Maggie Wykes

Reconstructing the sexual abuse of children: ‘cyber-paeds’, panic and power

In recent years there have been several culturo-criminal discursive shifts, which have oriented political and public concerns away from ‘real world’ sex crimes against children and the people most likely to commit them. These include the construction of the dangerous stranger as the primary threat to children; the widespread use of the terms ‘paedophile’ and ‘child pornography’ in the common lexicon and the placing of both the paedophile and pornography in virtual rather than real space. Such discourses not only fail to protect children, but may even work to fetishize youth and youthful bodies colluding with the widespread commercial sexualization of children. In the ‘cyber-paed’ the news media have created the monster of our age and orchestrated what some criminologists might term a moral panic about both ‘cyber’ and ‘paeds’. This has occurred in a culture that, simultaneous with the castigation and outrage of the ‘cyber-paed’, routinely sexually objectifies children and infantilizes women to sell products, or pleasure as product; a culture that also largely ignores the evidence that most sexual crime against children happens in families. This article explores the contradictions and deflections inherent in contemporary constructions of sexuality and childhood and assesses the panic about paedophiles in cyber-space.

‘Moatifs’ of masculinity: The stories told about ‘men’ in British newspaper coverage of the Raoul Moat case

This article addresses the common omission and/or obfuscation of men in accounts of crime and particularly accounts of violence, despite the overwhelming presence of men in violent activities and, indeed, crime per se. In doing so it identifies key themes that frame masculine identities. Using the case of Raoul Moat, the piece analyses the discourses available in British newspapers to account for male violence. Raoul Moat killed one man, injured his ex-partner and a police officer and finally shot himself dead in the Northumbrian wilderness. Whereas most accounts of male violence blame ‘bad’ women, race, youth, terror, gangs and madness, here news stories evoked different tales of domestic, institutional and elemental masculinity. The themes of those tales, we argue, constitute broad contexts for constructing masculine identities and our analysis offers new insights into how masculine identity is constructed through discourse and why violence is a significantly male-dominated activity; insights which address some of the lacks in current theoretical work on both masculinity and violence.