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This essay is going thematically analyze and discuss the media response to the Rotherham child abuse scandal. I have decided to go for a different news story from what I had read about while completing my previous poster assignment but down a similar route. This is a different topic from what I studied in my previous poster, however, I will still be discussing the issue of moral panics, I just decided to change the news story because I figured there was much more I could write about regarding the Rotherham child abuse scandal as it was a bigger news story and more articles were written and an even bigger moral panic was created. I also was undecided before beginning my poster as to which news story I should do, it was between the Rotherham scandal or Alisha MacPhail. Also, I have a greater interest in this news story than I did with the Alisha MacPhail story.
The Jay report was a report that investigated many child abuse cases in 2014 and on August the 26th 2014, the Report was published, It was over a 16-year duration. This report recognized that around 1400 children were likely to have been victims of Child Sexual Exploitation or child abuse. As a result of this staggering number, the publication of the report drew a lot of attention to the town of ‘Rotherham’ considering many of the abuse cases were in Rotherham, which, in turn, created a moral panic. In this essay, I am going to explore the media response to the findings of the ‘Jay Report’ and the moral panic surrounding its findings. I will be examining in-depth news articles and looking out for widespread and frequent themes within the articles and information I perceive.
The term ‘moral panic’ emerged in 1973 by Cohen; he defined a moral panic as ‘’a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media’’ (Cohen 1973:28). Social work and child abuse have often been a significant moral panic because child abuse and neglect are a major issue in society because children are just innocent and helpless. (Clapton and Smith 2015). For example, there was the huge news story of ‘Baby P’ with Peter Connolly (2007), who was a very young boy being neglected and abused by both his parents which left him bruised and battered, and eventually he sadly was murdered in the end. One of the main themes I noted was the fact that many of the articles I examined stated that social workers and other local authorities were rubbish and didn’t help out much with child abuse cases, therefore another significant moral panic was about the fact that social workers didn’t prioritize these cases, like with the baby P case, the social workers got much of the blame for not realizing soon enough what was going on even though it was obvious something wasn’t right in their household but arguably, they ‘ignored’ the problem and were blind to the abuse that was happening to baby P (and other abuse scandals) behind closed doors.
I studied around twelve main news articles in order to make up my data in order to begin my Thematic Analysis and I also read more little articles just to get a clearer and more vivid picture of the child abuse occurring in 2014 but haven’t quoted these in my analysis. Thematic Analysis as defined by Braun and Clarke is ‘a method for identifying, analyzing and reporting patterns within data.’ (Braun and Clarke 2006:79.) I took themes from the newspaper articles that described the Rotherham abuse scandal. I essentially followed Braun and Clarke’s process for conducting the thematic analysis. An example of their first step is for me to familiarize myself with the data, gathering different themes and sub-themes, and using mind maps to note each theme. Then, I finalized the themes I was going to use in my study and went on from there.
The Jay Report was a report which investigated the Rotherham scandal and many other child abuse cases. In 2014, the report inspected a sample of Child exploitation case files and interviewed a bundle of employees from local authorities and other agencies. From the Report, they found that around or over (unreported cases as such) 1400 children were sexually exploited in Rotherham from 1997 to 2013, this abuse involved rape, trafficking, abduction, and physical abuse and evidently, it was something that dragged on for a long period of time. This suggests that nobody managed to realize the extent of the child abuse in good time, meaning officials most likely weren’t doing their jobs properly which I will discuss later in this dissertation. In support of this, the report stated that there were massive failings in child protection and little support for those who were abused, as there was some victim blaming within the case, the Jay report also noted. He identified there was a poor response to services for instance, many police at the time lacked a real understanding of child exploitation and gave it no priority even though it was an important issue that needed to be addressed and seen. However, despite the Report mentioning that local authorities were too lazy, it also highlighted that in 2007, there were considerable improvements in the situation whereby the police aimed to deal with child exploitation and were more aware of events happening because the Rotherham scandal was a real eye-opener for police and local authorities that this was a growing problem and they needed to get to grips with the work they had to do in order to resolve the issue. Consequently, social workers and teams were now better trained and had a better understanding of child exploitation and essentially had more available, better resources for dealing with it, consequently, it became a work–in–progress.
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