MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF VICTIM

Abstract

It is now a widely acknowledged fact in criminology that media, be it news media formats or social media, overwhelmingly focus on the most severe examples of crime and victimisation. By contrast, lower-level property offences, drug related offences and domestic violence cases that make up the significant majority of recorded crimes and white-collar offences, that comes with great costs for society, are given relatively sparse attention and, in most cases, even ignored altogether. However, interesting is the fact
that mass media’s focus on severe crimes is also highly selective and there might be several explanations for this. The impetus of this paper is to describe media practices and tries to find a logical explanation for such a biased approach. In doing so, the paper first briefly considers the development of academic victimology and the various theoretical strands within the discipline. Then it goes with introduction of the socially construct images of victims by the media, as deserving and undeserving victims, and summarises their characteristics. The paper then examines three basic tropes — villain, victim, and hero — that emerge in images, claims, and narratives in media context and critically evaluates each one of them. Finally, it analyses positive and negative influences of victim portrayal by the media, including social media and throughout the paper it gives practical recommendations for media, how crime victims shall be represented, so that the revictimisation of the people most affected by the crime be minimised to a large extent