Framing Child Sexual Abuse: A Longitudinal Content Analysis of Newspaper and Television Coverage, 2002-2012

Abstract

The way in which the news media frame child sexual abuse can influence public perception. This content analysis of the child sexual abuse coverage of eight national news organizations in the United States from 2002 to 2012 includes the two dominant events of the Catholic Church and Pennsylvania State University child sexual abuse scandals. Census and systematic stratified sampling techniques were applied to articles obtained from the Lexis/Nexis Academic database, resulting in a sample of 503 articles. Intercoder reliability was ensured by double coding a randomly selected sample. Study findings indicate a shift in the attribution of responsibility of child sexual abuse among news organizations over the past decade from an individual-level problem with individual-level solutions to a societal-level problem with institutional culpability. Nevertheless, individual-level solutions continue to be framed as the best possible solution.

Keywords: child sexual abuse; content analysis; framing; framing of responsibility; institutional failure; mass media.