| abstract |
This research paper reviews the Central Park Jogger Rape Case through a transdisciplinary lens to highlight how the New York City newspapers influenced the investigation and the trial's social justice outcomes, ultimately leading to multiple convictions. These newspapers influenced how people viewed the incident and motivated them to believe that the accused were guilty, both privately and publicly. This project demonstrates that the sensationalist New York City newspapers were embedded with racial stereotypes that invoked old and new racist mores, resulting in a panicked public, a divided city, and the wrongful convictions of a group of Black teenage boys. Historically, New York City newspapers have misrepresented Black culture and Black masculinity to the public, resulting in unequal social justice practices and outcomes.
America's historical legacy of prosecuting groups of Black boys and men accused of sexually assaulting White women began in the early 20th century with the Scottsboro Boys case in 1932 and has continued through to the Central Park Five (CP5) Jogger case in 1989. The ramification of this trend presents new layers of social disability within disability studies. The fear of Black boys and men sexually violating White women is a significant phenomenon in American discourses constructed and supported by the newspapers. In Athens, Tennessee on July 24, 1868, under the Editorial Brevities entitled "Lynching," The Athens Post headline read "Lynching of the Black Fiend for outrage committed upon young White girl by a negro," and The Chattanooga News article about Ed Johnson in 1906, "A Fiendish Crime," included the announcement of the scheduled lynching of John Hartfield in the Jackson Daily News on June 26,1919.
Using a social, political, cultural, and historical lens, this project employs a mixed methodology with a convergent parallel design of quantitative analysis of scholarly writings from the fields of sociology, criminology, journalism, history, anthropology, linguistic, and cultural studies, with the qualitative data from the focus group survey results. The methodology was developed using selected elements from each academic field to examine and interpret content analyses of articles, photographs, and headlines from New York City newspaper archives. Qualitative analysis of a focus group's survey responses to questions based on knowledge of other historical cases involving race, sex, and crime were presented in a PowerPoint presentation of front-page news articles, newspaper headlines, and photographs to stimulate individual and collective memory discussion.
In doing so, it was revealed that the New York City newspapers were complicit in influencing the social response of the public to the accused individuals and the social justice outcomes of the case. In the same manner, my model equates the permanent social barriers imposed on the wrongly accused and convicted Black boys and men as a form of disability.
This study was limited by the small group size of participants in the focus group, access to data during the worldwide COVID pandemic when this research began, and the unavailability of other transdisciplinary studies that focused on race, sex, crime, culture, and journalism.
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