Ideological Resilience and Disruption: Reproducing and Resisting Gender and Racial Inequality in Cases of Teacher Sexual Misconduct
Date
2014
Authors
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Publisher
University of California at Riverside
Abstract
Through a comparative analysis of the media coverage and legal treatment of a national
sample of criminal cases involving sexual contact between teachers and their adolescent
students, this research examines how gender and racial inequalities are reproduced and
resisted in the news media and criminal justice system. Using regression analysis of
sentencing outcomes, I find support for the selective chivalry hypothesis, which suggests
that female defendants who adhere to dominant gender expectations experience leniency
in the criminal justice system while female defendants who are viewed as gender deviants
are treated especially punitively. I also employ qualitative discourse analysis of the new
media coverage and court room construction of a subsample of 66 cases to consider how
inequality is reproduced and resisted. I draw on a conceptualization of hegemonic
ideology as a set of symbolic resources that individuals have differential access to
depending on their location in the matrix of privilege and oppression. Using this
conceptualization, I elaborate how defense attorneys strategically draw on patriarchal
views of women’s passivity to reduce the culpability of their female clients, how
prosecuting attorneys resist these hegemonic ideals and demand that the sexual
perpetrating of both male and female defendants be taken seriously, and how judges
discursively perform neutrality even while making sentencing decisions that are shaped
by gender ideology. I also analyze the media framing of these cases, including how the
explosion of discourse around cases involving white female perpetrators relates to the
regulation of female sexuality and how the politics of Black respectability are used to
frame cases involving Black male defendants. Finally, I analyze the constructed and
contested nature of sexual victimhood, and how the differential access to claims of
“worthy victimhood” identity relates to the race and gender of the adolescent victim.
Description
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Keywords
educator sexual misconduct, educator sexual misconduct, schools, child sexual abuse, law, courts
Citation
Mulligan, K. R. (2014). Ideological Resilience and Disruption: Reproducing and Resisting Gender and Racial Inequality in Cases of Teacher Sexual Misconduct (Doctoral dissertation, UC Riverside).