Abstract
This chapter will discuss the mass media’s coverage of child sexual exploitation (CSE) cases in Rochdale (Greater Manchester) and Rotherham (South Yorkshire). These cases gained prominent media attention in the period between 2010 and 2015. The cases involved male abusers of black and minority ethnic (BME) background, in particular of Pakistani heritage and of Muslim faith, who had been abusing young female victims. Although some of the victims were also of the same ethnic background as the abusers, media attention selectively focused on those victims who were of white ethnic background. The chapter argues that the cases were narrated entirely through a cultural repertoire and drew on older racialised panics about the brown menace and white victims. The problem here is that the crime of CSE in these locales (and others like it) became racialised—presented as a form of culturally specific deviance, rather than one about gender and power, this process of ‘browning’ not only created a newer category of the black folk devil, and thus ignored white perpetrators, but also served to marginalise all victims of such abuse. A comment on the media’s racialised (re)presentation of these CSE cases takes into account their relative power in modern society, as well as their status, along with other elites, as joint-producers of information about race and racism (van Dijk 2000: 36).
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Notes
- 1.
‘Grooming’ has been a term commonly used in the media’s presentation of child sexual exploitation (CSE) cases. However, it must be recognised that ‘grooming’ is a ‘dubious category’. It is not a distinct sexual offence, as the media would have us believe, but rather it is an ‘ill-defined subset’ of child sexual exploitation (Cockbain 2013: 22). Grooming is used to refer to the tactics used by sex offenders in attempts to sexually abuse children (Craven et al. 2006, cited in Gill and Harrison 2015: 35).
- 2.
Speaking on the BBC’s Newsnight programme in January 2011, Jack Straw said about Asian men of Pakistani heritage: “These young men are in a western society, in any event, they act like any other young men, they’re fizzing and popping with testosterone, they want some outlet for that, but Pakistani heritage girls are off-limits and they are expected to marry a Pakistani girl from Pakistan, typically…So they then seek other avenues and they see these young women, white girls who are vulnerable, some of them in care … who they think are easy meat” (Jack Straw, quoted on Newsnight, 7 January 2011).
- 3.
This comment in no way detracts from the victimisation experienced by the girls in these CSE cases.
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Patel, T.G. (2018). Cultural Repertoires and Modern Menaces: The Media’s Racialised Coverage of Child Sexual Exploitation. In: Bhatia, M., Poynting, S., Tufail, W. (eds) Media, Crime and Racism. Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71776-0_3
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