Lecherous’ Refugee ‘Sex Mobs’ ‘Threatening German Women’? the Stereotypical Portrayal of Migrant Men/Refugees in German Print Media - a Quantitative Content Analysis

The main aim of this paper is to present and discuss core research findings of the first phase of our British Academy/Leverhulme Trust funded Research Project ‘The end of tolerance’. ‘Race’, Sex and Violence in Germany’s Media discourse on migration (2017/2018).

The project methodologically triangulates a quantitative content analysis with a Critical discourse analysis of three major German newspapers [FAZ, Sueddeutsche, BILD] and the political Weekly FOCUS, chosen on the basis of their popularity and market-leading role and circulation compared with other newspapers.

The data sample of articles (n=408) covers a period of 21 months between May 2015 and January 2017 and has been collected in a digital data screening of these media based on a keyword search matrix.

The paper focuses on core findings of the first stage of the research, involving a quantitative content analysis of the data corpus, using a formal coding instrument to identify the prominence of different themes and actors in the sample. Based on the search of truncations (such as *sex *mob *refugee *migrant *muslim *islam *arab, *syr *northafrican etc.) as well as the analysis of the interpretation of crime statistics discussed in the articles the paper discusses the use of specific words and the wider context of the development of stereotypes in the three newspapers and the weekly magazine. Beside the univariate and bivariate statistical analysis the Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) enables the visualisation of the distances of the truncations in order to show the different images of migrant men related to sex-related issues created in the three newspaper and the weekly magazine. First results show that those created images to a certain extent follow the assumed political agenda of the newspapers and the weekly magazine.