Analyses & Alternatives (분석과 대안)

Korea Consensus Institute(KCI) (사단법인 코리아컨센서스연구원)
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A Content Analysis of Child Sexual Abuse Coverage in Vietnamese News Media

  • Nguyen Thi Thuy (Sookmyung Women's University) ;
  • Jae Woong Shim (Sookmyung Women's University)
  • Received : 2024.09.21
  • Accepted : 2024.10.12
  • Published : 2024.10.31
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Abstract

This study examined how Vietnamese news media reported on Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) cases from 2017 to 2021. A quantitative content analysis was conducted on 663 news articles related to CSA from Vietnam's two most popular news media, vnexpress.net and dantri.vn. The study found that some news articles disclosed personal information such as gender, age, address, photograph, and occupation of both victims and perpetrators. The most frequently cited sources were government agencies, while experts on children's issues, who are arguably more relevant, were rarely referenced. The most prevalent news frame was weak punishment, followed by moral decay, tradition of saving face, and lack of proper sex education. These findings suggest that Vietnamese news media may fall short in raising awareness of CSA as a serious crime. This shortfall could result from a lack of professionalism among journalists and inadequate adherence to journalistic principles. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to the role of news media and journalism ethics.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2020S1A6A3A03063902); It was based on the first author's master's thesis in 2022.

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