ABSTRACT
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 claims-making. 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. Child abuse began as a relatively esoteric concern of a few medical researchers, but a dramatic article published in a medical journal in 1962 attracted the mass media's attention. The chapter focuses on 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. Child abuse horror stories use two journalistic conventions to elicit an emotional response from the reader: ironic contrast and structural incongruity.
