ‘flexible’ and ‘adaptable’ staff. Sympathy for the
prison officers is created through the favourable representation of their
work which they do‘ in a responsive professional way’, emphasizing its
demanding nature. It is of course important to acknowledge the officers’
work, just as creating empathy for the prisoners’ situation is. However,
there are no comments on critical issues regarding prison officers, such
as standards of recruitment, possibly indaquate training and allegations of
harrassment and brutality.
A closer look at the representational strategies for these two groups of social
actors demonstrates the way that we are encouraged to see the prisoners as
individuals. Although they are also visually and linguistically collectivized as
‘prisoners’ and ‘repeat offenders’, they are mostly individualized, nominated
and categorized, as we saw above. Officers are also collectivized as ‘staff’,

but again mostly individualized by being nominated and functionalized:
Phil Taylor, Governor

Dina Officer, Senior Segregation Officer
Gillian Forbes, Bio- Hazard Officer
Tracy Price, Dog Handler
Garry Hurst, Segregation Officer
This constant individualization and personalization, both linguistically and

visually, serves to heighten the viewer’s sense of connection to rather intimate
moments in the daily activities of both sides. The film and editing techniques
have a similar effect. When inmates are being restrained by officers, the camera
follows them in a way that looks like amateur footage, again drawing on the
Direct Cinema conventions of immediacy; this can also be observed when
the camera ‘eavesdrops’ on conversations among prisoners or prison staff.
The ‘fly on the wall’ camera technique communicates to the audience that
they are able to follow events as they unfold and to witness ‘real- life’ tensions
between inmates and staff. Through these linguistic and visual techniques,
the viewer is offered a sense of the intimate truth of the dangerous, volatile
and unpredictable world of prisons, and invited to witness life as prisoners
and prison officers experience it and how they react to it.
Looking at social action and transitivity patterns, we see that prisoners
arrive daily; pass in and out; currently serving four and a half years; started
thieving ; has spen t his life in jails; is nearing the end of his sentence; has
crashed a car; end up in segregation unit; has smeared excrement all over
his cell; has been detained for immigration charges; causes havoc; struggle
to remain on the straight and narrow.
Most of these material processes, apart from ‘has crashed a car’ and ‘has
smeared excrement over his cell’ are goal-less or ‘non-transactional’ (i.e.
without a concrete material outcome). In terms of relational processes we find
has been in and out of jail most of his adult life; has psychological problems;
is two years into a five-year sentence; is frustrated; is stressed out; I’m not
a kid, I’ve got a daughter; can’t be a dad to her’; are damaged; are difficult;
are vulnerable.
These describe the prisoners’ states and identities and can present as ‘facts’
what may be opinions, such as ‘has psychological problems’, ‘is stressed out/
damaged/difficult’. There may be valid reasons for the prisoners to be difficult

or damaged. Would prisoners classify themselves in these terms?
Importantly, there are also a number of mental processes:
wants a transfer to an open prison; has decided to go on a dirty protest;

is losing his plot; miss kids and family; think about my daughter a lot; love
her dearly; want to turn round his life; is missing his children; has found it
almost impossible to survive outside prison.
There are a small number of verbal processes:
admits to an obsessive compulsive disorder; pleaded guilty; protesting

about conditions.
We could argue that these mental and verbal processes, the former of which,
especially, can have a humanizing effect, in some way act like Wiseman’s
awkward close- ups and lingering shots. Through revealing emotions they
provide a sense of veracity, which however glosses over the lack of deeper
insight we might have gained had the documentary been more critical of the
legitimacy of the prison as an institution.
In terms of transitivity patterns for the staff, we find that the officers’
material processes are typical examples of what van Leeuwen (2008) calls
‘reactions’, which are provoked by the ‘unpredictable’ behaviour of prisoners:
deal with problems; having to manage individuals; having to manage anger,

having to manage things like self-harm; random cell searches performed;
restrain; deal with that in a responsive, professional way.
The relational processes all express obligation:
have to be highly trained/adaptable/flexible; have to be prepared to put up

with a lot from individuals.
The same relational processes and qualities such as being ‘flexible’ and
‘adaptable’ are not attributed to the prisoners, who are for the most part
represented as tragic, helpless, if threatening, rather than as strategic and
lucid. The use of professional-type actions such as ‘manage’, ‘respond’ and
‘be adaptable’ maintain a sense of order and structure to what appears visually
as the madness of suppressing the crazed frenzy of men kept in closed rooms
for up to 23 hours a day. Terms like ‘highly trained’ help to maintain some
dignity to the situation and may sound reassuring to the viewer.
A smaller number of mental processes is used for the officers, such as
‘ be human, feel intimidated ; I felt ’, which allow insights into their minds and
feelings. Overall, the transitivity patterns used to describe the officers serve to
represent them as professional and rational, not as ‘faceless’ staff. However,
it is clear that they behave on one level with little reflection on the actual
nature of the prison system, and that their jobs appear to mainly involve the
restraint and subjugation of difficult and volatile men and that they therefore
have every right to feel immense frustration.
As we have pointed out so far, much of the commentary and visuals are
concerned with the disciplinary measures to which inmates are subjected
and the officers carrying out these measures. Visually, the content is very
much focused on punishment, restraint, confinement and loss of liberty,
although there are also scenes when prison officers act compassionately,
for example when one female officer comforts a prisoner who has just self-
harmed . There is, however, a predominance of prison iconography with an
emphasis on the claustrophobic atmosphere of the prison through close-
ups of perimeter fencing, razor wire, barred windows and heavy clanging
doors. There are also the usual shots of landings, stairwells, and prisoners
moving about, some with digital squares on their faces to obscure their
identity. Other stock shots stress more mundane prison activities, such
as prisoners lining up for food and prison officers going about their daily
routines of escorting, searching and locking prisoners up. These scenes
are accompanied by the voice- over providing the authoritative comment on
what happens.
To sum up, on the one hand, Wormwood Scrubs does depict the
inhumanity of incarceration, thereby providing an opportunity for the
viewer to question the legitimacy of the prison as an institution. And the
documentary should be credited for attempting to create empathy for both
prisoners and staff. But on the other hand, through the ‘scoptophilic treatment
of violence’ (Mason, 2006a: 257), this documentary could be charged with
reinforcing the prison’s legitimacy, even if this is not intentional. No political
context is provided to the ‘management’ of threatening men with chaotic
lives. The ‘truth’ on offer here is achieved through mental processes,
represented both visually and linguistically, rather than proper analysis
of prisoner and staff conditions. Of course, we might view Wormwood
Scrubs as nevertheless countering other media representations of prisons,
which routinely demonize offenders and evoke demands for retribution and
revenge. In fact, former prisoner Erwin James (2010) has said that the
documentary ‘highlighted the frailty of those in prison and the system that
fails them’ and
instead of healing the open emotional wounds of its inhabitants, the stark
concrete and steel fabric of Wormwood Scrubs aggravates and exacerbates
them. This documentary showed a prison that any prisoner anywhere in
the country would have recognized. And the makers did a brilliant job of
demonstrating precisely why our prisons fail so badly.
This very favourable comment by a prisoner-turned journalist is however

offset by the following viewer reactions to the programme, which have
been posted on Orange TV blog (http://blogs.orange.co.uk/tv/2010/05/
wormwood- scrubs- prison- documentary- itv.html). The question asked was,
‘Did Wormwood Scrubs change the way you think about our prisons?’
I agree the programme was shocking it was a right eye opener for me, but
got to say the staff do a good job, the system stinks needs to be harder
on the crims and you 100% agree with the death sentence or hanging,
anyone in there for more than 10 years the uk should do away with them,
save us tax payers!
The programme has not made me feel sorry for the inmates at all, in fact
it has made me more angry that as a nation, we are paying to house such
vile people at an average cost of over £27000 per prisoner per year. I can
understand how it reaches such a cost, when they are self harming and
trashing cells, seeing psychologists and all the other medical staff they hav[sic]
running around after them most of the time seemingly for attention.
The lags who were interviewed seemed to have lost track of how ‘normal’
people behave and regarded the Scrubs as a home away from home. Like
Norman Stanley Fletcher [. . .] they viewed imprisonment as an occupational
hazard.
I have spent the last 19 years legitimately going in to all categories of Prisons
and I was pleased to see this programme showing the reality of Prison Life
for serious offenders and the problems facing Prison Officers on a day to
day basis. Efforts are made to try and rehabilitate Offenders but the General
Public should realize that the majority do not want to be rehabilitated. Crime
for them is a way of life and like Fletcher in Porridge being in Prison is just a
hazard. [. . .] The public should also realize that they only hear of the Deaths
in Custody. They never learn of the very much larger number of Prisoners
whose lives are saved by vigilant Staff. Well done to the Prison Service for
giving the Public a sight of life inside since most of them have no real idea.
Bread and Water it is not but neither is it a Hotel.
If these online comments are anything to go by, the programme has inflamed
some viewers’ negative attitudes towards offenders rather than the opposite.
In some of the 20 comments that were posted on this site, prisoners were
referred to as ‘hateful’, ‘vile’ and ‘scum’, for whose keep the ‘taxpayer’ has
to foot the bill. While there was some praise for prison officers’ good work
(coming from prison officers themselves, as in the third comment above) and
an acknowledgement of the difficult nature of their jobs, not one comment was
really sympathetic towards offenders. What we also find in two comments
above is the reference to ‘Norman Stanley Fletcher’ the main character in the
prison sitcom Porridge, a career criminal. These references (‘Like Norman
Stanley Fletcher [. . .] they viewed imprisonment as an occupational hazard’)
are used by the bloggers in support of their negative view of prisoners
This brings us back to the point made above about the potential of prison
programmes, factual and fictional, to act as vehicles for changing the public’s
negative perceptions of prisoners. Jewkes (2006: 146) points to evidence from
media ‘effects’ and audience research (e.g. Hall, 1973; Kitzinger, 2004) which
points to the complexities involved in the audience’s ‘decoding’ of the ‘preferred
meaning’ of a text. So while the maker of Wormwood Scrubs, Paul Hamann, a
miscarriage- of- justice campaigner who headed the BBC’s documentaries and
history department from 1994 to 2000, certainly intended to show a thought-
provoking prison programme, audiences still may take an oppositional position
or resist the producers’ intended message outright. What is more, research by
Gillespie and Mclaughlin (2002, 2003) suggests that tabloid newspapers, with
their pro- prison agenda and discourses, are much more likely to shape public
attitudes towards prison than are TV programmes and films.
Conclusion
Existing academic literature on prisons and the media have pointed to the
dominance of the view of prisons as a ‘soft’ option and of the prison population
as dangerous and volatile. In this chapter, we have shown how linguistic
and visual analysis of a number of newspaper texts draws attention to the
way in which news media use language to treat institutions and offenders
as one homogenous group when it suits them to conceal details of policies
and practices. We found that some linguistic and visual strategies serve to
delegitimize prisoners and legitimize the stance of prison authorities. These
also serve to negatively represent issues of rehabilitation and prison reform
and to reinforce the idea that politicians who are not in favour of more prisons
and longer sentences are ‘soft’ on crime. We also found that in our example of
prison documentary footage, while both linguistic and visual techniques may
encourage a more sympathetic view of prisoners, there were no coherent
alternatives or even critical discourses articulated that could question the
legitimacy of prisons.
8
Corporate crime
C orporate crime – or, more generally, the deviant activities of respectable

institutions, corporations and individuals – has been relatively neglected
in the study of crime and deviance, although it is a widespread problem in all
contemporary societies; so much so that it can be thought of as a normal part
of how our societies in general, and capitalism in particular, operate (Minkes
and Minkes, 2010). To some extent, corporations are set up through teams of
accountants, lawyers and professional enablers precisely to maximize profits
through ‘creative law avoidance’ (Minkes and Minkes: 49). And even when
such crimes are challenged, they may come to be defined as ‘illegal’ but not
‘criminal’ (Geis, 1972). While corporate crime is far more costly for society
than other kinds of crime, it is simply not seen as being the same kind of
burden on us as conventional crime.
This neglect of corporate crime has been generally reflected in the media.
Although the news media have always devoted at least some space to the
crimes of the rich and powerful, and popular awareness of corporate crime has
certainly increased over the years through the reporting of high- profile cases,
there is still far less information about this type of crime than there is about
‘common’ or ‘street’ crime. Why this should be the case is not too difficult to
see. A great deal of corporate crime is made invisible by the careful planning
and execution of those involved in it, the relative lack of law- enforcement and
prosecution, and the lenient legal and social sanctions imposed on those who
stand accused of it. Governments will often create legislation in the context
of what a particular sector finds acceptable (Minkes and Minkes, 2010). And
unlike other kinds of crime dealt with in this book, corporate crime will not be
so easily provided to journalists by the usual definers of crime, the police.
In Britain in the twenty-first century, there have been a number of high
profile public cases which could, in other contexts, be seen as criminal acts.
Banks were responsible for reckless behaviour leading to billions of pounds of
demands on taxpayers, and privatized companies were running health services
with reduced staffing and services in order to hike up profits, leading to
run- down services and festering buildings riddled with hospital viruses. We
find that pubic employees are told to mislead benefits claimants to cut down
on the number of unemployed. We are told our pensions may no longer exist,
as the government has tapped into these in order to lower tax rates. Names
and organizations may arise in the news media, but we certainly find no
mention of ‘crime’ or sentencing. What appear to be injustices and unfairness
in our society may have little connection to what comes to be called ‘crime’.
This (ideological) lack of coverage in the both the print and broadcast media
has been noted by many working in criminology and media studies. According
to Box (1983: 31), the market value of public preference for immediacy over
complexity is the driving force here. As he puts it, ‘The public understands
more easily what it means for an old lady to have £5 snatched from her purse
than to grasp the financial significance of corporate crime’. We are continually
exposed to a portrayal of crime (some of which is fictional) with an emphasis
on sensational, especially violent, cases, which is considered essentially a
lower- class phenomenon. This sensationalist bias serves to divert attention
from structural and political sources of crime.
In this chapter, we first review the academic literature that defines corporate
crime and which attempts to account for the reasons why it resists being
defined as ‘crime’. We then apply this to a case study of the Paddington rail
crash which resulted in a large number of deaths and gruesome injuries, and
was caused by companies systematically cutting costs to increase profits.
Defining corporate crime

Knowledge and understanding of corporate crime was greatly influenced by
American criminologist Edwin Sutherland (1940, 1949), who coined the term
‘white- collar crime’ and defined such a crime as one ‘committed by a person of
respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation’ (Sutherland,
1949: 9). Sutherland also included crimes committed by corporations and
other legal entities within his definition, which he regarded as widespread and
endemic.
Sutherland’s study of white- collar crime was prompted by the view that
criminology had incorrectly focused on the social and economic determinants of
crime, such as family background and level of wealth. According to Sutherland,
crime is committed at all levels of society and often by persons operating
through large and powerful organizations. White- collar crime, Sutherland
concluded, has a greatly underestimated impact upon our society.
Although it was Sutherland who first popularized the term ‘white- collar
crime, recognition of this type of crime goes back much further in history.
As Friedrichs (2004: 2) notes, there has been a long tradition in Europe and
CORPORATE CRIME 201
America that has recognized the crimes of the powerful and privileged. In
the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels (1848) argued that the powerful and
privileged commit crimes as a direct consequence of the capitalist economic
system, a view that was echoed at the beginning of the twentieth century by
Dutch criminologist Bonger (1905), who regarded capitalism as criminogenic.
While Europe has a long history of radical and critical social theory, the
United States has a much richer tradition of ‘explicit treatment’ of corporate
crime (Slapper and Tombs, 1999: 2–3). For example, in The Theory of the
Leisure Class, Norwegian- American economist and sociologist Thorstein
Veblen (1899) likened captains of industry to ‘street’ criminals. They were, he
said, ‘like the ideal delinquent in [their] unscrupulous conversion of goods and
persons to [their] own ends’, and displayed a ‘callous disregard of the feelings
and wishes of others, and of the remoter effects of [their] actions’ (1899:
237–8). In the early twentieth century, popular concern about corporate crime
in America was expressed in the ‘populist movement’ and subsequently the
‘muckraking’ tradition, with its investigative journalists who exposed some of
the wrongdoings of the emergent capitalist industrial order. One movement
associated with muckraking, ‘progressivism’, sought to limit the excesses of
individual capitalists, while being in favour of capitalism in principle. It was
within this progressivist climate that American sociologist E. A. Ross (1907)
identified the ‘criminaloid’, the businessman who committed exploitative, if
not necessarily illegal, acts out of an uninhibited desire to maximize profit.
Ross, who had a direct influence on Sutherland, held these criminaloids
directly responsible for the deaths of workers and consumers and regarded
them as a threat to a just capitalist society, which he supported. And in 1935,
Albert Morris drew up a list of the ‘criminals of the upperworld’, in which he
included bankers (!), stockbrokers, manufacturers, politicians, contractors and
law enforcement officials as examples of the type.
Sutherland’s definition of white- collar crime is now somewhat dated,
although the term continues to be widely used, as it is convenient for
distinguishing this type of crime from ‘street’ crime. Since the mid-1970s, the
term ‘corporate crime’ has become widely used, which is seen as both a major
form of white- collar crime and a specific form of organizational crime (Kramer,
1984; Friedrichs, 2001). There is no one accepted definition for corporate
crime, but perhaps the one offered by Schrager and Short (1977), which was
later elaborated on by Box (1983), is a useful starting point. Schrager and
Short (1977: 409) define corporate crime as
illegal acts of omission or commission of an individual or a group of individuals

in a legitimate formal organization in accordance with the operative goals
of the organization which have a serious physical or economic impact on
employees, consumers or the general public.
That corporate crime should include acts of omission as well as commission

is significant. This definition also stresses that ‘the pursuit of organizational
goals is deeply implicated in the cause(s) of corporate crime’ (Box, 1983: 21)
and that officials are socialized into an organizational ‘way of life’. Corporate
crime can therefore be caused by an organization’s structure and its culture.
Most corporate crimes, argues Braithwaite (1984: 2) ‘cannot be explained by
the perverse personalities of their perpetrators’. This claim calls into question
the tendency in individualistic cultures in general, and in crime reporting in
particular, to locate the source of ‘evil’ acts in ‘evil’ people. This does not
mean that individuals within corporations should be not be held accountable
for their actions, but that corporations are ‘sites of complex relationships,
invested with power and authority’, between individuals and wider groups
within the corporation (Slapper and Tombs, 1999: 17). This is precisely what
is missing from a lot of news coverage on corporate crime. Like ‘street’ crime,
corporate crime is often reduced to an individual- level analysis of good versus
evil that obscures the organizational nature of corporate crime (Vaughan,
2001).
Corporate crime and the media

Many working in criminology and media studies have commented on
the (ideological) lack of coverage on corporate crime in both the print and
broadcast media (e.g. Cohen and Young, 1973; Chibnall, 1977; Box, 1983;
Slapper and Tombs, 1999; White 2008 ; Jewkes, 2011). Cavender et al. (2010)
distinguish between two traditions of media studies of corporate crime.
One view stresses a general lack of interest in corporate crime because
it lacks ‘the brimstone smell’ (Evans and Lundman, 1983: 529) and moral
blameworthiness (Simpson, 2002: 49) that characterizes street crimes.
Corporate crimes are too complicated to make for a good story and therefore
are not conventionally newsworthy (Lynch et al., 2000). The second tradition
suggests that, nowadays, the public is interested in corporate crime and that
the media do cover the phenomenon. However, it is the nature of the coverage
that is the problem. When the media cover corporate crime, they employ the
same crime news frame as for ‘street’ crime, a frame that oversimplifies the
phenomenon (Cavender and Mulcahy, 1998). By and large, this tendency of
the mainstream media to report on corporate crime as a matter of individual
pathology has hampered the investigation and condemnation of large
corporations and governments for their criminal acts. Importantly, one of the
ways the corporate origins and nature of corporate crimes are obscured is
through the language used in the media and by corporations themselves.
CORPORATE CRIME 203
A number of criminologists (e.g. Tombs and Whyte, 2007; Walters, 2010)

state the importance of labelling the wrongdoings of corporations as ‘crime’.
But there is still a preference in media cycles to report on corporate crime
in terms of ‘abuses of power’ and ‘scandals’, not least because that makes
them more newsworthy (Levi, 1987: 10). Terms such as ‘scandal’ and ‘abuse’
carry implications of immorality rather than criminal offence and makes these
crimes look novel and rare, while in fact they are widespread and routine
(Slapper and Tombs, 1999).
Wells, too, has commented on the relative lack of labelling available for
criminal acts committed by corporations, stating that, for example, the term
‘fraud’ is an ‘anaesthetizing generic term for a number of offences including
theft’ and that ‘if we do not call a white- collar thief a thief then we should
not be surprised that it sounds a little odd to talk of a corporation stealing (or
wounding or killing)’ (1993: 10).
Another term, ‘accident’, commonly used for occupational health and safety
and environmental crimes, connotes ‘the unforeseeable, unknowable and
unpreventable’ and evokes ‘discrete, isolated and random events’ (Slapper
and Tombs, 1999: 95). There is no doubt that the use of some of these
terms is the result of corporate manipulation. This is not surprising, given the
privileged access to and ownership of all mass media by large corporations
who in this way control and manage information. The choice of this kind of
language suits not only corporations but also the commercial media, which
generally report on crime in a manner that evokes notions of spectacle
(Jewkes, 2011). Labelling corporate crimes as ‘scandals’ makes them
immediately more newsworthy and spectacular. According to radical crime
and media theorists, apart from investigative journalism, media institutions
either downplay or misrepresent the crimes of powerful corporations. As
a result, news reporting remains ‘coupled to state definitions of crime and
criminal law’ (Jewkes, 2011: 24).
Techniques of neutralization
In Sin and Society, E. A. Ross (1907) states that ‘criminaloids move in an
atmosphere of friendly approval [. . .] and this can still smart any conscience
with the balm of good fellowship and adulation’ (quoted in Box, 1983: 54).
Box (1983: 55), following Mills, argues that corporate officials are able
to translate motives into actual criminal behaviour because they act in a
‘subculture of structural immoralities’ (Mills, 1956: 138). This notion is,
according to Box, similar to what Matza (1964: 33–68) described as the
‘subculture of delinquency’. Matza applied this concept to conventional
(adolescent) criminals, but both concepts consist of norms and beliefs

which act as extenuating conditions and make crime permissible. Box
concludes that
these subcultures, respectively enable corporate officials and lower- class

adolescent males to commit crimes without too many pangs of conscience;
through their sanitizing prism, each subculture softens criminal acts so that
they assume the appearance of ‘not really’ being against the law, or it
transforms them into acts required by a morality higher than that enshrined
in a parochial criminal law. (Box, 1983: 55)
There is much evidence of this phenomenon. To quote just one example,

Cressey (1953) found that embezzlers interpreted their criminal conduct
merely as ‘borrowing’ the money over which they had control. Although
people know that their behaviour is wrong, they manage to offset it in their
minds through what Sykes and Matza (1957) have termed ‘techniques of
neutralization’, that is, verbal accounts through which deviants mitigate and
justify their criminal conduct. Sykes and Matza developed these in relation
to young offenders, but they have been applied to ‘white- collar’ corporate
officials (e.g. Box, 1983; Slapper and Tombs, 1999), because, just like ordinary
criminals, they deny responsibility. They do so, for example, by claiming that
they acted under orders or by pleading ignorance. Laws regulating corporate
behaviour tend to be vague and can be interpreted differently by those
violating them. Claiming that negligent behaviour (as seen with BP in the
gulf of Mexico) was an ‘accident’ is another convenient way of abrogating
responsibility.
A second common technique of neutralization for corporate officials is to
deny the victim. Unlike with a lot of ordinary crime, in which real people are
the victims, many corporate crimes, because they affect distant countries,
can be interpreted as ‘victim- less’ (e.g. exporting toxic waste).
A third technique for corporate officials is to condemn the condemners
by denying the legitimacy of the law regulating their behaviour as well as the
competence of those enforcing the law, that is, the government.
Fourth, corporate officials may appeal to higher loyalties by claiming loyalty
to the corporation as a superior moral imperative. By using some or all of
these four neutralization techniques, which are embedded in the ‘structural
immorality’ of corporations, Box (1983) says, executives are able to violate
the law without guilt and without damaging their respectable non- deviant
self- image. We can see one neutralization technique in operation in the case
we will go on to discuss now.
CORPORATE CRIME 205
The Paddington rail crash

In this section, we consider one case study that allows us to scrutinize the
observations made about corporate crime above in the context of the news
coverage of one event. We look at the way that blame is allocated to a private
corporation and at the accusations made against them for their actions, which
in this case, clearly led to public death and injury. What we show is that
the death and injury of large numbers of people in this particular case are
reported, in the first place, through non- crime news frames. Media scholars
have shown how events are only recognized as newsworthy by journalists
when they tick a number of news values criteria (see Chapter 1), or when they
fit a number of news frames (Bennett, 2005). The Paddington rail crash is
covered, in the first place, as a ‘disaster’ rather than as a crime. And disaster
reporting has specific stages which dominate other concerns. We find that
the issue of criminality and punishment is raised, but this is partly lost in the
discourses being used. As we shall see, one key problem is the absence of
the official definers of crime (i.e. the police) and the lack of a terminology to
describe the Paddington rail ‘disaster’ as a crime.
On 5 October 1999, two trains collided in Paddington, London. Thirty- one
people were killed and 400 injured in the crash, many with horrific burns,
as one carriage was engulfed by burning fuel. In the final hearing outcome,
two rail corporations were fined several million pounds each. There were a
number of key criticisms of the companies.
In the first place, a driver with only three week’s experience and poor
training had passed a badly designed and concealed signal which was known
by the operators to be problematic. At the hearing, there was much criticism
of the training given to drivers following privatization of the railways in 1994.
Many experienced workers had been made redundant in order to cut costs.
Formerly, drivers had been recruited from existing staff who had a great deal
of experience and who would ride with an experienced driver for one year
before driving alone.
In the second place, to avoid costs, the companies had grossly neglected
safety and in many cases appropriate measures had not been taken to resolve
known and well- reported problems. At the hearing, this decision had been
shrouded in claims of being concerned with not passing the costs onto
the travelling public. Railway workers had been told to carry on and meet
deadlines and targets and to ignore problems and safety issues.
Additionally in this case, some blame lay with the government, who had
abandoned an early warning system installation programme in the early
1990s in the lead- up to privatization. The estimated cost of £3 billion was
thought to exceed ‘normal safety investment criteria as measured by cost per

equivalent fatality avoided’ and the government had been concerned about
the excessive price of the stock should the money be invested.
In summary, safety standards were not implemented by the government
because the railways were soon to be privatized. Upon privatization, there
were changes in staffing, recruitment and training in order to save costs.
There was also a lack of regard for warnings regarding safety issues, again
with a view to costs. The privatization of the railways in Britain has been
connected with an emphasis on short-term profitability and gross neglect of
investment in safety and infrastructure (Jack, 2001).
From the point of view of crime, we could argue that the companies running
the railways failed to maintain equipment despite warnings and were guilty
of reducing staff training necessary for the levels of experience required. We
could also argue that the government, too, made decisions that contributed
to the situation by not providing an adequate warning system, and also that
they failed to correctly monitor the rail companies. In the face of previous
accidents involving deaths, and clear knowledge of signalling problems and
the inadequacy of warning systems, there was awareness at some level that
trains were operating in a way that could lead to further deaths.
Of interest here is the way the news media reported the event and how
responsibility was attributed and what penalties were called for. We look at
the way the question of responsibility and blame was raised as the events
took place and as they were later discussed as new information became
available to journalists.
To understand the reporting of this story, it is important that we view it as
part of the typical, ritualized way that the news media represent disasters:
through a sequence of bearing witness to the horror, the moral community,
and dissent and disagreement.
First of all, the news media reported the drama of the event itself. Coverage
focused on images of shock, suffering and disruption. For example, consider
the following headline:
PADDINGTON RAIL DISASTER: PEOPLE WERE JUMPING OUT ON FIRE.

I STEPPED OVER A DEAD WOMAN . . . AND WEPT BY THE TRACK (Daily
Mirror, 6 October 1999)
This was typical of the first response of the news media. These stories
contained graphic descriptions of what happened in the collision and gave
firsthand accounts of the survivors telling what they had experienced during
the crash and how they had been trapped, seen burning bodies and heard
screams. These are the typical first responses of human drama found in
large- scale disasters such as the events of 11 September 2001 in New York
CORPORATE CRIME 207
and 7 July 2005 in London. Pantii and Wahl- Jorgensen (2007: 13) speak
of the way that this stage of media reporting is characterized by ‘bearing
witness and giving testimony to the carnage’. The use of the ‘ordinary’
person guarantees authentic details of misfortune.
This first wave of stories was followed by a second wave which
celebrated the heroes of the day. Media scholars have noted how the initial
phase of disaster reporting is followed by a stage which emphasizes bonds
of community and solidarity (Turner, 1982). So here we celebrate heroic acts
of survivors and rescuers. We find this characterized in the following headline
from the Daily Mirror two days after the event:
DISASTER AT PADDINGTON: HEROES OF HORROR; HOW WE HELPED

RAIL CRASH VICTIMS: AMBULANCEMAN (8 October 1999)
This story recounts the experiences of ambulance workers, the sights they
saw and how they worked extra shifts. Other newspapers ran stories related
to other brave individuals. At this stage, we will also find reflection on individual
case studies, such as from this Daily Mail headline:
Bright futures snatched away amid tearing metal;

TRAGIC DOSSIER OF THE FIRST IDENTIFIED VICTIMS DISASTER AT
PADDINGTON (8 October 1999)
In other disasters, this is the stage in which we are shown the mother and
child survivor of an earthquake or some other catastrophe as they are found
in the rubble.
Here we also find other stories which point to moral community, such as
the reactions of family members, as can be seen in the following story from
the Daily Mail (8 October 1999):
PILGRIMAGE OF SORROW
[. . .]
They had seen pictures of the blackened wreckage on television and in
newspapers. But now the relatives of the Paddington rail disaster victims
faced the scene itself. In their desperate grief they could only cling together
for comfort.
It is typical at this stage in the coverage to see more staged images of survivors
and families uniting in sympathy and grief, as opposed to the earlier ones
of victims and destruction. We do find the use of the word ‘victims’ but no
reference to human or criminal agency. People are simply victims of a disaster.
Later there will be further ritualization through official ceremonies. Newspapers

will call on the nation to pray and remember together (Cottle, 2009: 56). It is at
this point that politicians are required to comment on their own personal grief
and shock. The following headlines from the Daily Mail are typical of this:
A candle for the daddies who will not be coming home (Daily Mail, 8
October 1999)
A tragedy making us one family (Daily Mail, 9 October 1999)
At the next stage in the ritual of disaster reporting, we read about dissent and
disagreement. It is at this stage that we find press criticism of authorities or
attempts to point to those responsible. Earlier in the coverage, when ‘what
happened’ was being rapidly thrown together, it appeared to be the fault of
the driver, as can be seen in the following headline:
Did driver jump a red light? INFERNO ON THE 8.06 IN A GRIM ECHO
OF SOUTHALL, HOW HUMAN ERROR may be to blame (Daily Mail, 6
October 1999)
The story reported on evidence that a light had been jumped and that ‘experts’
had commented that it was unlikely to be a mechanical failure. The story does
level some blame, but it is unspecific, in the form of:
If, as seems likely, the Ladbroke Grove tragedy was caused by an

overshoot, it will fuel anger against both the Government and the previous
Tory administration.
It is at this point, as media scholars have observed, that journalists may be

able to raise actual concrete issues for concern, such as social inequality and
corporate power, and the society we want to live in (Dayan and Katz, 1992).
We find the following in the Daily Express (7 October 1999) only a few days
after the crash:
CRASH WAITING TO HAPPEN
At this stage, the journalist presents the incident as part of broader issues and
trends, rather than dealing with the exact details of the current crash:
BRITAIN’S railways have seen an alarming increase in the number of

dangerous incidents caused by trains running through red lights. Last year
CORPORATE CRIME 209
more than 50 drivers passed red lights, failing to stop within the safety
distance, an increase above 25 per cent.
The rise paints a picture of an accident waiting to happen and was a
cause for concern among safety professionals before the Paddington
disaster.
Last month the Rail Inspectorate published the results of a year- long study
into trains overshooting warning lights. There were a total of 643 incidents
over the last year, but most involved trains which stopped 183 metres after
passing the light – the recognized safety distance.
The inspectorate noted that the real concern was the huge increase in
dangerous incidents. It warned that more lives would be lost in accidents
if the industry failed to make improvements.
Eighty per cent of the cases were found to be driver error – many simply
had not seen the signal
[. . .]
Methods for assessing the competence of drivers are also questioned. A
driver who passed a signal at Upminster in March 1997 was found to have
had ‘an unsuitable temperament for driving suburban type trains’.
[. . .]
The report says companies need to devote more time and effort to ensure
such incidents do not happen. It concludes that over- runs of red lights
‘probably give rise to the highest safety risk facing the rail industry and
therefore demands an appropriate level of resource and commitment’.
Of course, actual information about the activities of the rail companies

involved was not available until the Cullen report was released in 2001. Here
the journalist has identified and used a report which was made public, more
broadly dealing with railway standards.
What is interesting here is that no crime as such is identified, and this is
contextualized as part of a pattern which points to ‘an accident waiting to
happen’ and in which companies ‘need to devote more time and effort’ to avoid
further ‘incidents’. There is no warning of responsibility and consequences.
We do not find the directive ‘company bosses found guilty of killing will
face a minimum of five years imprisonment or a fine of five million pounds’.
This text also merges issues of driver error with company responsibility for
improvements.
In such cases, there are none of the usual definers of crime. The journalist is
dependent on the definitions offered by the report. The police are not the first
source from whom we hear about this event, and they are not mentioned in the
report. Here, the sources are ‘safety professionals’ and the ‘Rail Inspectorate’.
Therefore, we find no mention of this as a crime. As Levi (1987) points out, the
news media rather point to ‘scandals’ and will use words such as ‘accident’
instead of ‘killing’. In fact, later investigation of the Paddington crash revealed the
way the companies had ruthlessly taken apart the system, making redundancies,
cutting costs to increase profits, ditching established, time- consuming and
expensive safety procedures and dramatically reducing training.
In the following excerpt from a Daily Mail article, we see an example in
which journalists did start to generate more background information about
the dire state of the railways. But there still is no mention of legal or moral
responsibility. In the Daily Mail (9 November 1999) we find,
TERROR OF RAILMAN WHO SAW IT COMING

Six lights all on red, but still the train failed to stop.
The article is drawn from an interim report on the events produced by the
Health and Safety Executive. It begins with the account of a railway worker
who tried to change the signal when he saw the train passing but was too
late. It then moves on to the list of problems with the rail system in terms
of signalling and warning technology. We can look at the language used to
describe causes and agents.
First we find that crash investigators said that
possible driver error was ‘only one factor’ and an overall systems failure
played a major part.
Here the ‘systems failure’ is personified as the agent, playing a part alongside
the driver error. Neither the negligence nor the greed of the companies, nor
the companies themselves, are positioned as agents. Likewise, we find the
government’s direct level of responsibility shifted through the use of the
passive verb in the following sentence:
The report, by Chief Inspector of Railways Vic Coleman, said the accident
would have been prevented if the Government’s planned Train Protection
Warning System had already been installed.
In the next section from the same article we do, however, find direct mention
of the possibilities of criminal charges; the report said,
The full investigation will focus on the ‘root causes’, immediate remedial
action and whether enforcement [. . .] including prosecution, is justified.
There could be manslaughter charges if there is evidence of gross neglect.
CORPORATE CRIME 211
There is no list of who might be responsible. Instead, we find a number of nouns

(‘root causes’, ‘evidence’) and nominalizations (‘investigation’, ‘enforcement’,
‘action’, ‘prosecution’) which all elide agency. But what we do find, in a
paragraph further down in the article, is an oblique pointer as to where neglect
might lie, described without directly connecting this to the events:
Thames Trains managing director Keith Ludeman said his company was
‘deeply disturbed’ by the accident and pledged to do all it could to improve
safety. But it emerged yesterday that Thames has cut its driver training by
almost half this year, from 18–20 weeks to ten.
Five days after the event, a stronger language of blame begins to emerge.
However, this is phrased in language that points to moral rather than legal
guilt. In the Mail on Sunday (10 October 1999) we find the following:
Sacrifices on the altar of rail profit

Internal Railtrack documents that we have seen show beyond doubt that,
at the highest level, vital considerations of passenger safety were given a
lower priority than cost and share prices.
Anyone who doubts that those who died were sacrificed on the altar of
profitability should simply read our report on the Rail-track board’s decision
in 1995 not to install the Automatic Train Protection system. It is clear that
the seeds of last Tuesday’s disaster were sown then.
The fateful board meeting reveals an unedifying picture of cynical and
short- sighted calculation.
No one is suggesting that board members actually expected that there
would be any tragic reckoning for their rejection of the new system on
grounds of cost. But what they hoped and expected is that even without
ATP – which would have cost GBP 750 million at that time – there would
be little likelihood of a serious crash.
[. . .]
For more than four years their gamble paid off. On October 5, outside
Paddington, it came disastrously unstuck.
It is clear, moreover, that, consciously or not, the calculation was heavily
influenced by the potential impact of GBP 750 million-worth of expenditure
on the value of a company that was about to be privatised.
This is something that really puts the directors in the dock – morally, if not
legally (though solicitors for the bereaved families might have a different
view of that). For, with their substantial share holdings, they had a direct
stake in ensuring that the value of the privatized company was as high as
possible.
[. . .]
And they should have thought of it when they were accepting that, in a
fragmented railway system, Railtrack would be able to resist paying more
than it thought costs justified. In short, the directors felt confident that
their decision would escape public scrutiny and criticism.
In the light of all this, the radical reassessment of Railtrack’s fitness to
monitor and safeguard safety standards, announced yesterday by Deputy
Prime Minister John Prescott, is entirely justified. And long overdue.
For, quite simply, our disclosures show that Railtrack cannot be trusted
with the safety of the millions who must rely upon it every day of the
week.
At the start of the article, we find that the link between the actions of
the company and the deaths and injuries of passengers is described with
a metaphor and a passive construction, ‘were sacrificed on the altar of
profitability’, which removes direct agency.
This could, in the case of an accepted crime, read something more like
‘Those who were killed and burned by Railtrack through their decision not
to install the system’. The motives of the company are described neither in
terms of ‘monsterization’ nor ‘pure evil’ but as an ‘unedifying picture of cynical
and short- sighted calculation’.
We are then told that

No one is suggesting that board members actually expected that there
would be any tragic reckoning for their rejection of the new system on
grounds of cost.
Here, actual responsibility is again mitigated. We are told that ‘no one is
suggesting’ that they thought there would be a crash. On the one hand, this is
a presupposition that assumes the possibility that someone might make this
suggestion. On the other hand, it allows the writer to provide a sense of what
everyone thinks. And in the next line, this is described as a ‘gamble’ which
had paid off for over four years. In this sense, the use of the world ‘gamble’
loosens the connection to intentionality. In business terms, we might argue
that the managers took a legitimate course of action making permissible
and reasonable decisions based on profit orientation, which is the job of the
managers of corporations.
CORPORATE CRIME 213
We are then told about the actual legal status of their actions:
This is something that really puts the directors in the dock – morally, if not
legally (though solicitors for the bereaved families might have a different
view of that). For, with their substantial share holdings, they had a direct
stake in ensuring that the value of the privatised company was as high as
possible.
It is hinted that there may be room for legal responsibility, but it is clearly
stated here that this is a moral rather than a legal issue. We could argue
that companies should be governed by legal sanctions when operating public
services for which safety is of such great issue. We could also argue that
there should be clear legal terms for such crimes.
The text suggests solutions in terms of closer monitoring of the rail
companies along with an assessment of Railtrack’s ability to be trusted. But
this is a language of ‘assessment’ and ‘trust’ and not ‘guilt’ and ‘retribution’.
What was lacking at this point in the unfolding of events was an individual
who could be used to personalize the events. As Braithwaite (1984) reminds
us, one reason corporate crime is too complex for news reporting is that
it is often hard to explain the crime through the perverse character of one
single evil- doer. As we have seen so far in this analysis, there appear to be a
number of organizations involved. There are two rail companies involved, and
also the negligence of the government, who were mindful of the value of the
company prior to privatization.
What was lacking for the press was personalization of the crime. This was
later provided through the head of Railtrack, Gerald Corbett. He became the
face that personified the companies who had the moral, if not legal, guilt. The
British news media will often convert such stories into cases of corporate ‘fat
cats’, although Vaughan (2001) points out that this focus on individuals who
went too far can serve to obscure the nature of corporate crime and the fact
that this is often part of the way the system is allowed to operate. We find
an example of how Railtrack chief Corbett was dealt with in the following
story from the Daily Mirror (12 November 1999). Here Corbett speaks about
resignation should his company be found at fault:
VOICE OF THE MIRROR: RAIL BOSS CAN’T SHIFT THE BLAME

RAILTRACK chief Gerald Corbett thought it would be good for him to come
out fighting yesterday.
But his public defence of the company’s involvement in the Paddington
disaster was so painfully inept that he would have been wiser to stay
silent.
Mr Corbett promised he would ‘resign immediately’ if anything was found

to be wrong with the fateful Signal 109. It was, he insisted, in ‘perfect
working order’ on the day of the crash.
But when pressed, he indicated that the signal would almost certainly now
be changed in the light of what had happened.
Changed? Why on earth would anyone want to change a perfect signal?
They will tell him that Railtrack’s relentless drive for profit at the expense
of fixing potentially fatal signal sites and installing vital safety equipment is
offensive. Very offensive.
What we see is that Corbett himself became the face of the rail company,
although he was certainly never questioned in terms of his character. It is normal,
as we have seen in other chapters, for criminals to be assessed as much on the
basis of their criminal personality as on the crimes they have committed. In the
case of the paedophile, Glen Tranter, in Chapter 6, it appeared that his character
was more at issue than what he had actually done, which was backgrounded
in the story. In this story, Corbett is represented as saying that he will resign
should anything be ‘found wrong with the fateful signal’. So here ‘resignation’ is
presented as a possible punishment and may be one way that corporations can
show they are accepting responsibility, diverting attention away from criminal
responsibility. And here the continued emphasis on the signal by Corbett could
be seen as keeping attention away from broader issues of neglect and criminality.
The signal here is described by Corbett as ‘fateful’ rather than the consequence of
downgrading safety through deliberate profit-motivated decisions. We therefore
can see the ‘denial of responsibility’ technique at work, an important part of the
neutralization process on behalf of companies (Box, 1983).
In the Mirror (25 November 1999), Corbett is criticized for shifting blame
for the crash to the train driver, who died in the crash:
Police rap Railtrack for crash ‘blame’

Police may recommend that Railtrack bosses be charged with corporate
manslaughter if there is evidence individuals in charge of public safety
were criminally negligent.
In a Mirror interview days after the disaster we asked Railtrack boss Gerald
Corbett if such charges would be appropriate.
He stormed out in a rage, saying: ‘I find that deeply offensive’.
Railtrack has tried to escape blame for the crash – which killed 30 people –
by claiming a Thames train jumped a red light and stressing its own
equipment was in order.
CORPORATE CRIME 215
Here we do find the language of crime (‘corporate manslaughter ’). This is

the first time reporters have received material from the traditional definers of
crime, that is the police. We also find the intentions of the police expressed
through low commitment (‘may recommend’). The rest of the text discusses
more details of the case, which are repetitions of earlier information about the
signal and the driver, and ends with a comment from the transport secretary:
And Mr Prescott will warn companies could lose their licence to operate if
they fail safety standards.
The criminal nature of the events is therefore discussed again in the context
of non- criminal terms, such as losing licences. Nor do we find the kind of
‘monsterization’ of the ‘bosses’ that would characterize those suspected
of other kinds of criminal acts. In such cases, unlike ordinary criminals, the
heads of corporations will have legal resources at their disposal to deal with
such kinds of treatment.
At this point, the news media, as is characteristic of disaster reporting,
shift attention to attacking the companies and the government, sometimes
using terms associated with crime, but for the most part not pinning down
what they were actually responsible for nor how they should be punished.
For journalists, there is clearly a sense that the public will be pleased by the
idea of challenging corporations in this way. The problem is that this is never
sustained in the fashion of other crime reporting. The Daily Mail (14 November
1999) wrote,
Train crash bosses could face charges

RAIL bosses could face criminal prosecutions and possible jail sentences
over the Paddington crash, it emerged yesterday.
A senior police officer heading the disaster inquiry said his team would be
examining whether there was evidence for manslaughter charges.
Superintendent Nick Bracken of the British Transport Police, who did not
name any of the companies, said: ‘We are looking to see if there was
individual or corporate criminal liability’.
Here we find terms such as ‘criminal prosecutions’, ‘jail sentences’,

‘manslaughter charges’ and ‘evidence’. However, the text does not explore
which people might face charges nor what the punishment might be. And
the jail sentences are only ‘possible’. It appears here that the journalist has
taken the liberty of providing a sentence hedged in low modality (‘could
face criminal prosecutions and possible jail sentences’) to provide his or
her own interpretation of what might result should there be manslaughter
charges. This is a significant step, as we begin to see some mention of

the kinds of punishment usually associated with ordinary crime. But there
is less confidence in the mode of writing. The journalist could have used
stronger modality and written ‘bosses must go to jail’. But there appears to
be evidence in the reporting of corporate- level crime that there is unease
with sending such people to prison, which is associated more with the
working classes. After all, in many ways, these are people whom our
society values because they are successful white middle-class men. Minkes
and Minkes (2010: 186) remind us that when lay people call someone a
criminal, they are not simply saying that they have broken a law. ‘Criminal’
has broader meanings and conveys many more value judgements about a
person, related to them being dangerous, ‘low- life’, immoral, a product of
bad genes/bad upbringing, as coming from broken families and so on. Most
importantly, ‘criminals are different’.
This news article then moved on to look at the details of signalling and
mentioned some of the aims of the government for changes in regulations.
Here, importantly, the reporter was able to obtain information from a crime
definer. Without this, they had previously been unable to talk about this in
terms of charges. But the difficulty in such criminal cases is mentioned, if not
highlighted, in terms of the police looking for individual or corporate liability. In
previous cases, no prosecutions had been made, as there was no clear single
individual responsible.
The Sunday Mirror (17 May 1999) went on to openly discuss the idea of the
law needing to be clarified for cases involving corporations:
Justice as law catches up with corporate killers

Politicians, both Tory and Labour, refused to accept responsibility for
starving the rail network of funds and failing to insist on rapid action on the
automatic safety system common in Europe.
Giant companies and their directors cannot be allowed to wriggle off the
hook when they are responsible for disasters that devastate lives.
As we reveal today, Government plans for new laws to make it easier to
prosecute of directors and other senior employees on the grounds of gross
negligence are welcome.
Under the current legislation there is a ‘catch 22’ that makes this virtually
impossible.
In the Southall train crash charges of corporate manslaughter were not
brought because a single individual could not be found responsible.
This is clearly a nonsense and everyone knows it.
CORPORATE CRIME 217
Bosses on obscene salaries, giant bonuses, golden share options and

platinum pensions must be forced to accept the responsibility for the
health and safety of their customers.
All the way to the dock of the Old Bailey if necessary.
This editorial took a refreshing stance by directly pointing to corporate

responsibility (‘corporate killers ’), although this lies with companies only and
not with politicians. There is no sense that events should be picked apart to
understand how governments can run down public services before selling
them off and how they can then permit companies to abuse these services
for profit. Lynch (2000) points out that one problem with corporate crime in
terms of news coverage is its complexity. A child abuse case is simple and
easily recognizable to the public. We have ‘good’ and ‘evil’, as in the cases we
examined earlier in this book. In cases of corporate crime, politicians may be
interwoven into companies and their interests. And in the Paddington case, it
appears that one of the Rail companies was itself given the role of checking
standards. In the text above, the writer strives for simplification by creating
a polarity of the ‘fat cat’ bosses and their customers. This seeks to give the
public their ‘evil- doer’. But as Fiske (1989) points out, this can, in some ways,
simply serve the ideological purpose of ritualizing and neutralizing the public
challenge to those in power.
What is also highly relevant in this case is the way that governments may
suggest that they have plans to change the law. While, in fact, in 2007 a
new law ‘The Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act’ was
introduced, this was not widely covered by the news media. The nature of
news reporting is fragmented, and there will be no follow- up. Scholars of
news reporting show how news, including crime and disaster reporting,
happens in fragmented ways (Benthall, 1993). The news may tell us a lot
about the suffering in one place at a particular time, but attention will soon
shift onto something else. The attention span of the news media may have
little connection to the actual flow of events at the place of reporting. A
famine may go on long after the news media have moved onto something
else. Nash (2008) points out that in the cases of disaster reporting, there may
be some mention of causes and responsibility, but these will never be fully
investigated and will be backgrounded by issues of suffering, and there will
certainly be no follow- up to report on whether the causes and responsibilities
have been addressed. And this is true of the coverage of the Paddington
crash. As Minkes and Minkes (2010: 75) point out, the 2007 law still failed to
address the weaknesses in previous laws in which individual responsibility
had to be clear.
There were direct criticisms of the profits made by the rail companies, as
in the Daily Mail :
Anger at Railtrack’s GBP 1.3m a day profits (5 November 1999)
However, there is no use of legal language. This did not become a sustained
part of the way that events were discussed. There was no actual connection
pointing to profit seeking as a cause of the crash. Profit was rather presented
as evidence of the greed and immorality of the companies. Again, this
appears to have become part of the ritualized way that the news media
provides the public with confirmation of what we all know, that ‘while we all
work hard to earn limited money, corporate fat cats are getting away with
so much’.
Over the next few months, the story resurfaced and the results of
investigations appeared, although the final verdict was not reached for several
years. And one clear reason events like this one do not gain the same kind of
coverage as other types of crime is the length of time they often cover, which
may not fit with the usual rituals of crime reporting.
In April of the following year, after a report by the police was made, the
Daily Mail (1 April 1999) reported the following:
Rail chiefs will escape justice over Paddington

RAIL chiefs will not face corporate manslaughter charges over the
Paddington train crash, the Daily Mail can reveal.
Although detectives have concluded there is proof of ‘negligence and
incompetence’ in the lead- up to the accident which killed 31, they say the
‘unsatisfactory’ state of the law makes it impossible to launch a successful
prosecution for manslaughter.
Then the events as they happened were repeated, and the text then returned
to the issue of there being no criminal charges:
Families of victims were last night infuriated by the decision not to press
charges. Denman Groves of Hartpury, Gloucestershire, who lost his 25-
year- old daughter Juliet, said: ‘We are all bitterly disappointed that the
law of the land is so naive that it can’t deal with this murderous type of
action. As far as I’m still concerned, my daughter and the others were
really murdered by Railtrack’.
[. . .]
Ministers are under pressure to change the law on corporate manslaughter
to make it easier for police to press charges in cases such as the Paddington
CORPORATE CRIME 219
and Southall rail crashes or the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster, which
killed 193 off Zeebrugge in 1987. At present, a corporation can be found
guilty of manslaughter only if a particular senior individual is proved to have
been grossly negligent.
Police are also understood to have ruled out the possibility of bringing
lesser charges under section 34 of the Offences Against the Person Act,
which deals with endangering the safety of train passengers.
A source close to the Paddington case said yesterday: ‘The decision
not to charge anyone with corporate manslaughter is very regrettable
and undoubtedly a crushing disappointment for survivors and victims’
families. But it is unavoidable.’ It is understood that the police inquiry has
highlighted serious negligence or incompetence within Railtrack and by
Michael Hodder, the Thames train driver who lost his life when he went
through a red signal.
[. . .]
There will be no charges. It is possible Railtrack may be prosecuted under
Health and Safety legislation. If found guilty, the company could be fined
heavily but no executives would be jailed
What is of note in this article is that it takes no moral tone of its own. Neither
the companies nor their bosses are monsterized for ‘escaping justice’, as
the headline reports. We are told that ‘[m]inisters are under pressure to
change the law on corporate manslaughter’, but we are not told who is
creating this pressure. It appears in this case that the pressure is from
the families, but this has been backgrounded to hint at something greater.
What is backgrounded in this text, crucially, are some of the details of the
actions of the rail companies and the government. We are told only that
‘the police inquiry has highlighted serious negligence or incompetence’.
The journalist has not created links between the actual details of the
government decision to not install expensive safety technology in order
to control stock prices prior to privatization, cuts in training, cuts in safety
measures, cuts in staffing in order to promote profits and the decision not
to bring criminal charges. Earlier in the coverage of the events, employees
were cited as saying that they had been told to ignore obvious faults in
order to meet targets. None of this is brought out. Yet in the coverage of
more traditional crimes involving large- scale deaths, it is more usual for all
the details to be drawn out on each occasion the story is revived (e.g. the
James Bulger murder case).
The language used for the lack of prosecution is also described through
the moderate words of one source who described it as ‘very regrettable and
undoubtedly a crushing disappointment’.
Finally, we see how the language of criminal prosecution had been

completely abandoned by reporters when the tenth anniversary of the event
was commemorated in 2009. We see this in the Sun (5 October 2009):
SURVIVORS of the Paddington rail crash have marked the tenth anniversary
of the accident at a memorial service for the 31 people who died in the
tragedy.
The article summarizes the events, playing down the suffering and carnage,
foregrounding the mourning and solidarity of those present. It ends by pointing
to the fines given to the companies:
A subsequent inquiry into the crash by Lord Cullen was highly critical of
Railtrack and of the training of Mr Hodder.
Thames Trains was later fined £2 million, while in March 2007 Network
Rail – Railtrack’s successor company – was fined £4 million for health and
safety breaches at Paddington.
Lord Adonis said: ‘Paddington was a terrible tragedy and one of the worst
in the world’s history.
‘I am glad that lessons were learned from the accident and that railway
safety has improved but that does not reduce the nature of the tragedy and
the impact it had on so many lives.’
The links between what took place, the appalling decisions and practices
that led to the ‘accident’ or ‘tragedy’, and the lack of criminal prosecution
are not mentioned. While during the events there were some calls in the
press to change the law, so that corporations can be prosecuted, there is no
mention of whether this has actually taken place. The continual use of the
terms ‘accident’ and ‘tragedy’ sidelines the legal issues which were present
and which resulted in the companies being fined.
What we see from the press coverage of the actions of corporations that
led to over 30 dead and 400 injured is that they are treated, in the first place,
within the rituals of disaster news reporting. By the time reporters turn their
attention to issues of responsibility, the horror of the events may already have
been replaced by new horrors in the news. The coverage only rarely used the
kind of language associated with crime that we might find in other crimes,
and reporters resisted using ‘monsterization’ terms for the corporate bosses.
And we see that through the fragmented nature of news reporting, different
information is not joined up; since in the cases of corporate crime there is
complexity and a longer time span, it is harder for reporters to use the same
kind of news frames.
CORPORATE CRIME 221
In terms of ‘crime’ and ‘criminality’ here, importantly, the government

escaped serious charges. They had created a deregulatory climate which
resulted in an environment of safety downgrading. They had also put in place
a system of targets with fines for companies running delayed services. This
system of meeting targets and tales of rankings have been heavily criticized for
the way that they can, in schools, hospitals, the police and universities, as well
as rail services, distract from the actual quality of the service being offered,
which is quite the opposite of what they claim to represent (Power, 1997).
The government, too, was responsible for the very downgrading of services
in the first place. Yet there was no mention of any criminal responsibility in
this context in the news media.
Conclusion
It is certainly not the case that the news media ignore corporate crime. On
the contrary, there is public interest in criticizing the elite, as is described in
the work of Fiske (1989). In particular, we find this in the news media through
criticism of corporate ‘fat cats’, although precise responsibilities and crimes
are not clearly articulated.
Importantly, in the Paddington case, the news coverage could be seen as
playing an important role in placing pressure on the government to introduce
the new law to address corporate manslaughter, even if this law was again
flawed in the same way as its predecessor. However, cases in which laws are
changed will most likely not be addressed by journalists. The nature of news
coverage is that it is unsustained and fragmented. While tabloid newspapers
may report on any news events, no matter how trivial, involving well- known
child murderers, they will be less likely to revisit more complex topics, such
as legal developments around corporate law. One reason for this is the way
that child murderers can be personalized and ‘monsterized’, and therefore
made memorable, whereas corporate criminals are not, and in many ways
they embody many of the values celebrated in our societies, such as ambition,
cunning, individualism, and the ability to make money.
A number of factors certainly make this reporting different from other crime
reporting. This can be seen in the language of the Paddington case study:
● Corporate crimes can be of a varied nature and will therefore be placed

into different news frames by reporters. In the case of Paddington, this
followed the rituals and language of disaster reporting. There appear to
be no rituals specifically for corporate crime.
● Corporate level crime may go against established news frames and
therefore be difficult to develop as stories. At the time of writing, news
stories were appearing in the British press in which officers working

in welfare benefits offices had been instructed to mislead claimants in
order to remove them from the system and meet government targets.
One problem for journalists seeking to develop this story as a crime is
that the victims, benefits claimants, are normally represented as those
who are a burden on society. This creates problems in terms of the
victim/evil- doer opposition required for more personalized or simplified
crime reporting.
● There is a lack of the traditional definers of crime. Offenders are
normally defined for journalists by courts, and police are not dealing
with offenders through a language of crime. Rather, corporate crimes
may be dealt with through ‘inquiries’ led not by legal people but by those
familiar with the industry/sector. This means that such crimes are often
dealt with as ‘accidents’ or as ‘greed’, which calls for vague punishment,
such as the call for resignations or ‘tightening of legislation’.
● Corporate crime is, on one level, complex. One important news value
is that events must be easily understood. Even when it appears to be
clear that the victims are the public and the criminals the bankers, what
has actually been done and the true nature of the crime is harder to
pinpoint. And the journalists will need a ‘hook’ around which to base
the story in the form of an official comment, a press release or a new
event. In long drawn- out inquiries, these might be hard to find. Media
researchers show that the attention of the news media on longer
running events is, at best, fickle.
● Finally, of course, corporations are part of the power structures of
our societies. The mass media, in turn, are owned by corporations
and funded by yet other corporations, the advertisers. Governments
tend to make laws that favour corporations. Corporations have a
powerful public relations machinery to present the restrictive actions
of governments as ‘red tape’ and ‘restricting their ability to compete’.
And media scholars have shown just how much of what now becomes
news output has its origins in PR (Bennett, 2005).
9
Conclusion
I n this book, we have shown how multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis

(CDA) can make a valuable contribution to the existing literature on crime
and deviance in criminology and in media and cultural studies. While these
disciplines provide insights into the social, cultural and economic contexts
that lie behind crime and the patterns of media representations that help to
prevent more informed understandings of crime, criminals and the justice
system, we have shown that a critical linguistic approach can enhance the
ability of the researcher to show the finer details of how these representations
work. A media scholar may reveal the sensationalist reporting of a crime
phenomenon; but a critical linguistic analysis may reveal more subtle,
but nevertheless strategic, nuances in the way that this reporting shapes
discourses of crime. Throughout the book, we have demonstrated the added
descriptive value that linguistic analysis can have. For example, in Chapter 6
we found that media scholars had explained the way that television crime
shows such as Crimewatch portray police work through dramatization and
sensationalism. This allows the police to be presented in the best possible
light, for example as a team of dedicated detectives. Our own analysis drew
attention to the personalization and impersonalization strategies representing
both the police and the offender. The offender was visually personalized in
extreme close shots, and, linguistically, we found representations of him as
having a ‘criminal mind’, a notion which is espoused in many current neo-
liberal discourses about crime. A transitivity analysis also revealed that there
was no attention to the details of what, in fact, the offender had done; more
importance was placed on who he was and what he might do in the future.
In Crimewatch, we found that the police were both individualized (by being
named, through the use of close shots, and the inclusion of mental verb
processes and soft voices), and collectivized as a team. In terms of transitivity,
they were represented through extensive transitive material processes to
show thoroughness, professionalism and agency in their fight against crime,
while in fact they unearthed very little information and even missed a call
from a concerned viewer, which was glossed over in the programme. Media
studies research may be able to point to the broader ideas communicated by
such texts, but a critical linguistic analysis is able to provide details on exactly
how this is achieved. In turn, this throws up more details that can sharpen
our analysis. It can show us how authors conceal and background agency,
and abstract kinds of actions through the process of ‘othering’ described in
sociological and media research.
The rewards of linguistic analysis are clear in all the chapters of the book,
for example, in the case of the female offender in Chapter 5. From researchers
working in both criminology and media studies (e.g. Wykes, 2001; Jewkes,
2004), we know that the mainstream media relies on a limited number of
stock narratives or discourses about criminal women. By choosing two recent
cases of female deviants, we unpicked these discourses and revealed, through
a combined linguistic and visual analysis of several newspaper articles, how
deviant women are indeed constructed as ‘evil monsters’. The linguistic
analysis also demonstrated that, on the one hand, women would be credited
as agents of lists of violent acts, as if to show how far they deviate from the
model woman/carer/mother, whereas, on the other hand, their agency would
ultimately be denied, as if they were driven either by men or by evil forces.
These women would also be the agents of deceiving others, which was shown
in the overlexicalization of relational terms for friends and family, whereas
men are more likely to be represented as offending in isolation. Clearly, the
women’s idealized familial role is as much at stake as their offences.
In this book, by looking in detail at both linguistic and visual semiotic choices,
we were able to comment more precisely on the interplay of image and text.
We showed that the discourses communicated by each were not always even.
For example, in Chapter 4, we found that a BBC knife crime programme aimed
at young people challenged some of the more simplistic views of knife crime.
Yet at the same time, it communicated many of these simplistic views visually,
by selecting gritty urban settings and clothing (‘hoodies’). Of course, media
studies scholars have pointed to the increasing importance of the image for
a long time (e.g. Hall, 1973) and have produced highly insightful research into
visual representations of crime (e.g. Jones and Wardle, 2008). Nevertheless,
we have shown that a detailed multimodal analysis of images can alert us
to possible ideological functions of images in a more sustained and detailed
way. In the case of the images we analysed in Chapter 5, we found that the
visual representation of one woman demonized her even further than the text,
thereby sidelining a more nuanced discussion of her crime.
We would argue that multimodal CDA also forms a natural partner for
disciplines such as (cultural) criminology and media research that is concerned
with crime representations. All three disciplines share a research interest in
the manifold transformations in late modernity, albeit from different vantage
CONCLUSION 225
points. For example, many criminologists (e.g. Reiner, 2007) have pointed
to the strong link between inequality and crime, both of which have been
exacerbated by late modern capitalism and the culture of consumerism. Like
many criminologists, critical discourse analysts emphasize the social/cultural
construction of crime and crime control and the salience of the media image
in this process. And crucially, CDA has also stressed the pervasive influence
of the market and consumer capitalism in these changes in late modern
Western societies.
An important characteristic of many of these late modern economic,
social and cultural changes and processes is that they are shaped
extensively by discourses, as scholars working within a critical perspective
have demonstrated (e.g. Fairclough, 1999). This is where a multimodal
analysis can make an important contribution. We can therefore say that the
transformations of late modernity, concerning crime, are to a significant
degree also transformations in language and discourse. The mainly retributive
public and media discourses of punishment, expressed in a language of
condemnation, demonize and criminalize an ever greater number of people.
Apart from criminals, these are people who are dependent on welfare,
single mothers, dysfunctional families, the ‘workshy’, substance abusers
and the young. What this shows is that individuals have been confronted
by a burgeoning ‘culture of control’ (Garland, 2001), while at the same
time they find their social world and welfare systems dismantled through
privatization and the shift to the global economy. Again, we explored the
way this demonization works linguistically and visually in Chapter 4 on young
people. Our detailed combined lexical and social actor analysis of a small
corpus of texts, found significant support for what cultural criminologists
Hayward and Yar (2006) have termed the ‘semantics of exclusion’. At all
times, social context, political decisions, changes in our economies and
rampant consumerism are suppressed as players in what we call crime.
We also showed that even when some media attempt to contest dominant
notions of crime or of punishment, such as the knife crime ‘epidemic’, they
still either rely on stock images and discourses, which to a degree preclude
a critical discussion of the problem in terms of structural and economic
reasons, or struggle to operate in a media landscape dominated by populist
discourses.
We would suggest that multimodal linguistic analysis can provide further
insights into crime due its power to draw attention to the details found in texts.
More work should be done on all of the areas covered in this book. What we
propose, then, is that sociological and criminological analysis of late- modern
culture and crime should be fused with multimodal CDA of its crime- control
discourses and discourses of the market. Here we have merely pointed to some
possible directions. But we would also encourage work in CDA to integrate
the wide array of research conducted on crime in other disciplines, so that it

better understands social patterns, actual political processes and decisions, the
real nature of police work, and the structures that underpin what comes to be
represented in the media.
What we ourselves have been struck by in the process of writing this
book, through the details this kind of analysis tends to throw up, is the sheer
repetition of the ways that crime is iconized and essentialized by the media
across time. In terms of language, we find examples of ‘One Boy Crimewave’
stories stretching over several decades. In each case, we find that ‘yob’ or
‘thug’ teenagers are attributed a lot of agency, often through abstract verb
processes, such as ‘wreaking havoc’, and the victims are usually a list of
society’s most vulnerable, such as pensioners, or the most valued, such
as ‘respectable residents’. The broader social processes a ‘thug’ is part of
are neglected in these texts. In term of visuals, we find regular use of stock
images of ‘knife crime’ and ‘drug users’, none of which document crime
but symbolize it through a limited number of habitualized icons, such as the
‘hoodie’. In both language and image, we find a recycling of generic news
frames rather than an examination of specifics, in which language strategies
help to conceal and background actual causes and contexts. Instead of
being offered a thorough examination of specific events, places, people and
situations, we are left with representations of ‘typical’ crimes, which may have
the effect of displacing all other possible or actual instances, making them
invisible. Even when details are brought to the fore, these soon disappear
from view, as the news media quickly move on or seek new drama in order
to avoid losing audiences. Bill Nichols (1992) once commented that media
representations of society, since they come to help define what we think
society is like, are putting our knowledge of how these societies work in
danger. Certainly regarding the representation of crime and deviance in the
media, it appears that rather than being encouraged to debate the nature of
crime, discuss what is actually wrong and where the causes and solutions
lie, the news media have long trained us to view only the memorable, the
iconicized and the fragmented. Susan Sontag (2004) contends that the news
media in particular have encouraged us to think about the world of events in
terms of memorable moments rather than lengthy complex processes. And
in this process, what is suppressed, for the most part, are the details, the
real causes, the connection of what we call crime to social processes, forces
and changes. What we have begun to discover by writing this book is the
central role of language in this suppression: how complexity is avoided; how
authors are able to bring a sense of providing details, while managing to be
entirely selective; how concrete responsibility, agency and victimhood can be
shifted, adjusted and lost. Of course, discourses exist within larger systems
of discourses, many of which are competing, and we do find the mass media
CONCLUSION 227
able to present a range of these. But discourses tend to strive for colonization
of all areas, in which case they appear to be neutral and natural. And in the
case of crime, it certainly appears that the more populist discourses and
language strategies, despite the existence of others, currently have the claim
to that status. We recommend that there should be more research into the
way that language functions in maintaining this situation, which is in turn
about maintaining specific power relations in our society. Until there are freely
accepted and available discourses for talking in other terms about the young
man who is the ‘One Boy Crimewave’, we will never be able to help him, his
‘unemployed single mother’ or the residents he ‘intimidates’.
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Index
abstraction in language 32, 51, fear of crime 2, 5, 8, 18, 21, 22,

60–1, 73, 86, 175 24, 60, 94, 95, 102, 166,
abuse 170, 172, 178, 182
of children 11
of power 8 hegemony 9–10, 13, 16
agency in crime 24, 40, 52–5, 57,
62, 82, 86, 207 iconography 104, 196
concealment of agency 211, 212 ideology 10, 11, 12, 17, 20, 21, 72,
women and agency 111, 114, 87, 105, 159, 193
117, 123, 130 of prisons 193
inequality 4, 9, 10, 208, 225
children
ASBOs 80 knife crime 76, 95–108, 122, 126–7
and drug education 48–50
and legislation 80 lexical analysis 27–32
corporate crime 199–222
and lack of criminality 211, 216 metaphor in crime representation 53,
crime and media 1–8 105, 111, 171, 193, 212
Crimewatch 153–67 modality 107, 148, 195, 215, 216
in late modernity 4–6 modernity 4–5
Critical Discourse Analysis 8–11 monsterization 18, 57, 147, 157, 212
cultural criminology 5, 15 of children 20
of women 24, 112, 113, 116–19,
deprivation and crime 24 125, 130, 132
discourse 3, 6–8 moral panics 21–3, 34, 95, 109
drugs multimodality 10, 11, 22–4, 29,
cannabis 41 79, 167, 169, 224
as a cause of crime 35–7 Muslim offenders 74–7
crack cocaine 42, 43
drug education 48–50 news values 16–21
as ‘edgework’ 35 news production 11–16
as normalized activity 33–4
and poverty 37 Paddington Rail crash 205–6
and media coverage 206–22
entertainment and crime 2, 3, 11, paedophile 116, 117, 130–5, 156, 214
19, 135, 137, 140, 154, 167, participants in crime 66, 77
187, 189 policing 137–68
246 Index
criticisms of police 150 structural opposition in language 84–7

factual portrayals 141, 153–67
fictional portrayals 139–41 techniques of neutralization 203–4
justification of work and PR 143, 147 television
and news 142–3 factual programmes 141–2
poverty and crime 2, 4, 33, 35, fiction programmes 139–41
36, 37, 44, 47–9, 104, 105, transitivity 51–66, 75–6, 122–3,
119, 142, 145, 183 159–64
prevention of crime 18
prison 169–98 victims 19, 20, 21, 24, 56, 57, 97, 132,
in documentaries 189–98 142, 148, 160, 166, 168, 204
pampering of prisoners 74–7 as genuine/none genuine 58
in popular media 187–98 and innocence 82, 84, 85, 132
prison staff 73, 74
women 114, 119, 129, 130
as a soft option 172–8
tax payers 172, 173, 175, 176, 178
welfare to punitiveness 79–80
violence in 193
women and crime 111–35
women in prison 179–83
compared to men 115–16
Wormwood Scrubs 189–98
and denial of agency 117–19
prisoners
as a danger to a fearful public 178 and feminist work 114
as mothers 117–18, 122, 179
racism 74–7 as ‘other’ 112
rapists 57, 71 and physical characteristics 113,
reactions in language 60 133–4
reconstructions of crime 138, and poverty 179
156–160, 166, 167 and standard narratives 117
recontextualization of social
practice 31–2 youth and crime 79–109
representation of social actors 27–50 and criminal responsibility 86–7,
92–5
social actor analysis 68–75, 120–2, and drugs 38–41
126–7, 157–9, 174–7 as a social problem 89–90

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The Language of

Crime and Deviance

Analysing Police Interviews, Elizabeth Carter

© Andrea Mayr and David Machin 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

British Library Cataloguing-in- Publication Data

EIISBN: 978-1- 4411-8692-8

Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

1 Introduction: crime, deviance and language 1

7 The criminal justice system in the media: the prison 169

8 Corporate crime 199

speech. Below is a key to the transcription symbols we have used in these

[ Interruption and overlap (two speakers talking at the same time)

Conventions for capturing non-standard pronunciation

study of language in representations of crime and deviance is one important

crime, while marginalizing alternative perspectives and approaches. This is

Crime and media in late modernity

20 years have seen the re- emergence of an explicitly retributive discourse

Discourse is often deﬁned in two different ways. According to the formalist

[. . .] the analysis of discourse is, necessarily, the analysis of language in use.

According to the functionalist paradigm, the analysis of language cannot be

concepts for understanding media institutions as sites of discursive power.

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

as value- neutral scholarship. CDA practitioners take an ‘explicit socio- political

analysis which aims to systematically explore often opaque relationships

these discourses are exercises of power through inconspicuous, less visible

Media theory and the social production

. . . active in deﬁning situations, in selecting targets, in initiating ‘campaigns’,

criminal justice organizations guarantee absolute control, as both journalists

diversiﬁed, widely accessible, and ultimately chaotic media environment has

[t]o be involved in some way in the act of transgression is pleasure enough.

of selling products, from ﬁlms to ’gangsta rap’ and clothing, presented in

News values and newsworthiness

purposes, by the therapeutic industry as an indication of societal rage, and

highly sexualized narratives and images of female victims and offenders. We

Celebrity or high-status persons

Spectacle and graphic imagery

especially on TV. Television is often perceived to be more ‘objective’, as

Conservative ideology and political diversion

internalize a certain sense of news imperatives, which act as an assessment

Moral and media panics in late modernity

disturbances in 1964, he argued that the labelling of these two groups in

The structure of the book

century and which points to the criminogenic features of capitalism. There

Simple word choice

I n this chapter, we begin our investigation of the language of crime,

The nature of lexical analysis

implicitly through visual semiotic resources. We explain this type of analysis

Youths attack local buildings.

In the last of these sentences, the lexical choice suggests something

The lexis of crime: the recontextualization

Ecstasy as cheap as a bar of chocolate for children

Lexical choices and the recontextualization

Substitution: The details and complexities of activities can be substituted

Criminological research on drugs

Drug use as a normalized activity

Drugs as a cause of crime

the likelihood of their involvement in the informal economy and in criminal

all poorer areas will necessarily experience widespread drug issues, as an

News media representations of

One in ﬁve pupils has been lured into drugs

It means that almost 620,000 youngsters aged between 11 and 15 risked