Attribution of Responsibility: Sex-Based Bias in Press Reports on Crime

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Abstract
The growing body of research on the subject of women and the media has only recently begun to consider the treatment of female criminality. The present study examines the `chivalry hypothesis' as related to media portrayals of female criminality. The data were obtained from a systematic content analysis of 724 press reports of crimes which appeared in Israel's leading dailies. The attribution-of-responsibility statements in these reports were classified by type of offence, offender's sex and other variables. A multivariate analysis, applying the log-linear procedure, reveals the effect of the interaction between the offender's sex and the type of crime on the tendency of the press to present the offender as a `pawn' or as an `origin' type criminal. In spite of the overall tendency to treat female criminality as a consequence of social or psychological factors (i.e. a `pawn'), the attribution of responsibility varies significantly across categories of crime, suggesting that sex-based bias in press reports of crime is highly dependent in the offence involved.

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