NaDiRa short study: Racism in the courtroom

Racism in court proceedings

National Monitoring of Discrimination and Racism (NaDiRa)

Project head: Prof. Dr. Sabrina J. Mayer

Project team:

• Sabrina Mayer
• Stephanie Müssig

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Project description:

The research project investigates how criminal cases and persons are presented in legal textbooks. It explores the question of whether certain types of cases are linked to individual nationalities or ethnicities - for example, whether the case "car theft" is associated with "Poles". In addition, the project examines the extent to which people are portrayed in stereotypical ways, such as sexist, discriminatory and/or racist. As part of the project, we analyse 110 textbooks from the field of criminal law.

Results:

First results show that textbooks from the field of criminal law very often contain sexist representations. Racist representations occur far less frequently in them. In some case types, especially theft, we observe that stereotypical representations, especially of persons from Eastern Europe, are slightly overrepresented. For the evaluation, we systematically analyse more than 5,000 codes.

Surprising insights:

The fact that sexist representations are much more present than racist ones was surprising. We had expected a far more frequent, similarly negative portrayal of people with a migration background and of foreigners.

Short studies in preparation of the Racism Monitor:

In order to prepare a comprehensive racism monitor, DeZIM called on scholars* from the DeZIM research community in 2020 to develop innovative study ideas. These should extend existing research projects, pursue new and innovative approaches or build an infrastructure to research racism. By 2021, more than 120 researchers at the six locations of the DeZIM research community had conducted a total of 34 short studies. These are divided into six thematic priorities:

• Health system
• Education system and labour market
• Institutional racism
• Dealing with experiences of racism
• Participation and the media
• Racist ideologies and attitudes

Funding: Federal Ministry for Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (Third-party funding)