Dawn Post, co-borough director of the Brooklyn, NY, office of the Children's Law Center (CLC), a non-profit law firm providing representation to over 10,000 children per year in the nation's busiest Family Court system, wrote this essay for CityLimits.org.
This issue is one that Lori Dorfman, director of Berkeley Media Studies Group, and I worked on in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the Reporting on Violence project, which encouraged reporters to take a data-driven, solution-oriented approach to crime reporting. Sad to say, crime reporting hasn't changed much since the late 1890s, and we weren't able to make much of a dent. Post's conclusion is that the media won't change. I think journalists can become trauma-informed, and take a solution-oriented approach to reporting. And there are organizations such as SolutionsJournalism.org that are doing so. Do you think the media can change how they do crime reporting?
I believe that there is a racial and socio-economic imbalance in how the media and community views and reacts to such violent deaths, which in turn, results in dramatically different amounts of support for the families. Almost 20 years ago Robert Entman, then an associate professor of communications at Northwestern University, conducted a study and found that, on average, stories about white victims of violent crimes lasted 74 percent longer than stories about black victims. The total time given to white victims was 2.8 times more than the total time devoted to both black and Hispanic victims. There is no current research to show that there has been any improvement in reporting.
This dramatic difference in reporting has serious consequences for the children and other victims of these crimes. A child whose parent is murdered in a wealthy neighborhood, where such a crime is “unexpected,” is more likely to be the subject of extensive media attention. He or she is then more likely to receive an outpouring of financial and community support that can allow them to begin to recover and move forward. A child whose parent is murdered in Brownsville, a neighborhood which in 2011 had the highest murder rate in the city, is less likely to be the subject of extensive media coverage, and thus less likely to receive the necessary financial and community support.
Perhaps we are desensitized because yet another death of a black woman at the hands of a black man, or a child at the hands of a parent, in a neighborhood such as Brownsville is not considered out of the norm. It is disheartening to know that these type of deaths have become commonplace such that little to no attention is paid to the survivors – the children.
http://www.citylimits.org/conversations/231/child-victims-of-violence
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