Willem Koetsenruijter
Humanities Faculty, Leiden University, The Netherlands.
E-mail: w.koetsenruijter@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Peter Burger
Humanities Faculty, Leiden University, The Netherlands.
E-mail: p.burger@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Emma Vine
Humanities Faculty, Leiden University, The Netherlands.
E-mail: e.vine@shu.ac.uk
Abstract: Focussing on the perpetrators, this paper investigates news media framing of clergy sexual abuse in the Netherlands, Belgium, the United Kingdom and Ireland. Results show that the four national presses vary in the way they construct the crime and its perpetrators, depending on cultural differences in the way the church is embedded in society. Each nation’s media frame the crisis in a way that fits their own rhetorical goals. The Netherlands and the UK share a focus that places blame on the Catholic Church as an institution and, in the case of the UK, on the Pope as holding ultimate responsibility. In Belgium and Ireland the offenders are portrayed as individuals. In all four countries media need to come to terms with what we call the dual offender: the individual priest and/or the institute that failed to control its employees and show compassion to their victims. The strategic construction of clergy abuse furthers the dominant ideological discourses of both paedophilia and Catholicism.
Keywords: Framing, abuse, catholic, church, content-analysis.
Rhetoric and Communications E-journal, Issue 29, July 2017, rhetoric.bg/, journal.rhetoric.bg, ISSN 1314-4464