‘It just seemed like your normal domestic violence’: ethnic stereotypes in print media coverage of child abuse in New Zealand

Abstract

Child abuse in New Zealand is a matter of ongoing concern for the government, public officials, health practitioners and wider society, with most information on the issue coming from mass media, which have played an influential role in forming public opinion. This study investigates the coverage of serious child abuse between November 2007 and November 2009 in three largest New Zealand newspapers: The New Zealand Herald, The Dominion Post and The Press. The analysis of 205 articles shows that three-quarters of the data described severe physical abuse and/or death, and one-quarter described sexual abuse. More than half of all media pieces (56%) represented reporting of ‘crime stories’, such as police and court reports, in addition to statistical data, recommendations and critique (44%). Two cases of Nia Glassie and the Kahui twins’ deaths were sensationalised by the media and were described or mentioned in 63 articles altogether. The dominant construction of child abuse as a ‘Māori issue’ was achieved through individual framing, focused on the personalities of the perpetrators and their inferred innate characteristics, such as being prone to violence and dysfunctional by nature, which were further generalised to Māori society as a whole.

Keywords

child death child physical abuse child sexual abuse Māori ethnicity New Zealand media Nia Glassie the Kahui twins

Introduction

In the area of communication and discourse studies, it has long been established that the media have the persuasive power to construct and dispense social knowledge (Matheson, 2005). For any important issue to gain public awareness, it has to be first formulated as a social problem – a function often performed by media (Franklin and Parton, 1991). Similarly, the impact of media in generating public awareness and concern about the issue of child abuse cannot be underestimated (Mendes, 2000). As pointed out by Goddard (1996), ‘A lack of interest in child abuse on the part of the media could only mean that children’s rights are once again removed from the agenda’ (p. 308). At the same time, media are often suspected of becoming obsessed with the sensationalist coverage of grievous cases of child abuse instead of investigating mechanisms behind it (Chenot, 2011; Hove et al., 2013). The aim of this research is to explore the ways New Zealand newspapers frame issues surrounding child abuse and to identify main patterns and discursive strategies used in these representations. This project was funded by the Child Injury Prevention Foundation of New Zealand 2009–2010 Summer Research Scholarship. Due to this, the data collection period was limited to the time period of 2008–2009 and was also aligned with particularly high media involvement during the court proceedings of two high-profile cases of child abuse and death of Māori children – that of a 3-year-old girl Nia Glassie and 4-week-old twin brothers Chris and Cru Kahui. While there are clear indicators that Māori children are over-represented among victims of abuse, Elder (2012) argues that ‘Māori experience may be similar to minority cultures in other parts of the world’ (p. 22), warranting a closer look at cultural and ethnic representations in mass media.

While, historically, social norms regarding physical discipline were implicated in child physical abuse, media coverage of related issues has often functioned as a catalyst for bringing change in social practices in both private and public arena (Douglas, 2009; Kitzinger, 2001; Lonne and Parton, 2014). International research on media coverage of child abuse emphasises the contradictory role of media in both creating myths (Goddard and Saunders, 2000) and increasing awareness and initiating campaigns aimed at reviewing policies and legislation (Douglas, 2009; Mendes, 2000). On one hand, a comprehensive media representation of child abuse as a social problem, with adequate identification of risk factors and wider social issues, may help audiences better respond to child abuse and inform policy-makers on specific areas lacking necessary legislation or funding (Chenot, 2011; Lonne and Parton, 2014). On the other hand, media are often ready to assign blame, reinforce stereotypes and opt for sensationalist coverage (Chenot, 2011), portraying abusers as ‘monsters’ (Lonne and Parton, 2014) and social workers as ‘wimps’ or ‘bullies’ (Franklin and Parton, 1991).

One of the most common myths recycled by media concerns ‘stranger danger’ – fear of parents that their child might be abducted and abused by a stranger (Kitzinger and Skidmore, 1995; Mendes, 2001). Consistent evidence from police investigation shows that such cases present extremely rare occurrences, while most child abuse is caused by someone known to a child, including family members and caregivers (Mejia et al., 2012; Mendes, 2001). Still, nearly each media report on assault of a child by a stranger brings an extensive coverage and causes a ‘moral panic’ (Franklin and Parton, 1991), which often diverts attention from the systemic problems of child abuse (Lonne and Parton, 2014).

One of the crucial contributions of media to social transformation has been the coverage of child sexual abuse, previously hidden from public view, which has made a significant impact on public consciousness and led to ‘a revolution in the public profile of sexual abuse’ (Kitzinger, 2001: 92). Despite that, Kitzinger (2004) suggests that child sexual abuse is often seen by media as a ‘taboo’ topic – something embarrassing or uncomfortable to talk about, especially as it threatens to undermine the basic element of a neoliberal society, that is, a nuclear family. Mejia et al. (2012) argue that to generate media interest, a case of child sexual abuse must have at least one of three notable features: (1) there are multiple victims or multiple abusers, (2) an abuser is an authority figure and (3) it is a particular violent case of abuse.

Naylor (2001) argues that ‘media coverage is selective’ (p. 156) based on perceived news values. Thus, media only follow the most gruesome, though rather rare, cases as they have the ability to provide news material needed to grab audiences’ attention. Kitzinger and Skidmore (1995) suggested that journalists may develop ‘child abuse fatigue’ and resist addressing the underlying issues. It is easier for journalists to capture public attention with dramatic events, rather than investigate structures and processes behind them (Chenot, 2011).

Media present various events by constructing different frames. Framing entails ‘selecting and highlighting some facets of events or issues, and making connections among them so as to promote a particular interpretation, evaluation, and/or solution’ (Entman, 1993: 52). Hove et al. (2013) suggest that media frame child abuse according to two opposing strategies. Episodic (or individual) frames focus on a concrete event, such as a specific case, and provide an extensive coverage of court hearings and/or detailed descriptions of victims and perpetrators. In contrast, thematic (or societal) frames emphasise the nature of social problems and feature statistical and research data, risk factors and wider societal causes. Episodic framing tends to place the responsibility on individuals, while thematic framing has potential to increase the collective responsibility of society in tackling risk factors and environmental conditions leading to child abuse.

When media report on extreme cases of child abuse and death, ‘moral panic’ and public outcry resulting from gruesome and shocking coverage demand retribution and intervention from officials. Collective responsibility for many social issues, including child abuse, places ‘us’, that is, society as a whole, at fault. It is easier to escape the feelings of collective anxiety and guilt by finding someone else to blame, so under the public pressure authorities have repeatedly adopted a ‘heads must roll’ attitude in response to media reports of extreme child abuse (Chenot, 2011). Research in the United States and United Kingdom show that even when the social welfare system got blamed for failing to protect vulnerable children, media were instrumental in appointing individual responsibility to social workers (Chenot, 2011; Lonne and Gillespie, 2014; Warner, 2013). Politicians are also eager to name specific people as accountable because this strategy exonerates authorities from tackling deeper problems that lead to child abuse, such as poverty (Warner, 2013).

Such individual framing provides audiences with an easy answer to the question, always asked when a child dies, ‘Who is to blame?’ For example, Australian media tend to blame Aboriginal people for the over-representation of child abuse within their communities (Lonne and Gillespie, 2014). The responsibility for child abuse is not only assigned to particular individuals but also extended to the Aboriginal community as a whole. As Lonne and Parton (2014) note, ‘The demonizing of parents as bad and dangerous has served to increase the alienation of already marginalized groups, particularly those in Indigenous and other socially excluded communities’ (p. 833). Elder (2012) argues that it is necessary ‘to address victim blaming language’ (p. 22) in discussing indigenous and ethnic minorities that are over-represented in non-accidental head injury statistics in children.

In New Zealand, mainstream media have been implicated in constructing and maintaining discourses of racism by producing degrading and racialised categorisations of Māori, the indigenous population. Nairn et al. (2006) suggest that media discourses of racism, stigmatisation and oppression are heavily implicated in health problems and poorer sense of well-being among Māori. The analysis of media coverage of ethnic mortality in New Zealand illustrates that the dominant media representations of Māori as irresponsible, lazy and overly dependent on the state serve to transfer the blame onto Māori for their own health problems and short life expectancy (Hodgetts et al., 2004).

In relations to child abuse, only a few studies have investigated the media constructions of Māori in New Zealand. Meek (2013) analysed the representation of child abuse in two New Zealand ‘glossy’ magazines, North and South and Metro, between 1994 and 2007. He suggested that New Zealand media coverage of child abuse differed from those in other Western countries due to different ethnoscape and a smaller number of news outlets. The issue of child abuse was constructed as a ‘Māori problem’, linking the whole Māori society to violence and invoking ‘the oldest colonial stereotypes of the lazy, ignorant native or wild savage’ (p. 32). Both magazines emphasised individual rather than collective societal responsibility through describing specific cases of child abuse and displaying ‘a consistent tendency in all of these articles to hold Māori accountable for child abuse’ (p. 29). There were no attempts in either publication to investigate the wider social and political contexts of child abuse, such as poverty, unemployment and an overall disparity between the socio-economic conditions of Māori people and the rest of society. The focus on individual responsibility was also evident in the unfavourable media representations of motherhood in two high-profile New Zealand cases of child abuse and deaths of Nia Glassie and the Kahui twins. Kenix (2011) argued that in both cases, the mothers were constructed by the media as traitorous hedonists, negligent and careless, absent at the time of the crime and, due to that absence, responsible for their children’s deaths. The studies by Kenix and Meek show that in comparison with the UK and US findings, New Zealand media are more likely to spare social welfare services and instead assign the blame to Māori people.

One reason for this is that Māori people are consistently over-represented on most, if not all, crime and deprivation indicators, reflected in higher incarceration rates (Brittain, 2016). Marie et al. (2008) argue that higher rates of violence among Māori may be partially explained by greater exposure to socio-economic disadvantage (social deprivation theory) and inter-generational abuse via greater exposure to violence in childhood (social learning theory). But they also argue that another explanation may be offered by the systemic theory of colonisation, if the nature of Māori cultural identity is investigated more closely in relation to other risk factors. One of the pathways to investigate collective cultural identity is through the analysis of mainstream media, implicated in constructing and recycling cultural and ethnic stereotypes, which the current study aims to undertake.

The background for the study

According to Ystgaard et al. (2004), all forms of child abuse (i.e. physical, sexual, psychological and emotional; neglect and malnutrition) may cause long-term harm to the victims. However, it is typically the extreme cases of cruelty towards children, including fatalities, which draw media attention (Chenot, 2011). Thus, it was decided to narrow the focus of this research to two types of child abuse – physical abuse and/or death, and sexual abuse – on the premise that such types of abuse tend to be sensationalised by media and contribute most to wider public awareness of the problem (Douglas, 2009; Lonne and Gillespie, 2014).

Previous research (e.g. Connolly and Doolan, 2007; Fanslow, 2005; Kitzinger, 2004) indicates the differing approaches to, and the distinction between, these two types of child abuse. While, in reality, both physical and sexual abuse may frequently coincide and have similar detrimental consequences for young victims (Ystgaard et al., 2004), research and media often report separately on these two types of abuse (Atmore, 1991; McDevitt, 1996), potentially due to the ‘taboo’ nature of child sexual abuse (Kitzinger, 2004).

New Zealand statistical data indicate that before the age of 16 years, 4% of children experience severe physical punishment from parents and 18% become victims of sexual abuse (Fanslow, 2005). A health survey of New Zealand youth estimated that around one in four girls and one in eight boys are likely to be sexually abused or raped before the age of 16 (Adolescent Health Research Group, 2003). In reality, these figures may be much higher if such problems as underreporting, classification differences and lack of necessary detail on available information are taken into account (Fanslow, 2005).

Connolly and Doolan (2007) analysed the New Zealand data on 91 child homicides from 1991 to 2000, pointing to the same risk factors and causes of death as in other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. The younger age of the victims was internationally found as one of the common risk factors; 63% of New Zealand victims were under the age of 5 years, with 35% being under 12 months old, which is similar to Canada (32%) and Ireland (33%) (UNICEF, 2003). New Zealand data are also in line with other research, in that the majority of perpetrators were related to victims: 30% were fathers, 24% were mothers, 18% were de facto spouses of a parent and only 10% were strangers, with the remaining 18% being relatives or other persons known to victims (Connolly and Doolan, 2007). Head injuries were found to be the most common cause of death (30%). Another review of international research on traumatic brain injury in children (Elder, 2012) shows significant over-representation of minority and indigenous cultures, with Māori infants having one of the highest rates of hospital admissions most likely due to non-accidental origin.

The statistical data, though, do not correspond to what is presented in New Zealand media where barely the very ‘top of the iceberg’ of child abuse cases makes it into public view (Merchant, 2010). Due to scarce research on media coverage of child abuse in New Zealand, the rationale for this study is to attempt to partially fill this gap and provide a foundation for further investigations into the topic.

The main objective of this research is to identify the most common media representations of child abuse in New Zealand newspapers. Therefore, the research questions are as follows: (1) What constructions are produced by New Zealand newspapers in covering serious child abuse? (2) What are the main discursive strategies and mechanisms of their production, and is there any particular framing of ethnic groups in relation to the issue?

Methodology

The data were collected using the electronic database, Newztext Newspapers, which is an archive for 19 New Zealand newspapers, started in 1995 and currently owned by Fairfax, an Australian media company. Among those there are the three major New Zealand newspapers – The New Zealand Herald, The Dominion Post and The Press (in the analysis referred to as NZ Herald, DomPost and Press) – which are published, respectively, in the three largest cities, Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, and have the largest readership and circulation (170,677, 84,047, and 81,017, respectively; Press Audit Results 2011). New Zealand does not have a national newspaper, despite the implications of The New Zealand Herald’s title.

To distinguish more serious types of abuse, the search terms used were ‘child <and> abuse <and> (sex <or> kill <or> fatal <or> injury)’. The time period covered 2 years from 30 November 2007 to 30 November 2009 that coincided with extensive media coverage of two cases of grievous child abuse and death – of Nia Glassie and the Kahui twins.

The search resulted in 798 records, but only 205 of them were retained. The majority of articles (593% or 74%) had no relevance to the research questions and were omitted from further analysis. The following topics were also excluded: events outside New Zealand, adults reporting historic child abuse, debates around ‘anti-smacking’ legislation and others.

The data were analysed following the rationale of critical discourse analysis (CDA; Blackledge, 2005; Fairclough, 1995). CDA aims at investigating the most prevalent and salient discourses deployed by media and other social sources and identifying the mechanisms of their production. Fairclough (1995) identifies three main issues central to media coverage of various events: representations, identities and relations. To investigate these issues, he suggests that analyses of media texts should examine how the world and people get represented in media sources, what identities get constructed through those representations and what relationships are set up between those portrayed in media reports. Based on that, the following analysis will look into the media representations of the issue of child abuse, as well as into the strategies used to construct the identity of main actors and the relationships between them.

Research findings and discussion

Based on previous research, the dataset was divided into two overarching topics, Severe Physical Abuse and/or Death and Sexual Abuse. Within each topic, two major categories were identified that produced different representations of child abuse: Police/Court Reports and Institutional Responses.

Severe physical abuse and/or death

The topic Severe Physical Abuse and/or Death contained nearly three times more articles (153) than Sexual Abuse (52).

Police/court reports

The category Police/Court Reports included 84 articles. Two particular cases stand out and therefore are analysed separately: the deaths of Nia Glassie (32 articles), and twin brothers Chris and Cru Kahui (10 articles). The effects of their deaths have been so significant that both cases have received separate entries in the Wikipedia, together with three other older cases of child death in New Zealand from 1987, 1999 and 2006 (Wikipedia, 2009). The impact of both cases on New Zealand society was reflected in various political and social events, leading to numerous comments by different public figures and Members of Parliament, including the then Prime Minister Helen Clark. Following Nia Glassie’s court case, The New Zealand Herald held a 1-week campaign (Our Lost Children) publishing various pieces on child abuse.

Nia Glassie

Nia Glassie was a 3-year-old Māori girl from Rotorua who died from severe head injuries in Auckland’s Starship Children’s Hospital on 3 August 2007. Six family members were variously convicted of murder, manslaughter and serious abuse, including her grandfather, who went on trial separately at a later date.

Out of 32 articles on Nia Glassie’s case, 21 articles were published during the court hearing in November 2008 and another 5 articles – during sentencing in 2009. In addition, there were 11 articles assigned to the category Institutional Responses because they only included references to this case while focusing on other issues, making the total of 43 articles in the dataset that mentioned Nia Glassie.

During the trial, the newspapers published reports on a daily basis. While Nia died from the brain injury, the reports emphasised the details of more horrifying and extremely violent examples of abuse that, although they had not led directly to her death, had the potential to shock the public, such as being placed in the spinning clothes dryer at top heat, being spun on the rotary clothes line until thrown off and had wrestling moves practised on her. These horrific details served to inflate the sensationalist flavour of the reports and aimed to attract public attention.

The accused, the Curtis brothers, Wiremu, 19, and Michael, 22 (both convicted of murder), Nia’s cousin, Michael Pearson, 20, and his partner Oriwa Kemp, 18, were consistently presented as morally reprehensible individuals who refused to accept any wrongdoing, showed no remorse, lied and blamed each other. Nia’s mother, Lisa Kuka, 35 (convicted of manslaughter), was pictured as an inadequate and careless parent who preferred to party instead of taking her dying daughter to the hospital. The fact that Kuka worked long shifts (i.e. 12–14 hours long) as a kiwifruit packer was mentioned only in one news report, as this information contradicted the general storyline of deviance told by the media. What became the main focus of media representations was a horrendous depiction of a highly dysfunctional family life:

Empty bottles littered the ground inside the fence and out the back of the small three-bedroom house in the low-income neighbourhood of Koutu […].

The house was the scene of the crime; the mess the aftermath of a 21st party which raged one Saturday afternoon and night with loud music and brawls while a battered, malnourished little girl lay dying inside […].

What was done to Nia was callous and violent and perpetrated by a group of no-hopers who lived and partied together, who smoked pot together and who for one reason or another didn’t like the little girl they failed to protect. (NZ Herald, 19 November 2008)

In these representations, the report clearly places the blame for these life conditions on the accused, labelling them ‘no-hopers’. There is no questioning of deeper social processes leading to such poor life conditions; the culprits are inferred to have chosen this lifestyle themselves instead of ‘normal’ lives, free from poverty and violence. Thus, the focus is not on the socio-economic reasons behind violence and abuse but on the individual characters of the accused, their moral profile and intrinsic qualities.

With continuous repetition of the horrific details and negative portrayal of the accused, news reports create an image of absolute ‘monsters’, devoid of normal human feelings or empathy:

Every day in court, a new horror unfolded. Jurors would stare at the defendants in disbelief.

The defendants don’t look appalled.

Perhaps they’re bored. Though, sometimes in court they laughed and whispered and often they tried to stare down the media. (NZ Herald, 19 November 2008)

The offenders showed no emotion as they listened to their fates yesterday. (Press, 5 February 2009)

The older Curtis barked like a dog as he was led away; the younger was unresponsive. (NZ Herald, 7 February 2009)

The explanations for such abnormal behaviour are grounded in the personality characteristics of the accused, as well as in dysfunctional nature of their families:

The abuse was normalised and it escalated. The brothers didn’t do sports or work, there was booze and pot. (NZ Herald, 19 November 2008)

Michael was the product of a dysfunctional and violent upbringing.

His family had strong gang connections and he did not start formal schooling until the age of 12. He did not stay at school long. […]

Wiremu is described as intellectually slow. At the time of Nia’s death he was 17. His cognitive age was that of a 12 year old. He is also virtually illiterate and not one for talking. […]

Much has been made of the defendants’ apparent lack of emotion in court. [Wiremu’s lawyer] Horsley suggests that could be a reflection of their lack of cognitive function, of their lack of intellectual capacity. (NZ Herald, 7 February 2009)

While the abusers of Nia Glassie are presented as ‘monsters’ and an aberration in a ‘normal’ society, multiple references to other Māori, both overt and covert (e.g. by using Māori names and surnames, etc.), extend this deviation to all Māori whanau (i.e. families), suggesting that such abuse and violence are ‘normal’ for them rather than ‘abnormal’. Even when Pākehā (i.e. White New Zealanders) are also mentioned as child abusers, they are constructed as an exception to the rule, while for Māori it is normalised as a common behaviour:

But it had just seemed like your normal domestic violence. This is a hard town, [Rawhiti Simiona] said, and it can be a scary one. (NZ Herald, 19 November 2008)

Incoming Māori affairs minister Pita Sharples […] has admitted there is a ‘subculture of dysfunction’ among poor families in New Zealand. (DomPost, 19 November 2008)

John Key talked of a growing ‘underclass’. […]

Though Pākehā perpetrate their share of child abuse […] the rollcall of shame to which Nia’s name can now be added has a sad commonality. […]

What is terribly wrong is surely the breakdown in Māoridom’s much-vaunted whanau structure. (DomPost, 20 November 2008)

These examples show that Māori people, in general, are constructed as dysfunctional and prone to violence. Even Māori politicians (e.g. Pita Sharples) are summoned to answer for ‘their own kind’ and have to explain and tackle the problems assigned to the entire ethnic group, which is labelled by Pākehā politicians (e.g. John Key) as ‘underclass’.

The Kahui twins

The second case that produced extensive media coverage was the death of 4-week-old twin brothers Chris and Cru Kahui from a South Auckland Māori family in June 2006. There were 10 articles published during the court hearing in May 2008, with 10 more articles across the dataset referring to the case.

The Kahui twins died from serious brain injuries in the Auckland’s Starship Children’s Hospital in June 2006. As a result of police investigation, the matter was brought to court nearly 2 years later, in May 2008, but no one was convicted. No details of what exactly happened have ever come to public knowledge, with main evidence on the extent of possible abuse coming from medical experts. The defendant, the twins’ father Chris Kahui, was found not guilty, while their mother, Macsyna King, was a witness for the prosecution in the trial of Chris Kahui and his defence successfully argued that, based on cellphone records, her statements of her own movements on the night the twins were assaulted were unreliable and there was reasonable doubt that she might have been responsible for their injuries. In describing both of them, as in the Nia Glassie’s case, the media focused almost entirely on their individual characteristics and personalities:

She has convictions for fraud, car conversion and burglary. She is a drinker and admits using drugs.

Evidence in court conveyed an angry, violent woman. The terrible mother who put McDonald’s before dying twins. Their possible killer.

Her failures are public record: six children to three different fathers, two of them dead, one taken by CYFS [Child, Youth & Family Services] to foster care, the other three abandoned long ago.

Macsyna Pono King was born into South Auckland’s underclass. (NZ Herald, 24 May 2008)

‘Macsyna is a volatile, in-your-face personality’ Mr Moore [QC] said.

‘She’s not one that bottles her frustrations up till she reaches explosion point, that is a personality that you might think fits comfortably with the accused’, he told the jurors.

‘The accused has no safety valve’. Kahui was a liar who blamed the twins’ injuries on his own son, Shayne, a 12-month-old who was not capable of speaking for himself. (DomPost, 21 May 2008)

Again, the coverage emphasised the personalities and individual features of both parents, constructing them as ‘monsters’ and blaming them for being the products of ‘South Auckland’s underclass’. A non-guilty court verdict for the father and the fact that the mother was only a witness in the trial did not stop the media from rendering their own ‘verdict’ and treating them both as ‘killers’.

Similar to Nia Glassie’s case, the blame for the abuse was extrapolated to wider Māori community. The extended family was accused of ‘stonewalling police’ and refusing to give any details regarding the abuse, while Māori were constructed overall as more prone to violence than other ethnicities:

Māori are not alone in abusing their children. Every culture has its dirty secrets, but there is no escaping the fact that Māori children are disproportionately represented among the victims.

Māori Party co-leader Pita Sharples says this is because Māori are over-represented in poverty stricken and under-achieving communities.

He may be right, but that is an explanation, not a solution. (DomPost, 27 May 2008)

The controversy around the Kahui twins’ case – that no one was convicted – led to continuous commentary in media and responses of numerous public and political figures on the issue of child abuse. Māori politicians were again demanded some answers. Pita Sharples pointed out to the environmental conditions leading to violence and child abuse; however, the newspaper dismissed his argument, instead demanding ‘a solution’, which in this context may be understood as ‘retribution’ rather than ‘prevention’.

Other cases

There were 42 articles covering other cases. In addition to Nia Glassie and the Kahui twins, the newspapers reported on 18 more cases of children who died or were seriously injured as a result of proven or suspected child abuse. Out of those, 10 ended in death, 6 children were in hospital in critical condition at the time of reporting and 2 children had recovered but were reported as still suffering from physical or psychological consequences of abuse. Overall, 12 children were reported to have sustained severe head injuries along with other serious injuries.

The age of children ranged from 11 weeks to 10 years, with 15 children being under the age of 3 and the other 3 children being 5, 7 and 10 years old. The mean age for the whole group was 2.4 years, with 89% of children being under 5 years. This is consistent with previous research, showing that younger children, especially those under 2 years, are more likely at risk of serious abuse and death (Connolly and Doolan, 2007).

In contrast to Nia Glassie’s and the Kahui twins’ cases, other reported cases did not receive the same media attention. The main feature across all these stories was that they did not include the sensationalist flavour and instead reported the events in a ‘matter-of-fact’ style. Although a few cases received somewhat detailed coverage, the extent and the nature of their coverage were not comparable to Nia Glassie or the Kahui twins’ cases.

Despite some similarities (e.g. the young age of the victim, the nature of injuries responsible for death, that is, severe brain trauma), only Nia Glassie and the Kahui twins’ deaths resulted in extensive coverage and involvement of public and political figures. The severe injuries and deaths of other child victims were only scantly reported even when considerable details relating to abuse were available from doctors, police and court officials. Ethnicity was mentioned in more than half of the cases, each time indicating that it was other than Pākehā – with one family named as Cook Islanders, another as Samoan and yet another as Indian. In other cases, Māori ethnicity was indicated either overtly or covertly, that is, by giving Māori names and/or surnames. There were no cases where Pākehā ethnicity was stated or inferred, making such cases ‘invisible’ to the audience.

Institutional responses

This category contained 69 articles on government and media campaigns, reports on research of child abuse, critiques of various agencies and recommendations offered by researchers and public officials, as well as editorials and readers’ letters; the latter ones were included as there were not many of them for a separate category, and they generally presented some kind of response and commentary to the issues covered in police and court reports. The overall coverage of child abuse in these articles focused on a wider societal perspective, and although some contained references to specific cases, they were used only as examples for discussing such problems as common risk factors and other issues raised by the cases. Thus, the main framing of child abuse in this category was thematic, or societal, in comparison with the episodic, or individual, framing of the issue in the category Police/Court Reports.

As mentioned above, 11 articles had references to Nia Glassie and 10 to the Kahui twins. These references functioned to reiterate the point that child abuse is primarily a ‘Māori issue’. There were also other linkages to Māori ethnicity, for example, including Māori names and locations where the majority of residents are Māori, such as Rotorua, Porirua and South Auckland, or simply referring to the ‘underclass’. A few news items focused on child abuse being a Māori issue, even when the research cited in them indicated otherwise:

Dr Kaa, who heads Te Kahui Mana Ririki, a new charitable trust to promote the wellbeing of young Māori, laid out the beginnings of a programme to combat rates that show Māori children are twice as likely to suffer abuse than other groups. (NZ Herald, 24 May 2008)

Smack-free marae, anti-violence resources written in Māori language, and educational radio programme and research into the effects of violence are amongst some of the plans to prevent Māori child-abuse. Statistics show that Māori children die from non-accidental injuries at twice the rate of other New Zealand kids. In the five years to 2005, 17 Māori children under the age of 15 died after being assaulted.

Last year a Māori child-abuse summit, involving about 120 Māori who work in the field, was held in Auckland to begin developing a plan of action. (NZ Herald, 10 December 2008)

Overall, newspapers included numerous references to statistical data from different sources that contradicted the main claim that child abuse is solely a Māori issue. Some news stories discussed general risk factors associated with child abuse, such as poverty, unemployment, alcohol and drug abuse, crowded and inadequate housing conditions. However, apart from Vic Tamaki, a Samoan living in New Zealand, who took part in TV commercials about domestic violence, there were no other ethnicities as clearly demarcated as Māori in news reports, thus solidifying the overall public perception that child abuse is a ‘Māori problem’.

Sexual abuse

The second overarching topic Sexual Abuse contained 52 articles. Two similar categories were identified within this category, Police/Court Reports and Institutional Responses.

Police/court reports

This category contained 30 articles on abuse linked to Internet child pornography, police investigations, court hearings on child sexual abuse and court reports that mentioned child sexual abuse cases but were focused on other issues.

Five articles were police reports: two on underage prostitution in South Auckland and three on sexual assaults by strangers in different suburbs of Auckland. Only in two of the latter ones was the ethnicity of abusers noted: the first identified as either Māori or Polynesian and the second one as Polynesian. There was no other personal information noted as the cases were still under police investigation.

Other 25 articles in this category provided more details as they were the court reports. Fifteen articles gave the full names of the accused, often followed by age, while 10 other articles provided some detail of the abuse, but the names were suppressed at the time of reporting. These reports were consistent with statistics on child sexual abuse, insofar as they involved an abuser who was known to a child. Three cases involved professions commonly identified with protection and care of public: a teacher, a former Army officer and an ambulance worker. According to Mejia et al. (2012), media interest in reporting on these cases could have been driven by a high societal standing of the abusers that added a sensationalist flavour.

Only one court report noted the ethnicity of the abuser, although the story focused on his successful appeal against deportation back to Tonga on humanitarian grounds:

A Tongan man who sexually abused a 14-year-old girl is allowed to stay in New Zealand – because his family could not cope with village life back in the Islands.

[…] This included [his wife’s] previous experience of Tonga where violence was ‘normal’ […]

The Tribunal was also told that Mr Fehoko’s offending was out of character. (NZ Herald, 11 March 2008)

Linking sexual child abuse and the wife’s statement about the ‘normality’ of violence in Tonga has a double effect: not only does it extrapolate the notions of violence and abuse to the whole of Tongan society, but it also trivialises child sexual abuse, especially when later in the article it says that it ‘was out of character’ for the abuser and that the Tribunal accepted this in deciding positively against his deportation.

In the other 14 news stories, ethnicity was not mentioned. Only one abuser’s name had a possible indication of being a Māori name, and another one being a foreign name, while others indicated no obvious ethnic identity other than Pākehā in the local context. Based on that, it is possible to question whether, apart from the two latter cases, all the abusers were Pākehā. Yet, their ethnic origin remained ‘invisible’ in the reports, and it was up to the audiences to make their judgements.

The representation of the accused ranged from a psychologically abnormal individual, for example, ‘a paedophile with a “predatory tendency” and a history of offending against children’ (Press, 2 November 2009), to ‘an award-winning […] long-serving ambulance officer […] who was staunchly supported by up to a dozen colleagues’ up until his guilty plea that left his friends and supporters ‘completely dumbfounded’ (NZ Herald, 20 June 2009). Such representations produce an impression that child sexual abuse is a crime that only deeply disturbed people, or freaks, would do. Offenders are constructed as an aberration from the general population and a deviation from normality, framing an understanding of child sexual abuse as something that never occurs within the context of traditional familial relations.

Institutional responses

This category contained 22 articles covering government campaigns, research and statistical data, recommendations and critique of government policies and agencies, as well as readers’ letters. The common thread repeated by many news items was that child sexual abuse is significantly underreported:

Research suggests only one in 10 abuse cases are reported to authorities. Six per cent of those achieve conviction. This means about half a per cent – one in 200 – cases of abuse are punished. (DomPost, 31 March 2008)

One in five females and one in 20 males said they had experienced sexual abuse. (DomPost, 17 December 2008)

Several government officials and researchers were interviewed to provide their commentary. A former Children’s Commissioner Cindy Kiro was quoted saying that ‘sexual abuse was still under-reported because it was a taboo subject’ (DomPost, 5 January 2009). Two articles referred to the ‘cycle of abuse’, citing the fact that ‘a third to half of sex offenders had also been sexually abused themselves, and most offenders abused members of their own families’ (NZ Herald, 6 August 2008). But the majority of articles only gave statistical results, without exploring any causal links or the reasons for underreporting.

There was no emphasis on ethnicity across this category, except for a letter to the editor in The Press on 22 November 2008. It came from the manager of Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse in Central Christchurch and it was in response to the previously published article, which had stated that child abuse was ‘an indictment of our sad history and a sign of the prevalent violence of Māori towards the young’ (20 November 2008). The author referred to his own experience working with survivors of sexual abuse:

I work with hundreds of men and boys who are victims of sexual and violent crimes committed on them as young children and the majority of them are Pākehā and in most cases the perpetrators were Pākehā. (Press, 22 November 2008)

This letter questions whether child sexual abuse is more prevalent among Pākehā. However, no news stories investigated that, and the ethnicity of abusers was mostly left unreported. Instead, media used a strategy to construct a stereotype of an abuser by reiterating the figure of the ‘paedophile’: a psychologically disturbed individual, an aberration in our ‘normal’ society and hence a rare occurrence. This framing is not consistent with the research data, which indicates that child sexual abuse is more common but underreported and usually involves family members or friends.

Conclusion

In summary, the analysis showed that three-quarters (74%) of the dataset described severe physical abuse and/or death, and one-quarter (26%) described sexual abuse. Altogether, more than half of all media pieces (56%) contained reporting of ‘crime stories’, such as police and court reports. This demonstrates that the main focus of newspaper coverage of child abuse was on ‘crime reporting’. This is consistent with past research which suggests that media are mostly interested in sensationalist features in news, especially criminal reporting (Chenot, 2011; Mendes, 2000), which also drives them to opt for individual (or episodic) framing of child abuse over societal (or thematic) framing (Hove et al., 2013).

Several explanations may be proposed for the scarce coverage of child sexual abuse. International scholars have routinely argued that this underreporting is due to the particular myths and attitudes prevailing in contemporary society, such as that child victims are more likely to lie about abuse or get confused about what actually happened (Frewin et al., 2009; Kitzinger, 2004). Also, intra-familial abuse, which has been found to be the most common type of sexual abuse of children, is commonly under-represented in media (Wilczynski and Sinclair, 1998, cited in Naylor, 2001). This may be explained by the reactive impulse of media to defend the traditional family values that such types of abuse violates (Mendes, 2000). The most prevalent framing of an abuser as a psychologically disturbed and abnormal individual, a ‘paedophile’, serves to blind general public to more ‘mundane’ but more common cases of intra-familial abuse, when an abuser is not a stranger but a trusted authority figure in the child’s life. Also, all sexual abuse (and child sexual abuse especially) elicits social stigma (Frewin et al., 2009) and is still considered largely a ‘taboo’ subject (Kitzinger, 2004), which was reflected in the current findings in the quote of the former New Zealand Children’s Commissioner Cindy Kiro (DomPost, 5 January 2009).

Another reason for the higher coverage of physical abuse may be embedded in the particular timing of the study, which coincided with two high-profile cases of Nia Glassie and the Kahui twins. Nia Glassie’s case is an especially vivid example of sensational and shocking coverage, where newspapers reiterated the horrific details of the abuse and utilised individual framing to draw audiences’ attention to specific characteristics of her abusers. This placed blame onto the abusers and their ethnic group while downplaying any representations expressive of societal framing, which would shift the responsibility to wider society. Even references to the whole Māori community do not present societal framing, as the focus is still on the individual characteristics assigned to a minority group, which is also used as a scapegoat for broader societal problems, such as violence, alcohol and drug abuse, and other low socio-economic markers.

International research (UNICEF, 2003) consistently identified the same risk factors across various ethnic groups, such as poverty, low education of parents, substance abuse, unemployment and overall low socio-economic conditions. Such factors as poverty are hard to solve by politicians and are difficult to investigate thoroughly by the media, who would rather seek quick retribution against those responsible. This research demonstrates that the main responsibility is placed by the media directly on victims’ parents and families, as well as on Māori community, rather than on government services or society as a whole. This serves to formulate the issue of child abuse in New Zealand as a ‘Māori issue’, rather than as an issue of the entire country. The representations of Māori as child killers, irresponsible and uncaring parents, uneducated, prone to violence and devoid of normal feelings and empathy enact an old colonial stereotype of wild savages and infer the aberration from the ‘normal’ White majority (Meek, 2013).

Similar individual framing was used by the media to construct the perpetrators of physical child abuse as monsters and those of child sexual abuse as paedophiles. However, while in the articles that discussed physical abuse the abusers were identified as Māori, there were no specific ethnic labels across the news stories on child sexual abuse. Such omissions effectively work against Māori, as the overall notion of child abuse, including sexual abuse, becomes in public consciousness a ‘Māori issue’. By not problematising all types of child abuse as a common occurrence across all ethnic groups in New Zealand, the media lead us to believe that Pākehā families never abuse their children, which in turn makes it harder to detect and address the problem. While Māori are over-represented in all crime statistics, including child abuse, they do not commit 100% of crimes. However, media use this over-representation as the ideological cover to conceptualise child abuse as an ethnic/racial problem.

In conclusion, the dominant representation of child abuse in New Zealand as solely a ‘Māori issue’ is a distorted view of reality based on sensationalist coverage of extreme but relatively rare cases of abuse involving Māori children. This representation is largely accepted by the general population in the country, including Māori themselves, despite the statistical and research data showing a different picture. For Pākehā, this serves as legitimate grounds for further denial of the effects of colonisation, as Māori are presented as intrinsically prone to violence and abuse. For Māori, this extends the effects of the trauma of colonisation (Meek, 2013) and traps them in negative stereotypes of an ‘underclass’ and ‘child killers’. If even Māori politicians and researchers have come to believe that child abuse is a Māori issue, rather than an issue of the whole nation, it becomes very difficult to address the conditions that lead to child abuse and violence in general. While this study challenges the prevailing media stereotype of child abuse as a solely Māori problem, Māori experience is not unique, as the studies on media portrayal of Aboriginal people in Australia confirm (Lonne and Gillespie, 2014; Lonne and Parton, 2014). However, there is a current lack of literature on whether similar constructions are applied to other indigenous and minority cultures across the world, warranting further research on media discourses of racism in relation to child abuse.

Footnotes

Funding

This project was funded by the Child Injury Prevention Foundation of New Zealand 2009-2010 Summer Research Scholarship.

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