US Newspapers’ Portrayals of Home Invasion Crime
| Author | ANDREW CANTU,WILLIAM S. MOLIDOR,REGINALD A. BYRON |
| Date | 01 June 2018 |
| Published date | 01 June 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12257 |
The Howard Journal Vol57 No 2. June 2018 DOI: 10.1111/hojo.12257
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 250–277
US Newspapers’ Portrayals of Home
Invasion Crime
REGINALD A. BYRON, WILLIAM S. MOLIDOR
and ANDREW CANTU
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Southwestern University,
Georgetown, TX, USA
Abstract: This article presents the first known analysis of US newspaper portrayals of
‘home invasion’ crime by quantitatively investigating over 1,000 cases of home invasion
drawn from 15 geographically spread city newspapers. In line with the concept of moral
panic, descriptive statistics suggest a recent marked increase in the usage of the term
‘home invasion’ among newspapers. Additionally, regression analyses predicting levels
of coverage suggest that a market-driven model of news production, invoking a fearful
worst-case scenario, prevails. Victimor suspect fatalities, the number of victims or suspects,
and the type of weapon reported, all generally predict the word count of initial articles
and the likelihood of a follow-up article. Analyses also partially support the hierarchy of
victimisation hypothesis. We conclude by cautioning that citizens and legislators should
consider these findings when calling for new legislation and appeal to criminologists to
produce comprehensive empirical analyses on home invasion crime.
Keywords: home invasion; media bias; moral panic; newspapers; social
construction
For over 50 years, a large body of research has investigated newspaper
coverage of crime (for example, Buckler and Travis 2005; Chermak
1994; Davis 1952; Duwe 2000; Gruenewald, Chermak and Pizarro 2013;
Johnstone, Hawkins and Michener 1994; Lin and Phillips 2012; Lundman
2003; Paulsen 2003; Pritchard and Hughes 1997; Schildkraut and Donley
2012; Sorenson, Manz and Berk 1998). Much of this work measures the
media’s distortion of homicide – where scholars assess the determinants of
whether homicides reported to the police are covered in city newspapers
at all and the predictors of celebrated homicide coverage (Gruenewald,
Parkin and Chermak 2014). A smaller group of studies explore newspaper
biases in other types of violent crime like carjackings (Cherbonneau and
Copes 2003) and school shootings (Kupchik and Bracy 2009).
The current study, although not a media distortion analysis (that is, it
does not compare newspaper coverage with more objective law enforce-
ment statistics on home invasion because these crimes are still inconsistently
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2018 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK
The Howard Journal Vol57 No 2. June 2018
ISSN 2059-1098, pp. 250–277
classified across police jurisdictions), extends the literature on newspaper
coverage of violent crime in other meaningful ways. This is the first known
analysis of newspaper coverage using the term ‘home invasion’ in the US.
We adopt the broadest definition offered by Catalano (2010) which de-
scribes a home invasion as a ‘crime committed by an individual unlawfully
entering a residence while someone is home’ (p.2). Initial scholarly reports
described confrontation, intimidation, group planning, and violence tar-
geted at the residents, as central elements to defining home invasions –
descriptions which were intended to distinguish home invasion from the
more common crime of burglary (Hurley 1995). However, there is still dis-
agreement about how home invasion crimes should be classified1and the
term ‘home invasion’ is ‘used widely to describe an array of victimizations’
(Catalano 2010, p.2; Kellermann et al. 1995). Our analyses seek to exam-
ine how newspapers portray contemporary home invasion crime and the
determinants of enhanced home invasion crime coverage.
Our article seeks to answer four broad research questions: How has the
frequency of the term ‘home invasion’ in newspapers changed in recent
times? How do newspapers portray modern home invasion crime? What
are the predictors of enhanced home invasion crime coverage? And which
theoretical framework best explains these patterns?
We find a markedrise in the use of the term ‘home invasion’ in our sam-
ple of newspapers between 2000 and 2010. Our descriptive statistics also
reveal that the reporting of home invasion crime in newspapers mirrors
media skews in the reporting of other violent crime (for example, Pizarro,
Chermak and Gruenewald 2007). Moreover,in regression analyses we find
that certain incident-based variables, in line with a fear-inducing market-
based model of news production, are strongly predictive of enhanced home
invasion crime coverage in US newspapers. Such analyses are important
because some citizens have reported significant fear of home invasion crime
(for example, Luo, Ren and Zhao 2016) and legislators have passed bills
which classify ‘home invasion’ as a new crime category warranting special
penalties (for example, Uliano 2014), without consideration of empirical
evidence of media skews in the crime’s representation. Although notions of
‘home invasion’ crime are nearly a century old, they are being recast using
a startling narrative that aligns with key features of the concept of moral
panic. This recasting has proven beneficial for various media, political, and
commercial entities.
Background
The term ‘home invasion’ has recently gained national and international
notoriety because of sensationalised incidents like the 2007 Petit family
murders in Cheshire, Connecticut (subsequently made into a Home Box
Office (HBO) documentary) and Oscar Pistorius’s defence in his 2014
murder trial in South Africa.2The earliest empirical literature on home
invasion crime in America, however,was published in the 1990s. Burke and
O’Rear (1990) were among the first to document how a specialised Asian
gang (known as Home Invaders) travelled the country to commit home
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2018 The Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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