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From Safety to Danger: Constructions of Crime in a Women’s Magazine

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Abstract

This study examines how the print media constructs signifiers of safety and danger for women. We analyze 155 news articles regarding crime and criminal justice from 1970 to 1990 in Chatelaine magazine, a Canadian women’s periodical. Both content and textual analyses are deployed to evaluate the media representations of crime and their role in facilitating images of fear and safety. We show that the meanings associated with women’s danger and safety in news narratives are socially constructed through claims, sources, content and culture. We find that news reporting did not initially incorporate signifiers of fear. However, crime messages increasingly included images of fear in the later reporting period. We argue that the transformations surrounding these images and texts are influenced by the rise in neoliberal thought in the 1980s. Our results indicate that ideological struggles external to the media are crucial to the representation of crime, which ultimately influence signifiers of danger and safety for women.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, NS, B3H 3C3, Canada

    Delthia E. Miller & John L. McMullan

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  1. Delthia E. Miller
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  2. John L. McMullan
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Correspondence to Delthia E. Miller.

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Miller, D.E., McMullan, J.L. From Safety to Danger: Constructions of Crime in a Women’s Magazine. Crit Crim 19, 265–283 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-010-9126-4

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