Framing Abuse by Jenny Kitzinger

Author:Jenny Kitzinger [Kitzinger, Jenny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Law, Child Advocacy, Social Science, Sociology, Marriage & Family, Media Studies, Sexual Abuse & Harassment
ISBN: 9780745323329
Google: WmdHAAAAMAAJ
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2004-01-15T04:27:27+00:00

m: The thing that made me think about it was the fact that they are all incomers. They weren’t local people, they were all English incomers.

f: That sheds a different light on it, that makes you think (Group 4).

It is worth noting that all the respondents quoted above live in Scotland and many claim some kind of direct or indirect access to opinion on Orkney. They came to their conclusion in spite of, rather than because of, the media coverage of the case. They had either picked up information from the media and reinterpreted this to reach different conclusions than those implied in media reports or they had accessed gossip and friends-of-friends to gain their own impressions of community reactions.

Different conceptual sentences, but a common grammar: similarities between these three accounts

On the face of it, the three positions outlined above may appear very different. In traditional media terms those taking the first position are following a dominant reading, while those adopting the second or third position might be described as reading the Orkney coverage against the grain or, in Hall’s terms as adopting oppositional and negotiated readings respectively. A great deal of investigation has focused on the diverse ways in which people interpret or respond to specific programmes (usually shown to research participants on video) (e.g. Morley 1980). The concern in such work is to examine how people resist the intended meaning of the programme producers (or the preferred meaning as identified by the researchers). In this sense the second interpretation outlined above is the most clearly resistant or oppositional. The research participants who declare that islands were likely to harbour child abusers, consciously oppose the predominant presentation of the Orkney story. They resist what they see as the manipulative self-presentation of the Orkney parents and refuse to accept what they understand to be the preferred meaning of most of the press and television reporting. Sometimes they quite self-consciously read against the grain.

However, the limits of the terminology ‘opposition’ and ‘resistance’ must be recognised. First, as I have already pointed out, it is important to draw a distinction between how people understand the message, and how they respond to it (a distinction often blurred by the concept of reading). More important still, the fact that people can resist such meanings does not mean that the media have no influence. It simply means that a particular message (the Orkney parents must be innocent because Orkney is such a nice place) can be disputed. This resistance is itself supported by other media messages. Positive reporting about Orkney may be challenged by drawing on books or films or other television or press representations of island life as strange or backward, however this cannot be used as grounds for generalising about audience resistance to media power in any broader way.

Rather than highlighting the differences between these three types of response it is more important to identify their shared framing. These first three groups have more in common than divide them. They may differ about

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