Child sexual abuse (CSA) has long been a global problem. Although the rate of CSA in China had previously been suggested as high in previous scholarly investigation (Chen, Dunne, & Han, 2006), CSA has only become a heated topic of public concern since 2013, when a scandal involving a principal and a public servant raping six girls from a primary school in the province of Hainan was exposed by the news media. After that, CSA as a serious social problem had finally attracted the attention of the public.
How people understand social issues like CSA is significantly influenced by news media according to frame theory (Bateson, 1955). How the news media frames the responsibility for an issue affects public perceptions regarding the solution, such as whether it should be provided at a societal or individual level (Kim, Scheufele, & Shanahan, 2002). Accordingly, child welfare advocates suggest that journalists should frame CSA as a problem for which communities and society in general are responsible, rather than shape CSA cases as isolated events. In this way, the audience will be more likely to support public policies that help to address the issue and less likely to blame the involved individuals (Mejia, Cheyne & Dorfman, 2012; Weatherred, 2017).
Previous studies have researched the news frames of CSA in Western countries and tracked a shift from individual blame to societal blame (Weatherred, 2017). News media portrayals of CSA can be different in China where sexual topics are still resisted in publications. In China, sexual topics are associated with morality shame due to a Confucian influence. For example, discussions about the victimized children’s loss of virginity is presented in CSA news reports in China. What is worse is that schools in China do not have sex education, which contributes to a lack of the appropriate understanding of sex abuse among the public, even for journalists. Based on previous studies on the effect of news frames, a problematic framing of a social issue can have negative influences on readers. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate how the news media in China portrays CSA cases.
This study collected 501 news articles on CSA cases from the WiseNews database, the largest database of news written in Chinese. Two coders were recruited to code the news articles on CSA published in the past 10 years, from 2010 to 2019. The patterns of news frame use were analyzed to see whether CSA was framed as a societal or individual problem.
Results show that newspapers in China tended to portray CSA as a personal problem in the past decade. The problem of moral blame needs to be solved. Fortunately, journalists started to report CSA more at a societal level as more child-support policies being implemented since 2015. Interestingly, the Chinese CSA news stories were more likely to present individual cause frames and societal solution frames (an inconsistency not seen in previous research with U.S. media) that may be attributable to a cultural preference for collective solutions.