Criminalisation of truancy as a manifestation of advanced marginality that mothers should be blamed for: Media framing in the Czech Republic

In this study, we present an analysis, driven by the Critical Discourse Studies, Frame Analysis, and Narrative Analysis, of how truancy is represented in the Czech media. Based on our findings, we assert that Czech media employ three frames (gender bias; moralisation and individualisation; and repression/retribution) for representing truancy, effectively depicting it as a criminal problem created by irresponsible mothers (and children they neglected) who must be punished to address the issue. Employing the cultural and feminist criminology framework, as a combination that is scarcely used in studies, we argue that media (re)produce criminalisation of mothers by amplifying deeply rooted and routinised gendered cultural stereotypes. In this sense, we show that cultural criminology is useful not only for analysing adrenaline/“exciting” transgression, subcultures, or edgework, but, especially when combined with feminist criminology, also for analysing possibilities of criminalisation rooted in mainstream culture. Furthermore, our analysis shows that Czech media representation of truancy is damaging both for society and for addressing the issue, reducing it to a mere neoliberal individual choice of irresponsible mothers, even though truancy is a much more complex phenomenon with communal and structural levels and can be seen rather as a product of advanced marginality.