Teenage pregnancies in the UK and their perception in the British print media

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,0, University of Paderborn (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: One of the most controversial issues in the United Kingdom is the topic of teenage pregnancy. The United Kingdom's number of teenage mothers is the highest one in comparison to all other European states. This is an astonishing fact, the more so as European countries such as Spain, Italy or Poland with a traditionally more conservative background formerly based on Catholicism with its strict moral principles against extra-marital sex or use of contraceptives have lower rates of teenage parents. The issue of teenage pregnancies in the United Kingdom is, in general, regarded as one of the main and most urgent social problems in a modern society. Several political parties and governmental institutions have intended to tackle the problem by various campaigns, especially during the years of Labour Government. Likewise, the media provide their readers and viewers frequently with new figures, research results, comments or stories regarding this topic.

In this paper I want to examine the portrayal of teenage pregnancy and teenage mothers in the British print media with a focus on daily newspapers. For this purpose, the main part will be an analysis of a number of articles concerning this topic from the most popular newspapers. The subject matter deals with the question if there exists a relation between the coverage of the topic and the portrayal of the mothers and the transfer of ideology by the media. How does this particular representation contribute to the implementation of cultural values and the maintenance of existing power relations? Another interesting question to pose is whether the reporting on this topic has changed over the course of time, if it has increased during the last years and if there are certain political rationales behind a changing coverage.