Browsing by Author "Schatz, Lili"

In 2020 and 2021, the Finnish news media covered violent youth crime extensively. Not because it had increased significantly, but due to a handful of exceptional cases that shook Finnish society. Several brutal and severe cases that took place in a short period seemed to generate a media narrative around a new crime wave that posed a threat to Finnish society. The theoretical basis for this research focuses on the intersection of media studies, criminology, and sociology. Youth violence is often disproportionately covered in the news. Cases, in which adolescents commit violent crimes, are often written about in more depth and more extensively than those committed by adults since the pairing of the innocence of children with horrendous acts of violence manifests a more newsworthy phenomenon. However, since media portrayals have the power to shape public perceptions, they can create distorted views of the prevalence of crime and spark fear in audiences. This Master’s thesis aims to gain an understanding of the nature of news narratives around violent youth crime in Finland. This study takes on a qualitative and empirical approach. The underlying assumption behind the research is that the concept of youth violence is a social construction and that news narratives play a role in the discursive creation of the phenomenon. This Master’s thesis focuses on the Finnish news coverage of three cases of homicide that happened in 2020 and 2021. In each case the perpetrators were adolescents. The methodological approach of this thesis is a qualitative content analysis of coverage in 137 news articles found online. The research focuses on how adolescent offenders are described, and how the reasons and solutions to youth violence are portrayed in the news. The results of the thesis suggest that violent youth and the threat they pose to society are covered in the news media as a paradox; on the one hand, only evil sadists are capable of such violent acts, yet on the other hand, society has failed its children if they resort to violence. The discussion around youth violence is populated by a plethora of individual actors, such as perpetrators, their peers, child service workers, the police, politicians and ordinary citizens, and everyone plays a role in how the phenomenon of violent youth crime is discursively constructed in the news.