A three-day conference focusing on violence prevention is underway in Bendigo this week.
Prominent speakers from across the violence prevention field are aiming to influence attitudes on violence and help devise a regional plan for the prevention of violence against women and children. They hope to bring attention to violence prevention and raise awareness that it is everyone’s role to do so.
“The conference is intended to reach a broad and diverse group of people from both regional and metropolitan centres to be a catalyst for action to eliminate violence against women, and raise awareness of violence prevention approaches,” the Women’s Health Loddon Mallee executive officer Linda Beilarz says.
One of the prominent focuses of the conference is the representation of violence against women in the media. Dr Gael Jennings from the Centre for Advancing Journalism, this morning addressed the role the mainstream media plays in perpetuating violence against women, discussing the impact of change of media ownership laws may have.
The media is such a central force in our society; we listen, watch, read and trust it every day. But more often than not, the media filters its stories, reporting on what they think the audience will find interesting, and most damaging of all, not reporting on what they think the audience wont.
Dr Jennings argued that often the media neglects to report on domestic violence cases, as they may not be the most ‘interesting’ story of the day.
Dr Jennings says that violence against women is only being reported about on a cursory level and does not reflect the reality of the male-on-female violence that is at epidemic proportions. She puts forth some horrendous statistics that are not reported about in the media such as “if an intimate partner rapes a partner, its 40 times less likely to be reported than if it’s a stranger” – the element of stranger danger would add an interesting angle to the story and would make headlines, whereas a partner raping a partner would not receive media coverage, therefore minimising the discussion of the epidemic of violence against women.
Dr Jennings explains that the key causes of violence against women, such as gender power imbalance and adherence to gender roles, are the same values underpinning mainstream media newsrooms. Therefore, mainstream media may perpetuate community attitudes that result in violence against women. A slide titled ‘Who Runs The Media’ displays the statistics of how truly male dominated the industry is.
A major issue with reporting on violence against women is that we continuously see the focus of the stories being on the women themselves and not their aggressors- their jobs, their appearances, their personalities –What relevance does this have to them being the victims of violence?
As seen with the reporting on the recent murder of Mayang Prasetyo, who was murdered, dismembered and cooked on a stove, Prasetyo was unnecessarily and offensively described in many various articles – the Courier Mail described her as ‘a transgendered prostitute’, and the Daily Telegraph presented the headline ‘Killed and coked trans woman was a high-class transsexual sex worker’. Here, the murderer is entirely removed, with the nature of her sexual biology and profession being the centre of the story – this has no relevance to the circumstances surrounding her murder, and again dismisses the key issue of violence against women.
Dr Jennings praises people on social media for their reactions towards the media coverage of Prasetyo’s murder, adding, “When you hear a man being sexist you stop him or you’re part of the problem.”
Dr Jennings further discusses a UK university experiment that found that most people couldn’t tell the difference between quotes from a men’s magazine and quotes reported from rapists. Quotes included ‘Mascara running down the cheeks means they’ve just been crying, and it was probably your fault . . . but you can cheer up the miserable beauty with a bit of the old in and out” and “Girls love being tied up . . . it gives them the chance to be the helpless victim” – both quotes from lad magazines. Just another distressing example of the way attitudes of sexism and violence against women are extremely misrepresented in the media.
It is clear there needs to be a shift in the way the media reports on violence. Hopefully Dr Jennings eye-opening presentation at the conference is a catalyst for change in the approach the mainstream media takes to reporting violence against women.