That was by far the largest category of stories about children in the study, which was produced in a unique cooperative project between newspapers and schools world-wide. The researchers were children themselves.

The study was conducted in late March and early April 2003, when 70 classes from 24 countries studied newspapers daily for one week and categorised all the news articles they found about children.

Children were portrayed as victims in nearly one in three of the stories examined. The second largest category was "children in schools," which included nearly one in five stories.

Other categories include "children are brilliant", with 17 percent of the stories, followed by "children in politics" (10 percent), "children as wrongdoers" (8 percent), and "children helping others" (4 percent).

"The responses to the study remind all those who work for newspapers that children are as diverse as their adult counterparts and that much remains to be done to satisfy their newspaper needs," said the authors of the report, Magne Raundalen, the Director of Research for Children’s Programmes at the Centre for Crisis Psychology in Bergen, Norway, and Jan Vincens Steen, the Newspapers in Education Manager for the Norwegian Media Businesses’ Association.

"The finding that almost one-third of stories related to children as victims supports previous findings and provides a reminder that coverage of children may easily become focused on limited issues," they said.

The study was conducted for the World Association of Newspapers in its Newspapers in Education Development Project, a new partnership initiative with the international newsprint producer Norske Skog to develop a wide range of new programmes for using newspapers and magazines in education all over the world.

The Children in Newspapers global project asked students aged 10 to 12 to read their local newspaper for one week and to cut out, discuss and categorise articles that portrayed children. The local newspaper was asked to partner with each of the participating schools.

"The children’s performance of the study tasks -- examining the newspaper, cutting out and classifying articles - enabled them to read about a wide diversity of children in different circumstances," said the authors. "There was also evidence of the positive effects of children being exposed to issues beyond those directly concerning children as they searched the newspaper for child-related stories."

"There were repeated recommendations that newspapers should give wider coverage to children’s issues, in particular ’bad news’ should be balanced with more examples of improvements in children’s lives. Children also want to read more that touches on their daily lives, presented in a way that is adapted to their level of understanding."

The authors said the project encouraged the young researchers to read newspapers. "They were disappointed when the week ended," they said.

"Children appear to have been motivated by seeing themselves reflected in the newspaper, by looking closely at their role in adult society and by working in groups," they said. "The limited involvement of adults may also be significant. The tasks involved in compiling the reports were extremely effective in bringing into play the learning strengths of both girls and boys.

"There exists an enormous potential for connecting the young child’s mind to mainstream political issues of the adult world and developing their voice as an integral part of living democracy," they said.

The study was presented to the WAN World Young Reader Conference, held in Helsinki, Finland, from 7 to 9 September 2003. An executive summary of the study can be found by clicking here.

Summaries of all presentations at the conference can be found at www.wan-press.org/helsinki2003/.

The Paris-based WAN, the global organisation for the newspaper industry, represents 18,000 newspapers; its membership includes 72 national newspaper associations, individual newspaper executives in 100 countries, 13 news agencies and nine regional and world-wide press groups.

Inquiries to: Larry Kilman, Director of Communications, WAN, 25 rue d’Astorg, 75008 Paris France. Tel: +33 1 47 42 85 00. Fax: +33 1 47 42 49 48. Mobile: +33 6 10 28 97 36. E-mail: lkilman@wan.asso.fr.