If you were watching the coverage, try to recall a picture or an interview with a Palestinian woman. A quick Google scan of the news images confirms that Palestinian women rarely make the news. Ironically, the only woman regularly pictured was Israeli military spokesperson, Major Avital Leibovich.

Typical photo of women. Creative Commons, Non Commericial/Attribution Photo by Alvaro Herraiz

The exclusion of women from media coverage of Gaza is sadly the norm. The invisibility of women in print, television and photographs silences them and their experience of war.

Invisibility is not the only way women are silenced. They are also silenced through mediums that appropriate their voices, image and experiences–the most powerful of which are photographs.

Think about the pictures you usually see of women in war zones. Maybe it’s a picture of a young girl with piercing, brown eyes and a worried look. Maybe it’s a picture of a middle-aged woman in a hijab wailing. Maybe it’s a picture of the AIDS-ravaged bodies of women raped by soldiers.

While these photos may evoke a strong emotional response, they don’t tell the stories of their subjects. They fail to provide information that would present the truth and challenge the dominant understandings of gender, race and class that shape and are perpetuated by the media.

The problem with pictures

The problem with pictures is that they are interpretive works that are given the authority of objectivity.

Writer and political activist Susan Sontag comments on this contradiction in her book Regarding the Pain of Others:

Photographs had the advantage of uniting two contradictory features. Their credentials of objectivity were inbuilt. Yet, they always had, necessarily a point of view. They were a record of the real—the incontrovertible, as no verbal account, however impartial could be—since a machine was doing the recording.

Sontag also suggests that photos exclude by framing. Framing dispels the myth of objectivity.

Typical exclusions in media images of women in war zones include their voices, their stories, and even, their names.

These images hide the complexity of victims as unique individuals and the context of violence.

Instead, pictures of women reinforce the stereotype of women’s helplessness and hide the power relations that perpetuate gendered-based violence.

One Victim

Common media representations of women demonstrate the same ‘ideal’ victim. The pictures generally portray women as helpless victims. Since the woman portrayed is helpless, she is also innocent—an assumption built on the virgin-whore dichotomy historically favoured by media.

These representations gloss over the reality that women and their responses to violence and conflict are complex and in some ways empowered.

For example, political scholar Mats Utas tells the story of a young woman named Bintu who had a series of relationships with soldiers during the Liberian Civil War.

After her first soldier-boyfriend was killed, Bintu was picked up as part of war spoils by another soldier. Despite being a victim of violence, Bintu used her situation to gain looted economic goods and secure physical protection.

A picture of Bintu would not demonstrate her identity as a complex victim, who, while constrained, is empowered to act.

One Context

Typical photo of a woman in war. Creative Commons License/Non Commerical Attribution, Photo by Algarabia

Photos of women also lack context. They hide the information we need to understand the social, economy and political context or the power relations that perpetuate gender-based violence.

We need to know that women experience rape during war as part of ethnic cleansing programs.

We need to understand the role of rape in breaking down the familial relationships that are central to a society.

We need to know that women are violently subdued as a part of a war economy that requires domestic workers or rewards male soldiers with women as the booty of war.

Without context, pictures depoliticize and dehistoricize the experiences of women. Violence against women is separated from power relations and suspended outside of history. This prevents an analysis of how these power relations make women vulnerable and how women respond.

Journalists have to accompany images of distant violence against women with stories and captions that enlighten us about the gendered-power relations that create vulnerability and empower us to question our own preconceptions about women as victims.

News Release: School of Journalism, University of British Columbia

The second poll on public interest in the murder trial of Robert Pickton in six months has found declining interest among British Columbians, with only 7% very interested in the case in June compared with 16% in January when the trial began. Only 1 in 10 residents access information about the trial daily, while 1 in 3 say they never access trial news.

Image by Getty Images via DaylifeBritish Columbians over age 55 are more interested in trial coverage, with 38% accessing information about the trial daily or every few days. Women are significantly less interested in coverage than men with 62% saying they access information about the trial less than once a week or never.

Interest in new forms of journalism, which include blogs from citizens and sex trade workers, was very limited, with 74% of British Columbians saying they aren’t accessing this kind of new media content, which is often found online. Perhaps, not surprisingly, approximately 50% of British Columbians over the age of 35 were not at all interested in this type of information, with 18-34 year old residents slightly more interested (24% of this age group said they were “somewhat interested” in this type of information).

Overall, the majority of British Columbians (52%) still found the amount of media coverage to date “just right,” with one-fifth (21%) still saying it is “too much”.

The poll, which was conducted by Mustel Group for the Feminist Media Project at the UBC School of Journalism, gauged public interest in the trial, which is in its sixth month after starting on January 22, 2007.

This poll, and one completed previously by the CBC involving the trial of Paul Bernardo for the sexual murders of two young women in the mid-1990s Toronto, found similar results suggesting that a significant proportion of the public were not interested in media coverage of that trial. That study of 1,000 respondents found that 46 per cent agreed that media were paying too much attention to the trial; 36 per cent disagreed. Also, more than half, 52 per cent, said the coverage was so upsetting, they would prefer not to be exposed to it. Only 33 per cent disagreed.

These results conflict with the perception that sensational crime stories, such as serial murder, sexual homicides and/or homicides involving children, drive audience interest. These types of crimes tend to gain large amounts of media coverage in North America - with crime and violent content filling between 20 and 25 per cent of the news section in newspapers and on television. This is despite the fact that no systematic evidence exists that audience members consistently prioritize crime content over other types of news information, such as environment and health news. In fact, at times, it may be the reverse.

These results were based on a survey of 852 B.C. adults between May 30 and June 10. The margin of error is 3.4 percentage points at 95% confidence level in the most conservative case.

Media Contacts:

Dr. Mary Lynn Young, Assistant Professor
UBC School of Journalism
604.822.9778
mlyoung@interchange.ubc.ca

Evi Mustel, CMRP
Principal
Mustel Group
604.742.2240
emustel@mustelgroup.com
www.mustelgroup.com

These types of crimes tend to gain large amounts of media coverage in North America, with crime and violent content often filling between 20 and 25 per cent of the news section in newspapers and on television. If not the media, who has the power and reach to speak for the many women who disappeared and died?

Feminist Journalism: Playing for the Girl’s Team
By Becky Atkinson
Relying upon the traditional news value of ‘objectivity’ to achieve clarity, traditional journalism reports facts gained from ‘legitimate’ patriarchal sources and authorities without the gender analysis and context provided by feminists. Because it diverts our attention away from gender, ‘objectivity’ obscures the social and political reality of patriarchy and reflects and reinforces patriarchal values and institutions.

Conversations with three feminist reporters covering the Pickton Trial
By Jessalynn Keller
The Missing Women trial in Vancouver involves the key issues of second and third wave feminism: sexual abuse, violence against women, sexuality and the roles that race, class and gender play in power relations. Why then is the media coverage of the case still so reflective of dominant cultural stereotypes of women, violence, sex and race? Jessalyn Keller interviewed women journalists from the Vancouver Sun, The Globe and Mail and the Canadian Press wire service.

Missing and Murdered Women: Reproducing Marginality in News Discourse
By Yasmin Jiwani and Mary Lynn Young
Employing a frame analysis, the authors analyze 128 articles from The Vancouver Sun published between 2001 and 2006. They argue that prevailing and historically entrenched stereotypes about women, Aboriginality, and sex-trade work continue to demarcate the boundaries of ‘respectability’ and degeneracy, interlocking in ways that situate these women’s lives, even after death, in the margins.

Lowman, John
“Violence and the Outlaw Status of (Street) Prostitution in Canada.” Violence Against Women. 6.9 (2000): 987 – 1011.
Implicates the Vancouver Sun as a contributor to a “discourse of disposal” in the early 1980s in BC that may have helped create a climate in which sex trade workers could be killed with impunity. No example articles, however. Perhaps useful as a pre-Pickton backdrop (also has statistics about sex trade in Vancouver, overview of responses to disappearance of women).

Harding, Robert
“Historical Representations of Aboriginal People in the Canadian News Media.” Discourse and Society. 17.2 (2006): 205 – 235.
Critical Discourse and Frame analysis of newspaper coverage of “flashpoints in the history of aboriginal-non-aboriginal relations in Canada”. Identifies three frames, and consistencies between coverage in 1860s and 1990s, which may help when considering how the aboriginality of some of Pickton’s victims is being figured in press coverage.

Two articles that provide analysis of press coverage and readers, providing very specific ideas about possible interventions.

Anastasio, Phyllis A. and Diana M. Costa
“Twice Hurt: How Newspaper Coverage May Reduce Empathy and Engender Blame for Female Victims of Crime.” Sex Roles. 51.9-10 (2004): 535 – 542.
Content Analysis to determine if victims of violent crime (not including sex crime) are identified differently vis-à-vis their gender. Also studied readers and found that the inclusion of personal info helped increase empathy for victims among male readers. Such info also reduced victim blame among both male and female readers. Therefore provides evidence for one specific feature to which one can attend when doing an intervention.

Henley, Nancy M. et al
“Syntax, Semantics, and Sexual Violence: Agency and the Passive Voice.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology. 14.1 (1995): 60 – 84.
Three studies were conducted to explore the effects of passive voice in news stories about violence against women. Found that the passive voice was more commonly used in reporting of men’s violence against women, and that male readers of stories in the active voice tended to attribute more harm and less victim blame to victims/survivors of violence. Also found that readers of both sexes exposed to stories in the passive voice were more accepting of, for example, rape myths (that women provoked their attack). Therefore provides another specific aspect of story-construction to which one can attend.

A few articles that consider interconnections of race, class, and gender in relation with violence against women:

Meyers, Marian
“African American Women and Violence: Gender, Race and Class in the News.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication. 21.2 (2004): 95 – 118.
Discourse analysis of local TV coverage of an annual weekend of partying in Atlanta that tended to result in increased incidents of violence against local, African American women. Found that the press mitigated the seriousness of the crimes, and hardly paid attention to them at all. As such, the attackers’ responsibility was undermined, while factors such as the women’s dress were highlighted, increasing victim blame.

Wilcox, Paula
“Beauty and the Beast: Gendered and Raced Discourse in the News.” Social and Legal Studies. 14.4 (2005): 515 – 532.
Also emphasizes the importance of considering intersections of gender and race, and to a lesser degree, class, in a way that will be useful to consider when analyzing Pickton coverage. Does a discourse analysis of the murder of two young black women in Birmingham, noting the need to emphasize their innocence. Argues that this is borne of assumptions of women’s, especially women of visible minorities’, guilt.

Cossins, Anne
“Saints, Sluts and Sexual Assault: Rethinking the Relationship Between Sex, Race and Gender.” Social and Legal Studies. 12.1 (2003): 77 – 103.
Not about media representations, but nonetheless interesting in its analysis of how laws discriminate not only by sex/gender, but by race as well. Provides a lengthy theoretical analysis of a large case study of sexual assault trials in Australia as she attempts to think through the different experiences of Aboriginal women complainants. Therefore provides an interesting addition to issues of media representations of violence against women.

Articles that help round out evidence of the press’s tendency to report on violence against women in manners that decrease its seriousness, increase victim blame, and otherwise perpetuate myths of femininity:

Carll, Elizabeth K.
“News Portrayals of Violence and Women: Implications for Public Policy.” American Behavioral Scientist. 46.12 (2003): 1601 – 1610.
A relatively brief and broad article that discusses more generally how news portrays women as both victims and perpetrators of violence. Suggests that such coverage in the U.S. and elsewhere only serves to help one avoid considering the reasons for such violence and suggests that more thoughtful press attention could help address these issues.

Korn, Alina and Sivan Efrat
“The Coverage of Rape in the Israeli Popular Press.” Violence Against Women. 10.9 (2004): 1056 – 1074.
Examines two rape cases in the daily Israeli popular press. Finds that in both cases the sexual history of the women was emphasized, perpetuating myths about women’s inability to be raped if they have ever had consensual sex. Notes the tendency to air the defendants’ sides far more than the victims, and suggest that the lurid details were used to help sell newspapers.

Howe, Adrian
“The War Against Women: Media Representations of Men’s Violence Against Women in Australia.” Violence Against Women. 3.1 (1997): 59 – 75
Examines the Melbourne-published paper, The Age’s 1993 series about violence against women. Relatively brief in its analysis of how the coverage emphasized such violence as aberrant, something in which women can acquiesce, and undermined feminist analyses to the contrary.

Michelle, Carolyn and C. Kay Weaver
“Discursive Manoeuvres and Hegemonic
Recuperations in New Zealand Documentary Representations of Domestic Violence.” Feminist Media Studies. 3.3 (2003): 283 – 299.
Examination of documentaries made in connection with a NZ campaign to raise public awareness of domestic violence. However, notes numerous ways in which these documentaries mitigated men’s responsibility while increasing that of women, and also tended to skirt issues of the social roots of men’s violence against women.

Barnett, Barbara
“Perfect Mother or Artist of Obscenity? Narrative and Myth in a Qualitative Analysis of Press Coverage of the Andrea Yates Murders.” Journal of Communication Inquiry. 29.1 (2005): 9 – 29.
Narrative analysis of press coverage of Yates’s drowning of her five children. Identifies two main narrative and sub-themes, arguing throughout that the coverage reinforced myths about women’s natural predisposition to care taking. Also suggests that issues of post-partum depression were largely avoided. Therefore provides an interesting counter-point to articles in which women are victims, as Barnett still finds a persistent reinforcement of ideas about women’s proper roles and behavior.

General Feminist Media Resources in Canada

Mahtani, Minelle. 2005. “Gendered News Practices: The Experiences of Women Journalists in Different National Contexts” in Allan, Stuart (ed). Journalism: Critical Issues. London: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill publishers. Pp. 299-310.

Mahtani, Minelle. 2001. “Mapping the Meanings of “Racism” and “Feminism” among Women Television Broadcast Journalists in Canada” in Twine, France Winddance and Kathleen Blee (eds). Feminism and Anti-Racism: International Struggles. New York: New York University Press. Pp. 349-366.

The Missing Women trial in Vancouver involves the key issues of second and third wave feminism: sexual abuse, violence against women, sexuality and the roles that race, class and gender play in power relations. Why then is the media coverage of the case still so reflective of dominant cultural stereotypes of women, violence, sex and race?

I decided to find out. I interviewed three women journalists, self-identified as feminists who are covering the case against Robert Pickton, who is on trial for the homicides of six women, and awaiting trial for the murders of another 19 women. All of the women went missing over of 30-year period from downtown Vancouver. Most of them were poor, racial minorities, and had been sexually abused as children or young women. Many of them had been engaged in sex work that left them vulnerable to violence. Almost all of them had limited access to social systems that most women and Vancouver residents take for granted.

All of the women journalists I interviewed, who represent three of the key print media outlets in Canada covering the trial – the Vancouver Sun, The Globe and Mail and the Canadian Press wire service – self identified as feminists. The good news is that they also said they were explicitly trying to assert feminist values in their coverage of the case.

The issues seem to cloud when they try to articulate these values through a mainstream media lens. They see their power residing primarily in practical journalistic decision-making such as language choices. The result is feminism light - news content without the conceptual tools or framework to help readers see and understand the structural challenges the Missing Women faced, the role of feminism historically and the continued struggle of many women in Vancouver today.

Women in a Man’s World?

Each journalist saw her gender as influencing her reporting of the story. “Women are natural storytellers,” says Stephanie Levitz, a reporter covering the trial for Canadian Press (CP), who believes that her gender lets her do contextual stories easier than men. “They have always been transmitters of history and culture to the next generation and that’s what makes women good journalists.”

She adds, “women can connect to the community in ways that a male journalist can’t.”

Lori Culbert, who has been covering the case for the Vancouver Sun, the largest metropolitan daily newspaper in Western Canada, for several years, agrees. Similar to Levitz, she sees her gender as an aid to understanding where the Missing Women came from and how they got to the Downtown Eastside.

“I’m not suggesting that men can’t do this, but as someone who has a great respect for women I feel it’s essential to report on the women living in the Downtown Eastside with respect and try to highlight the circumstances that lead these women there,” Culbert says.

Jane Armstrong, a reporter for The Globe and Mail, one of two national newspapers in Canada, also sees her gender as informing her journalism. While she acknowledges there has been great coverage done by men, she credits feminism as sparking her interest in many of the contextual issues of the story, such as women’s addictions.

Fact or Fiction? Gender and journalistic norms

While all agree gender influences their reporting on the missing women, the reporters remained committed to traditional journalistic responsibilities such as objectivity, accuracy, and facts.

“As a journalist, I believe that you shouldn’t proclaim your ideology from the rooftop,”
Levitz says. “I don’t want someone to think they can’t speak with me because I’m a feminist.”

Culbert agrees. “Because I’m a reporter I try to keep my own opinions and background out of my writing. That said, I do have a strong belief that, in this case, the victims are very important and I try to make that a strong message in my writing.”

Armstrong also discusses her obligation to accurate reporting, even if this approach has earned her some criticism.

“Families have gotten mad because I wrote the women were ‘drug addicted prostitutes’” Armstrong says. “You can’t sugar coat it either, you can’t say that they weren’t drug addicted prostitutes, because they were.”

Armstrong’s loyalty to a strict, traditional newsroom definition of the ‘facts’ reveals the power that masculinist newsroom culture has over journalists, even those who identify as feminist. While this disconnect between feminist values and news norms was hinted at by a couple of the women, none of the journalists directly challenged traditional new norms as a model that may influence ‘getting at’ the story of Vancouver’s Missing Women. Indeed, their analysis of their own feminist strategies remained within the norms of traditional news reporting.

The power of language?

All of the reporters felt that language was an area where they could exercise their feminism. Each reporter revealed a different strategy for describing the missing women, and all had considered their choices carefully.

In contrast to Armstrong’s literal interpretation of ‘facts’, Culbert chooses to avoid ‘prostitute’ unless the term is in a quote. When police officers in an interrogation tape played for the courtroom called the missing women “girls,” Culbert said she consciously chose to paraphrase the quotes, avoiding using the word “girls.” If she had to quote directly, Culbert put the word in quotations to denote that it had been said by someone else. “I try not to even use the words sex trade workers or drug addicted. They’re [the women] not on trial here,” explains Culbert.

Levitz concedes that both ‘prostitute’ and ‘sex trade worker’ are loaded terms, but she prefers ‘prostitute.’

“To me, sex trade worker implies choice – but these women weren’t working or making a choice, they were surviving.” Levitz says that in making her language choices she continually asked herself how to present the women fairly and remain true to who they were as people.

“I would never use the word ‘hooker’ but unfortunately, that word sometimes has the right amount of characters for a headline,” she says.

Women like ‘us’… or not? Framing decisions and context

Along with language, all three reporters talked about public identification with the story. This concern follows a traditional journalistic belief that the public must be able to identify and relate to the people in the story in order for the story to have significance. Thus, making the story have ‘relevance’ was a major goal for each journalist.

“One of the biggest challenges for everyone is to try and make this story have resonance with the mainstream population, and I don’t know if it ever will,” says Armstrong. “Not many people can identify with this kind of life.”

Levitz sees it differently. She is adamant that murders of this nature could happen to any woman, viewing the problem as structural rather than issues based solely in the Downtown Eastside.

“Would this have happened if these women weren’t on the streets? Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy weren’t prostitutes and look what happened to them,” Levitz reasons.

Levitz connects the story with violence against women and consequently sees her role as a woman journalist as uncovering these social issues and making connections to the broader society.

“A woman [journalist’s] role goes beyond covering the day-to-day trial proceedings,” Levitz says. “There are other issues that are more important than sitting in a courtroom listening to DNA results on socks.”

In this sense, Levitz strays from the more masculine ‘just-the-facts’ reporting, adopting a more contextually driven storytelling style that attempts to make the story about everyone, rather than just about the Downtown Eastside.

But keeping contextual issues alive becomes difficult as the trial is continually pumping out more crime facts that must be reported.

“How do you keep the victims front and centre throughout the trial?,” Culbert asks. Her strategy has been to keep the memories of the women at the forefront by including the names and pictures of the women and their relatives in her work whenever she can.

This type of ‘humanistic coverage’ - depicting the women as mothers, daughters, and sisters - increased in the weeks leading up to the start of the trial.

But while ‘humanistic’ coverage is useful in reframing the mainstream narratives, it often individualizes the women’s problems, positioning them as objects of pity. “I try to stay away from framing the story like these women need to be rescued. They were in the DTES as a result of choices – not necessarily their own individual choices - but choices we’ve all made [as a society]” Levitz says, countering the individualist framework many stories about the women have employed.

“As journalists, we spend too much time focusing on the DTES and not on how these women got there. Where were we 26 years ago when these women were children?”

So with feminists in our major newsrooms why aren’t we seeing more feminist-oriented coverage of the Pickton trial? The first thing we might consider is whether we need a new model of feminist journalism.

Two Vancouver women-centered service groups supporting sex trade workers aim to control the impact of the media frenzy during the Pickton trial in January 2007 by compiling a press package to protect women from journalists.

WISH and PACE, sex trade worker groups in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, plan to release a video of clips from the extended family of some of the women that Robert Pickton is accused of murdering, before his trial begins on Jan. 8.

“We know the media is going to be involved in this and it’s important to raise awareness about violence against sex workers, but at the same time they need to try to be respectful and engage in a way that is not harmful,” said Sue Davis, media liaison at PACE.

The press package will assist local and international media to access the information they seek, while mitigating potential psychological harm to sex workers.

“The media takes the path of least resistance, so if you give them what they want right away, they don’t have to chase and hound women working on the streets,” Davis said. “We can at least minimize the amount of times that happens by providing stock footage where you can’t see the girls’ faces.”

The point of the videos is to allow members of the sex trade community to express their experiences in a safe, private environment, where they can speak in anonymity and film several takes if they choose, said Kate Gibson, executive director at WISH.

“It’s not up to a member of the press to out them. Sex trade workers are entitled to just as much privacy as the rest of us,” she added.

The press package will include fact sheets, answer the most commonly asked questions about the sex trade and list easily-accessible contacts for the media, in an attempt to use the influx of media coverage to raise awareness on issues concerning sex workers.

The groups want sex workers’ voices to be heard, but are trying to prevent re-victimization of the women by reporters who do not understand the issue, said Davis, “a real live hooker,” who has been dealing with most of the media herself.

“The Canadian press corps is desperate for background information on the victims,” she said. “But they ask me really invasive questions like ‘When was the last time you were assaulted?’ and ‘Who is your pimp?’ While these questions are relevant, women that have to go back on the streets do not feel safe answering them.”

The groups are also educating sex trade workers about their rights when dealing with the media.

“Our intention is not to curb women from speaking with the media but to make sure their interests are protected,” Gibson said. “We’re gathering the women to talk with them so they have some power and understand they don’t need to be hounded or filmed.”

In the past, police escorts have accompanied camera crews seeking quotes from sex workers, intimidating women into answering invasive questions or being filmed, said Gibson.

Despite the sometimes-tenuous relationship between the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) and sex workers, the police have been very helpful in providing media training for WISH and PACE, Davis and Gibson said.

“The VPD was really supportive and didn’t try to influence our message whatsoever, they are just interested in having us ready – to think about what’s coming,” Davis said.

In August, the VPD organized a free workshop on media training for organizations supporting sex workers, but have no further involvement with the video, said VPD spokesperson Const. Howard Chow.

“We were concerned that when the Pickton trial hits the press, the sex workers are going to be inundated by the media, so we are trying to tell them some things they might expect from the media and offer suggestions on how to deal with it.”

Although Chow said that the VPD is committed to working with sex workers on a continual basis, Sue Davis believes that the media training provided by the VPD is an olive branch to the sex trade community after years of neglecting it.

“Everyone in the sex worker community knew who Pickton was. There was no question among workers. If the police had taken our reports and prosecuted people, he would never have gotten away with it for so long,” Davis said. “Their complacency, that I witnessed first hand, contributed to it. I think in retrospect they see the harm their negligence has caused, so they’re trying to help us now.”

Davis believes that the widespread neglect of violence against sex trade workers will finally be made visible during the Pickton trial. She hopes that media coverage of the trial will make people realize that sex workers are part of the community.

“Hopefully people will see that these women did have dreams and parents with dreams for their children and, in some cases, children who miss their moms.”

News Release: School of Journalism, University of British Columbia

The first poll on public interest in the murder trial of Robert Pickton has found that slightly more than half of British Columbians (52%) are interested in media coverage of the case, with slightly less that half (46%) not interested. Vancouver residents are also significantly less interested in the trial than those who live outside of the Lower Mainland. Only 1 per cent are not aware of the trial.

Despite the split results on interest in the upcoming trial, the majority (53%) found the amount of media coverage to date “just right,” with one-fifth (21%) saying it is “too much” already. British Columbians also feel that the media have behaved responsibly to date, with 75 per cent agreeing with that statement.

The poll, which was conducted by Mustel Group for the Feminist Media Project at the UBC School of Journalism, gauged public interest in the trial, which starts on Jan. 22 and is expected to garner international media attention while leading the mainstream news agenda in British Columbia.

This poll, and one completed previously by the CBC involving the trial of Paul Bernardo for the sexual murders of two young women in the mid-1990s Toronto, found similar results suggesting that a significant proportion of the public were not interested in media coverage of that trial. That study of 1,000 respondents found that 46 per cent agreed that media were paying too much attention to the trial; 36 per cent disagreed. Also, more than half, 52 per cent, said the coverage was so upsetting, they would prefer not to be exposed to it. Only 33 per cent disagreed.

These results conflict with the perception that sensational crime stories, such as serial murder, sexual homicides and/or homicides involving children, drive audience interest. These types of crimes tend to gain large amounts of media coverage in North America - with crime and violent content filling between 20 and 25 per cent of the news section in newspapers and on television. This is despite the fact that no systematic evidence exists that audience members consistently prioritize crime content over other types of news information, such as environment and health news. In fact, at times, it may be the reverse.

With respect to the reporting of salacious and disturbing details from the trial, which involves the murders of six women, whose bodies were found in various states of dismemberment/degradation on a farm in the Lower Mainland, the clear message was that the public felt less was more. Fifty-six per cent said the media should “restrict violent and sexually explicit details,” while just over one third (37%) said the public should know as much detail as possible.

Finally, women were significantly more likely (63%) to want less detail and restrictions on violent and sexually explicit content than men (49%).

These results were based on a survey of 806 B.C. adults between January 3 and January 10. The margin of error is 3.4% at 95% confidence level in the most conservative case.

Media Contacts:

Dr. Mary Lynn Young, Assistant Professor
UBC School of Journalism
604.822.9778
mlyoung@interchange.ubc.ca

Evi Mustel, CMRP
Principal
Mustel Group
604.742.2240
emustel@mustelgroup.com
www.mustelgroup.com

John Lowman’s 2000 article “Violence and the Outlaw Status of (Street) Prostitution in Canada” provides an interesting, if brief and largely quantitative overview of newspaper stories about prostitution in the Vancouver Sun. This overview forms part of a larger project concerned with the increase during the 1980s in the murder of (predominantly street-based) women working in the city’s sex trade. Lowman’s article is therefore useful in providing a backdrop of patterns of coverage against which one can situate coverage of the Pickton case, although he does not provide an in-depth, discursive analysis of even one example article. However, he does make interesting connections between the media discourse, homicide statistics, and activities of both the police and citizens’ groups.

Lowman first reviews statistics of murders of sex trade workers in British Columbia from 1964 – 1998, and describes the various “strolls” in Vancouver. He also discusses battles of both neighborhood residents to have street-based prostitution moved out of their areas, and of others (such as family members) to have the disappearance of many women involved in the trade investigated.

It is in attempting to account for the increase in murders in the 1980s that Lowman suggests looking at the local news coverage of the sex trade, specifically in the Vancouver Sun from 1983 – 1998. Lowman suggests that the majority of articles in the early 1980s contributed to a “discourse of disposal” in the public arena that may have facilitated the rise in homicide by creating the impression that prostitutes are unwanted – and thus easy targets (1003). That is, coverage focused on the nuisance caused by street prostitution and the efforts to “get rid” of the trade. Lowman finds an increase in reporting of violence against sex workers only after the 1985 law against communicating (for the purposes of prostitution) was enacted, and some off-street venues were shut down, which pushed more sex trade workers into the streets (and thus rendered them more vulnerable to crime). However, he asserts that news articles were never “crime wave” style, instead treating incidents as individual occurrences. Lowman thus offers a general, “pre-Pickton” sense of reporting about the sex trade in Vancouver.

Whereas Lowman pays scant attention to issues of race, Robert Harding’s 2006 article “Historical Representations of Aboriginal People in the Canadian News Media” points out some frames that have been used historically and more contemporarily in newspaper stories about aboriginal-non-aboriginal relations. While Harding does not consider issues of gender, much less of sex trade workers specifically, the frames that he discusses may be relevant if the aboriginal heritage of some of Pickton’s victims is persistently being mentioned.

Harding considers two incidents in the mid-19th century and two in the mid-1990s that generated press attention to aboriginal-non-aboriginal relations in British Columbia. Using critical discourse analysis alongside frame analysis, Harding identifies two common frames in press coverage in the 1860s. The first follows the news’ tendency to dichotomize groups into ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, as stories were often framed with the notion that “aboriginal people (are) inherently inferior” (208 emph. orig.). This framework then justified, or even obligated, white settlers’ actions to control ‘Indians’. The second frame that Harding identified was that of the “heroic white man saving primitive aboriginal people”, a frame which included the suggestion that aboriginals’ susceptibility to “corruption” rendered them a particular challenge for the humanitarian efforts of white settlers (210 emph. orig.).

Harding goes on to discuss how the subtler, “sanitized ethnocentrism” replaced biological racism in the 1990s (206). Nonetheless, he argues that traces of the first two frames are discernable in stories in the 1990s that still dichotomized between a presumed white audience (“Us”) and the aboriginals (“Them”) (206, 214). In discussing coverage of the results of a land claim, Harding suggests a third frame: the “triumph of reason over emotion”, whereby overly emotional aboriginals are forced to succumb to the reason of Euro-Canadians’ judgment (217 emph. orig.). He notes that the sole story written by an aboriginal author is also the only one connecting the land claims judgment with Canada’s colonial history, whereas many others raise the specter of violence through references to, for example, the Oka crisis. As Harding suggests, “associating aboriginal people with violence and criminality is an argumentative ploy that has been used historically to discredit aboriginal people and causes in news discourse” (221). Harding thus argues that the press coverage of issues related to aboriginals clears the way for government actions “that “reproduce material and social inequality between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people” (206).

Similarly, the authors discussed below that consider the news media’s reporting of crime usually at least gesture to the interactions between news and the broader social context, while some also attempt to measure effects of reporting conventions on audiences. The results of some studies that have attempted to identify common features in reporting of violence against women and how these features impact readers may be of particular interest in making the argument against common means of reporting such violence, and thinking about how one might make changes.

For example, Phyllis A. Anastasio and Diana M. Costa’s 2004 article “Twice Hurt: How Newspaper Coverage May Reduce Empathy and Engender Blame for Female Victims of Crime” provides interesting evidence, if only from a small study, of how the portrayal of crime victims can influence empathy for them, particularly with regard to gender. After noting literature that asserts that news coverage of crime often increases victim blame, particularly when victims are female, the authors analyzed 148 articles about violent crime during a seven-week period in 2000, from three national, American newspapers, about violent crime. Sex crimes were excluded, as the authors were particularly interested to see how victims were identified. They found that %21 of stories with male victims included personal information (name, background info, etc) about the victim, in contrast with only %14 of stories about female victims. Moreover, a small audience analysis using eight versions of a crime story read by Undergraduates found that the presence of personal information did increase empathy for the victim when the victim was female. Personal information did not change empathy for male victims. For both genders, however, the inclusion of personal information decreased victim blame. The authors therefore suggest that the lack of personal information could decrease the apparent importance of the crime and threaten to normalize, for example, violence against women. Attention to such issues of personal information may therefore be of particular use when conceiving an intervention into coverage of the Pickton case.

Nancy M Henley et al’s 1995 “Syntax, Semantics, and Sexual Violence: Agency and the Passive Voice” provides a somewhat more in-depth consideration of another specific feature of crime news stories: the verb voice used in describing the crime. From a psychology of language standpoint, the authors seek to consider how active vs. passive voice affect readers of crime stories in terms of, for example, victim blame. The authors therefore first outline how the literature concerning the effects of verb voice supports “the common assertion that the passive voice directs emphasis or salience toward the object rather than the subject of a sentence” (62). Henley et al. then review “discourse studies” with regard to how apparent agency depends on verb voice – i.e., how the passive voice and “agent deletion” (in truncated passive voice) render it easier to attribute welfare dependency to personal characteristics of African Britons as opposed to systemic racism. The authors then conducted a content analysis in the Boston Globe to explore the frequency of passive voice use in reporting violence against women, particularly with regard to rape. They found that the passive voice was more frequent for describing “male sexual and nonsexual violence, whereas the active voice predominated for positive and neutral acts” (69). And, although they also found that passive voice was used even more for nonsexual than sexual violence, they argue that the “frequency of passive voice and truncated passive usage in writing about rape is great enough for concern if it is true that these forms tend to minimize the perception of agency in the mind of the reader” (71).

The second study saw the authors ask Undergraduates to rate the positive/negative valence of various verbs (for ex; rescue, rape, thank, murder for ex). The authors did find that the more negatively the students rated a verb, the more frequently the verb had appeared in the passive voice in their first study.
Finally, Henley et al conducted another audience study to see how verb voice in cases of violence against women impact assessments of harm to victims/survivors, victim blame, and whether readers exposed to stories in the passive voice would “be more accepting of rape myths, interpersonal violence, and battering, and have more negative attitudes toward rape victims” (73). Overall, their hypotheses that active verb voice would increase attributed harm, and perpetrator responsibility when reporting sexual violence was found to be true. However, this effect of verb voice was contingent on the gender of the reader, affecting male readers only. On the other hand, all readers of stories in the passive voice demonstrated on a survey afterwards a greater acceptance of battering of women and rape myths (such as the woman provoked the attack). The authors therefore suggest that becoming more conscious of verb voice could help writers who seek to avoid perpetuating such myths when reporting on violence against women - another specific suggestion that may be of use for the intervention with regard to the Pickton case.

Marian Meyers’ 2004 article, “African American Women and Violence: Gender, Race and Class in the News” and Paula Wilcox’s 2005 article, “Beauty and the Beast: Gendered and Raced Discourse in the News”, also examine issues of representations of violence against women. While both authors have concerns that are somewhat comparable to those of Henley et al, Meyers and Wilcox are more explicitly interested in considering the complicated intersections of gender, race and class in representations of violence against women. As such, I think that both the literature reviews in these articles and specific findings of their case studies may be of interest when considering the Pickton case.

Meyers provides a discourse analysis of Atlanta’s local TV news coverage of violence experienced by African American women during Freaknik. From 1982 until 2000, Freaknik grew from a small event for students in Atlanta to a huge annual weekend of partying every spring. Meyers notes that, even allowing for a tendency for sexual assault to go unreported, by the mid-1990s rape crisis centres were experiencing a dramatic rise in visits from African American women during the Freaknik period. She argues, however, that the “convergence of gender, race, and class oppressions” meant that this violence was minimized in the press, and the victims were stereotyped as either Jezebels or naifs. She notes in her literature review, for example, that Black women tend to be stereotyped as Jezebels, welfare cheats, matriarchs, etc. These stereotypes then combine with views of “Africanist sexuality”, and the press’s tendency to blame women for violence against them, to create a public discourse in which people are not predisposed to take violence against black women seriously.

Interestingly, Meyers found that despite the above-mentioned increase in violence against women during Freaknik, this issue was only reported by the TV news if cameras happened to be there during an incident or shortly afterwards. Women who complained of having been groped by random men were framed by shots of short skirts, for example, suggesting that the women’s clothing somehow provoked or justified the harassment. Another attempted rape was described as a “tense moment”, minimizing the seriousness of the attack. Meyers thus suggests that by “blaming the victim” the news both warns women against “the dangers of transgression while reaffirming middle class values and behaviors as the antidote for the male violence against women” (113). The latter part of this equation is borne of Myers’s observation that the press emphasized that most acts of violence were perpetrated by local young men (inner-city, lower-class, African American), who were contrasted with the students (middle-to-upper-class, predominantly white) that just wanted to have a good time.

Wilcox is similar to Myers in her interest in examining gender, race, and, to a lesser extent, class. However, Wilcox also introduces the idea of “the moral framework of the myth” as a means of considering the normalization of “gendered and raced discourse” (516). That is, Wilcox focuses on considering how ideas of innocence and guilt are connected to the social constructions of gender, race and class as she examines newspaper coverage of a drive-by shooting of two young women in Birmingham, England.
Wilcox first provides a useful overview of newspaper representations of violent crime, noting the tendency for a focus on “interpersonal violence in public space, focusing most often on victims rather than perpetrators” (516). A main point of Wilcox’s subsequent analysis is the press’s insistence on the girls’ innocence, noting the numerous quotes from locals and authorities insisting that they were innocent bystanders. In contrast, Wilcox suggests, male victims are most often simply described as victims. Wilcox suggests that this emphasis is required to move the young, black women away from the image of the black woman as “always-already guilty” into a space more akin to the implied “benchmark” female (white, middle-class, sexually innocent, etc.). Wilcox also argues that the guilt was spread to the entire black community, as black men are similarly positioned as always-already guilty. She notes, for example, the repeated assertions that the men came from a “notorious” (lower-class) neighborhood, thus implicating the entire community (one dominated by ethnic minorities). Wilcox also suggests that the press focused on the exceptionality of this crime, avoiding a consideration of systemic discrimination experience by black men, echoing Harding’s comments about the press’s reticence to address historical and contemporary contributors to Aboriginal communities’ social problems.

Finally, a citation Wilcox includes from Carol Smart may be of interest: “In legal discourse, for example, ‘the prostitute is constructed as the bad woman, but at the same time she epitomizes Woman in contradistinction to Man because she is what any woman could be and because she represents a deviousness and licentiousness arising from her (supposedly naturally given) bodily form, while the man remains innocuous’” (Smart in Wilcox 528). The implication is that the most innocent women are sexually innocent. Associated is the idea that men are guilty only to the extent that the woman is innocent, an issue which may be of relevance when considering the Pickton case, even if Pickton is being demonized.

Because of the number of aboriginal women victims in the Pickton case, and the likelihood that their aboriginality will figure at least in some manner in coverage of the trial, it is useful to briefly consider another article from which Wilcox drew when discussing the construction of innocence and guilt in relation to race, gender, and class. Anne Cossins’s 2003 article “Saints, Sluts and Sexual Assault: Rethinking the Relationship Between Sex, Race and Gender” is an exploration of various means through which to think about the experiences in the legal system of Australian aboriginal women who have made sexual assault complaints.

Cossins’s interest is to consider how “legal cultures create different categories of Woman according to race, ethnicity, religion, age, class”, and how these legal cultures are experienced by aboriginal women in sexual assault cases (78). Before delving into these theoretical concerns, Cosssins outlines a large study conducted on sexual assault trials in Australia. She notes that when taking into account their proportion of the population, aboriginal women were ten times more likely to be a complainant. Moreover, aboriginal women were subjected to far more questions concerning their drinking habits and experiences of casual sex, and had a lower conviction rate when men plead not guilty than did Euro-Australians.

Without rehearsing the many theoretical nuances and debates through which Cossins takes readers, some points are particularly interesting. As she reviews sex/gender debates, for example, Cossins ultimately suggests that the case under consideration indicates that aboriginal women were distinguished not only by their sex. That is, Cossins insists that laws create more than one sexed body, as they are also raced: “(t)his means that the discrimination experienced by white women can never be the same as that experienced by black and indigenous women – as between women, the normal female body is the white body while the black or indigenous body is constructed in ways that evoke abnormality” (92). Another point that Cossins makes that dovetails with some of the work discussed above is her suggestion that the rape complainant is “the ‘criminal body’ of the sexual assault trial” because the sexed female body carries meanings of “dishonesty, deceit, revenge, fantasy and unreliability” (95, 93). However, Cossins suggests we need to further consider how some women are made more unreliable than others through constructions of their race. Cossins’s article may therefore be interesting as an extension of the work that focuses on how such discourses about women are reinforced in press coverage of violence against them.

In addition to the work of these authors cited above, several others have done work that further bolsters the argument that news media report on violence against women in manners that decrease the seriousness of assaults. An overview of some examples will therefore provide further examples of features of such reporting to watch for, and to avoid.

Elizabeth K. Carll’s 2003 article, “News Portrayal of Violence and Women: Implications for Public Policy” provides a general overview of trends in media reporting on violence against women. Carll suggests that despite the statistical frequency of violence against women in the U.S., media coverage tends to provide merely a “mirage of individual pathology”, preventing one from considering the “social roots” of such violence (1603). Carll also notes the disproportionate amount of coverage that female perpetrators of domestic violence receive, given the more systemic occurrence of domestic violence against women. Carll touches on parallels with other countries’ media coverage of violence against women, further helping one to argue about the pervasiveness of such patterns. Carll is a firm believer in the power of the press, suggesting that if such coverage were undertaken in a different manner, it could help garner support for legislative change. In fact, she suggests that attention to acquaintance rape has helped put this issue on the agenda of policy-makers.

Alina Korn and Sivan Efrat published an Israeli case study in 2004; “The Coverage of Rape in the Israeli Popular Press”. In their examination of two rape cases that each received a great deal of attention in the Israeli popular press, the authors found that the sexual history of the complainants – who were both minors – was persistently emphasized. Indeed, Korn and Efrat echo Anastasio and Costa, and Henley et al when discussing the tendency for the press to increase victim-blame, and reinforce myths about women and rape – particularly, in this case, the apparent inability for women to be raped if they have ever had consensual sex. In their analysis, Korn and Efrat pay particular attention to the sides of the stories that are aired in the newspapers, noting in both cases the defendants’ sides were given far more attention, and therefore far more legitimacy. The authors also suggest that sex crime stories may be used to help sell papers, as the most titillating aspects of the cases were given ample attention. In addition to bolstering claims made in other articles, Korn and Efrat’s work might also be useful for this suggestion concerning the newsworthiness of crime involving sex, even if the Pickton case is focused on homicide, not rape. At the very least, Korn and Efrat have a fairly large literature review which may be of interest.

Adrian Howe’s 1997 piece, “The War Against Women: Media Representations of Men’s Violence Against Women in Australia”, is a response to The Age’s 1993 series called ‘The War Against Women’. In contrast with most other studies under consideration, Howe includes lengthy clips from various articles that appeared during the 3-week period of the series. Many of Howe’s findings are similar to those patterns discussed above in terms of the tendency to “reinscribe hegemonic narratives of gender relations” when attempting to explain violence against women (73). Howe also points out how the voices of feminists were undermined throughout the series, in favour of treating violence against women as aberrant, unusual occurrences and thereby minimizing men’s responsibility for their behaviour. As such, Howe views this series as yet another affirmation that women somehow acquiesce in violence against them, and that domestic violence ultimately “is a war that cannot be won” (73).

Carolyn Michelle and C. Kay Weaver’s analysis in their 2003 article “Discursive Maneuvers and Hegemonic Recuperations in New Zealand Documentary Representations of Domestic Violence” also has findings similar to media analyses already discussed. Indeed, six years after Howe published his article, the authors suggest that the literature still indicates a tendency for the press to focus on domestic violence as the aberrant behaviour of a few men. The authors also note the observation that women are blamed through suggestions that if they would only have done something about it, they could have avoided the violence – rather than reporting on any institutional failures or other systemic problems.

These authors’ particular analysis is of three documentaries created as part of a New Zealand police campaign to raise awareness about domestic violence. Drawing on Foucault’s idea of competing regimes of truth, the authors identify five discourses circulating in social science literature that have been used to understand domestic violence. They go on to suggest that each discourse is present in the documentaries, but in a hierarchy whereby feminist analyses of the issues are once again stifled. For instance, the authors point out that the documentaries claimed to be about “family violence”, thus ignoring how most domestic violence is perpetrated by men. The documentaries thus also avoid how feminists have connected this violence with women and men’s respective status in society. The authors found that by focusing on individual stories, and the idea that the violence was learned by the men, these productions further mitigated attention to such social issues. Finally, the authors argue that the documentaries’ focus on the hope of reconciliation resulted in reemphasizing the necessity, or desirability of women taking partial responsibility for changing patterns of behavior.

In addition to these articles’ suggestion of numerous contexts and ways in which violence against women is problematically represented in the press, an article by Barbara Barnett from 2005 expands on Carll’s brief point about the disproportionate amount of coverage that female perpetrators of violence receive. “Perfect Mother or Artist of Obscenity? Narrative and Myth in a Qualitative Analysis of Press Coverage of the Andrea Yates Murders” provides an interesting counter-point to the articles discussed, as Barnett outlines how the press coverage of this case also tended to reinforce ideas about femininity and maternity. (Andrea Yates drowned her five children in 2001).

Barnett first outlines the denial of any “maternal ambivalence” in society; that is, the pervasiveness of ideas about the natural disposition of women to nurture and care for children (and men). Barnett then focuses on considering how the narratives common among press coverage in both the local, Houston paper and the national Newsweek during the year of the trial tended to reinforce such myth. Barnett suggests that two narratives prevailed, that of the traitor, and that of the quest. In narratives about the traitor, Barnett argues, Yates figures predominantly as a Judas figure, betraying not only her own family but her sex. Barnett did find sub-themes in this narrative, such as her husband being figured as a traitor for his inability to prevent his wife’s actions, and the medial community betraying Yates through inadequate care. However, stories frequently suggested that Yates’s own mind betrayed her, a theme that Barnett argues largely reinforced myths about the good mother, instead of seriously considering post-partum depression. In discussing the aspects of the Quest narrative, Barnett focuses on the search for legal remedy and punishment for Yates’s crimes. Even here, Barnett suggests that maternal myths were employed once more as issues of post-partum depression were often ignored or minimized, in favor of focusing on the idea that women are simply meant to be natural caretakers.

Taken together, these articles suggest that coverage of the Pickton case may mitigate Pickton’s responsibility for his actions (and ignore the involvement of any others) by focusing on aspects of his mental health, or by ignoring the particular combination of socioeconomic and political factors that helped lead to or rendered easier these crimes. Questions about why sex trade workers are particularly vulnerable to such violence may also fall by the wayside, or serve only to reinscribe ideas about women’s appropriate behaviour and roles. Indeed, if sex trade workers, particular those of visible minorities are always-already guilty in many social discourses, and the systemic nature of violence against any women tends to be consistently mitigated in the press, it is all too easy to imagine how the Pickton case will provide ample opportunity for the reinforcement of myths about gender, race and class difference and the appropriate responses to the issues the case raises.

Works Cited

Anastasio, Phyllis A. and Diana M. Costa. “Twice Hurt: How Newspaper Coverage May Reduce Empathy and Engender Blame for Female Victims of Crime.” Sex Roles. 51.9/10 (2004): 535 – 542.

Barnett, Barbara. “Perfect Mother or Artist of Obscenity? Narrative and Myth in a Qualitative Analysis of Press Coverage of the Andrea Yates Murders.” Journal of Communication Inquiry. 29.1 (2005): 9 – 29.

Carll, Elizabeth K. “News Portrayals of Violence and Women: Implications for Public Policy.” American Behavioral Scientist. 46.12 (2003): 1601 – 1610.

Cossins, Anne. “Saints, Sluts and Sexual Assault: Rethinking the Relationship Between Sex, Race and Gender.” Social and Legal Studies. 12.1 (2003): 77 – 103.

Harding, Robert. “Historical Representations of Aboriginal People in the Canadian News Media.” Discourse and Society. 17.2 (2006): 205 – 235.

Henley, Nancy M. et al. “Syntax, Semantics, and Sexual Violence: Agency and the Passive Voice.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology. 14.1 (1995): 60 – 84.

Howe, Adrian. “The War Against Women: Media Representations of Men’s Violence Against Women in Australia.” Violence Against Women. 3.1 (1997): 59 – 75.

Korn, Alina and Sivan Efrat. “The Coverage of Rape in the Israeli Popular Press.” Violence Against Women. 10.9 (2004): 1056 – 1074.

Lowman, John. “Violence and the Outlaw Status of (Street) Prostitution in Canada.” Violence Against Women. 6.9 (2000): 987 – 1011.

Meyers, Marian. “African American Women and Violence: Gender, Race and Class in the News.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication. 21.2 (2004): 95 – 118.

Michelle, Carolyn and C. Kay Weaver. “Discursive Manoeuvres and Hegemonic Recuperations in New Zealand Documentary Representations of Domestic Violence.” Feminist Media Studies. 3.3 (2003): 283 – 299.

Wilcox, Paula. “Beauty and the Beast: Gendered and Raced Discourse in the News.” Social and
Legal Studies. 14.4 (2005): 515 – 532.

About Heather Peters
Heather Peters is a Master’s student in Concordia University’s Communications Department. Her research examines Canadian press representations of women working in the Thai sex tourism industry.