“They’re flooding the internet”: A cross-national analysis of
\nnewspaper representations of the ‘internet predator’ in Australia, Canada, the UK and USA

Although online child sexual abuse is an issue of international concern, little is known
\nabout the news media’s role in its construction. In this study I draw upon a corpus of
\n6,077 newspaper articles from Australia, Canada, the UK and USA – four member
\ncountries of the Virtual Global Taskforce set up in 2003 to combat online child abuse.
\nThrough a quantitative content analysis, I trace the trajectory of news coverage in
\neach country and identify the news hooks and key events through which the issue has
\nbeen framed during peak periods. This is complemented by a critical discourse
\nanalysis, through which I interrogate discourses around spatiality, particularly those
\npertaining to the paedophile’s migration from the ‘real world’ to ‘cyberspace’, and
\nfrom the ‘outside’ into the heart of ‘the home’. The quantitative element of my study
\nshows that: (1) although coverage began to emerge during the mid-1990s, it only
\nbegan to accelerate after the turn of the century; (2) online abuse has been defined
\nthrough episodic coverage, often around high-profile ‘grooming’ cases; (3) coverage in each country has largely followed a unique, nationally-specific narrative (shaped
\nby its own socio-political context); and (4) although coverage has gone through
\nperiods of peaks and troughs, there are few signs that online abuse is slipping off the
\nnews agenda. In my qualitative analysis, I present evidence that: (1) claims-makers
\nhave drawn upon existing understandings of, and fears about, parks and playgrounds
\nto construct aspects of the internet as online ‘paedophile places’; (2) a discourse of
\ntemporal proximity has been adopted to depict children as being ‘seconds’ or ‘clicks’
\naway from an internet predator; (3) this discourse of temporal proximity has been
\nused to localise a global problem and depict the internet predator as being even closer
\nto children than the traditional figure of ‘the paedophile’; and (4) the internet has been
\nframed as bringing fundamental changes to how sexual threats to children should be
\nunderstood. Through this analysis I argue that these discourses have been used to
\nlegitimise tighter regulation of children’s lives and, although specific to the internet,
\nthey perpetuate myths about paedophiles, childhood, the family and home that limit thinking about child sexual abuse on a much broader scale.

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