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Subproject C09
Fear of Crime - Media dramatizations of crime, its prevention and punishment

3. Funding period (2022-2025)

Doesn't mass media often stir up fear of crime? And under what conditions does this not happen? Press coverage, television programs, and films that deal with crime have a significant influence on whether the public perceives delinquency primarily as a security problem or whether society's interest is directed more toward the genesis of criminalized deviant behavior and thus toward possibilities for prevention and resocialization.

In the current research, the subproject is specifically concerned with constellations in which the media - for quite different reasons - explicitly do not dramatize crime. It thus extends the research interest from the second funding phase (2018-2021), in which the focus was on media formats, with various television investigation programs, that conjure up unsolved criminal cases as a security problem and claim to help solve the diagnosed problem.

The focus of the current research includes numerous Hollywood films that portray the death penalty as problematic. Using different cinematic repertoires, they shift debates about deterrence and retribution to issues of social inequality, racism, and state cruelty. A different case, to which the subproject is devoted, is press coverage in the Third Reich. It had to largely refrain from publicized depictions of burglaries, robberies, rape and murder, since the National Socialists had promised to create a society safe from crime through their repressive criminal policy.

With its research interest, the subproject is on the trail of media logics of the securitization and de-securitization of crime.

Cooperation Partners