Iconography of child sexual abuse in the news (justice and crime reporting)

Child sexual abuse (CSA) is a major global problem (Barth et al., 2013). Therefore, it is important for researchers in communication science to systematically examine the representation of the CSA issue in the media using manual and computational methods of content analysis. According to previous review papers (Popović, 2018; Weatherred, 2015), existing content-analytical studies are mostly manual and limited to newspaper articles and the text level. Currently, it is unclear what kind of visual representations are used to illustrate the CSA issue in the media. We therefore present a tested new instrument to analyze the dominant image motifs (= iconography) in CSA news media coverage (Döring & Walter, 2021).