Narrating childhood under state violence: media power, territorial stigma and the Malvinas case in Ecuadorian journalism

Abstract

This study examines how Ecuadorian digital newspapers constructed childhood and attributed responsibility in coverage of the Malvinas case, in which one child and three adolescents aged 11–15 were detained by military personnel in Guayaquil on 8 December 2024, forcibly disappeared, and later found dead near Taura. Childhood is conceptualized as a socially produced, rights-bearing category, while direct state violence is distinguished from structural violence. A qualitative content analysis, informed by critical discourse analysis, framing, indexing theory, the hierarchy-of-influences model, moral-panic scholarship, and mediated-memory studies, was conducted on a purposive final corpus of 12 digital journalistic texts published by eight Ecuadorian outlets between December 2024 and August 2025. The analysis examined actor visibility, source hierarchy, lexical agency, territorialization, visual ethics, genre, narrative frame, underlying message, and transmitted values. Three recurrent configurations were identified: securitized/officialist, rights/forensic, and sensationalist. Officialist tendencies were strongest when coverage depended on military or governmental definers and when Las Malvinas was rendered as a geography of danger. Rights-oriented accounts emerged through family testimony, forensic evidence, legal categories, and longer investigative formats. Journalistic discourse can either reproduce institutional self-legitimation or re-humanize children as subjects of rights. Ethical reporting on child victims of state violence requires precise legal language, contextual depth, genre transparency, child-protection protocols, and an ethics of memory that resists territorial stigma and symbolic erasure.