Conclusion
In this book, we have shown how multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) can make a valuable contribution to the existing literature on crime and deviance in criminology and in media and cultural studies. While these disciplines provide insights into the social, cultural and economic contexts that lie behind crime and the patterns of media representations that help to prevent more informed understandings of crime, criminals and the justice system, we have shown that a critical linguistic approach can enhance the ability of the researcher to show the finer details of how these representations work. A media scholar may reveal the sensationalist reporting of a crime phenomenon; but a critical linguistic analysis may reveal more subtle, but nevertheless strategic, nuances in the way that this reporting shapes discourses of crime. Throughout the book, we have demonstrated the added descriptive value that linguistic analysis can have. For example, in Chapter 6 we found that media scholars had explained the way that television crime shows such as Crimewatch portray police work through dramatization and sensationalism. This allows the police to be presented in the best possible light, for example as a team of dedicated detectives. Our own analysis drew attention to the personalization and impersonalization strategies representing both the police and the offender. The offender was visually personalized in extreme close shots, and, linguistically, we found representations of him as having a ‘criminal mind’, a notion which is espoused in many current neo-liberal discourses about crime. A transitivity analysis also revealed that there was no attention to the details of what, in fact, the offender had done; more importance was placed on who he was and what he might do in the future.
In Crimewatch, we found that the police were both individualized (by being named, through the use of close shots, and the inclusion of mental verb processes and soft voices), and collectivized as a team. In terms of transitivity, they were represented through extensive transitive material processes to show thoroughness, professionalism and agency in their fight against crime, while in fact they unearthed very little information and even missed a call from a concerned viewer, which was glossed over in the programme. Media studies research may be able to point to the broader ideas communicated by such texts, but a critical linguistic analysis is able to provide details on exactly how this is achieved. In turn, this throws up more details that can sharpen our analysis. It can show us how authors conceal and background agency, and abstract kinds of actions through the process of ‘othering’ described in sociological and media research.
The rewards of linguistic analysis are clear in all the chapters of the book, for example, in the case of the female offender in Chapter 5. From researchers working in both criminology and media studies (e.g. Wykes, 2001; Jewkes, 2004), we know that the mainstream media relies on a limited number of stock narratives or discourses about criminal women. By choosing two recent cases of female deviants, we unpicked these discourses and revealed, through a combined linguistic and visual analysis of several newspaper articles, how deviant women are indeed constructed as ‘evil monsters’. The linguistic analysis also demonstrated that, on the one hand, women would be credited as agents of lists of violent acts, as if to show how far they deviate from the model woman/carer/mother, whereas, on the other hand, their agency would ultimately be denied, as if they were driven either by men or by evil forces. These women would also be the agents of deceiving others, which was shown in the overlexicalization of relational terms for friends and family, whereas men are more likely to be represented as offending in isolation. Clearly, the women’s idealized familial role is as much at stake as their offences.
In this book, by looking in detail at both linguistic and visual semiotic choices, we were able to comment more precisely on the interplay of image and text. We showed that the discourses communicated by each were not always even. For example, in Chapter 4, we found that a BBC knife crime programme aimed at young people challenged some of the more simplistic views of knife crime. Yet at the same time, it communicated many of these simplistic views visually, by selecting gritty urban settings and clothing (‘hoodies’). Of course, media studies scholars have pointed to the increasing importance of the image for a long time (e.g. Hall, 1973) and have produced highly insightful research into visual representations of crime (e.g. Jones and Wardle, 2008). Nevertheless, we have shown that a detailed multimodal analysis of images can alert us to possible ideological functions of images in a more sustained and detailed way. In the case of the images we analysed in Chapter 5, we found that the visual representation of one woman demonized her even further than the text, thereby sidelining a more nuanced discussion of her crime.
We would argue that multimodal CDA also forms a natural partner for disciplines such as (cultural) criminology and media research that is concerned with crime representations. All three disciplines share a research interest in the manifold transformations in late modernity, albeit from different vantage points. For example, many criminologists (e.g. Reiner, 2007) have pointed to the strong link between inequality and crime, both of which have been exacerbated by late modern capitalism and the culture of consumerism. Like many criminologists, critical discourse analysts emphasize the social/cultural construction of crime and crime control and the salience of the media image in this process. And crucially, CDA has also stressed the pervasive influence of the market and consumer capitalism in these changes in late modern Western societies.
An important characteristic of many of these late modern economic, social and cultural changes and processes is that they are shaped extensively by discourses, as scholars working within a critical perspective have demonstrated (e.g. Fairclough, 1999). This is where a multimodal analysis can make an important contribution. We can therefore say that the transformations of late modernity, concerning crime, are to a significant degree also transformations in language and discourse. The mainly retributive public and media discourses of punishment, expressed in a language of condemnation, demonize and criminalize an ever greater number of people. Apart from criminals, these are people who are dependent on welfare, single mothers, dysfunctional families, the ‘workshy’, substance abusers and the young. What this shows is that individuals have been confronted by a burgeoning ‘culture of control’ (Garland, 2001), while at the same time they find their social world and welfare systems dismantled through privatization and the shift to the global economy. Again, we explored the way this demonization works linguistically and visually in Chapter 4 on young people. Our detailed combined lexical and social actor analysis of a small corpus of texts, found significant support for what cultural criminologists Hayward and Yar (2006) have termed the ‘semantics of exclusion’. At all times, social context, political decisions, changes in our economies and rampant consumerism are suppressed as players in what we call crime. We also showed that even when some media attempt to contest dominant notions of crime or of punishment, such as the knife crime ‘epidemic’, they still either rely on stock images and discourses, which to a degree preclude a critical discussion of the problem in terms of structural and economic reasons, or struggle to operate in a media landscape dominated by populist discourses.
We would suggest that multimodal linguistic analysis can provide further insights into crime due its power to draw attention to the details found in texts. More work should be done on all of the areas covered in this book. What we propose, then, is that sociological and criminological analysis of late- modern culture and crime should be fused with multimodal CDA of its crime-control discourses and discourses of the market. Here we have merely pointed to some possible directions. But we would also encourage work in CDA to integrate the wide array of research conducted on crime in other disciplines, so that it better understands social patterns, actual political processes and decisions, the real nature of police work, and the structures that underpin what comes to be represented in the media.
What we ourselves have been struck by in the process of writing this book, through the details this kind of analysis tends to throw up, is the sheer repetition of the ways that crime is iconized and essentialized by the media across time. In terms of language, we find examples of ‘One Boy Crimewave’ stories stretching over several decades. In each case, we find that ‘yob’ or ‘thug’ teenagers are attributed a lot of agency, often through abstract verb processes, such as ‘wreaking havoc’, and the victims are usually a list of society’s most vulnerable, such as pensioners, or the most valued, such as ‘respectable residents’. The broader social processes a ‘thug’ is part of are neglected in these texts. In term of visuals, we find regular use of stock images of ‘knife crime’ and ‘drug users’, none of which document crime but symbolize it through a limited number of habitualized icons, such as the ‘hoodie’. In both language and image, we find a recycling of generic news frames rather than an examination of specifics, in which language strategies help to conceal and background actual causes and contexts. Instead of being offered a thorough examination of specific events, places, people and situations, we are left with representations of ‘typical’ crimes, which may have the effect of displacing all other possible or actual instances, making them invisible. Even when details are brought to the fore, these soon disappear from view, as the news media quickly move on or seek new drama in order to avoid losing audiences. Bill Nichols (1992) once commented that media representations of society, since they come to help define what we think society is like, are putting our knowledge of how these societies work in danger. Certainly regarding the representation of crime and deviance in the media, it appears that rather than being encouraged to debate the nature of crime, discuss what is actually wrong and where the causes and solutions lie, the news media have long trained us to view only the memorable, the iconicized and the fragmented. Susan Sontag (2004) contends that the news media in particular have encouraged us to think about the world of events in terms of memorable moments rather than lengthy complex processes. And in this process, what is suppressed, for the most part, are the details, the real causes, the connection of what we call crime to social processes, forces and changes. What we have begun to discover by writing this book is the central role of language in this suppression: how complexity is avoided; how authors are able to bring a sense of providing details, while managing to be entirely selective; how concrete responsibility, agency and victimhood can be shifted, adjusted and lost. Of course, discourses exist within larger systems of discourses, many of which are competing, and we do find the mass media able to present a range of these. But discourses tend to strive for colonization of all areas, in which case they appear to be neutral and natural. And in the case of crime, it certainly appears that the more populist discourses and language strategies, despite the existence of others, currently have the claim to that status. We recommend that there should be more research into the way that language functions in maintaining this situation, which is in turn about maintaining specific power relations in our society. Until there are freely accepted and available discourses for talking in other terms about the young man who is the ‘One Boy Crimewave’, we will never be able to help him, his ‘unemployed single mother’ or the residents he ‘intimidates’.