Book Review: The Search for Justice in a Media Age: Reading Stephen Lawrence and Louise Woodward
| Author | Eamonn Carrabine |
| Published date | 01 August 2006 |
| Date | 01 August 2006 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480606065920 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Banner, Stuart (2002) The Death Penalty: An American History. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Derrida, Jacques (1999) ‘The Century and the Pardon’, Le Mondes des Debates
9 (December): http://fixion.systes.net/pardonEng.htm
Sarat, Austin (2001) When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the
American Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Siobhan Holohan
The Search for Justice in a Media Age: Reading Stephen Lawrence and Louise
Woodward
Hampshire: Ashgate, 2005. 182 pp. £45.00.
•Reviewed by Eamonn Carrabine, University of Essex, UK
DOI: 10.1177/1362480606065920
The ways in which the news media shape public understandings of criminality
and legal processes have been subjected to long-standing critical scrutiny within
criminology. Siobhan Holohan’s book makes a welcome contribution to this
tradition and is firmly situated within it. From the beginning she states that like
‘many authors writing about media discourse on law, order and deviance, I
suggest that the focus of media enquiry transforms over time in order to
confront issues that may concern the dominant ideological structures within a
particular society’ (p. 1). The originality of the book lies is in its use of
psychoanalytical concepts to grasp the sacrificial element of scapegoat mecha-
nisms that make certain criminal incidences prone to media spectacle. Through
two well-known cases of the 1990s—the murder of Stephen Lawrence in
London and the trial of the British au pair Louise Woodward in the United
States—Holohan details how media representations construct a sacrificial
figure to uphold and strengthen the existing social order.
Her account opens with a brief outline of critical criminology’s treatment of
the media. Howard Becker’s (1963) Outsiders and Stan Cohen’s (1972) Folk
Devils and Moral Panics are both given their due for highlighting the im-
portance of media constructions of deviance, which is then elaborated through-
out the 1970s by the Glasgow University Media Group in a series of influential
publications. The first chapter ends with a discussion of René Girard’s psycho-
analytical account of scapegoating that enables Holohan to sketch out her
own position.
The rest of the book is composed of two parts. The first deals with the case
of British au pair Louise Woodward, who was tried in the American courts for
her part in the suspicious death of a baby left in her charge. Holohan begins by
detailing the competing representations of the case in the American and British
media, which revolved around collapsing family values, exploitative domestic
labour and white national identity. While American tabloids tended to portray
Woodward as a monstrous child abuser, the British press initially saw her as a
Book Reviews 405
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