# Reports on sexual violence published in an online Chinese newspaper: A new frame research

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes how an online Chinese newspaper has reported on sexual violence over 15 years, revealing trends and media framing.

## Contribution

The study provides new insights into how Chinese online media frames sexual violence and its societal implications.

## Key findings

- The number of news stories about sexual crimes has significantly changed over 15 years.
- Most sexual crime news stories are about incidents in mainland China.
- Media coverage focuses on blaming perpetrators and uses an episodic framework.

## Abstract

The leading role of the media is very important in the new media era to build the reporting system and framework of sexual violence crimes, guide people’s awareness and public opinion, and improve society’s vigilance on sexual crimes. This study took People’s Daily Online, a representative online media in China, as a research object to analyse the reporting of sexual crimes over the past 15 years. We conducted relevant searches for specific keywords set in the Python crawler and used IBM SPSS Statistics 19 software to analyse the frequency of relevant content. The results of the research show that, firstly, there have been significant changes in the number of news stories about sexual crimes. Second, the majority of sexual crime news stories are from mainland China. Third, the focus of the news stories and people is relatively concentrated on the perpetrators. Fourth, the People’s Daily Online’s coverage of sexual crimes focuses on blaming the perpetrators. Fifth, sexual crimes show that the framework is more episodic. This paper examines changes in the coverage of sexual crimes in China and captures how the media cover socially relevant issues, providing important insights for future social health, psychological awareness and diversion, and media policy.