La relatividad de lo normal: Análisis del lenguaje en los medios de comunicación

Abstract

People consider “normal” what they have socially learnt to consider as such. In a society, expectations about the “correct” behaviour of an individual are generated, thus establishing social consensual norms. Social norms are not written, they have a cultural and religious bias, and they have evolved to generate “normalised socialisation processes” into individuals. Medias are the major secondary source of socialisation. Together with school and family, they influence the socialisation of individuals. When someone deviates from what a given society considers as normal, that person starts to be judged, stigmatised and labelled. This causes a feedback loop, meaning moral prejudices –social norm– lead to laws –legal norm– and vice versa. Likewise, the medical norm stigmatises a dysfunction, thus identifying a person with his disease. These three aspects of the normal-norm overlap. At this stage, we can see how a delinquent or antisocial conduct, over the course of history, has been associated with abnormality and, therefore, with certain diseases, as if what is “evil” could only come from the sick –the crazy– and never from the normal. To that end, the objective of the current work is the analysis of the normal-norm split in the three following aspects: how the word “normal” is used in newspaper articles, the psychiatrization of criminal behaviour, and the criminalisation of what is pathological. Firstly, we analysed the language used in the Medias, selecting various newspaper articles, according to given criteria. Secondly, we used the discussion group technique, albeit not representative, with the aim of evaluating the perception of the language used by the Medias. Although criminology has been focusing on analysing what deviates from the medical norm in order to understand what deviates from both moral and legal norms, we demonstrated that criminality stems from normality. As a result, we dispelled false myths which are still present nowadays on the figure of the delinquent and the link between mental disorders and acts of violence. Neither all offenders suffer from mental disorders, nor all individuals suffering from mental disorders are offenders. Overall, further investigations in this field are needed together with a change in the criminological approach.