ABSTRACT
Feminist criminologists have called attention to the fascination of the news media with deviant girls and the resulting moral panic. Although there has been much discussion surrounding the media’s portrayal of girls’ violence, there is a dearth of systematic research on the news media’s constructions of violent girls. Through a content analysis of articles published in major news outlets, our chapter provides the first intersectional empirical examination of the coverage of girls’ violence in top-circulating newspapers and news magazines. We find that although girls of all racial and ethnic backgrounds were constructed in disparaging and demeaning ways by the media, these constructions were clearly racialized. Depictions of violence by Black girls were often dehumanizing and evoked animalistic imagery, whereas depictions of violence by White and Hispanic girls commonly attempted to reconcile their behavior with idealized conceptions of girlhood. However, while violence by White girls was framed as an aberration, violence by Hispanic girls was seen as symptomatic of their inability to achieve normative expectations of femininity. Our chapter fills a void in the literature around the construction of the moral panic of girls’ violence and sheds light on the complexity of construction of violent girls by the media.
