Women, Violence, and the Media: Readings in Feminist Criminology

Chapter 1. Words that Wound: Print Media's Presentation of Gendered Violence

·  · chapter  WORDS THAT WOUND Print Media’s Presentation of Gendered Violence Michelle L. Meloy and Susan L. Miller News stories about female victims, offenders, and criminal justice professionals permeate our culture and shape our perceptions of them. When reporters dissect criminal incidents, they rely on well-worn clichés and stereotypes associated with men and women and work these gendered assumptions into news accounts about victims and offenders. Unfortunately , little attention has been paid to how the media frame gender and violence despite numerous studies that show that the media are one of the most powerful influences in shaping public perceptions about crime and victimization (Chermak, ; Lipschultz & Hilt, ). To help rectify the deficit, we discuss how gendered assumptions work their way into news reports and then we identify gendered assumptions about victims and offenders in several high-profile cases. Americans devote a large portion of their leisure time, about , to consuming and interfacing with the media. This time exceeds that spent reading, visiting with friends and family, or being outdoors (Ryan & Wentworth, ). Although some individuals may experience crime or violence directly, most Americans look to the media as the primary storyteller (Chermak, ). Not surprisingly, there is a direct correlation between the time individuals spend consuming mass-media information and their “buy-in” or acceptance of its images and stereotypes (Ryan & Wentworth, ). In other words, the media frame how and what we view as social problems, what we define as good or bad or as acceptable or unacceptable, and who we label as criminal offenders or legitimate victims . More specifically for our purposes, the media frame how women’s experiences with crime and victimization are presented to the public (Jewkes, ). When we compare the media’s presentation of crime with more objective sources of data, several things are clear. The media exaggerate crime compared with its actual occurrence. The media misrepresent who is pri- ·  · michelle l. meloy and susan l. miller marily at risk of becoming a victim of violence and tell a false story about who is most dangerous (Meyers, ; Ryan & Wentworth, ). Distortions and misrepresentations like these are built into the process of newsmaking. As reporters scan events, looking for what is newsworthy, they sort according to established criteria. Events must be serious in nature (Chermak, ), have sensational components and crime elements (Benedict, ), involve prestigious victims1 (Benedict, ) or notorious offenders (Meyers, ), and match the relevance to and interest of the viewing audience (Chermak, ). The more a crime incident exempli fies these tenets (e.g., violent and high-risk situations), the more likely it is that a reporter will write it up as news, ignoring other considerations such as accuracy or balance (Benedict, ; Daly & Chasteen, ; Grover & Soothill, ; Johnstone, Hawkins, & Michener, ; Pritchard & Highers, ). The selection of newsworthy events and the framing of those events are not arbitrary processes; instead, they rest on the decisions of reporters, journalists, and their supervisors operating within the print media’s hierarchy . Men outnumber women as reporters. They hold most of the highlevel and high-visibility positions within the news and media industry and thus possess the authority to direct news agendas (Chermak, ; Meyers, ). As a result, the working assumptions that male journalists have about gender, including ideas about female victims and offenders, play a role in the selection of events and in the framing of those events. Such working assumptions might be called a “masculine perspective.” Feminist scholars argue that male journalists, relying on a masculine perspective, suffer from a failure to see gendered violence as the significant social problem that it is (Meyers, ). Others have noted that the failure to see is part of a broader system of domination: “The concept of male power is interwoven throughout all interpersonal male–female interactions , constituting a structural dimension of society in which violence against women and other demonstrations of male power act to reproduce and maintain male dominance and female subordination” (Hanmer & Maynard, , p. ). The masculine perspective that we are describing tends to underreport male-on-female violence while highlighting the atypical event: extreme acts of violence by or against women. Most crimes against women and most of the crimes committed by women are considered ordinary and ·  · words that wound common from a masculine perspective. They rarely become news items. Up to  of all reported crimes against women do not receive any media attention (Caringella-MacDonald & Humphries, ). The most dramatic example of underreporting...