Images of Issues

Typifying Contemporary Social Problems

Joel Best

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780202305394
• eBook ISBN: 9781351310260
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Constructionist theory describes and analyzes social problems as emerging through the efforts of claimsmakers who bring issues to public attention. By typifying a problem and characterizing it as a particular sort, claimsmakers can shape policymaking and public response to the problem. Th is new edition of Images of Issues addresses claimsmaking in the 1990s, featuring such issues as fathers' rights, stalking, sexual abuse by the clergy, hate crimes, multicultural education, factory farming, and concluding with an expanded discussion of the theoretical debate over constructionism.

PART I
Claims

Claimsmaking is an act of communication. Claimsmakers address different audiences: Some hope to identify and organize the people directly harmed by the conditions described in their claims; others try to educate the general public; and still others approach the policymakers who can do something about the conditions. While some meet their audiences face-to-face, many contemporary claimsmakers use the mass media to reach their audiences. If the press can be convinced that their claims are newsworthy, the media will help spread their message.

Whatever the audience and however claimsmakers approach them, claimsmaking attempts to persuade. Claimsmakers want to convince others that X is a social problem or that Y offers the solution. Claims-makers’ success depends partly upon whether their claims persuade their audiences. In other words, claimsmaking is a rhetorical activity, and we can use rhetoric—the study of persuasion—to analyze claims (Best 1987). Several chapters in this book examine the content of claims and how claimsmaking rhetoric typifies social problems.

Claims often begin with dramatic examples. This is particularly true when the press presents claims. Consider the opening paragraphs in a front page Los Angeles Times story about a gang intervention program:

This is what journalists call “a grabber”; it is a conventional, but very effective, way to begin a story, particularly one describing a social problern. The example captures the reader’s attention, it links the larger, abstract problem of gangs to a specific image—an unrepentant 11-year-old. Note that the reporter does not claim that this is a typical case; in fact, the story suggests that it may be “the worst.” Beginning with a dramatic example is a standard technique in newsmagazine cover stories, television news feature stories, and newspaper articles. Because we encounter them first, and because they are vivid, these examples play an important role in typifying social problems. Examples shape our sense of just what is the problem, of what needs to be done about it. In Chapter 2, John M. Johnson describes the role played by dramatic examples—what he calls horror stories—in the construction of the child abuse problem.

Claimsmakers choose typifying examples because they illustrate particular features of social problems. There are always alternative ways to typify social problems, but those alternatives are not always apparent unless an issue is contentious. When there is open debate about a social problem, rival claimsmakers may offer competing—often very different—typifying examples. For instance, advocates of expanded programs for the homeless might plead for sympathy for homeless children whose parents cannot find work; in contrast, critics of such programs might point to a homeless alcoholic, arguing that society should not be responsible for housing someone who continues to drink. But, for many claimsmakers, indifference is a greater obstacle than opposition. Audiences ignore many claims until claimsmakers develop a rhetorically powerful way of typifying the problem. But these alternative typifications are not always obvious until they evolve. For example, in Chapter 3, Kathleen Lowney and Joel Best trace the recent history of claims about stalking. They show that early typifications of this problem attracted little attention, and that stalking had to be redefined and retypified before it achieved widespread recognition as a social problem.

In our society, it has become common to use a medical model to typify social problems. Medicalization refers to the process of defining issues as medical matters: a problem is a “disease,” that displays “symptoms,” that must be “diagnosed” by medical professionals, who apply appropria te “treatments,” in hopes of “curing” the condition (Conrad and Schneider 1992). During the twentieth century, such medical language, originally applied to measles, smallpox, and other disorders of the body, was applied increasingly to troubling behavior. Thus, psychiatrists and other medical authorities claimed that a wide range of behaviors, including criminality, sexual deviance, eating disorders, and poor school performance, needed to be recognized as medical problems. While not all of medicalized claims achieved complete acceptance, the notion that some behaviors might be “sick” and evidence of a “disease” became widespread. In Chapter 4, Lynn M. Appleton suggests such medicalization extends beyond the claims made by medical professionals. The use of medical language to describe problem drinking—that is, claims about “the disease of alcoholism”—has become routine, even though physicians pay little attention to and make few claims about alcoholism. Appleton explains this apparent contradiction by suggesting that sociologists define medicine too narrowly.

The doctor struggling against disease is just one way to characterize social problems, but most social problems claims draw upon equally familiar cultural imagery. Chapter 5, by Shan Nelson-Rowe, points to another popular typifying model—melodrama. Melodramatic claims typify social problems in terms of victims who are exploited by villains and who must be rescued by heroes. The melodramatic model is perhaps most often applied to crime problems, but Nelson-Rowe shows that it has other applications. He argues that the campaign to promote multiculturalism in education routinely uses melodramatic rhetoric to typify educational issues.

2
Horror Stories and the Construction of Child Abuse

John M. Johnson

Everyone recognizes that the mass media’s power extends beyond the mere transmittal of information. Their power (and some of their mystery) also derives from their ability to elicit emotions. Eliciting emotions often paves the way for action. We recognize the importance of this process at a common-sense level. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, for example, gained much support and momentum from the publication of emotionally provocative photographs and accounts of the brutalities at Selma and Montgomery, Alabama. Press coverage helped shape public action, leading to subsequent civil rights reforms. The Vietnam War—“the first mass media war”—offers another good example. The pervasive newspaper stories and television accounts of daily battle scenes were important influences at all stages of the war, for both its supporters and detractors. More recently, press coverage of the rioting in South Africa is seen as an important influence on U.S. policy.

Sociologists recognize the relevance and importance of emotionally provocative mass media accounts for creating new social problems. Sensationalized mass coverage often is an important aspect of social problems claimsmaking (Spector and Kitsuse 1977). Examples include the construction of “crime waves” (Fishman 1978), various problems of juvenile justice (Bortner 1984; Cavender 1981; Zatz 1985), foreign policy (Altheide 1985), corporate homicide (Swigert and Farrell 1980), and missing children (Best 1987), among others. This chapter analyzes mass media’s use of child abuse horror stories, emotionally provocative stories about violence to children. Such horror stories have played an important role in the political, social, and institutional success of the child maltreatment movement in the United States.

The Emergence Of Child Abuse As A Social Problem

Child battering, child abuse, and child neglect (now commonly subsumed under the term child maltreatment) are relatively new terms, even though injuries and fatalities to children are as old as recorded history. Dr. S. West published the first medical documentation of systematic, intentional injuries to children in 1888 (Solomon 1973:774). Researchers continued reporting important information about nonaccidental childhood traumas to the medical professions long before child abuse emerged as a social problem and political issue in the early 1960s (Caffey 1946; Wooley and Evans 1955).

In 1962, the research team headed by Dr. C. Henry Kempe and Dr. Ray Heifer published their now-famous article on “The Battered-Child Syndrome” in the Journal of the American Medical Association. This study, published in the medical profession’s most prestigious and respected journal, was accompanied by an official editorial asserting the seriousness of this new medical problem. The characteristic features of the syndrome included traumatic injuries to the head and long bones, commonly done to children under 3 years of age by parents who were themselves beaten or abused as children. The parents commonly denied mistreatment of their children. The publication of this research article was an important step in legitimizing this problem as one demanding medical intervention.

The first state laws specifically formulated for child abuse intervention were passed in 1963; between 1963 and 1967, 47 of the 50 states passed some form of child abuse and/or neglect legislation (deFrancis 1963, 1967). The American Humane Association (AHA) and several prof es-sional social work organizations provided expert testimony and played other active roles in advocating legislative initiative (deFrancis 1970). Technological advances, as well as certain features of pediatric radiology as an occupational specialty, played important roles in these early efforts to establish the child abuse and neglect movement (Pfohl 1977). These developments have increased significantly the number of officially recognized and classified child abuse and neglect cases (Johnson 1986). In 1963, a study commissioned by the AHA could document only 662 cases of nonaccidental trauma to children for the entire United States but, by 1980, nearly 700,000 cases achieved official recognition and status.

Child abuse began as a relatively esoteric concern of a few medical researchers. But the dramatic article on “The Battered-Child Syndrome” by Kempe et al. (1962) attracted the mass media’s attention. Barbara Nelson (1984:65-75) argues that professional and mass media publications offered complementary coverage, which was critical to the early agenda-setting and political successes of the social movement. Initially, the emphasis was on physical abuse or “battering.” but as the movement achieved legitimacy, the scope of both media and movement concern expanded to other areas, including child neglect, emotional abuse, and, eventually, incest and sexual abuse of children (Johnson 1986, 1987). The publication of child abuse horror stories has played a prominent role in the social, political, and institutional successes of the child maltreatment movement during the last 25 years. These horror stories are mass media reports of individual cases that involve dramatic or unusual injuries to children and that evoke an emotional response about the problem of child abuse or neglect. This chapter analyzes the formal properties of child abuse horror stories and the role they have played in the emergence and definition of this social problem.

Nature of the Research

This chapter derives from a larger study of all newspaper stories on child abuse and neglect that appeared for 32 years in the Arizona Republic and the Phoenix Gazette, the two major newspapers in Arizona. The earliest newspaper files on these topics begin in 1948 under the headings cruelty to children, family problems, domestic disturbance, as well as various conventional criminal classifications involving victimized children. Arizona was not one of the 47 states to pass child abuse legislation in the early 1963-1965 period. Arizona passed its first laws in August 1970; they became effective at the beginning of 1971. After the 1970 legislative action, state news organizations began keeping files labeled “child abuse” and “child neglect,” as both phenomena were defined in the early legislation. I examined news stories from 1948 to 1980 to study the relations between mass media reporting and legislative action, the role of local versus national wireservice reporting, and the stories’ substance (Johnson 1981,1982). In addition, I collected clippings from many other newspapers, magazines, and other media over a period of more than 10 years.

During 1948-1980, a total of 623 news stories about child abuse and neglect appeared in the Phoenix newspapers. There were 93 stories during 1948-1969, an average of slightly more than 4 per year. Arizona’s first child abuse law passed in 1970, producing a 10-fold increase in the news stories about this topic (N-40). Between 1971 and 1980, the papers published an additional 490 stories concerning all aspects of child battering, abuse, neglect, and maltreatment, averaging almost 50 per year.

Much of this coverage featured child abuse horror stories. Of the 93 stories published during 1948-1969, 88 (95%) presented facts about an individual case of childhood injury. Most of these were dramatic, horrific stories. While the proportion of child abuse horror stories fell after 1970, they remain the dominant form of newspaper report. Of the 623 stories published during 1948-1980, 436 (70%) placed primary emphasis on reporting the facts of an individual case. Local (Arizona) stories accounted for 350 (80%) horror stories; the remaining 86 (20%) stories came from the AP and UPI national wireservices.

To better understand the nature of these horror stories, I conducted an ethnographic content analysis (Altheide 1986), which is a method of analyzing documentary evidence, based on the observer’s or analyst’s insider understanding about a setting or phenomena (see Johnson 1975). In this case, I analyzed the mass media reports on child abuse to i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I Claims
• PART II Claimsmakers
• PART III Connections
• PART IV Policies
• AFTERWORD
• Index