Bones Analytical Essay

The television show Bones provides a unique insight into the criminal justice system through gender, race and class lenses. Bones is a television program that investigates crimes through the use of forensics. In most episodes, there are victims and perpetrators of crime as well as investigators to solve the crime. This report will discuss how gender, race and class figure into the portrayals of victimization, portrayals of perpetration of crime, and the representation and roles of the investigators on prime-time crime-fighting television.

Victims

Gender is the main lens for the victims in the three Bones episodes I coded. In two of the three episodes, the homicide victims were males, while the remaining victim was female. As two of the three

In two of the three episodes, the actual perpetrators were males, while the third was female. From 1976-2005, males committed 88.8% of homicides in the United States (Belknap, 2015, p. 144). Additionally, 65.3% of the homicides committed during that time victimized males (Belknap, 2015, p. 144). In episode 14, the homicide victim was a female killed by a male. During 1976-2005, only 22.7% of homicides committed were male on female. Episode 16 is the episode in which the actual perpetrator was female and the victim was male. According to Belknap, only 9.6% of homicides from 1976-2005 were female on male (2015, p. 144). It is worthy of note that a working class female would commit a homicide because between 2002 and 2011, only 11.8% of females, from a sample of 8,359 participants, were arrested for homicide (Belknap, 2015, p. 114). This information illustrates that crime-fighting television deviates from actual crime statistics when creating its’ programming. Although it has been shown that females are responsible for 20% of the index violent offense arrests, television does not portray this. Out of three episodes, one actual perpetrator was female; however, there were three additional female potential suspects. I think this pattern shows that television uses the stereotypical portrayals of males and females. When the numbers from the three episodes are combined, there are a total of sixteen potential and actual perpetrators. Four out of sixteen were females, while the other twelve were males. Females are thought to be less powerful and dominating than males, which is a possible reason why females are not often shown as killers or