Abstract
There are a growing number of studies into the subject of female sexual offenders and how they are perceived. In the past, the concept of female sexual offenders was considered an oddity and rarity; but is now recognized as occurring more frequently than previously thought. Past studies examined the perceptions of students about educators who sexually offend. This paper, however, examines the perception given by newspaper articles concerning educators who sexually offend. This is a quantitative content analysis of the adjectives used by newspaper reporters to see if there is bias in how they report female and male educations who sexually offend. The source of the data is from the ProQuest newspaper online database. ProQuest catalogs 721 newspapers from the United States as well as 139 newspapers published in the United Kingdom. The newspapers used for this study span between 2002-2011. Using crosstabulations, a quantitative content analysis was conducted. There are four key findings. First, the data show that newspapers will label male educators as predators more often than their female counterpart. Second, newspapers use more gentle and lenient language in their description of female educators who sexual abuse their students. Third, newspapers will use the term mentally ill more often in their description of female sexual offenders than a male sexual offender. These three key findings supports that the use of inflammatory descriptive terms or placating terms is dependent upon the gender of the offender and not the seriousness of their crime. In addition to these findings, this study also shows that American newspapers use more inflammatory language toward educators who sexually offend while United Kingdom newspapers use more innocuous terms. This may be attributed to the fact that it has only been since 2003 that sexual crimes against children by educators are treated more seriously by the Crown Prosecutors.