Analyzing The Crime News Framing Of Carly Ryan

This essay will discuss the crime news framing of Carly Ryan, 15, the first Australian to be murdered by an online predator. The Victorian schoolgirl was 14 when she met ‘Brandon Kane’, a 20-year-old Texas ‘emo’ guitarist living in Melbourne, through the online community vampirefreaks.com. ‘Brandon’ was an internet construct created and used by 50-year-old Garry Francis Newman to approach Carly. ‘Brandon’ and Carly developed an online relationship over several months before Newman, posing as Kane’s father ‘Shane’, attended Carly’s 15th birthday party in Adelaide. After Carly reportedly rejected his sexual advances, Newman left. A month later, Newman approached Carly again, arranging to meet with her and his son, who posed as ‘Brandon’. The

At his Supreme Court trial, the jury found Newman guilty of murder. On March 31st, 2010 Justice Trish Kelly sentenced Newman to a life behind bars with a 29-year non-parole period. The framing techniques used by news media sources when reporting Carly’s murder, and the impact these had on the audience’s attribution of responsibility and expectation of solutions will be the topic of this essay’s discussion. These framing techniques included, images, language and narrative, and sources. The discussion will include the consequences of the framing in the context of the internet and paedophile “moral panics”. This will be done by comparing the framing of three news articles, “Extraordinary scenes at start of Carly Ryan murder trial” (Fewster, 2009); “Sex predator jailed for life” (Dornin, 2010); and “Ten years after a violent sadist lured Carly Ryan, 15, to her death with a cruel trick her mother wants to warn others” (Sutton,

Cohen, 1972, proposes that a moral panic occurs when “a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests” (Cohen 2010, p.462). Mainstream media construct stereotypical representations of these groups and their practises as ‘dangerous,’ ‘deviant’ and ‘destructive,’ and report in a disproportionate manner – magnifying areas of concern. Thus, the groups emerge as ‘folk devils’ in wider society, prompting collective revulsion and the demand for more repressive measures (Clifford & White, 2017). In the aftermath of small number of high-profile cases of child abduction, rape and murder in the 1990s and 2000s, including eight-year-old Sarah Payne, the paedophile emerged as a ‘folk devil’ (Jewkes & Wykes 2012, p.935). Media representations in this period resulted in child sexual abuse being coined “the most significant moral panic of the last two decades” (Jewkes 2015, p.116). Simultaneously, the rapid technological evolution created anxieties concerning the uncontrollable, all-pervasive qualities of cyberspace (Jewkes & Wykes 2012, p.945). Thus, media discourse emerged linking the predatory stranger with the internet as a source of danger to children. However, the focus on the ‘folk devil’ paedophile as a stranger who preys on children fails to reflect the fact that the majority of children who are sexually abused are,