Policy feedback and media framing of crime victims

Drawing on framing theory and the social construction of target populations, this study examines whether and how landmark legislation is associated with shifts in media framing of the populations it targets. We examine this question through the Crime Victims’ Rights Act of 2004 (CVRA), landmark legislation that significantly changed the way the legal process understood victims. By expanding victims’ participatory rights in the prosecution of those who harmed them, it designated victims as deserving a voice in the process and institutionalised the fact that the victim’s experience mattered for the fair provision of justice. Treating the CVRA as a chronological anchor, we conduct a theory-driven framing analysis of 315 articles from four major US newspapers across the four years surrounding the CVRA’s passage to examine how media frames of crime victims shifted across this threshold. We document an asymmetric pattern: frames of victim power and agency shifted measurably in the direction a policy-feedback account would predict, while frames of victim complexity (indirect harm, secondary victimisation, and non-ideal representation), predicated by victimology, did not. We offer this pattern as one plausible instance of arena-refracted feedback effects , in which policy feedback is refracted by institutional carriers, such as the media, through which it travels to reach mass publics.