Citizen Journalists or Cyber Bigots?: Child Abuse, the Media and the Possibilities for Public Conversation: The Case of Baby P

Abstract

The paradox at the heart of newspaper and broadcast media reports of child abuse is that they have tended to offer only scant attention to the child who should be at the centre of the coverage. Instead, journalists have preferred to fabricate and focus on two oppositional portrayals of social welfare professionals. Both stereotypes have been highly unflattering, have influenced social work practice, hindered recruitment to the profession, but also helped to inform and shape public conversations about the appropriate policy response to such cases. Across 40 years of press coverage ranging from Maria Colwell (1973) to the Peter (‘Baby P’) Connelly tragedy (2007), journalists have presented social workers as either ineffectual wimps incapable of protecting children who were suffering physical or sexual abuse or, alternatively, as bullies whose unjustifiable interventions in the private affairs of families have resulted in their precocious break-up (Franklin 1998a, 1998b, 1999; Franklin and Parton 1991). This chapter explores a distinctive approach which places social media at the heart of its concerns by examining YouTube representations and reactions to the death of Peter Connelly in Haringey in 2007. It analyses the public conversation about the death of this child by conducting a qualitative analysis of a sample of the most popular videos (by viewing) uploaded to YouTube and viewers’ postings in response to them. The research ambition informing this chapter is to compare recent social media — especially YouTube — conversations about child abuse, with earlier journalistic accounts.