What has — and hasn’t — changed in the way news addresses sexual violence |
Despite decades of commitments to gender equality, women remain marginalized in news media. According to the latest report of the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) — the largest research study on gender equality in the media — women constitute only 26 per cent of news subjects and sources.
This imbalance is especially concerning in Canada where local news outlets are increasingly shuttered and national newsrooms continue to shrink. As such, whose voices make it into the headlines matters now more than ever.
The problem, however, is not only underrepresentation but also misrepresentation. The GMMP report notes news stories that challenge simplistic, widely held beliefs about women and men are rare, indicating that gender stereotyping in news coverage is more pronounced than at any point in the past 30 years.
Equally alarming is the finding that stories of gender-based violence seldom make the news. In fact, fewer than two out of every 100 news articles, and only a third of these, focus on sexual assault and harassment against women.
These findings challenge the myth of post-feminism in 21st-century media and raise important questions such as:
How do journalists cover cases of sexual violence?
Whose views and voices are heard?
And what has changed, if anything, since the #MeToo movement, which sparked an outpouring of stories of sexual assault, increased reporting and heightened public dialogue on the issue?
Our research explored these questions.
We analyzed news articles published........