The Routledge Companion to Gender, Media and Violence (Routledge Companions to Gender) 1032061367, 9781032061368

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO GENDER, MEDIA AND VIOLENCE

With heated discussion around #MeToo, journalistic reporting on domestic abuse, and the popularity of true crime documentaries, gendered media discourse around violence and harassment has never been more prominent. The Routledge Companion to Gender, Media and Violence is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this important subject and is the first collection on media and violence to take a gendered, intersectional approach. Comprising over 50 chapters by a team of interdisciplinary and international contributors, the book is structured around the following parts: • • • •

News Representing reality Gender-based violence online Feminist responses

The media examples examined range from Australia to Zimbabwe and span print and online news, documentary film and television, podcasts, pornography, memoir, comedy, memes, influencer videos, and digital feminist protest. Types of violence considered include domestic abuse, “honour”-based violence, sexual violence and harassment, female genital mutilation/cutting, child sexual abuse, transphobic violence, and the aftermath of conflict. Good practice is considered in relation to both responsible news reporting and pedagogy. The Routledge Companion to Gender, Media and Violence is essential reading for students and researchers in Gender Studies, Media Studies, Sociology, and Criminology. Karen Boyle is Professor of Feminist Media Studies at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland. Susan Berridge is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at the University of Stirling, Scotland.

ROUTLEDGE COMPANIONS TO GENDER

Recent titles in series: The Routledge Companion to Beauty Politics Edited By Maxine Leeds Craig The Routledge Companion to Romantic Love Edited By Ann Brooks The Routledge Companion to Gender and Sexuality in Comic Book Studies Edited By Frederick Luis Aldama The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West Edited By Susan Bernardin The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sexuality and Culture Edited By Emma Rees The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories Edited By Janell Hobson The Routledge Companion to Intersectionalities Edited By Jennifer C. Nash, Samantha Pinto The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction Edited By Lisa Yaszek, Sonja Fritzsche, Keren Omry, Wendy Gay Pearson The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect Edited By Todd W. Reeser The Routledge Companion to Gender, Media and Violence Edited by Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/RoutledgeCompanions-to-Gender/book-series/RCGENDER

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO GENDER, MEDIA AND VIOLENCE

Edited by Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

Designed cover image: Getty Images First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. With the exception of Chapter 30, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Chapter 30 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Names: Boyle, Karen, 1972- editor. | Berridge, Susan, editor. Title: The Routledge companion to gender, media and violence / edited by Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Routledge companions to gender | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023011063 (print) | LCCN 2023011064 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032061368 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032061382 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003200871 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Violence in mass media. | Violence‐‐Sex differences. | Sex role in mass media. | Women in mass media. | Women‐‐Violence against. | Feminism and mass media. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC P96.V5 R68 2024 (print) | LCC P96.V5 (ebook) | DDC 302.23‐‐dc23/eng/20230713 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023011063 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023011064 ISBN: 978-1-032-06136-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-06138-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-20087-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871 Typeset in Times New Roman by MPS Limited, Dehradun

CONTENTS

List of figures and tables List of contributors Acknowledgements

xii xiii xxvii

Introduction Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

1

PART 1

News

13

News: Introduction to Part 1 Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

15

1 “Sensational spikes” and “isolated incidents”: Examining the misrepresentation of domestic abuse by the media using the case studies of football and Covid-19 Nancy Lombard

23

2 The media and male victim-survivors of domestic abuse Stephen R. Burrell and Alishya Dhir

34

3 Invisible feelings, anti-Asian violences and abolition feminisms Salonee Bhaman and Rachel Kuo

44

v

Contents

4 Towards a fair justice system in Canada: Women and girls homicide database project Kandice Parker, Melanie A. Morrison, Todd G. Morrison, Senator Lillian Eva Quan Dyck, and Karissa Wall 5 Familicide, gender and “mental illness”: Beyond false dualisms Denise Buiten

55

65

6 Femminicidio in Italian televised news: A case study of La Vita in Diretta Federica Formato

75

7 Cruel benevolence: Vulnerable menaces, menacing vulnerabilities and the white male vigilante trope Kathryn Claire Higgins

84

8 Exploring US news media portrayals of girls’ violence in the 1980s and 1990s: The emergence of a moral panic Tia S. Andersen, Jennifer Silcox, and Deena A. Isom

95

9 Child sexual exploitation and scapegoating minority communities Aisha K. Gill

105

10 Hidden or hypervisible? Mapping the making of a moral panic over female genital mutilation/cutting Emmaleena Käkelä

116

11 Examining the Zimbabwean news media’s framing of men as victims of sexual assault Mthokozisi Phathisani Ndhlovu

127

12 The HIV man, Alexandra man and Hotboy: Swedish news coverage of rape as a folklore of fear Gabriella Nilsson

136

13 Forward and backwards: Sexual violence in Portuguese news media Júlia Garraio, Inês Amaral, Rita Basílio Simões, and Sofia José Santos

145

14 Representations of gender-based violence against children in Nigeria Onyinyechi Nancy Nwaolikpe

155

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Contents

15 Media, courts and “#RiceBunny” testimonies in China Li Jun

163

16 Journalism, sexual violence and social responsibility Einar Thorsen and Chindu Sreedharan

174

PART 2

Representing reality

185

Representing reality: Introduction to Part 2 Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

187

17 The politics of the traumatised voice: Communicative injustice and structural silencing in contemporary media culture Jilly Boyce Kay

194

18 Public survivors: The burdens and possibilities of speaking as a survivor Tanya Serisier

204

19 Telling an authentic, relatable #MeToo story on YouTube Carol Harrington and MacKenzie Gerrard

213

20 Mental images and emotive voices in true crime podcasts focused on female victims Jennifer O’Meara

222

21 Sexual violence and social justice: The celebrity #MeToo documentary in the US Tanya Horeck

232

22 Remediating the “Yorkshire Ripper” event in the era of feminist true crime Hannah Hamad

242

23 Class, victim credibility and the Pygmalion problem in real crime dramas Three Girls and Unbelieveable Helen Wood

251

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Contents

24 Victimhood and violence: Weaponising white femininity in South Africa Nicky Falkof

261

25 Pregnant and disappeared: The Missing White Woman Syndrome in magazines Jennifer Musial

271

26 Discourses and narratives of gender-based violence in Greek women’s magazines Rafaela Orphanides

281

27 Just a fantasy: How the discourse of fantasy attempts to resolve the conflicts of porn consumption Maria Garner and Fiona Vera-Gray

290

28 Patriarchal protectors of the national body: Violence, masculinity and gendered constructions of the US/Mexico border Lucia M. Palmer

300

29 Militarised masculinity and the perpetration of violence in Chilean documentary Lisa DiGiovanni

310

30 Women’s activist filmmaking against gendered violence in Pakistan Rahat Imran

319

PART 3

Gender-based violence online

329

Gender‐based violence online: Introduction to Part 3 Susan Berridge and Karen Boyle 31 Technology-facilitated abuse: Intimate partner violence in digital society Anastasia Powell 32 Tactics of hate: Toxic “creativity” in anti-feminist men’s rights politics Debbie Ging

viii

331

337

348

Contents

33 Bad actors or bad architecture? Rethinking gendered violence online Emma A. Jane

358

34 Networked misogyny on TikTok: A critical conjuncture Sarah Banet-Weiser and Sophie Maddocks

369

35 Naming and framing the harms of cyberflashing: Men sending non-consensual dick pics Clare McGlynn

380

36 The non-consensual dissemination of intimate images on Telegram: The Italian case Silvia Semenzin and Lucia Bainotti

391

37 Online child sexual exploitation in the news: Competing claims of gendered and sexual harm Michael Salter

401

38 Responding to transphobic violence online Ben Colliver

412

39 Homophobic humour in rape memes Maja Brandt Andreasen

423

40 Online discourses of violence against men: Portrayals of neglect, discrimination and equality gone too far Satu Venäläinen

432

41 The curious case of Karen Carney: The argument for equity over equality in curbing the online abuse of women in sports media Guy Harrison and Melody Huslage

442

42 “Online othering”: The case of women in politics Emily Harmer

452

43 Cyberviolence against women in politics Eleonora Esposito

462

44 Violence and the feminist potential of content moderation Carolina Are and Ysabel Gerrard

473

ix

Contents PART 4

Feminist responses

483

Feminist responses: Introduction to Part 4 Susan Berridge and Karen Boyle

485

45 Engaging men online: Using online media for violence prevention with men and boys Michael Flood

491

46 Hashtag feminism in Brazil: Making sense of gender-based violence with #PrimeiroAssédio Gabriela Loureiro

501

47 After the affect: The tenuous leadership of viral feminists Angela Towers

511

48 Mediatisation of women’s rage in Spain: Strategies of discursive transformation in digital spaces Sonia Núñez Puente and Diana Fernández Romero

522

49 Hashtag feminism straddling the Americas: A comparison between #NiUnaMenos and #MeToo Francesca Belotti, Vittoria Bernardini, and Francesca Comunello

531

50 Digital feminist activism against gender violence in South Korea Kaitlynn Mendes and Euisol Jeong 51 Women 2020: How Pakistani feminisms unfolded between Twitter and the streets Munira Cheema 52 Digital feminist and queer activism against gender violence in China Jia Tan 53 Controversies, protests, coalitions: Screen media’s lessons from the past Gary Needham

x

543

553

563

573

Contents

54 Collective action, performance and the body-territory in Latin American feminisms Paula Serafini 55 Doing feminist activism through creative practice research Eylem Atakav

582

592

56 Rethinking the curriculum: #MeToo and contemporary literary studies Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett

601

57 I won’t look: Refusing to engage with gender-based violence in women-led screen media Rebecca Harrison

611

Index

621

xi

FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures 4.1 4.2 4.3 15.1 15.2 30.1

Victim-perpetrator relationships by presumed or confirmed victim race (percent) Conviction types based on presumed or confirmed victim and perpetrator race (percent) Second-degree murder sentencing length (years) by presumed or confirmed victim and perpetrator race Xianzi and her supporters before the first trial. Her placard reads “Must Win”. Photography: Zhang Yiyi Xianzi and other feminists show support for He Qian and Zou Sicong during the Deng Fei trial. Photo provided by Xianzi Emphasising vulnerability in Swara (Samar Minallah)

58 59 60 165 166 322

Tables 6.1

Corpus of televised news recalling episodes of femminicido in La Vita in Diretta 8.1 Description of the analytical sample of print news media articles (1980–1999) (n = 97) 8.2 Print media coverage of girls’ violence over time (1980–1999) (n = 97) 26.1 GBV in Global North and Global South settings in women’s magazines

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79 97 98 287

CONTRIBUTORS

Inês Amaral is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra. She holds a PhD in Communication Sciences from the University of Minho and is a researcher at the Centre for Communication and Society Studies. She has been researching sociabilities in digital social networks, media and digital literacy, technologies and ageing, audiences and media consumption in the digital age, gender and media. Inês has published in journals including the International Journal of Communication, El Professional de la Información, Media Studies and the European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults. Tia S. Andersen, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. Her main areas of research include mentoring and other strength-based approaches to positive youth development, servicelearning and media constructions of girls’ violence, and gender and racial disparities in juvenile justice system processing. Maja Brandt Andreasen is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender Studies at the University of Stavanger, Norway. She holds a PhD in Gender Studies from the University of Strathclyde. Her research is interdisciplinary, focusing on the discursive construction of gender, race and sexuality in online humour. Her research interests include Internet memes, rape culture, online extremism, the manosphere, and online misogyny, racism and homophobia. Carolina Are is an Innovation Fellow at Northumbria University’s Centre for Digital Citizens. Her work on social media moderation, platform governance and algorithm bias has been published in Feminist Media Studies, Porn Studies, First Monday and Journalism, and featured in MIT Technology Review, The Atlantic, Vice, Wired and Mashable. She is also a blogger, writer, pole dance instructor and award-winning activist. Eylem Atakav is Professor of Film, Gender and Public Engagement at the University of East Anglia where she teaches courses on women and world cinema; gender and Middle

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Eastern media and documentary. She is the author of Women and Turkish Cinema: Gender Politics, Cultural Identity and Representation (2012) and editor of Directory of World Cinema: Turkey (Intellect, 2013). She is the director of Growing Up Married – an internationally acclaimed documentary about forced marriage and child brides in Turkey; and co-director of Lifeline, a documentary that reveals the reality of working in the frontline of the domestic abuse sector in the UK during the pandemic. Lucia Bainotti (PhD) is Lecturer in New Media and Digital Culture and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. As a postdoctoral researcher, she works on the SoBigData++ project, focusing on visual analysis for social media research. Her main research interests revolve around digital consumer cultures, social media influencers, digital methods and gender-based abuse online. She is the author of the book Donne tutte puttane. Revenge porn and maschilità egemone (with Silvia Semenzin, Durango Edizioni), which addresses the phenomenon of the non-consensual dissemination of intimate images on Italian Telegram channels. Sarah Banet-Weiser is Distinguished Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and Professor of Communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She is the founding director of the Center for Collaborative Communication at the Annenberg Schools (CCAS). She has authored or edited eight books, including the award-winning Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture and Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny. Her latest book, co-authored with Kathryn Higgins, is forthcoming in 2023 with Polity Books, titled Believability: Sexual Violence, Media and the Politics of Doubt. Rita Basílio Simões is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra. She holds a PhD in Communication Sciences and is a researcher at the NOVA Institute of Communication. Rita serves as coordinator of the Portuguese Association of Communication (SOPCOM) Working Group on Gender and Sexualities and of the Portuguese participation in the Global Media Monitoring Project. She has expertise in feminist media studies, digital media, journalism studies, gender violence and media policy. Her research focuses on feminist studies, digital media, journalism, gender violence and media policy. Francesca Belotti (PhD) is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Communication and Social Research, Sapienza University of Rome (Italy). Her research, carried out between Europe and Latin America, focuses on alternative media practices of grassroots organizations, ranging from Indigenous communities to feminist and youth climate movements. She also investigates digital media usage practices across generations, with a focus on ICT-related sexist and ageist stereotypes. Vittoria Bernardini (PhD) is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Economics, Engineering, Society and Business Organization, University of Tuscia (Italy). Her main area of research is gender-based violence and feminist digital activism. She has also worked on young people’s constructions of gender and intersectional identities.

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Contributors

Susan Berridge is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at the University of Stirling, Scotland. Her research focuses on gender inequalities on- and off-screen in film and television. She has published on these themes in journals including Feminist Media Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies and Journal of British Cinema and Television as well as in edited collections on gender and media. She is currently working on a BA/Leverhulme funded project on intimacy coordination in contemporary UK television (with Tanya Horeck). Salonee Bhaman is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History and programme in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her research interests focus on histories of race, gender, social welfare, migration and labor in the twentieth century United States. She also leads historical walking tours of New York City and is a co-leader of the Asian American Feminist Collective. Karen Boyle is Professor of Feminist Media Studies at the University of Strathclyde, Scotland. Her research focuses primarily on gender, violence and representation and publications include #MeToo, Weinstein and Feminism (Palgrave, 2019), Everyday Pornography (as editor, Routledge, 2015) and Media and Violence: Gendering the Debates (Sage, 2010). She is currently working on a BA/Leverhulme funded project on the use of trigger warnings in higher education. Denise Buiten is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Social Justice at The University of Notre Dame Australia and Senior Research Associate of the University of Johannesburg. Her research focuses on understanding gender-based violence and tracing the evolving discourses surrounding gendered violence in media, policy and public debates. Stephen R. Burrell is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Durham University. His research focuses on men, masculinities and violence. He is currently exploring the impact of climate change on these issues and how to engage men and boys in caring for the environment. Stephen is the Deputy Director of Durham’s Centre for Research into Violence and Abuse, a trustee at White Ribbon UK and steering group co-chair for a local community interest company, Changing Relations. He also cohosts a podcast called Now and Men: Current conversations about men’s lives. Munira Cheema is Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College, London. Her research interests are at the intersection of cultural studies, media and politics. She is currently working on two projects: the first looking at the rise of social media as an alternative public sphere in Pakistan; the second evaluating female politicians’ participation across mediated and parliamentary contexts in Pakistan. Her books include Women and TV Culture in Pakistan: Gender, Islam and National Identity (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the forthcoming Spaces of Protest in Pakistan: Debating National Identity on Social Media and in Cafes (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024). Ben Colliver is Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Birmingham City University. His research interests focus on hate crime, gender and sexuality. His research broadly investigates the role of gender and sexuality in relation to victimisation. He has published extensively on transgender people’s experiences of hate crime, online hate speech and the representation of

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Contributors

lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people in video-games. He is also a member of the British Society of Criminology “Hate Crime Network” as a steering group member. Francesca Comunello (PhD) is Full Professor in the Department of Communication and Social Research, Sapienza University of Rome (Italy), where she teaches “Internet and Social Media Studies” and “Gender and Media Studies”. Her research and publications focus on the intersections between digital technology and society, including digitally mediated social relations, ageing and digital communication, gender and digital platforms, digital media and disaster communication. Alishya Dhir is a PhD researcher and Teaching Fellow based in the Centre for Research into Violence and Abuse (CRiVA) in the Department of Sociology, Durham University, UK. Alishya’s PhD is focused on youth image-based sexual abuse and police responses. She has also carried out research into technologically-facilitated sexual violence and sexual violence at music festivals. Lisa DiGiovanni is Professor of Spanish Peninsular and Latin American Studies, jointly appointed in the Departments of Modern Languages and Cultures and Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College (USA). She is also affiliated faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching centers on representations of war and dictatorial violence in 20th – 21st century Spain and Latin America. Her first book, Unsettling Nostalgia in Spain and Chile: Longing for Resistance in Literature and Film, was published in 2019. Her current book, Militarized Masculinity in Spain and Chile, focuses on narratives that render visible the causes and consequences of militaristic culture. The Honourable Senator Lillian Dyck, PhD, occupied roles as both Professor and Associate Dean at the University of Saskatchewan. The Honourable Lillian Dyck is a member of the Cree Gordon First Nation in Saskatchewan as well as a first-generation Chinese Canadian. Dr. Lillian Dyck has dedicated her life to the pursuit of equity, equality and justice, and was the first Indigenous woman to occupy the role of Senator in Canada and the first Canadianborn Senator of Chinese descent. Eleonora Esposito is a Researcher at the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) of the University of Navarra (Spain) and a Seconded National Expert at the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE). A Marie Skłodowska-Curie Alumna (2019-2021), Eleonora has been investigating complex intersections between language, identity and the digitalised society in a number of global contexts, encompassing the EU, the Anglophone Caribbean and the Middle East. Nicky Falkof is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Wits University in Johannesburg. Her books include Worrier State: Risk, Anxiety and Moral Panic in South Africa (2022), Intimacy and Injury: In the Wake of #MeToo in India and South Africa (2022), Anxious Joburg: The Inner Lives of a Global South City (2020) and The End of Whiteness: Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa (2015).

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Contributors

Diana Fernández Romero holds a PhD in Communications. She is Senior Lecturer in Communications and Media at Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid, Spain). Her research interests include Discourse Analysis, Communication and Gender, Gender-based Violence and Digital Feminist Activism. She has been Visiting Researcher at Birkbeck, University of London, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and Università di Bologna. Her recent research has been published in journals like Journal of Gender Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Social Science Computer Review, Feminist Theory and European Journal of Women’s Studies. Michael Flood is an internationally recognised researcher on violence against women, violence prevention, and men, masculinities and gender. He has made significant contributions to scholarly and public understanding of men’s involvements in preventing violence against women and building gender equality, and to scholarship and programming regarding violence and prevention. Professor Flood is also an educator and advocate. He is the author of Engaging Men and Boys in Violence Prevention (2019), the co-author of Masculinity and Violent Extremism (2022) and the lead editor of Engaging Men in Building Gender Equality (2015) and The International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities (2007). Federica Formato is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Brighton. Her research interests range from gendered and inclusive language to masculinities and to male violence against women. Her work has been published in international peer-review journals. In 2019, Palgrave published her first monograph Gender, Discourse and Ideology in Italian. She is currently working on Feminist, Corpus-Assisted Research and Language Inclusivity (under contract with Cambridge University Press). Maria Garner is Research Fellow at the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit, London Metropolitan University, where she researches violence against women. Júlia Garraio is researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, where she currently co-coordinates the working group Policredos (Religion, Gender and Society) and the Observatory of Masculinities. She is co-founder of the international research group SVAC-Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict. She is Reviews Editor on the International Editorial Board of the European Journal of Women’s Studies. Júlia has participated in six research projects in the areas of Gender Studies, Memory Studies, Cultural Studies, Literature and Communication. Her main focus of research is narratives and the politics of representing sexual violence in literature and the media. MacKenzie Gerrard is a recent Master’s graduate in Criminology from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her Master’s research focused on the ethical concerns surrounding transnational conglomerates in the digital era, with a particular focus on corporate greenwashing. She has most recently worked as a research assistant, collaborating on publications relating to the intersection of stigma, sexual harm on social media, and government mismanagement of natural disaster victims. She has previously worked as a tutor and marker on courses relating to women and crime, criminal psychology and research methods. Ysabel Gerrard is Lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the University of Sheffield. Her research on social media content moderation has been published in journals like New Media

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Contributors

and Society and Social Media + Society, and featured in venues like The Guardian and WIRED. Ysabel is also the Chair of ECREA’s Digital Culture and Communication section and has been a member of Meta’s Suicide and Self-Injury Advisory Board since March 2019. Aisha K. Gill, PhD, CBE is Professor of Criminology at University of Bristol. Her main research areas are health and criminal justice responses to violence against Black, minority ethnic and refugee women in the UK, Afghanistan, Georgia, Jordan, Libya, Iraqi Kurdistan, India, Pakistan and Yemen. She has been involved in grassroots work to address violence against women and girls, “honour” crimes and forced marriage for 23 years. Recent publications focus on femicide, “honour” killings, forced marriage, child sexual exploitation and sexual abuse in Black and racially minoritised communities, FGM, sex selective abortions, and women who kill. She is Co-Chair of End Violence Against Women Coalition. Debbie Ging is Associate Professor of Digital Media and Gender at Dublin City University. She teaches and researches on digital misogyny, anti-feminism, male supremacism online and the incel community. Debbie is co-editor of Gender Hate Online: Understanding the New Antifeminism (Palgrave, 2019). She is a member of the National Anti-Bullying Centre and of the Institute for Future Media, Democracy and Society (FuJo). Hannah Hamad is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Cardiff University, School of Journalism, Media and Culture. She is the author of Postfeminism and Paternity in Contemporary US Film: Framing Fatherhood (Routledge, 2014) and Film, Feminism and Rape Culture in the Yorkshire Ripper Years (BFI/Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2023). Emily Harmer is Senior Lecturer in Media and Co-Director of DigiPol: Centre for Digital Politics, Media and Democracy at the University of Liverpool. Her work addresses the relationship between gender, media and politics. Her recent work explores the online abuse, harassment and everyday sexism aimed at women in the UK Parliament. She is the author of Women, Media and Elections: Representation and Marginalisation in British Politics (Bristol University Press, 2021) and co-editor of Online Othering: Exploring Digital Violence and Discrimination on the Web (Palgrave, 2019). Carol Harrington is Senior Lecturer in the School of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her research concerns politics and policy on violence against women, sexual violence and sex work. She has taught courses on the sociology of violence, sexuality and comparative welfare regimes. She has published on the politics of sexual violence, including anti-sex-trafficking policy in Bosnia and Kosovo, gender expertise within peacekeeping operations and sex work knowledge politics in Timor Leste, Sweden, the UK and New Zealand. Most recently, she has published the book Neoliberal Sexual Violence Politics: Toxic Masculinity and #MeToo (Palgrave, 2022). Guy Harrison is Assistant Professor of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research focuses on gender and race in U.S. sports media. In 2021, he published the book On the Sidelines: Gendered Neoliberalism and the American Female Sportscaster.

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Rebecca Harrison is Lecturer in Film and Media at The Open University and a freelance film critic. As a survivor and from a working-class background, she is committed to challenging the white, patriarchal, and elitist structures that have historically excluded students and scholars from Higher Education. Her research tends to focus on histories of media technologies and questions of identity and power. Her writing appears in MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture and Sight & Sound, among many other venues, and her most recent book is the BFI Film Classic title The Empire Strikes Back (2020). Heather Hewett is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and an affiliate of the English Department at SUNY New Paltz. She is a co-editor, with Mary Holland, of #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture (Bloomsbury, 2021). Her work on contemporary women’s writing and feminism has been published in scholarly journals and edited collections as well as mainstream and literary publications. During 2022-2024, she will be working with the American Council of Learned Societies on their higher education initiative. Kathryn Claire Higgins is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her writing on language, culture and the politics of vulnerability is published in Journalism, Visual Communication and Feminist Media Studies, among others. Together with Sarah Banet-Weiser she is the co-author of Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt (Polity, 2023). Mary K. Holland is Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, where she teaches contemporary literature, women’s writing and theory. Her most recent book is #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture (co-edited with Heather Hewett, Bloomsbury, 2021). She is also the author of The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism (Bloomsbury, 2020) and Succeeding Postmodernism (Bloomsbury, 2013), and co-editor of Approaches to Teaching the Works of David Foster Wallace (MLA, 2019). Currently, she’s working on a collection of narratives about gendered abuse in academia. Tanya Horeck is Professor of Film and Feminist Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin University. She is the author of Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film and Justice on Demand: True Crime in the Digital Streaming Era. Her current research projects include an UKRI/AHRC funded study on online sexual risks and gendered harms for young people during Covid-19 and a British Academy funded study on the rise of consent culture and intimacy coordination. Melody Huslage is a doctoral candidate in the College of Social Work at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her research utilises an intersectional framework to investigate issues of diversity, equity and inclusion. Rahat Imran holds a PhD in Cinema Studies from the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University, Canada. Dr Imran held a 2-year MSCA Post-doctoral Research Fellowship at the Department of Film and Screen Media, University College Cork (UCC), Ireland (2020-2022). Prior to this, she served as Associate Professor at the School

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of Creative Arts, University of Lahore, Pakistan. She published the first academic book on Pakistani documentary cinema: Activist Documentary Film in Pakistan: The Emergence of a Cinema of Accountability (Routledge, 2016) and is currently writing the first monograph on Afghan women filmmakers (forthcoming, Routledge, 2024). Deena A. Isom is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice and the African American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina. She received her PhD from Emory University in 2015. Her research aims to understand the causes and consequences of disparities in criminal behaviours and contact with the justice system. Emma A. Jane – formerly published as Emma Tom – is Associate Professor at UNSW Sydney. She researches the social implications of emerging technologies using public interest technology frameworks and co-design methods to interrogate the issues and consider proposed interventions. She has presented her research findings to the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Australian government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency and the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House. Prior to her academic career, Dr Jane spent nearly 25 years working in print, broadcast and electronic media. Over the course of her working life, she has received multiple awards and prizes for her scholarly work, journalism and fiction. Her 11th book, Diagnosis Normal (Penguin Random House, 2022), is a hybrid memoir. Euisol Jeong is an instructor in Women’s and Gender Studies at Chungnam National University, South Korea. Her research interests include digital practices, feminist movement, and the role of digitally mediated affect in social activism, specifically in the recent feminist phenomena in East Asian societies. She is currently preparing a manuscript on “trollish” digital feminist activism, based on her PhD Troll feminism: the rise of popular feminism in South Korea (2020). She is also working on a research project that investigates the impact of digital feminism on the gendered experiences of young women living in nonmetropolitan areas of South Korea. Emmaleena Käkelä is Research Associate at the School of Social Work and Social Policy at the University of Strathclyde. Her participatory doctoral research explored refugee women’s changing vulnerabilities in relation to female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) and other forms of gender-based violence from a migration perspective. Her research interests are in the areas of forced migration and asylum, cultural and identity negotiation and the relationship between gender-based and structural forms of violence and harm. Jilly Boyce Kay is Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester who specialises in feminist media and cultural studies. She has published widely on gender, class, feminism and popular and political culture. She is author of the monograph Gender, Media and Voice: Communicative Injustice and Public Speech (Palgrave, 2020). Rachel Kuo is Assistant Professor of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests focus on race, feminism, social movements and digital technology. She is a founding member and current affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and a co-leader of the Asian American Feminist Collective.

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Li Jun (AKA Li Sipan,
) has a PhD in political sociology. She is Chau Hoi Shuen Scholar-in-Residence of Beatrice Bain Research Group at the University of California Berkeley and Associate Professor at the Cheung Kong School of Journalism and Communication, Shantou University in China. In 2004, she established the feminist organisation Women Awakening Network (), focusing on gender equality in journalism and communication. Li has coordinated many landmark advocacy projects on anti-sexual harassment policy and anti-domestic violence legislation. Her research focuses on the generational difference in media strategy within Chinese feminist activism. Nancy Lombard is Professor in Sociology and Social Policy at Glasgow Caledonian University. Her research, in the main, looks at violence, gender and young people. Her findings have generated policy change and investment in gender equality programmes across health, education and the voluntary sector. She is currently co-leading a Horizon Innovation project across Europe examining innovative solutions to eliminate domestic abuse. She is an Associate Director at the Centre for Research in Families and Relationships and also leads GREeN: Gender Research and Equalities Network. She provides consultation and training on gender equality. Dr Lombard is a disability advocate and community activist. Gabriela Loureiro is a researcher, lecturer and queer feminist mainly interested in feminism, antiracism, decoloniality, migration, sexuality and emotions. She currently teaches Sociology of Emotions at the University of Edinburgh. Gabriela’s doctoral thesis examines the role of emotions in Brazilian online feminist activism and theorises hashtags as digital consciousness-raising. She holds a master’s degree in Gender, Sexuality and the Body by the University of Leeds and a BA in journalism by the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM). Before academia, she worked as a journalist in newsrooms in Brazil and at the BBC in London. Sophie Maddocks is a doctoral candidate in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Particularly concerned with cyber-sexual violence, she has published research on image-based abuse (commonly misnamed “revenge porn”), deep fakes and gender-based trolling. Sophie’s current work examines individual, organisational and legislative responses to image-based sexual abuse. Clare McGlynn is Professor of Law at Durham University and has over twenty years’ experience working with victim-survivors, policy-makers and violence against women organisations to reform laws and policies on pornography, sexual violence and online abuse. She is co-author of Cyberflashing: Recognising Harms, Reforming Laws (Bristol University Press, 2021) and Image-based Sexual Abuse: A Study on the Causes and Consequences of Nonconsensual Nude or Sexual Imagery (Routledge, 2021). Kaitlynn Mendes is Associate Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Inequality and Gender at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She is interested in the relationship between digital technologies, feminist activism and sexual violence. More recently, she has focused on translating her research into impactful resources for young people, parents and educators. She is author of the award-winning SlutWalk: Feminism,

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Contributors

activism and media (Palgrave, 2015), Feminism in the News (Palgrave, 2011) and Digital Feminist Activism: Girls and Women Fight Back Against Rape Culture (Oxford University Press, 2019, with Jessica Ringrose and Jessalynn Keller). Melanie A. Morrison is Full Professor in the Department of Psychology and Health Studies in the College of Arts and Science, at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. Melanie is passionate about promoting the health and safety of women and girls and, in so doing, challenging and eradicating gender-based, cultural violence. As a social psychologist, Melanie has spent much of her career conducting attitudinal and behavioural research and publishing peer-reviewed works on the stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination that marginalise social groups and serve to compromise the wellness of individuals in their communities. Todd G. Morrison, PhD, is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Saskatchewan. His interests include cultural representations of marginalised groups, homonegativity, gay male pornography, masculinities and psychometrics. He has published in peer-reviewed journals including Body Image, Porn Studies, Psychology of Men and Masculinities, Sexuality & Culture, International Journal of Transgender Health, Journal of Sex Research and Journal of Homosexuality. He is Co-editor of Psychology & Sexuality and serves on editorial boards including the Journal of Social Psychology, Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity and Journal of Sex Research. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association. Jennifer Musial is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at New Jersey City University and holds a PhD in Women’s Studies. She publishes in three fields; 1) reproductive justice and gender-based violence; 2) critical yoga studies; and 3) Women’s and Gender Studies field formation. Recent work has been published in Social and Legal Studies, Journal of Feminist Scholarship and Feminist Formations. She has forthcoming chapters in Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies Volume II and Carcerality Locally and Globally: Feminist Critiques of States of Violence. She is the managing editor for Race and Yoga. Mthokozisi Phathisani Ndhlovu is a PhD student in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He is also a lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) in Zimbabwe. His research interests are in political communication and media and sexuality. Gary Needham is Senior Lecturer in Film and Media at The University of Liverpool. He is the co-editor of Queer TV (Routledge, 2009) and United Artists (Routledge, 2020) and his forthcoming book Sex, Guys, and Videotape (Edinburgh University Press) is a history of American independent film during the AIDS crisis. Gabriella Nilsson is Associate Professor in Ethnology at the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University. Her research has long had a focus on how violence is portrayed, explained, politicised and negotiated in various discursive contexts and historical times. Most recently, she has been working on a project about the news media’s coverage of rape in Sweden during 1990-2015.

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Contributors

Sonia Núñez Puente is Professor of Gender and Media at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Madrid, Spain). Her research focuses on the analysis of social media and the transformation of cultural violence. She has led national and international research and development projects on feminist digital activism and gender-based violence. She has been a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) and a lecturer at Vanderbilt University (USA). She has been a Visiting Scholar at The University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), The University of Coimbra (Portugal), The University of Milano-Bicocca (Italy) and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany), among others. Onyinyechi Nancy Nwaolikpe is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mass Communication at McPherson University, one of the private universities in Nigeria. She has a PhD in Mass Communication, specialising in Development Communication, from Babcock University, Nigeria and has just completed a postgraduate programmme on Gender Analysis in International Development at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom. She has published articles in local and international academic journals and books and won many research travel grants to present her research papers at international conferences. Jennifer O’Meara is Assistant Professor in Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin. She has published widely on the topic of screen sound and gender, in publications including Feminist Media Studies and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Her latest book, Screening Women’s Voices in the Digital Era: The Sonic Screen from Film to Memes, was published by University of Texas Press in 2022. Rafaela Orphanides obtained her PhD in 2020 from Loughborough University. Her current interdisciplinary research explores the relationship of Reality and the Imaginary in popular culture. Through this research she has explored mediations of authenticity, success and gender-based violence in media, and the triple entanglement of feminism, postfeminism, and neoliberalism in mediated representations. Dr Orphanides has experience from Universities in the UK and Cyprus in teaching modules at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Lucia M. Palmer is Assistant Professor of Media and Communication at Middle Georgia State University. She has published articles in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, International Journal of Communication, Studies in Popular Culture, and Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas. Her interests primarily revolve around the intersections between media, culture and constructions of nationality, gender, race and sexuality. Currently, her research focuses on how cultural and political movements utilise media, in particular alternative and independent formats, to struggle over meanings of the US/Mexico border and immigration. Kandice M. Parker is a PhD candidate in the Psychology of Culture, Health and Human Development programme at the University of Saskatchewan. She has previously acquired a B.Sc. in Biology (UVic), a B.A. in Psychology with Honours and M.A. in Applied Social Psychology at the University of Saskatchewan. Her research interests include gender and violence, men and allyship, woke performativity, gender equality and postfeminism. Kandice has published in numerous outlets including Psychology & Sexuality, Porn Studies and Journal of Bisexuality.

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Contributors

Anastasia Powell is Professor of Family & Sexual Violence at RMIT University (Melbourne, Australia). Her research examines the intersections of gender, violence, justice and technology, and includes the books: Image-based Sexual Abuse (Routledge, 2020), Digital Criminology (Routledge, 2018), Sexual Violence in a Digital Age (Palgrave, 2017), Domestic Violence (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2011) and Sex, Power and Consent (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Michael Salter is a Scientia Fellow and Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of New South Wales. His research is focused on complex trauma, gender-based violence and child sexual abuse. His published work includes the books Organised Sexual Abuse (Routledge, 2013) and Crime, Justice and Social Media (Routledge, 2017) and over fifty papers in international journals and edited collections. He is the academic member of the Advisory Group to inform the development and implementation of the Commonwealth ten year National Plan To Prevent Violence Against Women and Their Children. Sofia José Santos is Assistant Professor in International Relations at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra and a Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the same university where she leads as PI the Project DeCode/M. She holds a PhD in International Relations (University of Coimbra) and a specialisation in Communication (ISCTE-IUL). Since 2008, she has undertaken research on media and international relations; media and masculinities; and internet and technopolitics. Sofia has published in journals such as the European Journal of Women’s Studies and Contexto Internacional. Silvia Semenzin is a postdoctoral fellow in Digital Sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid and a digital rights activist. She researches on data justice, technological imaginaries and cyberviolence against women and girls. In 2019, she promoted the art.612ter included in the ‘Red Code’ bill to criminalize image-based sexual abuse in Italy and in 2021 she co-founded Virgin & Martyr, a non-profit association for gender and sex education. Together with Lucia Bainotti, she published the book Donne Tutte Puttane (Durango Edizioni, 2021) to discuss the widespread phenomenon of the non-consensual dissemination of intimate images across Italian Telegram channels. Paula Serafini is Lecturer in Creative and Cultural Industries at Queen Mary University of London. Her research is situated in the field of cultural politics, and her interests include extractivism, social movements, art activism, performance, cultural labour, cultural policy, feminist politics and alternatives to development. She is author of Performance Action: The Politics of Art Activism (Routledge, 2018) and Creating Worlds Otherwise: Art, Collective Action, and (Post)Extractivism (Vanderbilt University Press, 2022). Tanya Serisier is Reader in Feminist Theory in the Department of Criminology at Birkbeck College University of London. She researches the cultural politics of sex, sexuality and sexual violence with a particular interest in the effects of feminist activism and scholarship. Her work on public survivors builds on her previous work on speaking out, including her 2018 monograph, Speaking Out: Feminism, Rape and Narrative Politics.

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Jennifer Silcox, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies at King’s University College at Western University. Her main areas of research include social inequality, youth crime and legislation in Canada, youth mental health, and media representations of crime. Chindu Sreedharan, PhD, is Associate Professor of Journalism at Bournemouth University (UK). A former journalist, he has a particular interest in journalistic storytelling as a means to improve human rights situations. His research focuses on “abnormal journalisms”, reportage that extends the boundaries of conventional newswork––from crisis and post-disaster reporting, to new forms of digital and long narratives. Chindu’s publications include Sexual Violence and the News Media (co-authored), Impact of Covid19 on journalism in Sierra Leone (co-authored), Hold Your Story: Reflections on the News of Sexual Violence in India (co-edited) and Disaster Journalism: Building Media Resilience in Nepal (co-authored). Jia Tan is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China (NYU Press, 2023). Einar Thorsen, PhD, is Professor of Journalism and Communication and Executive Dean of the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University (UK). His research covers journalism and social change, citizens’ voices, news reporting of crisis and politics. He has co-authored and co-edited several reports, including a 2021 UNESCO report on journalism and sexual violence in India and national survey reports on the impact of Covid-19 on journalists in Nepal (2020) and Sierra Leone (2021). His recent books include Media, Journalism and Disaster Communities (Palgrave, 2020, co-edited with Jamie Matthews). Angela Towers is a postgraduate researcher at Lancaster University UK within Feminist Media and Cultural Studies. She is currently working on an oral history of viral feminism of the last decade. She works as a graduate teaching assistant across the Sociology and Media and Cultural Studies programmes at Lancaster. Satu Venäläinen is a postdoctoral researcher in Social Psychology in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on discourses, identities and affects linked specifically to the shifting gender relations both in online and offline contexts. She has specifically done research on meanings linked to gendered violence and her current research project explores affective and discursive meanings and dynamics of sexual harassment among young people. She has published in journals such as Social Problems, Men and Masculinities, The Sociological Review, Feminist Media Studies, European Journal of Women’s Studies, and Feminism & Psychology. Fiona Vera-Gray is the Deputy Director of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit (CWASU) at London Metropolitan University. She is the author of two books on public sexual harassment and a forthcoming book on what porn means for women.

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Karissa Wall completed her Masters in Applied Social Psychology at the University of Saskatchewan. Karissa now works as the Manager of Institutional Research at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Helen Wood is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Lancaster UK. She has published widely on class and gender in the media including the books Reality Television and Class and Reacting to Reality Television with Beverley Skeggs. She has edited Television for Women: New Directions with Rachel Moseley and Helen Wheatley and the book The Wedding Spectacle Across Media and Culture with Jilly Kay and Melanie Kennedy. Her recent work on representations of the working-class girl can be found in Feminist Media Studies and the Journal of British Cinema and Television.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This collection originated in a conversation with Alexandra McGregor at Routledge, at the very beginning of the first lockdown in 2020. We would like to thank Alex for her enthusiasm for the project, careful stewarding of the commissioning process and her understanding and support as we adjusted to the new normal. Eleanor Catchpole Simmons and Charlotte Taylor at Routledge have provided ongoing guidance, particularly in the final stages of the project, and we are grateful for their care and attention. To all our contributors who have juggled their chapters with the realities of pandemic life and many other unforeseen circumstances: we are so grateful for your commitment to the project, your good humour and patience in responding to our editorial comments and, most of all, for continuing to work in an area which can be so challenging. We hope you are pleased with the final collection and enjoy the opportunity to learn from each other over these pages as we have enjoyed learning from you. We have been incredibly lucky to work on this together, to be able to keep each other going, spread the load and maintain intellectual engagement with a wider world, particularly during periods of home schooling, lockdown and illness. And so we thank each other for being the best other half of an editorial team we could have wished for. Karen would like to thank Ian Garwood for his love, unwavering support and for taking on way more than his fair share of everything else as the deadline approached; and Alec and Carys Garwood for providing (usually welcome) distraction and motivation. Susan would like to thank Vicky Wason, Duncan Robertson and Mike Rowling for their unconditional love, support and encouragement; and Marshall and Emmett Robertson for their wise words and for helping me keep things in perspective. Thanks also to Indiana Bones for alleviating stress along the way.

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INTRODUCTION Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

Thinking about gender, violence and the media in a pandemic This is a pandemic collection. The Covid-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on how communities globally engage with media and communications technologies, but also on experiences and understandings of gender violence. As a core principle of feminist theorising on gender violence is that it is inextricably linked with gender inequality, the historical moment in which this collection is situated is clearly significant. As is well-documented, the pandemic exacerbated inequalities and enhanced vulnerabilities. In the first months of the pandemic, UN Women reported that violence against women had intensified (UN Women, 2020a, p. 3), and that – across 13 countries – 45% of women reported that they, or a woman they know, had experienced some form of violence since the beginning of the pandemic (p. 4). Help-seeking behaviours were also impacted, with increasing reports of domestic violence and/or increased demand for emergency shelter documented in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, Cyprus, Germany, Lebanon, Mexico, Spain, the UK and the US (UN Women, 2020b, pp. 2–3). Unsurprisingly, online abuse increased, with implications for workplaces as well as educational settings (see Ging, Chapter 32, this volume). The trajectory of the pandemic also led to targeted racist attacks in a number of contexts, including the US (see Bhaman and Kuo, Chapter 3, this volume). From the early days of the pandemic, its broader gendered implications were also apparent. For instance, a UN Women report noted that women in Asia and the Pacific had been disproportionately impacted by income reductions and their formal employment opportunities had been curtailed whilst unpaid caring responsibilities increased at a rate higher than men’s. Whilst men were more likely to die from the virus itself, the emotional impact of the pandemic fell disproportionately on women (UN Women, 2020b). This wider picture matters. Where gendered inequalities increase, the prospects of ending gender violence diminish. The pandemic has thus brought into sharp relief the persistence of violence against women and the adaptability of patriarchy. Persistence and adaptability is a core theme of this collection, one which contributors explore not only in relation to the pandemic but also in terms of technological, economic and political shifts and the ways in which these have given rise to specific gender-based abuses. Whilst such developments are often hailed as

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-1

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“new” or “unprecedented” by mainstream media inattentive to histories of feminist activism and scholarship, in this collection we work to establish the connections, continuities and changes across time, place and platform. Like many of our contributors, we have started this introduction with evidence produced by transnational bodies about the prevalence of violence against women. However, whilst these accounts place women’s experiences – and vulnerabilities – centre stage, they often do so in a way that renders men invisible as the primary perpetrators of this violence. In the next section, we trace variations on this linguistic vanishing act and situate this collection in relation to these debates.

What’s in a name? Although the terms gender-based violence and (men’s) violence against women are often used interchangeably in activist, research and policy contexts (Boyle, 2019a) it is important to insist on the distinctions between them. This collection is centrally concerned with how violence is understood in and through gender – and vice versa. But this does not mean it is concerned only – or specifically – with gender-based violence. UN Women give the following definition of gender-based violence: Gender-based violence (GBV) refers to harmful acts directed at an individual or a group of individuals based on their gender. It is rooted in gender inequality, the abuse of power and harmful norms. The term is primarily used to underscore the fact that structural, gender-based power differentials place women and girls at risk for multiple forms of violence. While women and girls suffer disproportionately from GBV, men and boys can also be targeted. The term is also sometimes used to describe targeted violence against LGBTQI+ populations, when referencing violence related to norms of masculinity/ femininity and/or gender norms. (UN Women, n.d.) As this makes clear, not all gender-based violence is violence against women. However, this definition emphasises the greater risk to women and girls, without identifying who is most at risk of perpetrating that violence. If gender-based violence is rooted in gender inequality and involves an abuse of power, the people perpetrating that violence in a patriarchal society are most likely to be men. This is not to say that gender-based violence is only perpetrated by men. For instance, female genital mutilation and cutting can be understood as gender-based violence not because it is always practised by men (it isn’t), but because it targets women and is a violent expression of gendered inequalities. Likewise, whilst transphobic violence may be perpetrated by people of all genders, that it functions to uphold gender-binary norms makes it a form of violence that is based in gender. But these examples do not undermine our point that just as women and girls “suffer disproportionately”, so men and boys are disproportionately represented as perpetrators. Yet, men and boys are only mentioned in this definition as potential victims. Even in the UN’s definition of violence against women and girls – the most common form of gender-based violence – it is gendered risk which is centred: Violence against women and girls is defined as any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or mental harm or suffering to 2

Introduction

women and girls, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life. Violence against women and girls encompasses, but is not limited to, physical, sexual and psychological violence occurring in the family or within the general community, and perpetrated or condoned by the state. (UN Women, n.d.) Reading these definitions you could be left wondering who on earth is doing all this violence. In our editorial choices for this collection, we have emphasised men’s violence against women, but to gain a fuller understanding of the ways that gender and violence are made meaningful in and through representation we have also included chapters that focus on other forms of gender-based violence, as well as on violence which is gendered (that is, understood in relation to gender) but not gender-based (an abuse of power). For instance, women’s violence is routinely framed in media reporting as a story about gender (and, sometimes, about feminism) making it important to consider in a collection of this type. It is not, however, gender-based violence according to the UN’s definition, as it is not – typically – “rooted in gender inequality, the abuse of power and harmful norms”. This discussion demonstrates that language matters and that applies not only when we are looking at the media, but also at policy and activist practice. Of course, it is inevitable that in any international collection which deals with such a wide variety of types of violence, there is no one definition that unites all of the chapters. As editors, we have not tried to impose one. But we have pushed contributors to be as precise as possible about who is doing what to whom and to be cautious of umbrella terms which may obfuscate gendered dynamics. This cautious approach to umbrella terms is one which is also advocated by Mia Fischer in relation to transgender visibility. Fischer is critical of “the framework of transgender visibility” which might “allow mainstream LGB(T) organizations to allege inclusion of the T without actually addressing the urgent needs and issues of transgender people” (2019, p. 13). In the context of gender and violence, we understand violence against trans people because of their gender identity to be a form of gender-based violence. This includes violence against trans women because they are women, and violence against trans women and men because they are trans: in these cases, both misogynist and transphobic violence can be based on perceived gender roles and gender (non)conformity. But to go back to the UN Women definition above, it is not obvious that all violence against the wider LGBTQI+ population is, or should be, understood as gender-based: homophobic violence, for instance, may not always be related to “norms of masculinity/femininity and/or gender norms”. A large part of what is at stake in these definitions, then, is the commonalities they establish between different forms of violence and different social groups. This leads us to a core concept which has informed our editorial selections and is adopted by many of our contributors: continuum thinking (Boyle, 2019a).

Continuum thinking Continuum thinking is a characteristic of feminist theorisations of gender and violence and can be arrived at via the work of a range of different theorists. Our own use of the continuum is indebted to Liz Kelly who introduced the concept in her 1988 book Surviving Sexual Violence as a means of understanding women’s experiences of sexual violence. For Kelly, the continuum was a way of conceptualising how women made sense of individual 3

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actions in relation to a continuum of related experiences throughout their lives. The continuum was a means of identifying the “basic common character that underlies many different events” and/or “a continuous series of elements or events that pass into one another and cannot be easily distinguished” (1988, p. 76). The value of the continuum, for Kelly, was in allowing us to see how experiences accumulated and worked together – in a context characterised by gender inequality – to shape women’s lives. Whilst it was Kelly’s work on sexual violence which led her to develop the concept of the continuum, subsequent feminist work adopted and adapted the continuum to trace how different forms of (men’s) (gender-based) violence against women are connected (Boyle, 2019a). The brackets are intended to highlight that feminist work has expanded beyond the continuum to consider a range of different continuums which allow us to make connections not only in the lives of victim/survivors (Kelly’s original focus), but also, for instance, by considering men’s behaviour, or the meaning and function of violence. In Surviving Sexual Violence, Kelly foresaw some of these uses of the concept, noting that continuum thinking could also help to establish the ways in which “typical” and “aberrant” male behaviour shades into one another (Kelly, 1988, p. 75). As Karen Boyle notes “this demands that we pay attention not only to women’s experiences of male behaviour, but also to that behaviour itself and how it is rendered meaningful for men” (2019a, p. 29). Media representations are some of the many ways in which that behaviour is rendered meaningful for men. Here, it is useful to turn to Raewyn Connell’s work and her term “hegemonic masculinity”. Hegemonic masculinity is the dominant/dominating form of masculinity in a given historical and society-wide social setting that legitimates unequal and hierarchical gender relations (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005). Reflecting on male violence specifically, Connell writes: most men do not attack or harass women; but those who do are unlikely to think themselves deviant. On the contrary they usually feel they are entirely justified, that they are exercising a right. They are authorized by an ideology of supremacy. (Connell, 1995, p. 83) We can connect this back to our discussion of the UN definitions above to note that one way male dominance is maintained is by not noticing it exists. Hegemonic masculinity means that much of men’s violence goes unrecognised as male violence, if, indeed, it is recognised as violence at all and not, for instance, disguised as sex or romance, as a winning mentality for business or sport, or as honour. When these linguistic disguises are adopted the speaker accepts the perpetrator’s framing of his behaviour (Campbell, 2022). In an article focusing on rape and sexual assault in the news, Boyle, Brenna Jessie and Megan Strickland note: To state that in certain conditions, and for certain types of men, rape and sexual assault can be “normal” is to recognise that the social and cultural construction of male sexuality and gender inequality legitimates and indeed celebrates sexual aggression as part of what it means to be “a man.” As such, if a man’s sexually assaultive behaviour is to be recognised as a problem, then he cannot simultaneously be recognised as a man. (2022, p. 116)

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Introduction

The “certain types of men” referred to here are those who are most closely aligned with hegemonic masculinity in any given culture. To qualify Boyle, Jessie and Strickland’s argument slightly, then, he cannot simultaneously be recognised as that kind of man. As many of the chapters in this collection demonstrate, if he is, or was, that kind of man (an awardwinning movie producer, say) then he must have been miscategorised – he isn’t actually one of them at all, he’s a monster. At the same time, across many of the contexts discussed in this book, there is an increasing sense that the ideology of male supremacy is under threat and that at least some of the men who did not previously think themselves deviant are being forced to think again. Feminist activism – including in media spaces – has had an important role to play in these reckonings. For an internationally-oriented collection, continuum thinking is a fundamentally political intervention because it allows us to see connections across disparate contexts whilst remaining alert to their specificities. Importantly, continuum thinking is about understanding the common character of differently-situated experiences, it is not about asserting an equivalence or a hierarchy. In this, it echoes long-standing principles of feminist organising, as well as debates about sameness and difference in women’s experiences within and across nations and the structural inequalities produced by race, religion, sexuality, gender identity, class and dis/ability. A collection like this allows us to contribute to this broader project of building a feminist community and theorising gender and violence by opening up space for reflection on the assumptions underpinning not only media coverage but also representation in theory and research. As one practical example of this, we want to briefly reflect on what we have learned from considering how “honour” structures justificatory accounts of men’s violence against women across different contexts in this collection. “Honour” is directly referenced in a number of chapters which deal with abuse in Islamic contexts such as Rahat Imran’s (Chapter 30) and Munira Cheema’s (Chapter 51) chapters focusing on Pakistan and Eylem Atakav’s (Chapter 55) discussion of child marriage in Turkey. But honour – and its correlate, shame (Gill, 2014, p. 2) – also feature heavily in reports of familicide in white communities in the UK and Australia discussed by Denise Buiten (Chapter 5); whilst ideas about honour, pride and white nationalism circulate in Kathryn Claire Higgins’s examples from Australia (Chapter 7) and Nicky Falkof’s from South Africa (Chapter 24). We are not suggesting that these examples are the same. Indeed, there are clear and important differences. So-called “honour” crimes are, typically, attempts to maintain or restore (familial) “honour” by ensuring women conform to cultural and religious expectations – or are punished for their failure to do so (Siddiqui and Mahmod, 2021, p. 404). In the cases discussed by Buiten, Higgins and Falkof, there are parallels in the positioning of men as the arbiters of family or community honour, but it is men’s understanding of their own behaviour or position (and how that is threatened) that is more central. But running through all these examples is the extent to which gender norms are underpinned by male entitlement and gender inequality, and that the violent policing of those norms is most often at the expense of women in families and communities. Putting these chapters together allows us to see connections in men’s excuses for violence (and so in women’s experiences of it), but at the same time raises questions about the very different language typically used to refer to these acts, both in media and research contexts. Activists are understandably dubious when debates over terminology become a means of deflecting responsibility and delaying action, particularly on the part of governments (Siddiqui and Mahmod, 2021). At the same time – and as other chapters in this collection 5

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explore in relation to phenomena including cyberflashing (McGlynn, Chapter 35) and child abuse images (Salter, Chapter 37) – the terms we use can determine patterns of recognition and restitution. This may be where those of us involved in media disciplines are able to make useful interventions in wider debates. So, to go back to our example of “honour”, what might we gain by thinking of certain kinds of familicide or white vigilantism as honour-based violence? What would such a framing allow (and deny), both in terms of our understandings of familicide and vigilantism and of our understandings of how ideas about “honour” are mobilised in Western accounts of “Islamic” practices and communities? To return to Siddiqui and Mahmod, might this offer a means to challenge the exoticisation of minoritised communities which often accompanies discussions of “honour”-based violence in the West (p. 409) and, therefore, limits minority women’s access to effective state protection? At the same time, might it also challenge the normalisation and relative invisibility of some forms of white men’s violence against white women which mean that their violence is likely to be understood in individualist rather than structural terms (Chantler and Gangoli, 2011)? Similar debates have taken place in relation to the relationship between “honour” violence and coercive control (Patel and Siddiqui, 2011; Gill, 2011) or “date” rape (Chantler and Gangoli, 2011). This work also interrogates whose versions of honour, of community and of gender are prioritised and naturalised – the troubling of “honour” often signalled (as we have done here) by the use of scare quotes or by insisting on its disputed status: so-called honour (Chantler and Gangoli, 2011, p. 359). These debates may be semantic, but they are also material, impacting, among other things, on how governments weaponise violence against minoritised women – and violence by minoritised men – to serve anti-immigration agendas: something which emerges in a range of contexts in this collection (e.g. Bhaman and Kuo, Chapter 3; Gill, Chapter 9; Käkelä, Chapter 10). It is important here to distinguish between continuum thinking – which has underpinned the editorial selections and analysis in this book – and analogous thinking. By analogous thinking, we are referring to attempts – in both media and some feminist work – to make gender-based violence matter by establishing how it is “like” something else: torture, terrorism, hostage-taking (Boyle, 2019a, p. 23). We have seen a lot of this, in various contexts, since 2020, as gender-based violence – and men’s violence against women in particular – has been described as a pandemic of its own. UN Women (2020c), for instance, described violence against women during Covid-19 as the “shadow pandemic”. Given the extent to which the Covid-19 pandemic has dominated every aspect of our lives since early 2020, this is an understandable move as it aims to make visible the scale of the problem and the sheer number of women impacted by it. However, we are wary of analogous thinking because the analogies are so often not themselves gendered and/or are phenomena for which individuals cannot be clearly accountable. As such, we can end up in a situation where we are talking about gender-based violence and even men’s violence against women in curiously ungendered terms and/or only focusing on structure, evading questions of personal responsibility. We understand why feminists have at times adopted this strategy as a way of getting the issue onto agendas which might be resistant to explicitly feminist language and analysis: indeed, we have done this ourselves (Boyle, 2019a, pp. 19–20). However, in the context of a collection about the media, the problematic ways in which analogous thinking – along with any form of euphemistic language – can work to constrain understanding and limit which kinds of violence, victims and perpetrators come into view are acutely felt. 6

Introduction

Our primary focus in this collection is on inter-personal gender-based violence – predominately, but not exclusively, men’s violence against women – but as the discussion so far should make clear, it is a core principle of feminist theorising that we cannot understand that violence in individualistic terms. Rather it requires a structural analysis which extends beyond the interpersonal to an analysis of kinship structures, as well as institutions in both public and private sectors (and, of course, media span both). It is important to emphasise that we are not suggesting that the media is a cause of men’s violence against women. This would be to divorce media from the wider societies in which they sit, whilst simultaneously denying the agency of media consumers, a group which, of course, includes victim/survivors, perpetrators, bystanders and policymakers. At the same time, a focus on cause and effect detracts attention from the abusive production practices within media organisations which have, for instance, been brought into sharp relief by the Harvey Weinstein case. As Meenakshi Gigi Durham (2021, p. 2) puts it, “[t]he media are in fact, quite literally, sites of sexual violence”, an issue explored in some detail in Part 3. Instead, we consider the media as part of the “conducive context” (Kelly, 2016) for gender-based violence – as well as, on occasions, a means of disrupting that context. In relation to the conducive context, Sam Keen’s description of “the hostile imagination” in the context of war is illuminating: “We first kill people with our minds, before we kill them with weapons” (Silver, 1991). We want to connect this comment to Connell’s understanding of the role of violence in hegemonic masculinity. Engaging with the media can be one of the ways in which violent behaviour can be imagined and understood as a normal – and in some contexts desirable – expression of masculinity. Militarised masculinities have a role to play in this process. Cynthia Cockburn (2004, 2012), whose work informs Lisa DiGiovanni’s analysis of militarised masculinity in Chile in Chapter 29, writes, “the violence of militarization and war, profoundly gendered, spills back into everyday life and increases the quotient of violence in it” (Cockburn, 2012, n.p.). Whilst this collection focuses primarily on inter-personal violence, there are a number of contributions which examine military or other forms of state-sanctioned violence and oppression, including in relation to police brutality (Bhaman and Kuo, Chapter 3) and border control in the US (Palmer, Chapter 28), restrictions to reproductive freedoms in Brazil (Loureiro, Chapter 46), or state-control of media systems in China (Li, Chapter 15; Tan, Chapter 52). These contributions are still characterised by continuum thinking but emerge from a range of different disciplinary, political and geographically-located vantage points – as with DiGiovanni’s centring of Cockburn’s version of the continuum, for instance; or Paula Serafini’s use of the work of Verónica Gago (2019, p. 14) to establish a “political cartography” of violence and so connect women’s experiences of male violence and their experiences of/under state oppression in Latin America. For us as editors, one of the challenges of adopting this expansive understanding of the continuum of gendered violence is the extent to which this opens up the field significantly beyond the parameters of one edited collection – even one with 57 chapters. Contemporary events – including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the state-sanctioned killing and torture of feminist protestors in Iran, and the extension of existing restrictions to reproductive freedoms in a range of territories including the US – demonstrate the importance of this model of thinking. Yet, mediated responses to war and state-sanctioned torture are not foregrounded in this collection as centrally as they would be if we were to start the commissioning process today. Instead, commissioning during a pandemic led us to privilege online spaces of violence and protest as we outline in the next section. 7

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Organisation of the collection The book is organised into four sections: News, Representing Reality, Gender-based Violence Online and Feminist Responses. This structure allows for the identification and analysis of different forms of violence in specific media forms, platforms and national contexts, as well as considering appropriate measures to change and challenge this occurrence, whether at the level of editorial policy, activism, production practices, platform moderation, regulation, public education or legislation. Contributors come from a range of disciplinary traditions and are writing from, and/or in relation to, different national contexts with distinct legal frameworks. These specificities sometimes lead to diverging priorities and strategies for feminist work on and with the media: what may work in one context, may not translate to another. As outlined above, there is no one term we can comfortably use to collectively describe the violence discussed across all the chapters in this collection. The unifying concern is not a type of violence – or a type of victim/survivor or perpetrator – but, rather, an approach to centring gender in examining how violence is made meaningful (particularly at the interpersonal level) whilst remaining attentive to local, cultural and contextual specificities. Many individual chapters explore more than one type of violence, highlighting the relationships between various forms of abuse, the way in which one type of violence may be experienced alongside another and/or the porous nature of online/offline boundaries. This kind of continuum thinking also characterises our editorial introductions to each part. The majority of chapters focus on contemporary examples. Whilst some explore media representations in national contexts marked by traditional gender roles, many others discuss examples from contexts where equality discourses are assumed. However, contributors highlight the complex ways in which equality discourses can at times be mobilised to reinforce right-wing views in order to justify surveillance of, and/or violence against, women and minoritised communities. There are parallels here with Sarah Banet-Weiser’s (2018) understanding of the deep entanglement of “popular feminism” and “popular misogyny”. It is important to recognise that this backlash to feminism is figured in ideological terms. Individual examples are used to make general critiques of feminism and women’s position in the public sphere more broadly. The personal and political are, therefore, at stake in both feminist and anti-feminist responses. The chapters in Part 1 focus on print, online and televised news, recognising that a great deal of feminist scholarship is concerned with the gendered and racialised nature of news reporting. However, subsequent sections look across a range of media. Part 2 includes chapters on gender violence in comedy, vlogs, podcasts, documentaries, dramatised versions of real crime, magazines, pornography, survivor memoirs, official state media and social media. Parts 3 and 4 mainly look at online platforms and social media, though Part 4 extends this scope to include considerations of performance, physical protests, campaign materials, literature, film and television. Although there is only one chapter that includes pornography in the title, there are others that discuss pornography in relation to imagebased abuse and other forms of gender-based violence online. Public education and strategic communication are considered, but in chapters with a broader focus and there are no chapters that focus solely on these forms. A more notable gap, perhaps, is the lack of attention to advertising, radio, reality television and photography, as well as to sports and entertainment journalism. However, we aimed first for geographical range and whilst there are – inevitably – patterns of dominance, and some notable gaps (particularly in relation to

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Introduction

the Middle East and Eastern Europe), we include case studies from 21 different countries, including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Finland, Greece, India, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Portugal, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, the UK, US and Zimbabwe. Several chapters offer more theoretical and/or less geographicallybounded case studies, bringing in examples from a range of different contexts. Our hope is that the collection will prompt readers to consider the relationship between the examples illuminated here and other local, national or regional contexts in their own research. Before moving into the individual chapters, however, there are ethical considerations for a collection like this which are important to address.

Coda: Representing violence ethically in academic work Ethical questions and considerations permeate this collection due to the nature of the subject matter and commitment to ethics in feminist research praxis more widely. As would be expected in a book titled Gender, Media and Violence, each chapter explores examples of violence, some of which are described in detailed ways. We have not included content warnings, though each section has an editorial introduction that maps out some of the different forms of violence discussed. Authors take different approaches to how to handle explicitness and this is by no means resolved within the wider academic field. Some authors choose not to include explicit accounts of violence as a way of mitigating the reproduction of the (often exploitative) representational patterns they are critiquing. Whilst the book contains no violent or sexually explicit images, there are chapters that contain explicit examples of racist and sexist hate speech as well as graphic descriptions of violence. For some authors, it is important to capture this detail explicitly in order to render visible the existence and severity of abuse and highlight the violent aspects of practices that are not always seen in this way. We recognise that there is a wealth of often polemical debates around trigger warnings. However, the nature of trauma means that it is impossible to determine what an individual’s trigger might be. As Jack Halberstam (2017, p. 539) asserts, there is a potential danger of prioritising some forms of gender-based violence over others, which works against the notion of continuum thinking and risks flattening out the complex differences that race and class might make to responses to certain material. Nevertheless, we do not dispute “the demand for new accountability around reception” (Halberstam, 2017, p. 539) and discussions of this accountability for consumers, researchers and educators recur in several chapters. Yet, as Halberstam (ibid) notes, many of the arguments around the use of trigger warnings rely on the idea of passive consumers. We trust in your agency as readers to use the editorial introductions to each part, along with the chapter titles, to make your own decisions about how to prepare mentally to engage with, or even avoid, particular content. There are also complex ethical questions and considerations raised in relation to the representation of victim/survivors in academic writing, particularly when dealing with survivor testimony. Different media forms and platforms enable different terms of agency for victim/survivors which contributors are attentive to. The extent to which victim/survivors, and their loved ones, can retain control over their experiences – particularly in relation to commercially-oriented media – and the potential harm caused when they lose this control, is a recurring question throughout this book, as are the ethics of our own affective responses as media consumers, researchers and educators. Many chapters engage with forms of media – vlogs, social media posts – where victim/ survivors can retain some form of editorial control over their disclosures and, therefore, 9

Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

may choose to retract or restrict previously publicly-available posts or videos at a later date. For this reason, our editorial stance has been to ask contributors to omit identifying details (such as usernames) for private or (on Twitter) unverified1 individuals unless a professional role is associated with their accounts or their online identities are well known. Still, even when users have large followings and might expect their videos and posts to be widely viewed, there remain ethical questions to consider about our role as researchers in handling that material. There is a recognition that whilst it is important for victim/survivors to be acknowledged in these debates, it is also important that they are not permanently linked to that identity. Chapters in Part 1 also explore questions of ethics in relation to decisions on how to report gender-based violence, considering how journalists can help change public understandings and attitudes. However, we need to remain attentive to local restrictions – legal or otherwise – which may shape what journalists are allowed to say about victim/survivors, perpetrators and specific actions or patterns of behaviour. For example, there may be restrictions around revealing victim/survivors’ identities – most often in sexual assault cases, and when the victim/survivor is a child. Whilst such restrictions are often to protect victim/ survivors, this can mean that perpetrators’ perspectives and lives are allowed to dominate media narratives (Miller, 2019; Boyle, Jessie and Strickland, 2022) encouraging a “himpathetic” response (Manne, 2018). There are further considerations around defamation, and – as Li Jun demonstrates in Chapter 15 – uneven access to legal instruments can leave public survivors vulnerable to prosecution. This is also an issue for those of us writing about these issues, meaning we often have to be less definitive in our language than we might like (Boyle, 2019b, pp. 13–14). As we move throughout the book, contributors also consider ethics in relation to our own engagement with representations of gender-based violence and/or with media produced in abusive contexts – as audiences, filmmakers, teachers and researchers. Finally, a note on the language used to refer to those experiencing, and those perpetrating, violence. We have not insisted contributors take a uniform approach to this, recognising that different terms can have utility and power in different contexts. In our editorial work, we have used the term victim/survivor. Whilst the term “victim” has been rejected by some as stigmatising, other feminists have insisted that there is no stigma in victimisation and cautioned that the refusal of the term can be a means of minimising harm (Jordan, 2004, p. 12). At the same time, “survivor” is often preferred in activist contexts as it offers a more agentic identity and the possibility of recognising women’s active resistance (Kelly, 1988). We see value in both terms and use the compound victim/survivor to acknowledge that neither victimisation nor survival are discrete experiences but are themselves moving points on a continuum rather than definitive identity markers (Kelly, Burton and Regan, 1996). This makes sense, for instance, of the oft-repeated claims that media coverage can itself be revictimising (Boyle, 2019b, p. 15). More recently, the term “perpetrator” has also been the focus of critique for similarly suggesting “a kind of person rather than an act or experience” (Khan et al., 2018, p.453). Whilst acknowledging these limitations, we have continued to use “perpetrator” in this collection in the absence of a widely recognised alternative.

Note 1

All of the research presented in this book was conducted before Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter in October 2022.

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Introduction

References Banet-Weiser, S. (2018) Empowered: Popular feminism and popular misogyny. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Boyle, K. (2019a) ‘What’s in a name?: Theorising the inter-relationships of gender and violence’, Feminist Theory, 20(1), pp. 19–36. Boyle, K. (2019b) #MeToo, Weinstein and feminism. Cham: Palgrave. Boyle, K., Jessie, B. and Strickland, M. (2022) ‘Rape in the news: Contemporary challenges’, in Horvath, M. A. H. and Brown, J. M. (eds.) Rape: Challenging contemporary thinking – 10 years on. London: Routledge, pp. 113–127. Campbell, R. (2022) ‘Revisiting Emotionally involved: The impact of researching rape. Twenty years (and thousands of stories) later’, in Horvath, M. A. H. and Brown, J. M. (eds.) Rape: Challenging contemporary thinking – 10 years on. London: Routledge, pp. 12–27. Chantler, K. and Gangoli, G. (2011) ‘Violence against women in minoritized communities: Cultural norm or cultural anomaly?’, in Thiara, R. K., Condon, S. and Schröttle, M. (eds.) Violence against women and ethnicity: Commonalities and differences across Europe. Leverkusen-Opladen: Verlag Barbara Budrich, pp. 353–366. Cockburn, C. (2004) ‘The continuum of violence: A gender perspective on war and peace’, in Giles, W. and Hyndman, J. (eds.) Sites of violence: Gender and conflict zones. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 24–44. Cockburn, C. (2012) “Don’t talk to me about war. My life’s a battlefield.” 50.50, Open Democracy, 25 November. Available at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/dont-talk-to-me-aboutwar-my-lifes-battlefield/ (Accessed: 19 September 2022). Connell, R. W. (1995) Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity. Connell, R. W. and Messerschmidt, J. W. (2005) ‘Hegemonic masculinity: Rethinking the concept’, Gender & Society, 19 (6), pp. 829–859. Durham, M. G. (2021) MeToo: The impact of rape culture in the media. Cambridge: Polity. Fischer, M. (2019) Terrorizing gender: Transgender visibility and the surveillance practices of the U.S. security state. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Gago, V. (2019) La potencia feminista: O el deseo de cambiarlo todo. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños. Gill, A. (2011) ‘Reconfiguring “honour”-based violence as a form of gendered violence’, in Idriss, M. M. and Abbas, T. (eds.) Honour, violence, women and Islam. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 218–231. Gill, A. (2014) ‘Introduction: “Honour” and “honour”-based violence: Challenging common assumptions’, in Gill, A. K., Strange, C. and Roberts, K. (eds.) “Honour” killing and violence: theory, policy and practice. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–23. Halberstam, J. (2017) ‘Currents: Feminist key concepts and controversies. Trigger happy: From content warning to censorship’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 42(2), pp. 532–542. Jordan, J. (2004) The word of a woman? Police, rape and belief. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Khan, S. R., Hirsch, J. S., Wamboldt, A. and Mellins, C. A. (2018) ‘“I didn’t want to be ‘that girl’”: The social risks of labelling, telling, and reporting sexual assault’, Sociological Science, 5(19), pp. 432–460. Kelly, L. (1988) Surviving sexual violence. Cambridge: Polity. Kelly, L. (2016) ‘The conducive context of violence against women and girls’, Discover Society, 1 March. Available at: https://archive.discoversociety.org/2016/03/01/theorising-violence-againstwomen-and-girls/ (Accessed: 18 December 2022). Kelly, L., Burton, S. and Regan, L. (1996) ‘Beyond victim or survivor: Sexual violence, identity and feminist theory and practice’, in Adkins, L. and Merchant, V. (eds.) Sexualizing the social: Power and the organisaiton of sexuality. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 77–101. Manne, K. (2018) Down girl: The logic of misogyny. New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, C. (2019) Know my name. New York: Viking Press. Patel, P. and Siddiqui, H. (2011) ‘Standing in the same dream: Black and minority ethnic women’s struggles against gender-based violence and for equality in the UK’, in Thiara, R. K., Condon, S. and Schröttle, M. (eds.) Violence against women and ethnicity: Commonalities and differences across Europe. Leverkusen-Opladen: Verlag Barbara Budrich, pp. 259–275. Siddiqui, H. and Mahmod, B. (2021) ‘Far and beyond’, Progressive Review, 27(4), pp. 401–413.

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PART 1

News

NEWS Introduction to Part 1 Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge

In Part 1, we focus on news media. The news has been a site of concern for feminist scholars working on gender and violence in a range of disciplinary contexts. This is evidenced in our choice of contributors for Part 1, a number of whom arrive at media analysis in a roundabout way, for instance, as a side-effect of empirical work with/for victim/survivors. They, and we, understand the analysis of the media as part of the broader feminist project to challenge and change gendered inequalities in the social world and see the news as one of the most visible sites of struggle. Research on gender and news globally has consistently pointed to the marginalisation of women as journalists, sources and subjects. The 2020 Global Media Monitoring Project – the largest international, collaborative, longitudinal study of women and news – showed that women made up around four in ten journalists and presenters for the leading news stories globally (Macharia, 2021, p.4) and 25% of news subjects and sources (ibid, p.17). Reflecting on where and in what roles women appear in the news, the GMMP 2020 report notes, “Women’s points of view were less frequently heard in the topics that dominated the news agenda; even in stories that affected women profoundly, such as gender-based violence, the male voice prevailed” (ibid, p.1). Having identified gender-based violence as a topic in around 6% of the stories in the global GMMP data, the report continues, “The near absence of coverage of gender-based atrocities committed against girls and women further supports the observation that such acts have been normalized in and through media coverage” (ibid, p.13). For gender-based violence to be at stake in 6% of the most prominent news stories globally does not seem to us to be a “near absence”. However, this interpretation points to a concern that characterises much work in this area: namely, that the everyday nature of gender-based violence – particularly men’s violence against women and girls – is not proportionately represented in news media. That the mundane nature of certain forms of gender-based violence defies newsworthiness is a recurring theme in the chapters which follow. This matters because making the problem visible is part of how we can make it actionable. Yet, at the same time, for the media to play a role in normalising gender-based violence, as also suggested in the GMMP quote, suggests a contradictory concern: namely that gender-based violence is a routine and unexceptional element of news coverage. This suggests that it is not the “near absence” of gender-based violence which is the problem, but DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-3

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rather the lack of feminist analysis in this coverage. Underpinning the contradictions in the GMMP report, then, is a broader tension in feminist research and activism around genderbased violence which sees the media as both a tool for change and as part of the problem. Sometimes simultaneously. Quantitively oriented projects like GMMP have been persuasive in policy contexts, but are less effective in helping us to unpack the ideological work of news media and this is where qualitative methodologies have prevailed.1 There is now a rich tradition of this work, spanning nations, regions and news genres, different kinds of violence and differently positioned perpetrators and victim/survivors. The chapters in Part 1 are in conversation with this tradition and demonstrate depressing consistencies in news coverage, particularly in relation to victim-blaming and a lack of willingness to engage critically with men’s violence in relation to gender norms. It is notable, for instance, how rarely the term men’s violence is used: the maleness of violence is both assumed and, yet, invisible as such. At the same time, stories about men’s violence against women – and gender-based violence more broadly – are mobilised in different ways to serve specific local and national agendas at different times. We will see, for instance, a recurring concern with how these stories can be mobilised for regressive political ends in relation to race, ethnicity and immigration. Collectively, then, the chapters in Part 1 demonstrate the resilience of certain long-standing feminist critiques of news coverage, whilst highlighting the importance of being attentive to context. We open with a chapter from Nancy Lombard focusing on news coverage of domestic abuse in the UK. Lombard situates her interest in the media in relation to concerns about how sociological research can be distorted in news stories. She demonstrates this by considering how sociological concern with correlations between domestic abuse and football or Covid-19 can become news stories which imply causality and, therefore, suggest easy ways to “fix” the problem of domestic abuse. These stories – and the fixes they imagine – ignore the gendered dimensions of the abuse, render victim/survivors less visible and fail to hold perpetrators to account. This provides an essential context for Stephen R. Burrell and Alishya Dhir’s research on male victims of domestic abuse, which similarly draws on research undertaken in the UK. Burrell and Dhir argue that misrepresentations of men’s violence against women – like those detailed by Lombard – also harm male victim/survivors. Whilst focusing on a statistically rarer form of domestic abuse (against men) this chapter highlights the newsworthiness of the exceptional and asks how these exceptional cases work to redefine the norm. Using social research with victim/survivors to make recommendations about representation, Burrell and Dhir note that many of the men in their study struggled to name their experiences and have them recognised by others. Burrell and Dhir’s argument isn’t that this is the fault of the media (although the gender stereotypes their respondents came up against are familiar from media representations), but rather that news media have an important role to play in shaping how the problem is understood. Following this, in Chapter 3, Salonee Bhaman and Rachel Kuo weave media examples together with broader debates about policing, justice and immigration in their reflections on the heightened visibility accorded to “Asian hate” in the US in 2022. Bhaman and Kuo demonstrate how violence against Asian American women is most visible and most legible as violence, when it can be slotted into a narrative of classed and racialised conflict where professional Asian American women are the helpless victims of Black men.2 This distorts the realities of racist, misogynist violence most routinely experienced by Asian American women and, importantly, prevents a wholesale analysis of American racism which would 16

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recognise what racially minoritised women share in the context of white supremacy. Instead, Bhaman and Kuo note that Asian-hate – at its most spectacular – has been re-presented as a Black phenomenon, and they contrast this with longer histories in which Asian women have been constructed as themselves (sexually) dangerous. For Bhaman and Kuo, questions about justice are therefore inextricable from questions about representation. Approaching the issue of the murder of Indigenous women in Canada, for Kandice Parker, Melanie A. Morrison, Todd G. Morrison, Senator Lillian Eva Quan Dyck and Karissa Wall, the media is firstly a resource they mine for data about murders in Canada. Their approach is a further demonstration of how central the media are to the ways in which we understand and recognise (or fail to recognise) men’s violence against women. One fascinating aspect of their analysis is the disconnect they identify between myths about violence within Indigenous populations which have been clearly identified in existing mediafocused research and the patterns of victim-offender relationships which a quantitative approach to a dataset built largely from media texts can reveal. Importantly, Burrell and Dhir, Bhaman and Kuo, and Parker et al all balance consideration of the “newsworthiness” of more exceptional cases (domestic abuse against men and femicide) with a discussion of the more “common” or recognisable forms of gender-based violence such as those discussed by Lombard. As outlined in the Introduction, Liz Kelly’s (1988) model of the continuum of women’s experiences of sexual violence has been an important touchstone throughout this collection. A central aspect of Kelly’s work was to insist that the continuum did not imply a hierarchy of seriousness. The exception she makes is sexual murder. Unsurprisingly, murder remains among the most newsworthy forms of violence. In adopting gendered terms to more accurately name the murder of women because they are women, feminists have sought to preserve the distinction Kelly makes about the severity of sexual murder whilst retaining the value of the continuum as a means of understanding these crimes as men’s violence against women. In Chapters 5 and 6, Denise Buiten and Federica Formato demonstrate the ongoing relevance of debates about naming and the im/precision of language. Denise Buiten focuses on familicide: the annihilation of family members, often accompanied by suicide. Whilst the term familicide is not, itself, gendered, Buiten demonstrates that the relationship between familicide and men’s domestic abuse of women has become a central – but contested – aspect of news reporting. Although this recognition is in some ways indebted to feminism, it can also be deployed in problematic ways to monsterise perpetrators. In cases of familicide, there seem to be two opposing explanations, either that perpetrators are “evil” or “monstrous” domestic abusers, or that they are in psychological distress. In effect, this is an updated version of the “mad or bad” framing of perpetrators of which feminists have long been critical, as it works against the kind of continuum thinking at the heart of Kelly’s analysis which allows us to see perpetrators as “normal” men. Like Bhaman and Kuo – and anticipating arguments by Emmaleena Käkelä (Chapter 10) and Satu Venäläinen (Chapter 40) – Buiten thus points to the ways in which feminist arguments can be mobilised to potentially anti-feminist ends. Buiten builds from this discussion of media framing to reflect more broadly on feminist theorisations of familicide, highlighting the extent to which questions of language and representation are at stake not only in our engagements with media but in our theoretical and activist interventions. Federica Formato’s emphasis, in Chapter 6, is on femminicidio in Italy – specifically, the murder of women by (former) intimate partners. Formato highlights a mainstream resistance to naming these crimes in gendered ways, which maps across policy and media. Her 17

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chapter focuses on selected news reports of femminicidio on the afternoon infotainment television programme La Vita in Diretta. Like Buiten, she finds inconsistency in reporting that both seeks to establish intimacy and familiarity with victims and, at the same time, draws on the perpetrator’s framing of their actions and motivations, for example, in relation to jealousy. In Chapter 7, Kathryn Claire Higgins considers how news reporting of white male vigilantism has been weaponised in Australian news and current affairs to justify the criminalisation of Black African communities. Whilst male-on-male violence is too rarely considered in discussions of gender-based violence, Higgins reminds us of the centrality of violence to masculinity and demonstrates how the legibility of that violence is highly racialised. She contrasts the contextualisation and explanation of white male vigilantism in Australian reporting, with the portrayal of the “Black African youth” targeted by victims of vigilante violence as an ungendered, dehistoricised and displaced mass. This, she argues, is part of a process whereby vulnerability is reconstructed to centre not the actually violated Black male, but the “threatened” communities the murderous white male vigilante claims to protect. Horribly, grieving Black women can be mobilised as part of that narrative, as symbols of the vulnerability caused not by white male vigilantism but, rather, by the Black male “criminality” the vigilantes are allegedly responding to. The threat white men have posed and continue to pose to women of all races is thus displaced. There are resonances here with Bhaman and Kuo’s chapter in that both highlight the ways in which stories about violence against racially minoritised communities are most newsworthy when they can be interpreted through the lens of Black male criminality. Whilst in the cases of anti-Asian hate crime that Bhaman and Kuo discuss this is through pitting one (model, feminised) minority against another (criminalised, Black, masculinised), in the stories Higgins considers this is achieved even when Black men are indisputably the victims of white, male violence. In the next three chapters, the authors are similarly concerned with how stories about gender and violence stand in for other social concerns and all three use the lens of moral panic to explore what is at stake in these representations. In Chapter 8, Tia S. Andersen, Jennifer Silcox and Deena A. Isom trace the origins of the moral panic around girls’ violence in their study of US media reporting from the 1980s and 1990s. In these reports, girls’ violence is generative of moral panic precisely because it challenges gender norms and so gender is consistently kept in view in a way it is not in routine reporting on boys’ and men’s violence. Their study highlights the different conditions of visibility for minoritised girls, pointing, in particular, to the ways in which the appearance of girls of colour is endlessly revisited, and policed, in these reports. This chapter also highlights the way that girls’ violence is presented as a result of feminist gains – a kind of equality gone wrong. Later in the collection, Satu Venäläinen (Chapter 40) and Guy Harrison and Melody Huslage (Chapter 41) similarly discuss the ways in which equality discourses are mobilised online to undermine experiences of abuse. The feeling that the more things change the more they stay the same is a recurring one when engaging with the media’s treatment of gender violence. The racialised dynamic of visibility is also at stake in Aisha K. Gill’s chapter, focusing on news coverage of so-called “grooming gangs” in the UK in the early 2010s. Gill’s chapter reminds us that the sexual abuse of girl children is not always seen as a social problem. In the cases she discusses, it is the ethnicity of the perpetrators and the ease with which they are therefore marked as monstrous in media discourses, which makes the abuse of these predominately white, working-class girls a problem. In other contexts, these girls are not 18

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necessarily visible as victims given dominant media narratives associated with this group (see also Wood, Chapter 23). The disproportionate attention devoted to Asian grooming gangs in the cases Gill discusses also meant that the more-common reality of child sexual exploitation by white male perpetrators was hidden from view, along with the targeting of minoritised girls. Similarly, Emmaleena Käkelä is concerned with the conditions and costs of visibility for ethnic minority communities in the UK. She traces the moral panic around female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) across policy, campaigning and media contexts, to demonstrate how the victimised bodies of women and girls of colour function in broader debates about immigration and border control. Interestingly, Käkelä argues that moral panic permeates representations on both the right and left of the political spectrum, being mobilised to slightly different political ends but with equally dehumanising results for women and girls of colour. She also notes key differences in the representations of women and girls, with adults more likely to be sexualised as victims (with a visual emphasis on their genitals) and blamed as perpetrators responsible for practising FGM/C on sad, vulnerable and voiceless girls. Käkelä and Gill are therefore concerned with the ways in which putatively feminist discourse can be co-opted in media and policy contexts in the UK to be used against communities of colour, in ways that consistently marginalise the expertise and lived knowledge of feminists of colour. In this, they echo Bhaman and Kuo’s concern that violence against minoritised women matters most when it can be mobilised against other minority communities. In all three cases, this means that the structural violence of both sexism and racism is rendered invisible in the contexts they focus on. This is consistent with the arguments of other chapters in Part 1 which point to the ways in which perpetrators from majority communities are understood as aberrant individuals meaning the gendered dimension of the violence is consistently marginalised, a theme that is taken up in the next chapters which focus on sexual abuse. Mthokozisi Phathisani Ndhlovu focuses on male victims of sexual violence and considers how Zimbabwean news stories discredit male victims, take an ambiguous position in relation to female perpetrators and sensationalise these unusual crimes, not least by representing women’s violence through the lens of moral panic as a sign of the downfall of existing social arrangements. In Chapter 12, Gabriela Nilsson is similarly interested in how stories about sexual violence can be reconfigured as expressions of related but distinct fears. Her particular focus is on how the significance of rape was subordinated to “greater dangers” – HIV and the internet – in Swedish reporting, starting in the late 1990s. As with Lombard’s discussion of reporting on domestic abuse, Nilsson argues that these rape stories are not really about rape at all – or certainly not about rape as a gendered crime. Instead, the reports Nilsson analyses are fundamentally moral in character, aligning rape to disease (and dis-ease), replacing the gendered threat of violence with an embodied threat of contagion that gains particular potency because of the serialised nature of the crimes discussed. These stories express contemporary fears but do so in a way which marginalises and distorts the gendered inequalities and violence at their heart. Understanding them requires, as Nilsson demonstrates, an attentiveness to the broader socio-historical and political context in which they circulate – her approach echoing that taken by Gill (Chapter 9) and Käkelä (Chapter 10). Following Nilsson, and also focusing on sexual abuse, Júlia Garraio, Inês Amaral, Rita Basílio Simões and Sofia José Santos turn their attention to Portuguese news media in a chapter that draws on both text-based analysis and interviews with journalists. They acknowledge that the contemporary moment is a contradictory one which has seen legal 19

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and social advances in challenging sexual violence on paper which have not always been evidenced in practice. They show that newsrooms and journalism education programmes remain relatively impervious to feminist critique, resulting in the uncritical reproduction of rape myths. Yet, there are dedicated journalists whose work has shifted the script. This contradictory picture of progress and restraint is brought into focus in their discussion of four of the most high-profile cases of sexual violence in Portuguese news media in the 2000s. Collectively they demonstrate that the meaning of allegations of sexual violence is always negotiated with reference to broader debates about gender and power, with national (and nationalist) inflections. Victim-blaming myths are most readily deployed in defence of men – like the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo – whose cultural and social position is most assured. In other cases, aspects of feminist analysis can make it into mainstream discourse, albeit in limited and contested terms. But Ronaldo’s cultural value is simply too great for the allegations against him to be interpreted as credible. That a feminist analysis of news reporting throws up contradictions is also evident in Onyinyechi Nancy Nwaolikpe’s chapter on the reporting of child abuse in Nigeria. Whilst Nwaolikpe argues that child abuse is massively underrepresented, with a very selective focus on sexual crimes and bullying external to the family, in her study of The Punch and The Guardian she also finds many examples of what feminists in other contexts have identified as best practice in reporting (see Zero Tolerance, n.d.; Femifesto, 2016; Impe, 2019; Sreedharan and Thorsen, 2021). These include: situating individual stories in relation to general patterns; drawing on expertise from those working to support victim/survivors; including a call to action for readers; and (in contrast to Käkelä’s discussion of FGM/C in the UK), linking gender-based abuse of adult women and girl children. At the same time, problems identified with reporting in other national contexts are present here too: the marginalisation of survivor speech (difficult to achieve in relation to children, of course), a tendency towards victim-blaming language and a focus on “innocence” to construct hierarchies of victims, for instance. The final two chapters in Part 1 extend Garraio et al.’s interest in journalistic practice, centring production and regulatory contexts. Li Jun focuses on high-profile civil cases linked to China’s #MeToo hashtag – #RiceBunny – and, like Garraio et al, is centrally concerned with the intersections of gender, power and celebrity. Rice Bunny (
) is pronounced metoo, and this localised version of #MeToo was adopted by Chinese feminists to evade censorship. Inherent in the hashtag, then, is a reminder of the potential limits placed on speaking out and on using media platforms to do so. Indeed, this is a central theme of Li’s chapter, which focuses on civil cases taken against alleged victim/survivors by the powerful, high-profile men they have accused. These #RiceBunny cases pre-date the 2022 Johnny Depp and Amber Heard defamation trial and are a potent example of how power and money shape the possibilities and realities of public testimonials. Whilst this is not unique to China – both Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey (2019) and Ronan Farrow (2019) have documented the intense pressure they were placed under during their investigations into Harvey Weinstein, for instance – Li’s chapter documents the specific ways in which news and social media interact in the Chinese context, shaping what stories about sexual harassment by the powerful can be told and where they can be told. Her chapter testifies both to the groundswell of support for women speaking out and to the costs inherent in doing so. She maps the effective spread of misinformation about these cases to serve the interests of powerful accused men and draws on interviews with media professionals to demonstrate the constraints placed on news organisations in reporting. 20

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Einar Thorsen and Chindu Sreedharan’s chapter, with which we close Part 1, also considers the experiences of reporters, this time in India. Their chapter draws on interviews with 257 journalists working across print, online and broadcast news, in which they explored their attitudes towards, and experiences of, sexual assault reporting. Although the journalists largely expressed good intentions, Thorsen and Sreedharan note that they are guided primarily by legal frameworks which significantly limit the potential for engaging with survivor discourse. At the same time, both the broader journalistic cultures in which they are embedded and the external actors (including police) they rely on in reporting these issues, reflect broader patriarchal attitudes around rape and sexual assault, resulting in a certain fatalism and frustrating any good intentions. Thorsen and Sreedharan thus point to the need to situate work with journalists in a broader context, moving beyond good practice guidelines to more fully consider the practicalities of journalistic practice and habitus. It may seem like a stretch to suggest that this allows us to end Part 1 on a hopeful note, but by highlighting the good intentions of reporters – however constrained these are – Thorsen and Sreedharan remind us that the change that other contributors to Part 1 demonstrate is so needed is not always a change that journalists are resistant to. This is not to be naïve about the challenges ahead. Indeed, Thorsen and Sreedharan situate their work with journalists against the backdrop of studies of Indian news media which point to continued victim-blaming attitudes, marginalisation of survivor voices and an emphasis on a limited range of victims and types of assault. Across Part 1 as a whole, we see that many of the problems with news reporting identified by scholars like Helen Benedict (1992) more than 30 years ago persist not only across time but also across a variety of national news contexts (UK, US, Australia, Italy, Nigeria, Sweden, Zimbabwe, Portugal, China and India). There are, of course, specificities which it is vital to study and understand: Gill’s analysis, for instance, situates the news coverage of so-called “grooming gangs” in relation to wider discourses around ethnicity, gender and crime in the UK; Ndhlovu’s chapter introduces forms of gender-based violence – specifically “sperm harvesting” – which have not (yet) been the focus of sustained attention either in media or scholarship outside of Zimbabwe; Nwaolikpe’s discussion allows us to see that the monsterisation of the paedophile is by no means a universal phenomenon; whilst Li’s contribution highlights the importance of understanding how national media systems work and in whose interests. This knowledge is essential in enabling activists and scholars to push for change – not just in representation, but also in media workplaces and practices – as part of the broader movement to challenge, and ultimately end, gender-based violence.

Notes 1 2

However, developments in using corpus linguistics in large news samples offer potential here (e.g. Tranchese, 2023). Where Black is capitalised, it is typically to signal that the term is used as a (politicised) identity marker (particularly in Euro-American contexts). White is also sometimes capitalised in this way, although this is a newer trend. In our editorial introductions, we have tried to present the terms in the way they are used by authors, recognising that this varies across contexts.

References Benedict, H. (1992) Virgin or vamp: How the press covers sex crimes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Farrow, R. (2019) Catch and kill: Lies, spies and a conspiracy to protect predators. London: Fleet.

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Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge Femifesto (2016) Use the right words: Media reporting on sexual violence in Canada. Available at: http://www.femifesto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/UseTheRightWords-Single-May16.pdf (Accessed: 17 December 2022). Impe, A. (2019) Reporting on violence against women and girls: A handbook for journalists. UNESCO. Available at: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000371524 (Accessed: 17 December 2022). Kantor, J. and Twohey, M. (2019) She said: Breaking the sexual harassment story that helped ignite a movement. London: Bloomsbury. Kelly, L. (1988) Surviving sexual violence. Cambridge: Polity. Macharia, S. (ed) (2021) Who makes the news? 6th Global Media Monitoring Project. Available at: https:// whomakesthenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/GMMP2020.ENG_.FINAL20210713.pdf (Accessed: 28 November 2022). Sreedharan, C. and Thorsen, E. (2021) Sexual violence and the news media: Issues, challenges, and guidelines for journalists in India. New Delhi: UNESCO. Available at: https://unesdoc.unesco. org/ark:/48223/pf0000378325.locale=en (Accessed: 17 December 2022). Tranchese, A. (2023) From Fritzl to #MeToo: Twelve years of rape coverage in the British press. Cham: Palgrave. Zero Tolerance (n.d.) Media guidelines on violence against women. Available at: https://www. zerotolerance.org.uk/resources/Media-Guidelines-on-Violence-Against-Women.pdf (Accessed: 17 December 2022).

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1 “SENSATIONAL SPIKES” AND “ISOLATED INCIDENTS” Examining the misrepresentation of domestic abuse by the media using the case studies of football and Covid-19 Nancy Lombard Introduction Domestic violence and abuse (DVA) is a complex, multifactoral, international and increasingly politicised social problem. Efforts to tackle DVA have been bolstered by research that has highlighted its nature, extent and detrimental impact. One of the consequences of the increased public and academic attention given to DVA, within the landscape of this ongoing debate, is that research which suggests potential links between DVA and certain factors (such as football, alcohol, mental health or Covid-19 for example) has proliferated and these links may be misinterpreted, misrepresented and misunderstood especially within the news media that are looking for “quick fix” stories. This chapter examines how the media (mis)represents DVA and perpetuates misunderstandings using two case studies that originally looked at the context of media reports in terms of football and Covid-19. Using Kitzinger’s (2000) template model, it argues that the media has used a fixed method of reporting DVA that prioritises certain types of abuse, involving a particular kind of victim and/or perpetrator. Although advances have been made here, encouraged by the proliferation of reporting guidelines (see for example, Easteal et al., 2021; Zero Tolerance, 2019) in the main these have focused on improved reporting on victim/ survivors and perpetrators. It is argued here that by framing cases as singular “incidents” or as a set of “spikes” the media continues to perpetuate a misrepresentation of the phenomenon of DVA as one-off episodes of physical violence. In doing so a more nuanced understanding of DVA as coercive control and as a course of conduct is disregarded. The chapter concludes with recommendations to prioritise the social context of DVA and the need to understand the dynamics of domestic violence as a pattern of abusive behaviours and gender inequalities, rather than viewing it as a reaction to a specific event.

Background In 2000, in a ground-breaking move, the Scottish Executive (now Government) adopted a gender-based definition of domestic abuse recognising that unequal gender power relations DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-4

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and socially constructed gender norms around gender roles provide the context within which domestic abuse occurs. Scotland is the only country within the UK to frame domestic abuse in this way. Furthermore, the Domestic Abuse (Scotland) Act 2018 came into effect on 1 April 2019. The law criminalises an abusive course of conduct regardless of the presence of physical violence perpetrated by an individual toward a partner or ex-partner, in line with Stark’s (2007) concept of coercive control. In its first year, 1,681 crimes were recorded under the legislation. Of those, 94% (or 1,577) involved a female victim and 6% (or 104) had a male victim (Scottish Government, 2020a). Whilst this chapter is written within the DVA context of Scotland it incorporates some analysis of non-UK news media.

Media and domestic abuse The media according to Ferrell and Websdale (1999) is a sphere through which meanings of crimes are constructed, attributed and enforced. It provides a framework for the public to interpret and understand DVA. DVA as a form of men’s violence has been traditionally and theoretically positioned within the private space of the home because of the nature of the relationship of those involved. Media focus on DVA is therefore somewhat of an anomaly because of its connection with the home and private space. Indeed, Hawley, Clifford and Konkes (2018, p. 2306) debate this contradiction, arguing for the media to; reframe family violence as a national problem rather than simply a private matter that happens behind closed doors to nameless, mostly female, victims. Stanko’s analysis reflects this dilemma of covering the issue within the media well, arguing (2006, p. 546) that familiarity between perpetrator and victim “disables a language of criminal harm”. As such it becomes necessary to locate space as a socio-cultural construction rather than simply the physical location of the home (Lombard, 2015). Doing so highlights the pervasive nature of such violence and identifies the “domestic” in terms of the intimate relationship thereby illustrating the extensive nature of men’s violence and the different types of abusive behaviours (Radford and Kelly, 1996). It is this contradiction that underlies news reporting on domestic abuse cases. Much has been written on the media coverage and representation of men’s violence against women, be it from the “stranger danger” phenomenon (Kitzinger, 2001; Scott, 2003), the glorification and sexualisation of certain forms of violence (Lees, 1997; DiBennardo, 2018) or the media’s role in perpetuating fear through the social control of women (Heidensohn, 2000; Easteal, Holland and Judd, 2015; Honkatukia and Keskinen, 2018). In relation to DVA, the media tends to report examples when the perpetrator, or the victim, is a celebrity (or in the public eye), when it involves the death of a child, or when the media can create an “explanation” for the behaviour of the perpetrator – typically based around victim blaming (affairs, leaving the relationship) and usually only then when the DVA results in death (Geertsema-Sligh and Worthington, 2020). Even in these cases, it is particular victims that make the news whilst others do not (Ingala-Smith, 2017). If there is nothing that draws this “private experience” into the public interest domain, then it is in effect a “nonstory” (Lyons and Henderson, 1997). Easteal, Holland and Judd (2015) in their comprehensive review found that the media still focused on the “mutuality” of the violence making a case that both the man and the women were equally culpable. An Australian review of media practices the following year 24

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(Sutherland et al., 2016a), also found that articles about domestic abuse were more likely to be published if the perpetrator was female, distorting the comprehensive view of violence against women as a recognised global phenomenon. They also found that when reports covered domestic murders, the focus was on the method of the murder and not the history of violence that preceded it, sensationalising the event and not reporting the facts (ibid.). Sutherland conducted a systematic review of representations of violence against women within the mainstream media (digital and social media) in 16 countries concluding that the majority misrepresented the reality of violence perpetrated against women: Some of the most common ways this occurs are considered with reference to the interrelated key themes: misrepresentations and rape myths, blame and responsibility, social context, sensationalism, and voices of authority and opinion. (Sutherland et al., 2016a, p. 6) The increasing public disdain and tolerance for sensationalised news stories especially those glorifying violence or focusing upon the behaviour of the victim (Sutherland et al., 2016b) has meant that journalists are encouraged to use less sensationalist language and not victim blame. Easteal et al. (2021, p. 1) in their case study of best practices for reporting violence against women in the media, emphasised the significant role the media has to improve a “community’s understanding and response”. They found that including personal information about victim/survivors increases empathy and focuses on perpetrator responsibility. Whilst by no means has this been achieved, there is a conscious move by (some) journalists away from victim blaming, perpetrator exoneration and reinforcement of myths. According to Chesney-Lind and Chagnon (2017) although there have been encouraging moves within the media to acknowledge DVA as a serious problem, it is still: often reported in a routine manner that focuses on minutiae instead of context, informing audiences minimally about the nature, extent, and causes of domestic violence. (2017, n.p.) So instead of the focus on the victim or the perpetrator, the media has begun to frame DVA in a particular way. It is now acknowledged as a social problem but rather than an appreciation of the gendered social and cultural dynamics underpinning DVA it seeks to attribute causal explanations to its occurrence.

Media frames and narratives In her work on childhood sexual abuse Kitzinger (1999, 2000) adapts Goffman’s notion of framing to create an explanation as to how the media reports upon specific stories. In this chapter, her theory is adapted to illustrate how media cover stories of domestic abuse. She maintains that “‘templates’ are defined by their lack of innovation, their status as received wisdom and by their closure […] they reify a kind of historical determination which can filter out dissenting accounts, camouflage conflicting facts and promote one kind of narrative” (pp. 75–77). Kitzinger’s concept of media templates – used to highlight patterns in particular issues or social problems – can be applied here to how the media reports domestic abuse. It differs from her original theoretical framework in that it is not one event that provides the template 25

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for others to be replicated from, rather it is the social “problem” of domestic abuse/domestic abuse homicides that is used as a template overlaid with cumulative “facts” that all point to the same “causal” links and outcomes. Repetition here is important. In Kitzinger’s work, it is one dominant template that imports the knowledge through which subsequent stories will be viewed. In domestic abuse coverage we can illuminate the tried and tested templates of: Poor perpetrator – he lost his job/wife/he was a lovely family man Victim blaming – what she did to deserve his actions Causal factors – football/affairs/feminism/alcohol/more recently with Covid-19 The following two case studies highlight how the media presents DVA in terms of these “templates”: isolated incidents (that can be blamed on individual circumstances) or sensational spikes blaming external factors for increased occurrence.

Case study 1: Domestic abuse and football In the UK, the narrative surrounding the apparent link between football and domestic abuse is perpetuated by local and national media (Café, 2012; Duell, 2014; Cambridge, 2016) based on quantitative data showing a correlation between football matches and DVA, which led to suggestions that football was a cause of it. Considering this, the Scottish Government commissioned a review of national and international literature to examine the links between football and domestic abuse (Crowley, Brooks and Lombard, 2014). There are few UK studies that specifically address the relationship of football to DVA. Those that exist primarily compare prevalence (as recorded either by police, other emergency services, or hospital accident and emergency departments) on the days that football games take place with various comparators. All these studies consistently show a link between DVA and football though, as identified by Crowley, Brooks and Lombard (2014), there are notable limitations of these studies. Yet messages from these studies informed media coverage around the UK, particularly in the run-up to large football tournaments or “crucial” matches providing what Kitzinger (1999) would call a “template”. Existing academic studies within the Scottish context are all quantitative analyses, based on incidents reported to the police (Scottish Government Analytical Services, 2011; Strathclyde Police, 2011; Dickson, Jennings and Koop, 2012; Williams et al., 2013). These studies have a predominant focus on “Old Firm” matches (fixtures between Celtic and Rangers)1 and their findings indicate that relative to various comparators, there was an increase in recorded domestic abuse incidents on the day that “Old Firm” fixtures were played. This was reported as being between 13% and 138.8%, depending on several variables: the day of the week the match took place; the comparator day/event; and the salience/outcome of a match. Studies that used other (non-Old Firm) football matches as a comparator found examples of apparent relationships between recorded domestic abuse incidents and the existence of the football match. However, these were less pronounced patterns and smaller increases (Crowley, Brooks and Lombard, 2014). Crowley, Brooks and Lombard (2014) identified limitations of these studies on the basis that the nature and characteristics of DVA offences recorded or how they came to the attention of the police were not known. Moreover, the potential impact of different recording practices between police forces, or different policing practices on the days of football matches, was not considered; this is a significant issue given the likelihood of increased policing around certain football matches and the growing prioritisation of DVA 26

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within Police Scotland. Studies conducted in England have broadly similar findings and limitations (Brimicombe and Café, 2012; Kirby, Francis and O’Flaherty, 2013). In addition to this body of research, anecdotal evidence and reports from the police and specialist DVA services across the UK (Williamson, Brooks and Lombard, 2015) raised the question of whether DVA increases, or is triggered by, major football tournaments and what that means for both local and national policy and practice. Williamson, Brooks and Lombard (2015) concluded that the absence of qualitative research exploring the perspectives of victims, perpetrators or practitioners was a “significant omission” in existing research evidence and consequently in national media coverage. They sought to establish how the potential links between football and DVA could be understood and addressed by gathering the views of key stakeholders across England and Scotland. In highlighting the complex and contested nature of the relationship between football and DVA, a diverse range of contributory and confounding factors were identified in the form of alcohol, the weather, match expectations, team affiliations, gendered norms, class, ethnicity, masculinity, entitlement and permissions. Specialist DVA service providers were concerned that focusing on football masks the underlying gendered causes of DVA and potentially offers perpetrators excuses for their abusive behaviour. The blurring of causes and excuses within the media frame looking at domestic violence is not new. Such data is reported without recognition of the complexities of an abusive relationship in national media with a cause-and-effect simplicity that forms part of the media’s DVA template, as the following headlines demonstrate: Euro 2020: Warning over spikes in domestic abuse during England matches (Oppenheim, 2021) Euro 2012: Tournament football and domestic violence (Café, 2012) Domestic violence almost doubles during old firm matches (Johnson and Johnson, 2013) When the media focuses upon these “triggers” it risks over-simplifying and “reincidentalising” DVA; replicating a process described by Hearn (1998) whereby DVA is reduced to an incident or set of discreet incidents through conventional agency or police responses. Examining the wider social factors that lead to the apparent increase in reporting figures – more police, the preemptive arrest of offenders, women having the space to make phone calls and violence and abuse within existing abusive relationships – helps to facilitate a more nuanced understanding of DVA as a form of “coercive control” (Stark, 2007) embedded within an ongoing pattern of behaviour. The argument made here is that in its reporting of Covid-19 and domestic abuse, the media replicated familiar “templates” (Kitzinger, 2000) yet again, focusing upon “triggers” – in particular, isolation, pressure, boredom, frustrations and anger – again oversimplifying and “re-incidentalising” DVA.

Domestic abuse, femicides and Covid-19 In January 2020, there were reports from China that a virus was circulating, originating from a city named Wuhan. Gradually over the course of the next few months, countries 27

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around the world went into “lockdown” due to Covid-19: the streets were empty and legislation was drafted that meant by law, people had to remain in their homes. On Monday 23 March 2020, the Governments in the UK followed suit. The UK media started to report a “surge” or “spike” in the number of DVA cases (e.g. Mohan, 2020; Grierson, 2021; Sales, 2021). Spiking and surging make us think in terms of more one-off incidents – but the pattern of abuse that is already there is increasing in terms of frequency and type because both parties always remain together. It is critical to contextualise these reports: more men were not starting to be abusive or violent, the patterns of abuse were becoming more frequent and, in some cases, being reported more readily. Early data from those countries that went into lockdown earlier than the UK suggested that during self-isolation, reports of DVA increased. In China for example, a report suggests that the number of reports of abuse increased threefold when comparing figures from February 2019 to February 2020 (cited in Williamson, Lombard and Brooks-Hay, 2020). Similarly, in France, reports of abuse increased by over 30% (ibid.), whilst there was a 33% rise in helpline calls in Singapore (ibid.). Spain reported 18% more calls to emergency helplines in the first two weeks of lockdown compared to the month before (ibid.), and reports from India suggest domestic violence has doubled (ibid.). Australia reported a 75% increase in internet searches relating to support for domestic violence victims (ibid.). Some communities, who are subject to distinct types of social inequalities, are disproportionately impacted by Covid-19 and therefore Covid-19 and DVA (see Sundari, 2010). For example, women with no resource to public funds, BME workers in frontline key services, those with underlying health conditions and disabilities and those living in poverty. From the outset, specialist DVA services (already dealing with precarious funding following austerity cuts) were preparing for a potential increase in both the occurrence and reporting of abuse, calling on the respective UK governments to issue clear guidance to potential victims and perpetrators during this time. UK (Westminster) (2020) and Scottish government (2020b) guidance stated that the police would come to assist in cases of domestic violence and that fleeing an abusive home was classified as essential travel. In non-virus times, on average, two women a week are murdered by their partners, and these crimes rarely make the news (ONS, 2019). In the three weeks following lockdown, there were 16 domestic abuse murders in England and Wales. This number was higher than the normal rates reported by Counting Dead Women and the Femicide Census (Allen et al., 2020). Describing domestic abuse killings as “Covid-19 murders” is dangerous as, like linking it to football, it masks the reality that the perpetrator is to blame for the violence: UK’s first coronavirus murder as husband is arrested over death of wife (Courtney-Guy, 2020) LOCKDOWN KILLER Pensioner, 70, who strangled wife is cleared of murder after court told first UK lockdown made him ‘snap’ (Little, 2021) The media framing of perpetrators is important. These men are constructed as family men, boyfriends, husbands and fathers who have murdered the women (and/or children) in their lives. This frames the violence in terms of love and passion, not power and control: 28

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The pilot admitted to the killing but maintains that it was a “crime of passion” after she threatened to divorce him. (Fahey, 2022) LOVE TRIANGLE MURDER Jealous husband ‘stabbed wife of almost 20 years to death after “losing it” when her affair with local joiner was outed’ (Christie, 2017) FAMILY HORROR Dad murders his two kids before killing himself over wife’s affair after telling brother ‘I’ll take them with me’ (Hill, 2020) The perpetrators are then assumed a veneer of respectability and normality associated with “the mate down the pub”, “the devoted dad” or the “family man next door”. This further cements the narrative that the virus (or other such context) is to blame and that, ordinarily murders such as these, would not otherwise be happening. More recent research by Bates et al. (2021) examining domestic abuse murders during Covid-19 has since shown that overall numbers did not actually increase. In their report, Bates et al. (2021, p. 17) found that: “Covid-blaming” as an excuse or justification by perpetrators for domestic abuse or coercive and controlling behaviour. […] This analysis shows how important it is for police, other agencies, the courts, and the public to understand that Covid might be used by perpetrators variously as a weapon of control and as an excuse for abuse or even murder. Much of the context of the lockdown magnifies existing abusive behaviours: isolation from friends, family and employment; the opportunity for constant surveillance; restrictions on access to the outside world and limitations on food. A further problem which comes from the media focus on domestic abuse as individual incidents is that it implies that we are in a situation that will dissipate after Covid-19 when DVA was there before Covid-19 and will be there after it. Whilst there may be increases in abuse and reporting, many victim/survivors will have used their many coping strategies to survive in social isolation and not report, this explains why in some countries reporting has decreased. Specialist services know from increases in reporting after school holidays and other times when families are in closer proximity, that reports are likely to increase for a period after the lockdown has ended. For many, it will be the time when they can leave the house, re-charge and get support that they will find the strength to report and leave an abusive situation.

Conclusions The key conclusion from these case studies is that focusing on “a cause” – or any other specific factors or events, in this case, football or Covid-19 – risks over-simplifying domestic violence. The media’s approach was to look at cases as one incident or set of separate incidents, rather than attempt a more nuanced understanding of domestic violence and abuse as a form of coercive control embedded within a regular pattern of behaviour. There are theoretical and methodological difficulties in identifying causal links between specific 29

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factors or events; even where correlations are found to exist there is little evidence of why these correlations exist, or indeed which direction they operate in. When the media focuses on external events – be it a health crisis, political instability, or a football match – it masks the underlying gendered causes of DVA and potentially offers perpetrators excuses for their abusive behaviour. Amidst the media reports it is imperative that we continue to see the dynamics of DVA as both a pattern of abusive behaviours and a product of gendered social and cultural norms rather than a reaction to a specific factor or event such as Covid-19. If, as a society, we continue to offer excuses to perpetrators we make it more difficult for victim/survivors to get help, pandemic or not. The “virus” element and lockdown make DVA more newsworthy. The importance of a football match or tournament does the same. This creates a media loop in which the misreporting of these crimes perpetuates the incident-based perception of abuse which subsequently leads to further misreporting and misunderstanding. This is a problem because many statutory and other agencies – whether that is the police, courts, or health practitioners – also continue to perceive this type of abuse in terms of incidents, when the reality for victim/survivors is that this is an underlying, ongoing, fluctuating pattern of abuse. This means that the reality of abuse becomes hidden and domestic abuse becomes invisible. It is crucial that we continue to see the dynamics of domestic violence as both a pattern of abusive behaviours and a product of the unequal world we live in, rather than viewing it as a reaction to a specific event. All that does is make it harder for victims to be seen and to get the proper help and support they need. Worse, it shifts the blame from those who should be held accountable for the violent abuse of their partners.

Acknowledgements This chapter is based on previously conducted and published research with Dr. Oona Brooks-Hay and Dr. Emma Williamson. I would like to thank them for allowing me to use our shared labour to write this chapter. I would also like to thank Dr. Katy Proctor for commenting on an early draft of this chapter.

Note 1

The Old Firm is a collective term for the Glasgow football teams Rangers and Celtic, who have a fierce rivalry linked to the religions of Protestantism and Catholicism.

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Nancy Lombard Johnson, S. and Johnson, S. (2013) ‘Domestic violence almost doubles during old firm matches’, The Telegraph, 20 September. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/ 10324172/Domestic-violence-almost-doubles-during-Old-Firm-matches.html (Accessed: 24 August 2022). Kirby, S., Francis, B. and O’Flaherty, R. (2013) ‘Can the FIFA World Cup football (soccer) tournament be associated with an increase in domestic abuse?’, Journal of Research into Crime and Delinquency, 51 (3), pp. 259–276. Kitzinger, J. (1999) ‘The ultimate neighbour from hell? Stranger danger and the media framing of paedophiles’, in Franklin, R. (ed.) Social policy, the media and misrepresentation. London: Psychology Press, pp. 207–221. Kitzinger, J. (2001) ‘Transformations of public and private knowledge: Audience reception, feminism and experience of childhood sexual abuse’, Feminist Media Studies, 1(1), pp. 91–104. Kitzinger, J. (2000) ‘Media templates: Patterns of association and the (re)construction of meaning over time’, Media, Culture and Society, 22(1), pp. 61–84. Lees, S. (1997) Ruling passions: Sexual violence, reputation and the law. Buckingham: Open University Press. Little, E. (2021) ‘Lockdown killer: Pensioner, 70, who strangled wife is cleared of murder after court told first UK lockdown made him “snap”’, The Sun, 15 February. Available at: https://www. thesun.co.uk/news/14058907/pensioner-strangled-wife-cleared-murder-lockdown-snap/ (Accessed: 24 August 2022). Lombard, N. (2015) Young people’s understandings of men’s violence against women. 1st edn, London: Routledge. Lyons, G. and Henderson, J. K. (1997) ‘Fools for scandal: “How the media invented whitewater”’, Newspaper Research Journal, 18(3), p. 156. Mohan, M. (2020) ‘Coronavirus: Domestic violence “increased globally during lockdown”’, BBC News, 12 June. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-53014211 (Accessed: 24 August 2022). Office for National Statistics (2019) Homicide in England and Wales: Year ending March 2018. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/ homicideinenglandandwales (Accessed: 24 August 2022). Oppenheim, M. (2021) ‘Warning over spikes in domestic abuse during England matches’, Independent, 12 June. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/euro-2020-domesticabuse-women-b1864404.html (Accessed: 26 August 2022). Radford, J. and Kelly, L. (1996) ‘“Nothing really happened”: The invalidation of women’s experiences of sexual violence’, in Hester, M., Kelly, L. and Radford J. (eds.) Women, violence and male power. Buckingham: Open University Press, pp. 19–33. Sales, D. (2021) ‘Covid crimewave: Domestic abuse, fraud and hacking soar during pandemic as criminals take advantage of victims’ changing behaviour in lockdown’, Daily Mail, 22 July. Available at: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9813933/Domestic-abuse-fraud-hackingsoar-pandemic.html (Accessed: 24 August 2022). Scottish Government Analytical Services (2011) The link between football and offending and victimisation: A summary of the available evidence. Edinburgh: Scottish Government. Scottish Government (2020a) Recorded Crime in Scotland 2019-2020. Available at: https://www.gov. scot/publications/recorded-crime-scotland-2019-2020/pages/3/ (Accessed: 8 March 2022). Scottish Government (2020b) Support for victims of domestic violence during Covid-19 outbreak. Available at: https://www.gov.scot/news/support-for-victims-of-domestic-violence-duringcovid-19-outbreak/ (Accessed: 24 August 2022). Scott, H. (2003) ‘Stranger danger: Explaining women’s fear of crime’, Western Criminology Review, 4(3) pp. 203–214. Sundari, A. (2010) ‘No recourse, no support: State policy and practice towards South Asian women facing domestic violence in the UK’, The British Journal of Social Work, 40 (2), pp. 462–479. Stanko, E. A. (2006) ‘Theorizing about violence: Observations from the Economic and Social Research Council’s Violence Research Program’, Violence Against Women, 12(6), pp. 543–555. Stark, E. (2007) Coercive control: How men entrap women in personal life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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“Sensational spikes” and “isolated incidents” Strathclyde Police (2011) Old Firm fixtures: Impact on violence, disorder, domestic abuse and policing, ‘H’ Territorial Policing Anti-Violence Directorate, Glasgow: Strathclyde Police. Sutherland, G., McCormack, A., Easteal, P., Holland, K. and Pirkis, J. (2016a) ‘Media guidelines for the responsible reporting of violence against women: A review of evidence and issues’, Australian Journalism Review, 38(1), pp. 5–17. Sutherland, G., McCormack, A., Pirkis, J., Easteal, P., Holland, K. and Vaughan, C. (2016b). Media representations of violence against women and their children: State of knowledge paper (ANROWS Landscapes, 15/2015). Sydney, NSW: ANROWS. UK Government (2020) Domestic abuse: How to get help. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/ domestic-abuse-how-to-get-help (Accessed: 24 August 2022). Williams, D. J., Neville, F. G., House, K. and Donnelly, P. D. (2013) ‘Association between old firm football matches and reported domestic (violence) incidents in Strathclyde, Scotland’, Sage Open, 3(3). Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2158244013504207 (Accessed: 2 December 2022). Williamson, E., Brooks, O. and Lombard, L. (2015) Football and domestic abuse in Scotland and England: A feasibility study, final report. London: Sir Halley Stewart Trust. Williamson, E., Lombard, N., and Brooks-Hay, O. (2020) ’Domestic violence and abuse, coronavirus, and the media narrative’, Journal of Gender-Based Violence, 4(2), pp. 289–294. Zero Tolerance (2019) Media guidelines on violence against women. Available at: https://www. zerotolerance.org.uk/resources/Media-Guidelines-on-Violence-Against-Women.pdf (Accessed: 8 March 2022).

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2 THE MEDIA AND MALE VICTIM-SURVIVORS OF DOMESTIC ABUSE Stephen R. Burrell and Alishya Dhir

Introduction The ways in which the media constructs discourses around domestic abuse have significant implications for societal perceptions and responses to the problem. This is certainly true in relation to the experiences of men who are victim-survivors of domestic abuse. This is a highly contentious and polarising topic, about which there are many misconceptions and disagreements, both within academic scholarship and society more broadly. Indeed, men’s experiences of victimisation can sometimes be exploited for political ends; for example, as an attempt to delegitimise feminist analyses or campaigns to end men’s violence against women (also Venäläinen, this volume). This chapter is built upon a feminist, critical masculinities approach, on the basis that feminist theory and research have contributed more than any other school of thought to our understandings of violence, abuse and victimisation. We see no contradiction in recognising that intimate forms of violence such as domestic and sexual abuse have a substantially disproportionate impact on women and girls, but that men can be subjected to them too and that their experiences need to be recognised and understood as part of what is a complex picture. The chapter is informed by research conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic (see Westmarland et al., 2021). The project involved observing calls to the Respect UK Men’s Advice Line for male victim-survivors of domestic abuse between June-September 2020. Members of the research team listened to 221 phone calls and read 113 e-mails to the helpline (a fraction of the overall contacts made). This enabled us to gain in-depth insights into the experiences of a large number of men, in an anonymous and relatively “natural” format. The data consisted of notes taken during calls and e-mail content, which was anonymised before being coded and thematically analysed. We excluded calls from people who did not appear to be male victim-survivors (e.g. professionals, family members, men who described situations which aligned more with them being the primary perpetrator of abuse). The research was conducted principally to learn more about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on male victim-survivors, and how interventions can serve their needs. However, it also provided broader insights into men’s experiences of domestic abuse, which can help us to move beyond some of the public misconceptions which remain influential.

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-5

The media and male victim-survivors of domestic abuse

Our argument here is not that the media are uniquely powerful or that their stories are passively absorbed, but rather that the experiences of victim-survivors demonstrate the importance of thinking critically about representation as part of any social research. When that research focuses on experiences which are – in many ways – outliers (and hence more newsworthy) this presents particular challenges (see also Ndhlovu; Gill; and Andersen et al, this volume). We draw on our research to highlight key factors which journalists should take into account when reporting on these issues, structuring the chapter around common “myths” about male victim-survivors of domestic abuse.

“Male victim-survivors don’t exist” Perhaps the most rudimentary myth is the notion that male victim-survivors of domestic abuse simply don’t exist – that this is something which only affects women. This connects to dominant ways in which masculinity is constructed in society, which associate manhood with strength, power, unemotionality and never showing weakness. This can make it difficult to come to terms with the idea of a man being a victim, of being vulnerable, of needing help (Huntley et al., 2019). Men are assumed to be active rather than passive, to be the subject rather than the object, to dominate rather than be dominated and any scenario which doesn’t fit this picture can be hard to recognise. This is magnified further in the intimate setting of the home and relationships, which men are rarely encouraged to focus on or communicate about. Men continue to be associated primarily with the public sphere, whilst their practices and experiences in the private sphere are less often explored, amongst one another or in wider culture. Our research clearly demonstrates that male victim-survivors of domestic abuse exist, with many of the men calling the Men’s Advice Line describing significant experiences of harm. One caller, Brian, said “I don’t know how much longer I can take this situation … mentally”. This was typically at the hands of current or former (female) partners in heterosexual relationships, though this is likely to be in part because specialist services such as the Galop Helpline exist for LGBTQ+ people in the UK. A minority described abuse by other family members (such as parents or siblings of any gender). Despite this, our difficulties in accepting men’s vulnerabilities provide obstacles to society recognising them as victims of domestic abuse. As a result, practitioners, friends and family members may find it hard to believe or take seriously when a man comes forward to disclose abuse. Indeed, male victim-survivors themselves may struggle to understand or accept what is happening to them (which can be difficult for any victim). Fears about showing “weakness” also obstruct men from opening up or seeking help if they are being victimised; something which is again challenging for any victim of domestic abuse, but with particular dynamics for men (Huntley et al., 2019). It is therefore valuable for the media to tell the stories of male victim-survivors in ways which take the issue seriously and do not demean the victim as if he has somehow “failed” to live up to masculine expectations. This will help to improve public awareness that male victim-survivors do exist – and to show that it can happen to any “type” of man, including those who appear to fit hegemonic standards of masculinity. In the process, it is important not to present male victim-survivors as exceptional or highly unusual, to avoid increasing a sense of isolation among men in similar situations (Scarduzio et al., 2017).

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“Domestic abuse is not harmful to men” Others might perceive that whilst men can be victims of domestic abuse, it is not as harmful for them as it is for women. Again, this can be linked back to gender norms, in which men are often expected to be tough, to never show fear or emotional fragility and be in control rather than subordinate or submissive. There is arguably a sexist element to this assumption; if domestic abuse is harmful to women, then why wouldn’t it be harmful to men as well? Our research demonstrated the real and substantial harms many of the callers were experiencing to their mental and physical health, and to their lives and freedom more broadly, with a sense of fear and anxiety often described. Alex remarked that “It got to the point where I was scared to do anything”. Men discussed experiencing physical, psychological, economic and, in a few cases, sexual abuse, with coercive and controlling behaviours often appearing to play a significant role. Covid-19, and measures to prevent it, were frequently exploited to further the control, as were vulnerabilities around immigration status. In some cases, differences in size and strength meant the caller did not feel at serious risk from the violence, but this could still contribute to a sense of bullying and humiliation. Sometimes perpetrators also involved other family members such as brothers in the abuse, or threatened to do so, for example in cases of “honour-related” violence, increasing the sense of danger. Often the psychological abuse took a gendered form, with several men discussing being called “weak”, “pathetic” and not “manly” enough. For example, Trevor remarked, “She says things like ‘You’re not a man, grow a pair, you can’t get it up’”. Some of the men described how either the perpetrators, or people they had confided in, were dismissive of their experiences. This points to the wider societal discomfort with the idea of men being vulnerable. It is therefore vital for the media to challenge such stereotypes about masculinity rather than feeding into them, by avoiding downplaying or making light of men’s experiences of domestic abuse (Scarduzio et al., 2017). It also suggests that discussing domestic violence in “gender-neutral” terms does little to help male victim-survivors. The abuse men are subjected to takes gendered forms and masculine norms can prevent men from getting the help they need, so it is vital to take the specificities of these complex gender dynamics into account for male and female victim-survivors alike.

“Domestic abuse is worse for men” Counterposed to this, the opposite is also claimed; that domestic abuse is more harmful for men than it is for women. This feeds into unhelpful “hierarchies” of victims when clearly domestic abuse is harmful for anyone. It also fails to take account of the multitude of struggles and obstacles which female victim-survivors face – frequently interlinked with wider gender inequalities and sexist stereotypes. For instance, it is often pointed out that few support services such as refuges exist for male victim-survivors. However, this can create an inaccurate perception that no such support is available (indeed, one valuable thing the media can do is signpost to such services), as well as ignoring the different needs men may have (for example, some may have less desire to make use of refuges). It also ignores the fact that support services for women are still significantly underresourced. It is therefore important to consider the similarities and differences in men’s and women’s needs and experiences. For example, it is possible to identify points of unity – that domestic abuse as a whole is not taken seriously enough, that the entire sector remains underfunded

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and more support for all victim-survivors is needed – whilst recognising that different groups benefit from specialist forms of support. There are also complexities relating to differences in experiences. For instance, many of the callers did not describe feeling substantially afraid or threatened by their partners to the same extent that female victim-survivors often report. Monty commented, “I am six foot three, and it’s hard to realise that abuse is occurring, because of the knowledge that physically I am ‘safe’”. So the fact that men do tend to have more physical strength and greater socialisation in the use of violence than women, is likely to impact upon the nature of domestic abuse in different contexts and may mean that, on average, the severity of impacts and risks faced by female victims is greater. In addition, living in a gender-unequal society creates multiple issues which can compound women’s experiences of abuse and be exploited by perpetrators. This includes women typically having fewer economic resources, being more restricted by caregiving responsibilities and having to overcome widespread misogynistic stereotypes, such as the notion that women lie and manipulate to get what they want. None of this is to suggest that male victims are not substantially harmed by domestic abuse, however, it shows that their experiences are likely to be different (Scott-Storey et al., 2022). The point is that whilst domestic abuse can have different forms and impacts, it is always highly damaging. This also shows that painting an accurate picture of the problem requires taking account of the context in which domestic abuse is being perpetrated and how this varies in relation to multiple intersecting systems of power and inequality.

“Women are not capable of violence and abuse” There is also a deep-rooted myth that women cannot perpetrate abuse, perhaps especially in relation to those close to them. This is influenced by stereotypes around femininity suggesting that women should be passive, compliant, caring and selfless. In reality, there is of course no reason why women cannot use violence; nothing which makes this innately or solely a problem to do with men. Yet when women are violent it can be fixated on and seen as particularly shocking precisely because it goes against dominant norms of femininity (also Andersen et al., this volume). Sometimes such expectations result in benevolent sexism, in which women are patronisingly perceived as not having the capacity to cause genuine mental or physical harm to others, especially men. In other cases, they underpin hostile sexism, in which female perpetrators are judged particularly harshly (treated as “evil” “witches” for example) when perceived to defy feminine norms. Yet as discussed earlier, society does not generally teach women and girls to use violence in the ways that it does to men and boys, nor is violence by women legitimised or constructed as desirable in the ways that men’s violence often is. It is these constructions of gender that are central to why most violence in society is committed by men. But this does not mean that women can’t perpetrate violence and abuse. Our research suggested that domestic abuse by women does look different in some ways. It may still be based on exerting power and control, but not necessarily “female domination” as such. The abuse frequently appeared gendered, but primarily in belittling the victim’s failure to live up to masculine standards, such as being a successful breadwinner. So rather than inverting patriarchal power dynamics, female perpetrators often seemed to actually reproduce them, but in a form where they were in charge, because of their partner’s supposed inability to fulfil that role. 37

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There are important lessons here for media coverage. Reporting should avoid perpetuating stereotypes about femininity in covering violence by women. This means recognising that women are capable of perpetrating violence and abuse, whilst refraining from overly fixating on or demonising them in sexist ways in the process. One helpline caller, Joel, said “When I tell certain guys they brush it off in quite a sexist way and say ‘that’s just women for you’”. Increased understandings of emotional and psychological abuse have helped us to recognise that women can engage in such behaviour too, but they are certainly not unique to women; it is clear that male perpetrators of domestic abuse can also be highly manipulative for example.

“There are equal numbers of male victim-survivors to women” Recognising that women are capable of violence does not mean equating that with the scale of men’s violence. Despite this, some have spuriously claimed that there is “gender symmetry” in the prevalence of domestic abuse (Scott-Storey et al., 2022). Domestic abuse in general is very difficult to measure because many victim-survivors do not recognise their experiences or wish to share them. Nonetheless, it is clear that this is a phenomenon which has a significantly disproportionate impact on women, both in terms of scale and consequences, and that male victim-survivors are in the minority. Acknowledging this does not mean that men cannot be subjected to domestic abuse or that their experiences should not be taken into account. So what do existing statistics tell us? During the year ending March 2019, the Crime Survey for England and Wales estimated that 7.5% of women (1.6 million) and 3.8% of men (786,000) had experienced domestic abuse (Office for National Statistics – ONS, 2019). However, the Crime Survey is limited in that it counts domestic abuse “incidents”, rather than being able to detect their impact and context (for example, whether they are acts of self-defence) or identify a course of abusive conduct. Further analysis of Crime Survey data by Walby and Towers (2018) found that 83% of “high frequency” victims (where more than 10 crimes were recorded) were women. The ONS (2021) notes that between the years ending March 2018–March 2020, 76% of victims of domestic homicide were women. ONS (2020a) data between March 2017–March 2019 shows that of 83 male victims of domestic homicide, the suspect was female in 39 cases and male in 44 cases (of the 274 female victims, the suspect was male in 96% of cases), and some of these are likely to have been committed in self-defence. Meanwhile, data about domestic abuse-related prosecutions (ONS, 2020b) shows that 92% of defendants were recorded as male, with 77% of victims recorded as female and 16% recorded as male (the victim’s sex was not recorded in 7% of cases). Whilst none of these statistics are perfect, they support the assessment that a substantial majority of victim-survivors are women, but that there is also a not-insignificant minority of male victims and that in some cases this will be within LGBTQ+ relationships. The media should therefore ensure that it is reporting accurately on the problem, by avoiding hyperbolic statements about the extent of male victimisation, whilst also recognising that male victim-survivors do exist and need support. This underscores that researchers should be sensitive to how their research is disseminated, to ensure studies about male victimsurvivors are not misrepresented or exaggerated by the media. Another factor to consider is that, by virtue of being rarer, cases of male victimisation may sometimes receive more media interest, whilst domestic abuse against women may be treated as more “par for the course”. 38

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“All male victims are abused by women” This highlights another important issue – that a proportion of male victim-survivors are gay, bisexual or trans men, abused by other men. This is a group which remains somewhat marginalised within discourses about male victimisation. However, such men are likely to be in particular need of support, given that issues facing male victim-survivors in general will be compounded by systemic homophobia, biphobia and transphobia. Anxieties victims may have about their sexuality and gender identity (which they may wish to keep private) can also provide barriers to seeking help and be exploited by perpetrators (Donovan and Barnes, 2020). The existence of domestic abuse in LGBTQ+ people’s relationships is sometimes assumed to “invalidate” feminist analyses of the problem, yet feminist theories of a patriarchal gender order and the complex ways in which this manifests itself within individuallevel gender relations have much relevance to abusive contexts beyond men’s violence against women (Connell, 2021; Scott-Storey et al., 2022). For instance, the patriarchal model of one person being “in charge”, having more agency and control and making most decisions is likely to play a substantial role in shaping most intimate relationships, even if it isn’t always manifested as a man having power over a woman. Meanwhile, research illustrating that men who are more attached to restrictive masculine expectations are more likely to use violence is likely to have some relevance to abuse perpetrated by gay, bi and trans men too (Oringher and Samuelson, 2011). Not all gay, bi and trans men necessarily challenge hegemonic masculinity; some are invested in it and seek to accomplish it in their own lives (Kay and Jeffries, 2010). It is therefore important for the media not to ignore the different contexts in which domestic abuse can take place, and to tell more stories about LGBTQ+ people’s lives in all their positive and negative hues. When covering domestic abuse in LGBTQ+ relationships, however, it should avoid sensationalising or “Othering” them in the process, as if there is something “uniquely” “deviant” about LGBTQ+ people.

The role of the media Considerable research demonstrates the multitude of problems with media coverage of gender-based violence. This is frequently rooted in, and in turn helps to amplify, sexist and misogynistic attitudes towards women and myths and misconceptions about different forms of violence and abuse (Gill and Toms, 2019). However, there is little research on how this relates to male victim-survivors – though it seems likely that some, if not all, of the myths described above continue to have some influence in media reporting. Lloyd and Ramon (2016) analysed reports about domestic abuse (including a minority about male victim-survivors) in two UK newspapers over ten years. Common themes identified in the reporting included a recurrence of victim-blaming, constructions of victims as being either “deserving” or “undeserving”, and a sexualisation of domestic violence (Lloyd and Ramon, 2016). Similar themes arose in one of the only studies exploring media portrayals of male victims, which focused on intimate partner homicide. Hanson and Lysova (2021) noted that amongst 64% of the 203 news articles they analysed, male victims were doubted or blamed and represented as non-ideal and illegitimate victims, typically through questioning their character or exhibiting sympathy towards the perpetrator. They also found that in 56% of the articles male victims were humanised, through victim personification and recognition of the perpetrator, though this was most likely to be when they fulfilled masculine stereotypes

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about being a “family man”, suggesting that gendered expectations also influence media treatment of male victim-survivors. Next, we explore further examples of common issues in media reporting of men’s victimisation connected to the myths we have discussed.

Sympathy and sexualisation in portrayals of perpetrators Alongside evidence that victim-survivors are often responsibilised or disregarded in domestic violence coverage, the media has a tendency to create sympathetic (mis)representations of perpetrators. This is widely evidenced in cases where men are the perpetrators, which Manne (2017) has described as “himpathy”. However, it can also be observed in media reports of male victimisation. In a Sun newspaper article (Baker, Crick and Pisa, 2017), a young woman was described as “too brainy for jail” after she physically attacked her partner. Much of the article details how the perpetrator was a student at Oxford and intended to become a surgeon. Meanwhile, the victim’s presence in the article is minimal, implying his experience to be less important or interesting and missing an opportunity to increase readers’ understanding of male victimisation. Additionally, the article gives significant attention to the appearance of the perpetrator (including multiple photos of her) and the aforementioned sympathy may in part be because she fits the young, white, conventionally attractive image which the media focuses disproportionately upon in their reporting of gender-based violence. This portrayal is also reflective of the commonplace “femme fatale” presentation of women who commit crimes, where fetishisation and exoticisation take priority over the facts of cases or victim experiences (Goulandris and McLaughlin, 2016). Such cases suggest that the media is more likely to pay attention to domestic abuse, including male victimisation, if it can in some way be sexualised, illustrating how media sexism can also influence coverage of female perpetration.

Creating a hierarchy of domestic abuse Speaking to the myth that domestic abuse is “worse” for male victim-survivors, the media can be complicit in constructing a hierarchy of domestic abuse, framing certain experiences as more serious or significant than others. For instance, the Daily Mail (Pleasance, 2014) ran an article describing “‘one of the worst’ cases of domestic violence police have seen” in its headline, concerning abuse perpetrated by a woman against her male partner. It goes on to quote a police officer remarking that “This was a nasty attack. It is certainly one of the most serious cases of domestic violence I have ever come across. It was a relentless assault”. There may be a well-intentioned element to this, in trying to demonstrate how serious men’s victimisation can be, but, in the process, it unhelpfully suggests that domestic abuse is more harmful or difficult for some people than others. Similar comparisons are made further on in the article when a solicitor is quoted commenting that “It is harder for men to come forward because of ideas of masculinity and that men should be tough”. Much of the article also focuses solely and in detail on the physical abuse the man was subjected to. Whilst this is undoubtedly important, it risks creating the impression that physical violence is more serious than other aspects of domestic abuse, or the only form it takes. This can impact on how other male victim-survivors make sense of their experiences and whether or not they recognise that they are being subjected to abuse. By placing its attention only on this attack, it also feeds into the perception that domestic violence is based around “isolated incidents” rather than patterns of abusive behaviour (see also Lombard, 40

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this volume). The article does not mention any features of the relationship more broadly, or whether the abuse took additional forms, such as coercive control. Perhaps the media is especially keen to focus on physical violence when covering domestic abuse by women against men because this is deemed particularly shocking and aberrant in relation to dominant gender norms. It can thus help to paint a fuller picture of domestic abuse by situating such acts within their wider context, both in terms of the nature of the relationship more broadly and how it connects to wider social dynamics. For example, the article also features a photo of the female perpetrator with a black eye but does not explain how this was sustained.

Who are seen as the experts? Some of the aforementioned quotes illustrate another issue with media coverage of male victim-survivors. Such reports often rely heavily on what is said in court cases, by state actors such as the judge, legal teams and police officers. However, there has been criticism levelled at the priority those working in the criminal justice system receive as experts or trustworthy sources within media reports of domestic abuse (Sutherland et al., 2016), especially given the lack of care many victim-survivors describe regarding their treatment by institutions such as the police. This was mentioned in several of the helpline calls we observed; for example, Jordan remarked “I went to the police … the police officer said ‘are you having a laugh?’” There is a great deal of research illustrating how police culture is highly masculinised (Brown, 2007). Because of this and continued inadequacies in police responses to domestic abuse more broadly, many male victim-survivors, who may perceive themselves as failing to “be a man”, are likely to be reluctant to come to them for help. Additionally, research has identified “a gap of trust” (Donovan and Barnes, 2020) between LGBTQ+ victims of domestic abuse and the police. Consequently, it could at times be viewed as disrespectful for police perspectives to be centred when many victim-survivors do not feel safe to include them in the help-seeking process. Similarly, research on representations of violence against women has identified that feminist expertise is routinely side-lined in reporting (Boyle, 2019). The media could therefore look to include the perspectives of experts who provide support to domestic abuse victims, such as specialist, community-specific third-sector organisations. Yet it should also be recognised that some of those seeking to advocate for men primarily focus on antifeminist, “men’s rights” agendas, so it is important to listen to those actually working with male victim-survivors, such as – in the UK context – the Men’s Advice Line.

Has there been progress? It is also important to recognise examples of progress where it is made in media coverage of domestic abuse. For instance, in 2019 the BBC released a 50-minute documentary entitled Abused By My Girlfriend. The documentary approaches male victimisation in a different manner from the aforementioned news articles. It focuses in-depth on the case of a young man and, whilst it does discuss the harrowing physical violence he was subjected to, it also provides insights into the impacts of controlling and coercive behaviour on him. The victimsurvivor and his family are given space to discuss the harm of the abuse he suffered and responsibility is placed on the perpetrator without her actions being presented as “monstrous” or “deviant”. 41

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At the same time, there are still notable issues with how the documentary has been marketed. The BBC used sensationalist language in their promotional materials, citing a police officer’s comment that it was “one of the most extreme cases of domestic violence they had ever dealt with”. Again, whilst it may be well-intentioned to seek to “prove” this, it unhelpfully hierarchises and distorts the unique and subjective nature of how individuals are harmed, whilst also ignoring the ultimate harm that some cases of domestic abuse lead to in homicide. Of course, media marketing needs to attract attention and convince people to engage with the product, but surely it is possible to do this in a way which remains sensitive, respectful and accurate to the nature of domestic abuse.

Conclusion The media can play an important part in efforts to tackle domestic abuse, by enhancing people’s awareness and understandings and their motivation to help stop it. This would be highly valuable in relation to male victim-survivors, about whom there remains a lack of cognisance and considerable myths and misconceptions. Within discussions about male victimisation there needs to be more of a focus on the facts; what’s actually happening to men and what help they need, rather than re-hashing politically charged debates about questions such as “gender symmetry”. Domestic abuse is a complex issue, which manifests in people’s lives in a variety of ways and it is important to recognise that. There are both similarities and differences in men’s and women’s experiences of domestic abuse – and one common thread is that media coverage often fails victim-survivors of all genders. But the media is changing and there are good examples of reporting on domestic abuse and journalists working with antiviolence activists to foster social change. One powerful thing the media can do is to help bring into question restrictive gendered expectations, by telling a wider range of stories about the complex and diverse nature of people’s lives, practices and experiences. This includes providing more open and honest insights into men’s experiences of vulnerability.

References Abused By My Girlfriend (2019) BBC Three. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/ p0700912/abused-by-my-girlfriend (Accessed: 12 March 2022). Baker, N., Crick, A. and Pisa, N. (2017) ‘Too brainy for jail: Oxford student surgeon who stabbed Tinder boyfriend could avoid prison thanks to “extraordinary” talent’, The Sun, 17 May. Available at: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3574770/oxford-student-lavinia-woodwardstabbed-tinder-boyfriend-spared-jail/ (Accessed: 10 March 2022). Boyle, K. (2019) #MeToo, Weinstein and feminism. Cham: Palgrave. Brown, J. (2007) ‘From cult of masculinity to smart macho: Gender perspectives on police occupational culture’, in O’Neill, M., Marks, M. and Singh, A. (eds.) Police occupational culture: New debates and discussion. Oxford: Elsevier, pp. 189–210. Connell, R. (2021) Gender: In world perspective (4th ed.). Cambridge: Polity Press. Donovan, C. and Barnes, R. (2020) ‘Help-seeking among lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender victims/survivors of domestic abuse: The impacts of cisgendered heteronormativity and invisibility’, Journal of Sociology, 56 (4), pp. 554–570. Gill, R. and Toms, K. (2019) ‘Trending now: Feminism, sexism, misogyny and postfeminism in British Journalism’, in Carter, C., Steiner, L. and Allan, S. (eds.) Journalism, gender and power. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 97–112. Goulandris, A. and McLaughlin, E. (2016) ‘What’s in a name? The UK newspapers’ fabrication and commodification of Foxy Knoxy’, in Gies, L. and Bortoluzzi, M. (eds.) Transmedia crime stories. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 17–45.

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The media and male victim-survivors of domestic abuse Hanson, K. and Lysova, A. (2021) ‘The father, the son, and the abuser: The portrayal of male victims of intimate partner homicide in the news media’, Homicide Studies. Online first, 25 September. 10.1177/10887679211047445. Huntley, A. L., Potter, L., Williamson, E., Malpass, A., Szilassy, E. and Feder, G. (2019) ‘Helpseeking by male victims of domestic violence and abuse (DVA): A systematic review and qualitative evidence synthesis’, BMJ Open, 9 (6), e021960. Kay, M. and Jeffries, S. (2010) ‘Homophobia, heteronormativism and hegemonic masculinity: Male same-sex intimate violence from the perspective of Brisbane service providers’, Psychiatry, Psychology and Law, 17 (3), pp. 412–423. Lloyd, M. and Ramon, S. (2016) ‘Smoke and mirrors: UK newspaper representations of intimate partner domestic violence’, Violence against Women, 23 (1), pp. 114–139. Manne, K. (2017) Down girl: The logic of misogyny. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ONS (2019) Domestic abuse victim characteristics, England and Wales: Year ending March 2019. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/ domesticabusevictimcharacteristicsenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2019/ (Accessed: 10 March 2022). ONS (2020a) Domestic abuse victim characteristics, England and Wales: Year ending March 2020. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/ domesticabusevictimcharacteristicsenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2020 (Accessed: 10 March 2022). ONS (2020b) Domestic abuse and the criminal justice system, England and Wales: November 2020. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/ domesticabuseandthecriminaljusticesystemenglandandwales/november2020 (Accessed: 10 March 2022). ONS (2021) Domestic abuse victim characteristics, England and Wales: Year ending March 2021. Available at: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/articles/ domesticabusevictimcharacteristicsenglandandwales/yearendingmarch2021 (Accessed: 10 March 2022). Oringher, J. and Samuelson, K. W. (2011) ‘Intimate partner violence and the role of masculinity in male same-sex relationships’, Traumatology, 17 (2), pp. 68–74. Pleasance, C. (2014) ‘Woman who attacked her boyfriend with a hammer, pole and broken bottle jailed for eight years after “one of the worst” cases of domestic violence police have seen’, The Daily Mail, 31 October. Available at: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2815712/ Woman-attacked-boyfriend-hammer-pole-broken-bottle-jailed-eight-years-one-worst-casesdomestic-violence-police-seen.html (Accessed: 11 March 2022). Scarduzio, J. A., Carlyle, K. E., Harris, K. L. and Savage, M. W. (2017) ‘“Maybe she was provoked” exploring gender stereotypes about male and female perpetrators of intimate partner violence’, Violence Against Women, 23 (1), pp. 89–113. Scott-Storey, K., O’Donnell, S., Ford-Gilboe, M., Varcoe, C., Wathen, N., Malcolm, J. and Vincent, C. (2022) ‘What about the men? A critical review of men’s experiences of intimate partner violence’, Trauma, Violence, & Abuse. Online first, 30 January: 10.1177/15248380211043827. Sutherland, G., McCormack, A., Pirkis, J., Easteal, P., Holland, K. and Vaughan, C. (2016) Media representations of violence against women and their children: State of knowledge paper. ANROWS Landscapes 25/2015. Sydney: ANROWS. Walby, S. and Towers, J. (2018) ‘Untangling the concept of coercive control: Theorizing domestic violent crime’, Criminology and Criminal Justice, 18 (1), pp. 7–28. Westmarland, N., Burrell, S. R., Dhir, A., Hall, K. E., Hasan, E. and Henderson, K. (2021) Living a life by permission: The experiences of male victims of domestic abuse during Covid-19. Durham: Durham University.

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3 INVISIBLE FEELINGS, ANTI-ASIAN VIOLENCES AND ABOLITION FEMINISMS Salonee Bhaman and Rachel Kuo

We begin with two deaths. Michelle Go was killed after being pushed onto the subway tracks on 15 January 2022 in New York City. Weeks later, Christina Yuna Lee was assaulted and stabbed to death in her Chinatown apartment. Both were college-educated Asian American women with professional class backgrounds.1 Their deaths were described by various media outlets as “shocking” and “senseless” acts of violence. While neither incident was deemed to be racially motivated, media coverage frequently emphasised their racial and gender identities as Asian American women and also circulated details of the attackers’ “criminal backgrounds” and histories of assault (Newman et al., 2022). Both attackers were Black men. This coverage followed familiar patterns of exploiting narratives of Black criminality and exacerbating Black and Asian conflict. In ongoing coverage of antiAsian violence in urban spaces during the pandemic, news outlets have highlighted attackers’ prior arrest records, former incarceration and homelessness (Hong et al., 2021). In New York City, the racial and gendered dimensions of Go and Lee’s murders became inextricably linked to political conversations about responding to anti-Asian violence and ongoing debates about the role of policing. The attacks on Go and Lee both occurred within a context of ongoing violence directed against Asian women, prompting feelings of heightened fear and anxiety over the possibility of verbal and physical violence during daily life. The specific details of these two acts of violence — pushed in front of a train and followed home at night — provoke a kind of visceral horror. These murders also occurred almost a year after the highly publicised and devastating murders of eight people, six of whom are Asian women, during targeted attacks on Asian-owned massage parlours in Atlanta, Georgia in March 2021. Unlike the murders of Go and Lee, the perpetrator in the Atlanta shootings was a white man, who targeted massage parlours because they represented “sexual temptation” to him (New York Times Live, 2021). His identification of the massage parlour as a site of sexual temptation signals a broader truth: Asian women occupy a particular place, constructed within a social imaginary and amplified by media, as simultaneously sexually available, devious and submissive, as both criminals and victims. In this construction, they are rendered permanently vulnerable to danger while also being dangerous (Shimizu, 2005; Cheng, 2018; Ninh, 2018). 44

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-6

Invisible feelings, anti-Asian violences and abolition feminisms

Understanding these instances of anti-Asian, gender-based violence together allows us to see a broader pattern. Through the pandemic, widespread media coverage of the gruesome deaths of Asian women marks a rupture from the silence that has historically shrouded similar moments of gender-based violence. This unmuting has functioned in two ways, both exposing histories of white supremacist constructions of Asian American women while simultaneously suggesting carceral solutions targeted towards other minority communities as appropriate redress. By questioning how violence against Asian women becomes rendered legible and visible (and illegible and invisible) in the US media landscape, this chapter offers theoretical frameworks for understanding racial and gendered violence in the context of how state violence structures death and dying. In addition, this chapter outlines the duality of criminalised violence against Asian women alongside the racialisation of Asian women as criminals. We connect subsequent state-based responses to this violence, particularly demonstrating how crime-based frameworks lead to expansions of structural harms. Media coverage and public discourse about anti-Asian violences under the umbrella of #StopAsianHate has worked to make Asian-ness more visible in discussions of racism and has also been used as an argument for racial justice motivations to increase policing. While policing has always been racially unjust, the stories of Go and Lee, combined with other media spectacles of the perceived new phenomena of anti-Asian racism, offer sites to examine and critique the narrative possibility that a “racially just” response to violence requires additional policing. We argue that to “stop Asian hate”, we must address the historical and contemporary problems of US imperialism, militarism and policing. In doing so, we build on scholarly discourses that intervene in narratives of racial and gendered violence as spectacular and unpredictable (e.g. Noble, 2014; Hong, 2015) and criticisms of carceral feminisms and narratives of violence that emphasise policing, punishment and hate crime legislation as legitimate and effective responses to racialised and gendered violence (e.g. Bernstein, 2012; Law, 2014; Kim, 2018). We end with a vision of abolition feminism as a response to antiAsian violences past and present.

Invisible feelings and the visibility of violence against Asian women The tenor of being rendered silent and invisible is a theme that permeates much of Asian American discourse, particularly surrounding violence and media (e.g. Roshanravan, 2018). The mutable visibility of Asian women’s specific experiences with gendered violence is not a unique phenomenon. For example, the construction of intimate partner violence and rape against women as a “universal” issue has resulted in a broader prioritisation of professionalclass white women in resource distribution and policies while simultaneously rendering violence against women of colour illegible (Richie, 2012). Similarly, media sensationalism surrounding “missing white woman” syndrome (Ifill, 2004) ignores other incidents of gendered violence (see Musial, and Falkof this volume). At least part of the anger that permeated Asian American spaces in early 2022 was in response to this historical erasure. But, far from encountering that familiar silence, news of Christina Yuna Lee’s murder in 2022 was circulated through multiple networks on Twitter and received front-page coverage in The New York Times, New York Post and New York Daily News. In comparison, the deaths of two Asian women during robberies at massage parlours in New Mexico, around the same time in late January 2022, received scant mainstream media coverage outside of local outlets. However, on social media platforms, Asian American 45

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writers connected Lee’s story to the murders of Sihui Fang, a massage worker in New Mexico and Julia (Yuliya) Li, a businesswoman in Minnesota2, aggregating incidents of violence under the hashtag #StopAsianHate. What is rendered invisible by this aggregation are the differences in their lives and positionalities and what remains unclear is the appropriate form of response to these harms. Some, like author Min Jin Lee, have argued on Twitter that “after each event, we tend to give context to the perpetrator and de-contextualise the experiences of victims” (@minjinlee11, 26 February) as part of a call to pay more attention to the specificity of each individual’s circumstances within the broad brush of Asian America. Others named this decontextualisation as a form of invisibilisation, which rendered their own concerns about safety and racism unimportant within progressive spaces. A baseline critique of the aggregation of various incidents of violence into “anti-Asian hate” is that this fails to interrogate the class and gender of individual victims. Some hope that naming the aforementioned violence targeted at women is a step towards a more thorough accounting of root causes. On a GoFundMe Memorial page (Lee, 2022), Christina Yuna Lee’s family wrote that “her death is part of an alarming pattern of unchecked, hateful violence against women, namely women of Asian descent and women of color that can no longer stand without consequence”. Speaking in interviews with major news outlets, Asian women in New York City reported feeling hopeless, alone and “suffocated” as well as needing to be constantly vigilant (Venkatraman, 2022). Overwhelmingly, those speaking out expressed a desire for safety and acknowledgement alongside frustration with the failures of existing systems for accountability and redress (Kim, 2022). The coverage of Go and Lee’s tragic murders did not emerge from a vacuum. We speculate that they became newsworthy because of several factors– including the ongoing coverage of racist remarks made by conservative lawmakers and increased public discourse surrounding gendered violence against Asian American women in the aftermath of the Atlanta spa shootings. Go and Lee were also professional-class, educated women living alone in New York City during a time when activists had mounted sustained calls to dismantle racially violent police departments and redistribute funds away from jails and prisons. Their murders, when read in a way that foregrounded their Asian American identities, suggested to some that perhaps there could also be a racially just argument for increasing policing. The responses of public officials, from New York City Mayor Eric Adams to various pro-police and conservative lobbyist groups, suggest that the highly documented coverage of the murders of Go and Lee has made their deaths a rallying point for those advocating for specific public safety interventions. For example, Go’s name has been frequently evoked in calls to address danger in New York City’s subway system. Rather than focus on the clear failure and neglect of social safety nets, these acts of violence continue to be instrumentalised by a carceral mayoral regime to expand the criminalisation of poverty. Without a broader vision that seeks an end to white supremacy writ large and critical analysis that connects all forms of policing to systems of violence, solving the problem of “Asian hate” often ends up both bolstering existing state structures of racialised violence while also neglecting to address them as sources of violence.

Politicising Asian American women as victims Often falsely equated with #BlackLivesMatter as an Asian American social movement, #StopAsianHate functions as a broad catch-all for indexing anti-Asian racism that is devoid 46

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of any liberatory politics. The call marks the aforementioned feelings of Asian invisibility within the broader landscape of racial politics without a specific call to action, allowing for a wide range of political responses and interpretations. Furthermore, the combination of racial and gendered tropes of Asians as quiet and submissive have spooled into two related conclusions in various media outlets and government responses: Asians are less likely to report crimes—and thus avenues must be made available to support Asians to report more crimes. Even in its most seemingly innocuous uses, the calls to “stop hate” or “take hate more seriously” have primarily translated to the expansion of hate crimes legislation to increase resources for police training and data collection (Kuo and Bui, 2021). Additionally, reporting of data collection by Stop AAPI Hate (an organisation tracking discriminatory incidents against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders) has widely circulated the statistic that 63% of incidents happen to Asian women and thus they are more likely to be targets of racialised violence (Pillai et al., 2021). Notably, multiple incidents of violence against Asian women have been made highly visible under the umbrella of #StopAsianHate, which has in turn also motivated misogynistic behaviour in activist spaces through a hypermasculinist “more arms, more police” organising in response to the feminised tropes of Asians as “submissive” (see Asian American Feminist Collective, 2020). The spectacular act of racial and gendered violence of the Atlanta shootings in March 2021 also exposed the many everyday compounded forms of economic violence and precarity for working-class migrants while fueling the escalating rallying cries to #StopAsianHate. After the shootings, police departments across US cities sent special units to Asian neighbourhoods under the guise of providing safety. In New York City, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio referred to the shootings as “domestic terrorism” and the NYPD’s Counterterrorism Unit (@ NYPDCounterterrorism, 16 March 2021) deployed military-grade “assets” to Asian communities “out of an abundance of caution”. However, the presence of heightened policing in Asian communities under the name of “public safety” has long been tied to ongoing violence, policing and harassment against Asian women in the US, including immigration exclusions against Chinese women through the 1875 Page Act; police raids of massage parlour workers; and detention and deportation regimes targeting working-class Asian migrants. Notably, city officials also did not make an effort to address the gendered nature of the attacks. By May 2021, the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act passed to expedite police review of racist incidents and expand community-based resources for crime reporting. The coupling together of domestic terrorism and hate crimes framing as a response to anti-Asian violences makes the dangerous implication that using military and police force is the solution to racial violence. The suggestion is especially troubling given that the histories of US military occupation and permanent war in Asia (e.g. the Philippine-American War, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Afghanistan War, ongoing geopolitical tensions with China and drone strikes in Pakistan) are connected to long-standing violence against Asian people. The targeting of different places in Asia as foreign threats to be eliminated alongside state desires for control and dominance over Asia work in tandem with everyday and structural violences against Asian people living within the US. At a local scale, the violent deaths of Go and Lee became an impetus for renewed calls to address seemingly “random acts of violence” occurring in public New York City spaces, including sidewalks and the transit system with expanded police presence and intervention. Several conservative community groups have blamed bail reform, police accountability, and other efforts to reduce the number of prisoners in state systems as the root of these acts of violence. Additionally, Mayor Eric Adams pushed for the elimination of cash bail as a measure 47

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to halt the release of “dangerous” people into the streets (Bates, 2022). He also instituted a new “zero tolerance” subway plan in February 2022 to remove unhoused people from train lines (where the primary housing alternative is NYC’s notoriously dangerous, crowded, and unhealthy congregate shelter systems).3 The plan also increases partnerships between law enforcement and city services, including healthcare, housing and homeless services. These two phenomena — the rise in politicised anti-Asian violence and the rise in the number of people unable to access support within the existing housing and mental health system — are related but separate, each requiring specific attention and feminist analysis. It is not the release of people from jails that is the problem, but the lack of access to stable housing, healthcare, food and other resources in the aftermath; the abusive and socially isolating conditions of jails and prisons; and the inadequate and violent kinds of care that comes with coercive institutionalisation into psychiatric wards (Ben-Moshe, 2020). These are the violences that are often hidden behind walls and tucked away from the public — that cannot easily be captured neatly for an Instagram post or in a pithy hashtag. While these calls are rooted in an effort to respond to the fear and anxiety prompted by Go and Lee’s deaths, they obscure more than they reveal about the root causes of these tragedies. Indeed, Asians and Asian Americans have faced increased targeted harassment and violence in the last two years, much of it tacitly endorsed by the Trump administration’s statements regarding China and the coronavirus. During this same time, the already threadbare social infrastructure providing support to an economically precarious and unstable racialised underclass within the US has faced historic challenges. The result has been the steady spilling over of otherwise “invisible” violence into the spaces of home, work and commute — fomenting feelings of crises across racial and class lines. As Black feminist theorists have long pointed out, the production of Black death, through extralegal and state-sanctioned means, has been rendered normative to the course of preserving everyday life (e.g. Gilmore, 2007; Hartman, 1997). To make sense of violence against Asian American women, we must move beyond a singular politics of identity towards a more expansive politics of difference (see Lowe, 1996). We must critique the legitimisation of state violence and the deployment of death through systems of racial and gendered difference against those rendered marginal and “dangerous” in order to protect lives worth living. The stories we tell about this violence must reflect the much more complicated history of how Asian American women have occupied these multiple positionalities.

Dangerous and endangered positions Asian women are constructed as simultaneously dangerous and endangered — categories with porous and shifting boundaries — within the United States’ criminal legal system. Understanding this particular positionality requires attention towards specificities of material experiences (e.g. class, immigration status) that are homogenised and flattened by broad calls to “Stop Asian Hate”. To actually stop anti-Asian violences, we need to understand and undo the ways that Asian women are collectively and structurally rendered vulnerable through immigration, welfare and national security policy. In other words, we must understand the production of differential structured vulnerability rather than pose individual acts of violence as the sole problem. Doing so requires us to zoom out and consider the long history of US racism and imperialism and the way that both have created specific forms of violence that draw people in and out in different ways. In this section, we demonstrate how the foundational 48

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construction of Asian women as dangerous, deviant and threatening to American mores occurred as a product of efforts to police the borders of the US and secure and preserve white national identity. We tie narratives of race, gender and sexuality with how they are concretised into policies that shape the material conditions that expose Asian women to violence. Policing the movements of Asian women created early apparatuses for the surveillance, management and detention of immigrants in the US (Chan, 1991; Luibheid, 2002). In the 19th century, “Yellow Peril” narratives (or fears of Chinese migration) also depicted all Chinese women as sex workers who were undesirable contagions that spread disease and threatened white masculinity. These narratives found life in media portrayals of Asian difference as dangerous. In the US, figurations of Asian women shifted from spectacles on display in exhibitions in sequestered viewing rooms (e.g. Afong Moy and Pwan Ye Koo) to public nuisances when their public presence became too “excessive” (Kang, 2002). This also converged with moral stigmatisation and scrutinisation of migration by single Chinese women as criminal and fraudulent. Steeped in anxieties over racialised labour and contagion, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Page Act of 1875, which both targeted Chinese migrants for exclusion from the nation, were the first legal limits on free migration into the US (Lee, 2003). The Page Act barred Chinese women from entering the US by citing fears that they were being trafficked as sex workers. In addition to restrictive property covenants and land ordinances, the spectre of immigrants as dangerous frequently mobilised around anxieties about miscegenation and also justified enforced geographies of racial segregation within cities like New York (Lui, 2005). In contrast to the Asian women as “prostitute”, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, the US government would negotiate a “Gentlemen’s Agreement”, which allowed Asian women to migrate as wives and brides. Japanese migrant farmers within the US could marry foreign brides and sponsor their migration (Ngai, 2004). While Japanese brides were allowed selective passage into the US through a recommitment to heteropatriarchal marriage, their arrival spurred new anti-Asian sentiment rooted in fears of excessive reproduction. These fears would be mobilised in later decades to justify incarceration and the forced removal of Japanese communities during the Second World War. Read together, both the Gentlemen’s Agreement and the Page Act surface related anxieties around interracial sex, assimilation and challenges to white property rights operating in two different policy registers: one defined by exclusion and the other by limited and highly controversial inclusion (Luibheid, 2002). Outside of the structures of immigration control and restriction, many of the first encounters between the US and Asian women occurred during military invasion and occupation, where occupation also created local sex industries in Asia. Demonstrated by multiple scholars, regimes of policing and regulating the bodies of Asian women in military-occupied Korea (Okazawa-Rey, 1997; Yuh, 2004), the Philippines (Tadiar, 2004) and Vietnam (Hoang, 2015) produced an extensive body of knowledge that pathologised Asian women’s sexuality. US military constructions of deviant Asian sexuality at midcentury dovetailed with an abundance of US cultural production representing Asian women as subservient, docile, and sexually available. While artistic works like Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon (and later films like Stanley Kubrick’s (1987) Full Metal Jacket) ushered in a new era of Asian women’s hypersexuality represented and amplified through mass media (Shimizu, 2005), journalists and pundits working in more staid forms also worked to recast nations like Japan as non-threatening through the use of Orientalist tropes emphasising a culture of feminised docility and infantile helplessness (Cheng, 2018). 49

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In representing Asian women as alternatively deviant or imperiled, cultural work reinforced their fundamental difference. As the US began to ease restrictions governing in-migration from Asia in the midcentury, primarily through policies regulating family and work-based migration through sponsorships (e.g. the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act, temporary H-1 visas), Asian women were exposed to other forms of violence (see Ngai, 2004; Choy, 2003). While seemingly expansive on the surface, the terms accompanying these policies tied migrants to family members and employers as sponsors which created economic vulnerabilities and dependencies that could be exploited and expose women to abuse and violence (Das Gupta, 2006). For example, roadblocks to naturalisation, such as two-year waiting periods, the threat of deportation and the loss of immigration status penalises divorce and separation from US citizen spouses. This enabled and incentivised — and continues to enable and incentivise — intimate partner violence by criminalising attempts to leave marriages and imposing onerous conditions on those alleging abuse (Das Gupta, 2006). The expansion of Asian migration into the US was also met with swift backlash from conservative lawmakers and anti-immigration lobbyists. Beginning in the 1970s, INS officials began to more aggressively pursue and punish cases against couples they suspected of being in “fraudulent” marriages. These cases often pivoted on tropes of Asian women being “deceptive” and “dishonest”. In the mid-1990s, the scapegoating of immigrants as economic burdens and as potential “terrorists” and dangerous criminals, was further concretised into policies, such as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA). In addition to expanding law enforcement authority in arresting immigrants and expediting processes of detention and deportation, these policies punished immigrants seeking welfare benefits by casting them as threats to the public purse (Das Gupta, 2006). Additionally, state responses to gender-based violence and intimate partner violence default to law enforcement and criminal punishment. The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) is tied to the 1994 Crime Control Act, which astronomically expanded policing and mass incarceration. VAWA increases punishment for those convicted of intimate violence and tethers protections to formal criminal accusations and reporting of violence. Within this policy matrix, migrant women stand on shifting ground: the subjects of suspicion unless they are willing and able to mobilise carceral resources attesting to their imperilled status (Richie, 2012). While this long history may not speak directly to the motivations behind recent attacks against Asian women in the United States, it offers useful context about the ways that the criminalisation of Asian women as a dangerous category has functioned to limit the options and life courses available to many. These reforms to welfare, migration and policing have prompted technologies of surveillance and punishment applied to domestic welfare recipients to also become routinely leveraged against migrants, with the double threats of deportation and detention close at hand. It cannot be left unmentioned that the fear of deportation under these same statutes and experiences of years of abuse and harassment at the hands of law enforcement accompanied 38-year-old Yang Song, a massage worker in Flushing, as she plummeted to her death during a police raid in 2017 (Grant and Whitford, 2017). While we may not definitely know why particular attackers target specific victims, we do know the ways that Asian women have been constructed as vulnerable (and made structurally vulnerable). Our responses to the violence that continues to affect Asian women in the US must take aim at the roots of these structures if we hope to build community safety in ways that do not produce further disavowals of life and death. 50

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Conclusion: Abolition feminisms Both of us are co-leaders of the Asian American Feminist Collective.4 Right after the shootings in Atlanta, our inboxes were inundated with media requests for a quote making sense of the violence. Understanding the murders of Asian women required labour, expertise and analysis by Asian women. Similarly, we observed friends and organisers at Red Canary Song (RCS), a collective formed after the death of massage worker Yang Song, receive increased public attention. RCS has long been organising for more safety and care for Asian and Asian American sex workers and massage parlour workers and calling attention to ways police hurt Asian migrant communities. We can only assume that our previous work about issues of police violence, sex work and Asian women drove this attention. Earlier, in September 2020, the Asian American Feminist Collective had released a statement against the creation of an Asian Hate Crime Task Force in the NYPD, co-signed by RCS. Our sudden visibility relied on the tokenisation of our racial and gendered identities versus our feminist analysis. Journalists wanted to know, why were these Asian women killed? What can be done? In conversations with media outlets prior to the shootings in Atlanta throughout the fall and winter of 2020 and early 2021, as more highly publicised incidents of violence against Asians and Asian Americans were reported, we occasionally received requests from reporters who wanted to publish different perspectives on safety and policing in Asian and Asian American communities. Repeatedly, we were asked to explain and prove why police are harmful to our communities. The quotes we gave were almost all redacted or fully omitted from the pieces that were eventually published. In media coverage of violence, journalists and reporters often seek to tell a specific narrative of violence that is recognisable — where there can be a cause and effect or readily identifiable explanations of responsibility. In other words, death and violence are treated as something exceptional to everyday life. Thus, it is difficult to translate everyday structures of death and dying unless there are quite literally, incidents of death and dying worthy of public attention. In building a collective politics of difference, Grace Kyungwon Hong (2015) reminds us how the preservation of particular lives holds the “exacerbated dispersal of minoritized death” (p. 8), where our ability to live protected lives depends on someone else’s inability to do so. Structural vulnerability produces “good targets” of violence. In this chapter, we have demonstrated the ways people may be deemed unworthy of protection by the state as well as the tensions in which Asians become recognised as needing state protection. We also argue that Asians and Asian Americans should not make bids for inclusion into a charter of protection that will always exclude some and be deadly to others. Carceral reforms will not make us safer but will produce further systems of vulnerability. The purposeful dismantling of social safety nets like food assistance and access to shelter, accompanied by the attendant expansion of carceral systems of policing and punishment, have worked in tandem to expose Asian women to everyday violence and foreclose possibilities for independently sustaining access to care and safety. In some cases, this violence is slow: the daily indignities of working under precarious and exploitative conditions. In others, it is spectacular: months before her death, Michelle Go’s attacker repeatedly sought, and failed to receive, mental health services. In many cases, it is quotidien: a constant process of negotiating whether to stay with a violent partner or risk family separation, deportation and homelessness. Abolition feminism redirects our energy away from systems of police and punishment towards other alternatives that address root causes of violence and provide sustainable

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forms of care and safety (see for example Davis et al., 2022 and Kaba, 2021). We must dismantle the carceral and punitive systems that render people disposable and expose them to premature death (Gilmore, 2007). While it may seem we have limited options to respond in moments of loss, grief and tragedy, we can work more expansively and creatively to change our systems to prevent future forms of violence. To “stop Asian hate” means continuing to work towards ongoing efforts to end policing; for safe and accessible housing and access to mental healthcare; and for building stronger social safety nets.

Acknowledgements Parts of this chapter are adapted and expanded from Kuo and Bhaman’s article for Truthout, “Attacks on Asian women are fueled by criminalization, war and economic injustice”, published on 23 March 2021. We are grateful to our friends and partners in the Asian American Feminist Collective: Julie Ae Kim, Senti Sojwal and Tiffany Diane Tso. This chapter is stitched together from ongoing conversations — walking down Chrystie Street together, phone calls during walks to the grocery store and text threads.

Notes 1 2

3 4

We use the term “Asian” to denote a process of racialisation and “Asian American” in reference to a distinct political category that may or may not be intentionally claimed. Of interest, in a local CBS news report (23 February) of this shooting, the perpetrator is a 15-yearold boy described by the local police spokesman as having “an extensive and violent criminal history”. For details, see the Subway Safety Plan, available at: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/home/ downloads/pdf/press-releases/2022/the-subway-safety-plan.pdf As a small feminist formation with local roots in New York City that has a relatively sizable social media presence, we are often misinterpreted as a national Asian womens’ organisation.

References Asian American Feminist Collective (2020) ‘We want cop-free communities: Against the creation of an Asian Hate Crime Task Force by the NYPD,’ Medium, 3 September. Available at: https:// aafcollective.medium.com/we-want-cop-free-communities-3924956251a2 (Accessed: 29 November 2022). Bates, J. (2022) ‘Eric Adams wants “dangerousness” factored into New York’s bail laws. Advocates say it will only bring more bias’, Time Magazine, 10 February. Available at: https://time.com/ 6146431/eric-adams-bail-reform-dangerousness/ (Accessed: 29 November 2022). Ben-Moshe, L. (2020) Decarcerating disability: Deinstitutionalization and prison abolition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bernstein, E. (2012) ‘Carceral politics as gender justice? The “traffic in women” and neoliberal circuits of crime, sex, and rights,’ Theory and Society 41(3), pp. 233–259. Chan, S. (1991) Entry denied: Exclusion and the Chinese community in America, 1882–1943. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Cheng, A. A. (2018) ‘Ornamentalism: A feminist theory for the yellow woman,’ Critical Inquiry, 44, pp. 415–446. Choy, C. C. (2003) Empire of care: Nursing and migration in Filipino American history. Durham: Duke University Press. Das Gupta, M. (2006) Unruly immigrants: Rights, activism, and transnational South Asian politics in the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Invisible feelings, anti-Asian violences and abolition feminisms Davis, A. Y., Dent, G., Meiners, E. R. and Richie, B. E. (2022). Abolition. Feminism. Now. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Gilmore, R. W. (2007) Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Grant, M. G. and Whitford, E. (2017) ‘Family, former attorney of Queens woman who fell to her death in vice sting say she was sexually assaulted, pressured to become an informant,’ The Appeal, 5 December. Available at: https://theappeal.org/family-former-attorney-of-queenswoman-who-fell-to-her-death-in-vice-sting-say-she-was-sexually-d67461a12f1/ (Accessed: 29 November 2022). Hartman, S. (1997) Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hoang, K. K. (2015) Dealing in desire: Asian ascendancy, western decline, and the hidden currencies of global sex work. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hong, G. K. (2015) Death beyond disavowal: The impossible politics of difference. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Hong, N., Southhall, A. and Watkins, A. (2021) ‘He was charged in an anti-Asian attack. It was his 33rd arrest,’ New York Times, 6 April. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/ nyregion/nyc-asian-hate-crime-mental-illness.html (Accessed: 29 November 2022). Ifill, G. (2004) ‘Gwen Ifill coins the term “missing white woman syndrome”’, 2004 Unity: Journalists of Color Conference. C-Span. Available at: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4666788/user-clipgwen-ifill-coins-term-missing-white-woman-syndrome (Accessed: 29 November 2022). Kaba, M. (2021) We do this til we free us. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Kang, L. (2002) Compositional subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American women. Durham: Duke University Press. Kim, J. (2022) ‘Anti-Asian violence prompts questions about safety and community care,’ Teen Vogue, 14 April. Available at: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/anti-asian-violence-safety-community (Accessed: 29 November 2022). Kim, M. E. (2018) ‘From carceral feminism to transformative justice: Women-of-color feminism and alternatives to incarceration,’ Journal of Ethnic & Cultural Diversity in Social Work, 27(3), pp. 219–233. Kuo, R. and Bui, M. (2021) ‘Against carceral data collection in response to anti-Asian violences,’ Big Data and Society, 8 (1). Law, V. (2014) ‘Against carceral feminism,’ Jacobin (October). Available at: https://www.jacobinmag. com/2014/10/against-carceral-feminism/ (Accessed: 15 March, 2021). Lee, A. Y. (2022) ‘Christina Yuna Lee Memorial Fund,’” GoFundMe, 19 February. Available at: https://www.gofundme.com/f/christina-yuna-lee-memorial-fund (Accessed: 28 February, 2022). Lee, E. (2003) At America’s gates: Chinese immigration during the exclusion era. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Lowe, L. (1996) Immigrant acts. Durham: Duke University Press. Lui, M. (2005) The chinatown trunk mystery: Murder, miscegenation, and other dangerous encounters in turn‐of‐the‐century new york city. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Luibhéid, E. (2002). Entry denied: Controlling sexuality at the border. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Newman, A., Schweber, N. and Marcius, C. R. (2022) ‘Decades adrift in a broken system, then charged in a death on the tracks,” New York Times, 5 February. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/ 2022/02/05/nyregion/martial-simon-michelle-go.html (Accessed: 29 November 2022). New York Times Live Team (2021) ‘8 dead in Atlanta spa shootings, with fears of Anti-Asian bias,” New York Times, updated 26 March. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/03/17/us/ shooting-atlanta-acworth (Accessed: 28 February 2022). Ngai, M. (2004) Impossible subjects: Illegal aliens and the making of modern America. Princeton University Press. Ninh, E. K. (2018) ‘Without enhancement: Sexual violence in the everyday lives of Asian American women,’ in Fujiwara, L. and Roshanravan, S. (eds.) Asian American feminisms and women of color politics. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, pp. 69–81. Noble, S. U. (2014) ‘Teaching Trayvon: Race, media, and the politics of spectacle’, The Black Scholar, 44(1), pp. 12–29.

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Salonee Bhaman and Rachel Kuo Okazawa-Rey, M. (1997) ‘Amerasian children in GI town: A legacy of US militarism in South Korea,’ Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, 3(1), pp. 71–102. Pillai, D., Yellow Horse, A. J. and Jeung, R. (2021) ‘The rising tide of violence and discrimination against Asian American and Pacific Islander women and girls’, Stop AAPI Hate. Available at: https:// stopaapihate.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Stop-AAPI-Hate_NAPAWF_Whitepaper.pdf (Accessed: 28 February 2022). Richie, B. E. (2012) Arrested justice: Black women, violence, and America’s prison nation. New York: New York University Press. Roshanravan, S. (2018) ‘Weaponizing our (in)visibility: Asian American feminist ruptures of the model-minority optic’, in Fujiwara, L. and Roshanravan, S. (eds.) Asian American feminisms and women of color politics. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, pp. 261–282. Shimizu, C. P. (2005) ‘The bind of representation: Performing and consuming hypersexuality in Miss Saigon’, Theatre Journal, 57(2), pp. 247–265. Tadiar, N. X. M. (2004) Fantasy-production: Sexual economies and other Philippine consequences for the new world order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Venkatraman, S. (2022) ‘“Nowhere is safe”: Asian women reflect on brutal New York City killings’, NBC Asian America, 16 February. Available at: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asianamerica/nowhere-safe-asian-women-reflect-brutal-new-york-city-killings-rcna16173 (Accessed: 29 November 2022). Yuh, J. Y. (2004) Beyond the shadow of Camptown: Korean military brides in America. New York: New York University Press.

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4 TOWARDS A FAIR JUSTICE SYSTEM IN CANADA Women and girls homicide database project Kandice Parker, Melanie A. Morrison, Todd G. Morrison, Senator Lillian Eva Quan Dyck, and Karissa Wall

In July 2013, a 25-year-old fashion design student named Bella Laboucan-McLean mysteriously fell to her death from a Toronto high-rise condo. In that same year, a 20-year-old mother named Cheyenne Santana Marie Fox was murdered in Toronto while working as an escort. Also in 2013, 15-year-old Leah Anderson left her aunt’s house in God’s Lake Narrows, Manitoba, to go ice skating; she was found dead two days later. What do these three murder victims have in common? All these victims are Indigenous women. In Canada, pervasive, ongoing, colonial settler narratives and stereotypes dehumanise Indigenous populations, maintaining a social narrative that views Indigenous persons as less credible, less worthy and prone to criminality (Jackson, 1989; Proulx, 2000). Indeed, Bella LaboucanMcLean’s family, after her suspicious death, were often questioned on whether Bella lived “a high-risk lifestyle” (Auger, 2016), a stereotype that has been used to justify the ongoing tragedy of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Canada (Amnesty International, 2004). Such stereotypes are entwined with media apathy surrounding missing and murdered Indigenous women. Gilchrist (2010) found that the Canadian media is 3.5 times less likely to report on missing and murdered Indigenous women, as compared to missing and murdered white women. Further, media reports on missing and murdered Indigenous women are shorter, less detailed, and less intimate than media reports on missing and murdered women who are white. Degrading stereotypes – such as the “Pocahontas” trope (Ho, 2015) and characterisation of victims as “prostitutes,” “street people,” and “addicts” (Martin Hill, 2003) – blame Indigenous women and girls for their “lifestyle choices” (Strega et al., 2014) and discount the pervasive social and economic marginalisation of Indigenous women and girls in Canada (Amnesty International, 2004). In a 2004 study, Amnesty International revealed that historically, in Canada, perpetrators who have victimised Indigenous persons are more likely to escape justice. Data from the General Social Survey on Victimization in 2014 indicates that Indigenous persons are two times more likely than non-Indigenous persons to experience violent victimisation (Mahoney et al., 2017). Indigenous persons are nearly two times more likely to be physically assaulted and three times more likely to be sexually assaulted than non-Indigenous persons (Boyce, 2016). Furthermore, Indigenous persons are disproportionately more likely to be victims of homicide (Mulligan, Axford, and Solecki, 2016). Although Indigenous Peoples DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-7

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comprise approximately 5% of Canada’s population, Indigenous Peoples accounted for onequarter of all Canadian homicide victims in 2015 (ibid.). Amongst Indigenous Peoples, the homicide rate for Indigenous women remains lower than that of Indigenous men,1 yet is six times greater than the homicide rate for non-Indigenous women (ibid.). In 2014, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) reported that Indigenous women represented 16% of all women victims of homicide officially known to police between 1980 and 2012. In addition, while the number of homicides against non-Indigenous women has declined steadily since 1980, the number committed against Indigenous women has either remained constant or increased. For example, in 1984, 8% of women homicide victims were Indigenous women; in 2012, the proportion had increased to 23% (RCMP, 2014). Strega et al. (2014) found that Canadian media perpetuates stereotypes that blame Indigenous men and women for these rates of violent victimisation, discounting ongoing colonialism and Canadian society’s collective complicity in failing to address the ongoing effects of colonialism. In this chapter, we review the outcomes of homicide cases involving non-Indigenous and Indigenous women and girls by using a unique database of cases built largely from media reports. In addition to reflecting on the gendered and racialised operation of “justice,” this dataset allows us to highlight patterns in the media reporting of these homicides.

Context and methods This research was conducted for the purpose of supporting Bill S-215: An Act to amend the Criminal Code (sentencing for violent offences against Indigenous women), as proposed by former Canadian Senator Lillian Dyck. This Bill was proposed as a means of legally establishing the identity of Indigenous women as an aggravating circumstance in cases of assault, sexual assault and murder. The purpose of Bill S-215 was to demonstrate that discrimination towards Indigenous women within the Canadian criminal justice system is unacceptable and to indicate to the Canadian public that violence towards Indigenous women will be neither tolerated nor regarded as less serious than the crimes committed against non-Indigenous persons. On 10 April 2019, the bill was defeated at a second reading in the House of Commons of Canada, with 237 Members of Parliament voting against the bill and only 45 Members of Parliament voting in favour (Parliament of Canada, 2019). To support the Bill and develop a resource to allow us to better map the problem, we gathered information about justice outcomes in homicide cases involving women and girls in Canada from the 1980s to 2013. The present database was built by first accessing the publicly available data compiled by Pearce in 2013. In its original form, Pearce’s (2013) database contains 3,329 names of women and girls who are missing, have been murdered, or died under suspicious circumstances, including 824 who are Indigenous. The cases span from 1946 to 2013 and, in this format, contain seven variables: the victim’s name, their age, the year they died or went missing, their race/ethnicity, the province in which they died or went missing, the case type (missing, murdered, dead) and status details (i.e., “Charges laid; unknown outcome”, “Murder of victim/Suicide of offender”, “Convicted – intimate partner”). To create the present database, we filtered the cases by date and case type so that only confirmed homicides from 1980 and onward were included. Given that our report relied on using the victims’ names to search for further information, we also removed cases that involved unidentified victims. The remaining 2,252 cases were retained for the purposes of this research. An additional 76 cases were later removed because they occurred before 1980, had been duplicated within the database, were not homicides, did not have a victim who was 56

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connected to Canada, or had a male victim. Five cases also were added during this period, resulting in a final tally of 2,171 victims within the current database. Eight pieces of information were added to each case: where the homicide took place; the victim-perpetrator relationship (intimate partner, parent/guardian, family member, known to victim, acquaintance or stranger); perpetrator name, race and gender; initial charge; conviction type (first or second-degree murder, manslaughter or a lesser sentence) and sentence length (in years and months). These data were collected by two graduate student researchers at the University of Saskatchewan, who in turn supervised an additional 16 volunteer undergraduate research assistants in building and coding the data and checking for data integrity. The data were collected from publicly available online news sources, the Canadian Legal Information Institute’s online database of court transcripts and a digitised archive of major Canadian newspapers (e.g., Ottawa Citizen, Winnipeg Sun, Toronto Sun) available through the University of Saskatchewan. The initial Pearce data file was split into 30-case increments, then transferred to the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) for analysis. We further recorded the number of cases in which perpetrators had not yet been charged or convicted, were eventually convicted of a lesser offence, were deemed not criminally responsible, had died by suicide, had died under other circumstances prior to conviction or had their charges stayed despite police considering the case solved. An openended “Notes” column also was maintained for any additional information relevant to sentencing outcomes (i.e., “underage perpetrator”). To maintain comparability, the racial categories used to group perpetrators were taken from those utilised by Pearce (2013). The categories are Indigenous, Asian, Black, white, Latino/Hispanic, Middle Eastern, South Asian and Unknown.2 If a reliable source (i.e., a newspaper or court transcript) confirmed the person’s race, it was entered as such. Cases that were less definitive were sorted as, for instance, “Presumed Indigenous” only when multiple pieces of information suggested the person’s category. For example, if a media source suggested that the individual in question was connected to an Indigenous community, if the homicide occurred on a reserve, the person’s photo was found and/or the person’s family members were confirmed as Indigenous. The present analyses included cases where a person’s identity was confirmed or presumed based on these characteristics. For both victim and perpetrator race, the categories were collapsed to look specifically at differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous3 victims and perpetrators. We faced challenges in navigating the biases in the reporting of online media sources. Firstly, information about cases involving murdered white women was more readily available (i.e., reported on by major news outlets) than those involving Indigenous women (also Musial, this volume). In contrast, information surrounding murdered Indigenous women and girls was more often found online via social media sources. Reflecting the diversification of source material, our database contains more cases from 2000 onwards than in previous decades,4 supporting the conclusion that social media can mitigate some of the biases of mainstream news media (Moeke-Pickering et al., 2018). At the same time, the race of white perpetrators was often unspecified.

General characteristics The database contains cases ranging from 1980 to 2013. There are 2,171 total victims and 1,397 of these murder cases have been solved. The remaining 774 cases are either unsolved or the outcome could not be accounted for by the search methods. Of the 1,405 victims 57

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whose racial background could be identified, 601 (43%) were Indigenous. In terms of age, half of the victims were 30 or younger, including 116 girls who were 10 or younger. A total of 1,468 confirmed perpetrators were identified.5 This figure includes cases where the perpetrator was convicted, died by suicide or other means prior to a trial or, in 26 cases, had charges stayed but the police consider the case solved (as in the many unresolved cases of Robert Pickton, a notorious Canadian serial killer). Of these perpetrators, 867 could be categorised based on race, with 688 (80%) being classified as non-Indigenous perpetrators and 161 (20%) classified as Indigenous perpetrators. Across all perpetrators, 92% were male.

Key findings Our analysis of these homicide cases revealed that patterns in reported judicial outcomes do not always map onto the kinds of discourses around gender, race, and homicide which circulate in media and policy contexts, identified at the beginning of this chapter. First, it is clear that violence against Indigenous women is not simply an intracommunity problem. For cases where both victim and perpetrator race could be identified, 34% of Indigenous victims were killed by non-Indigenous perpetrators. In contrast, 98% of non-Indigenous victims were killed by non-Indigenous perpetrators. This is a meaningful finding because it dispels the myth that violence towards Indigenous women is uniquely intra-communal, and that Indigenous men are responsible for the high rates of homicide of Indigenous women. This myth is reflected in news reports such as the 2015 CBC Radio report entitled “RCMP: 70% of murdered indigenous women killed by indigenous men”. It also challenges discourses which position Indigenous men as disproportionately dangerous to white women. Second, this study shows that Indigenous women (29%) are significantly more likely than non-Indigenous women (18%) to be killed by someone with whom they are unacquainted (Figure 4.1).6 Moreover, while intimate partner violence affects all women, non-Indigenous women (46%) are more likely to be killed by a former or current partner than are Indigenous women (34%). These findings align with data presented by both the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC, 2010) and the RCMP (2014). Importantly, these findings further demonstrate that misguided and unfair stereotypes 50

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inform cultural narratives about the murder and domestic abuse of Indigenous women, defining the problems as contained within Indigenous communities. The findings also powerfully highlight that the dominant threat – both to Indigenous and non-Indigenous women – is from non-Indigenous perpetrators. When we examined conviction type and race, we found that when the victim of a homicide is non-Indigenous, the patterns of conviction are the same, regardless of the perpetrator’s background. That is, approximately one-third of perpetrators when the victim is other than Indigenous are convicted of first-degree murder, 45% of second-degree murder and 20% of manslaughter. When the victim is Indigenous, however, the patterns of conviction change. In cases of Indigenous victims and perpetrators, manslaughter convictions are far more common (46%), whereas when the perpetrator is non-Indigenous and the victim is Indigenous, firstdegree murder charges are more likely (37% compared to 15% when the perpetrator/victim are Indigenous)7 (Figure 4.2). The underlying causes of this discrepancy, in which Indigenous perpetrators are significantly more likely to be convicted on more lenient charges, demand further investigation. That is, do the differences truly reflect the degree of planning and intent or are they related to biases in the judicial system? Conversely – and perhaps surprisingly given the persistence of racial stereotyping in reporting on violence against women identified in other chapters in this collection – perpetrator racial information has no impact on the sentencing when the victim is non-Indigenous. This pattern, however, is not maintained in relation to sentencing in second-degree murder cases – one of two major conviction types where sentences are not predetermined. Non-Indigenous perpetrators’ sentences are unaffected by the race of their victims, whereas Indigenous perpetrators are sentenced less harshly when their victims are Indigenous (12.4 years) compared to when their victims are non-Indigenous (21.5 years)8 (Figure 4.3). For manslaughter cases, no significant differences in sentencing outcomes were found. Where the victim was Indigenous, perpetrators were, on average, sentenced to a significantly 50

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Figure 4.2 Conviction types based on presumed or confirmed victim and perpetrator race (percent).

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21.5

20 17.4

18 16 14

14.9 12.4

12 10

Indigenous perpetrator

Non-Indigenous perpetrator

Indigenous vicm

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Figure 4.3 Second-degree murder sentencing length (years) by presumed or confirmed victim and perpetrator race.

shorter parole eligibility period (14.0 years) than in cases where the victim was nonIndigenous (15.0 years).9 Of course, not all cases are solved and non-Indigenous victims (77%) are significantly more likely to have their cases solved than Indigenous victims (52%).10 In this context, a solved case is one wherein the perpetrator has been clearly identified and the case is considered by police to be solved. This figure includes cases where the perpetrator was found not criminally responsible, died prior to conviction, evaded police but is considered the only suspect in the crime, or had charges stayed for reasons unrelated to a lack of evidence (i.e., the unresolved Robert Pickton-affiliated cases). However, it does not include cases where a suspect was charged but information about a conviction could not be found. NWAC (2010) reports a nearly identical percentage of solved cases (53%), whereas the RCMP (2014) reports that 88% of homicides of Indigenous women have been solved. The discrepancy between these two figures requires further investigation; acquittals, inclusion or exclusion of suspicious deaths and the role of media coverage could exert influence over these inconsistencies in data.

Future directions Continued work needs to be done to account for the homicides that have occurred since 2013. We were unable to record acquittals in a consistent, systematic fashion; future work that examines acquittals could yield additional valuable insight. Given the high-profile 2018 acquittals of Gerald Stanley and Raymond Cormier – white men who were each charged with the murders of young Indigenous people – it is clear that the acquittals of violent offenders form an important component in Indigenous Canadians’ perceptions of the criminal justice system (Milward, 2018). In addition, no information regarding perpetrators’ previous criminal histories was recorded. Perpetrators such as John Martin Crawford, for example, show that escalating levels of violence can occur after initial sentencing and release from prison. Crawford was convicted of manslaughter in 1981, released after serving his sentence and then went on to murder three more Indigenous women in 1992. Escalation of violence also appears to be common, though not systematically documented, in cases of 60

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intimate partner violence, where previous victimisation was noted in media reports of a woman’s homicide. Thus, questions around sentencing, conditions of release and how best to prevent future violence from occurring are important points of discussion highlighted by this database.

Conclusion While previous research indicates that the Canadian media is complicit in perpetuating negative stereotypes surrounding missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, the current investigation was able to highlight this misrepresentation using the media itself. Comprehensive online searching, complemented by legal and newspaper library sources, revealed significant discrepancies in justice-related outcomes based on the race of victims and perpetrators of homicide and evidenced the falsehood of pervasive Canadian stereotypes surrounding the nature of violence towards Indigenous women and girls. Indigenous men are not solely responsible for the high rates of homicide of Indigenous women. Conversely, nonIndigenous men are responsible for 98% of the homicides of non-Indigenous women. The findings dispel the myth that the homicides of Indigenous women are mostly the result of domestic violence. Instead, the study reveals that non-Indigenous women are at a higher risk of spousal violence and murder, while Indigenous women are more likely to be killed by a stranger – often a non-Indigenous man. Moreover, the convictions and sentencing of perpetrators are not free of racial bias. Indigenous perpetrators are typically convicted of a lesser offence than are non-Indigenous perpetrators when found guilty of killing an Indigenous woman. Further, when a second-degree murder conviction is secured, perpetrators of any race receive sentencing lengths that are more lenient when their victim is Indigenous. Importantly, Indigenous victims are also significantly less likely to have their cases solved than are nonIndigenous victims. Our data also provide evidence that those who murder Indigenous women receive lighter sentences than those who murder non-Indigenous women and these perpetrators are more likely to receive shorter parole eligibility periods. These findings emphasise the importance of addressing the racial biases that exist within Canadian consciousness and serve to marginalise Indigenous women and girls. The Canadian government’s failure to legally sanction and effectively promote the idea that Indigenous women and girls are worthy of extra protection – by defeating Bill S-215 – is a missed opportunity towards reversing the status quo. Arguments that were made against the bill illustrate the pervasive negative typecasting of Indigenous persons. For instance, critics focused on the statistic, derived from this research, in which 66% of Indigenous women are murdered by Indigenous men, arguing that the bill could lead to increased incarceration for Indigenous offenders (Warick, 2019). This argument plays into the typecasting – as outlined in this work – of violence against Indigenous women as an intra-community problem. The statistic in which 98% of non-Indigenous women are murdered by nonIndigenous men, in comparison, is neglected and not brought into discussions on violence towards women. In response to the Canadian federal government’s rejection of Bill S-215, former Senator Lillian Dyck stated, “One of the biggest challenges we’ve faced is indifference to the plight of Indigenous women. This is just a shocking example of indifference” (Warick, 2019, para. 5). A common saying among Indigenous advocates living in Canada is that “there is no reconciliation in the absence of justice.” Canada has a responsibility to acknowledge, and work to address, the systemic disadvantages experienced by Indigenous women and girls, which are being upheld in the current legal system and broader colonial 61

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society. On 21 June 2021, Bill C-15 was passed by the House of Commons of Canada. This bill calls for the Government of Canada to take “all measures necessary to ensure that the laws of Canada are consistent with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” (Parliament of Canada, 2021). Article 22 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples specifies that “states shall take measures, in conjunction with Indigenous peoples, to ensure that Indigenous women and children enjoy the full protection and guarantees against all forms of violence and discrimination” (United Nations, 2007). Accordingly, Canada must commit to balancing the criminal justice system and recognising that Indigenous women and girls are, too often, victims of violent crime and that the perpetrators are often strangers. Such a commitment would further complement the 231 Calls for Justice outlined in Canada’s Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (see The National Inquiry, 2019). The current Liberal government has been subject to intense criticism for doing little to implement these Calls for Justice, to date. The findings of this study directly address number 5.25 of The Inquiry’s Calls for Justice, which advocates for “research on men who commit violence against Indigenous women, girls” (The National Inquiry, 2019). This study’s investigation of media itself revealed trends that contradict typical Canadian media representations in which the victimisation of Indigenous women and girls is disregarded or excused. These contradictions emphasise the media’s role in maintaining harmful and inaccurate stereotypes. The media needs to be held accountable for its role in dehumanising Indigenous women and girls through inaccurate portrayals of their victimisation and systemic racism. Canada needs responsible media reporting that works to actively challenge popular myths about Indigenous persons and actively disrupt racialised discrepancies in the frequency of, and tone in, reports of victimisation. Any effort towards reconciliation in Canada must recognise the reality of the disproportionate violence experienced by Indigenous women and girls and advocate for their equal access to justice.

Notes 1 Globally, the average male homicide rate (9.7 per 100,000) is almost four times higher than the average female homicide rate (2.7 per 100,000) ( UNODC, 2013). Around the world, men experience unique pressures to aggressively maintain dominance and power over other men – often minority groups ( Connell, 1987). Socially marginalised men, such as Canadian Indigenous men, often express destructive and exaggerated masculinities to emphasise their power and protest their marginalised position ( Jewkes and Morrell, 2018). Furthermore, historical colonial violence and the residential school system have destroyed many Indigenous cultures and traditions and brought “violence into the homes and minds” ( Fanon, 1963, p. 38) of Indigenous Canadians ( Lacchin, 2015). This has led to various forms of self-destructiveness (i.e., alcohol and/or drug abuse and suicides) and internalised/displaced violence (i.e., sexual abuse, homicide) ( Fleras, 2012). 2 These categories were used for comparison purposes only. It is recognised that the categories fail to adequately account for the nuance of multiracial backgrounds. In the rare case of an Indigenous person appearing to be white, they were categorised as Indigenous. In cases where the racial background was reported as mixed, we attempted to use the category that fits best with the visual representation of the individual and how they would be perceived by others. 3 This category includes white persons as well as all non-Indigenous people of colour. Although it is recognised that the latter group may also face biases in the justice system, we chose to include them in the analyses to highlight the potentially unique nature of the Indigenous experience. 4 231 occurred in the 1980s, 604 in the 1990s, 827 in the 2000s, and 410 from 2010 to 2013. 5 This figure is higher than the number of victims whose cases have been solved due to the 92 instances in which a victim was killed by multiple perpetrators.

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Towards a fair justice system in Canada 6 The “not known to victim” category included strangers and acquaintances. The latter included cases where the victim and perpetrator had met just prior to the murder taking place or those who had lived in the same building but were otherwise not known to each other.
2 (3, N = 952) = 15.0, p < .001, Φ = −.126. 7
2 (5, N = 568) = 28.8, p < .001, Cramer’s V = .225. 8 It is important to interpret this result with caution, as there were only four cases listed that involved an Indigenous perpetrator and non-Indigenous victim. 9 F(1, 64) = 6.59, p = .011, partial eta squared = .028. 10
2 (1, N = 1,488) = 103.66, p < .001, Cramer’s V = .264.

References Amnesty International (2004) Stolen sisters: A human rights response to discrimination and violence against indigenous women in Canada. Available at: http://www.amnesty.ca/sites/amnesty/files/ amr200032004enstolensisters.pdf (Accessed: 4 October 2022). Auger, N. (2016) ‘Bella Laboucan-McLean: One shattered dream and a devastated family’, Calgary Journal, 6 October. Available at: https://calgaryjournal.ca/2016/10/06/one-shattered-dream-anda-devastated-family/ (Accessed: 4 October 2022). Boyce, J. (2016) Victimization of Aboriginal people in Canada, 2014. Catalogue no. 85-002-X201600114631. 28 June. Available at: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/2016001/article/14631-eng. htm (Accessed: 4 October 2022). CBC Radio (2015) ‘RCMP: 70 per cent of murdered indigenous women killed by Indigenous men’, 10 April. Available at: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-friday-edition-1. 3028194/rcmp-70-per-cent-of-murdered-indigenous-women-killed-by-indigenous-men-1. 3028738 (Accessed: 4 October 2022). Connell, R. W. (1987) Gender and power: Society, the person and sexual politics. Cambridge: Polity Press. Fanon, F. (1963) The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Fleras, A. (2012) Unequal relations: An introduction to race, ethnic, and Indigenous dynamics in Canada. Saskatoon, SK: Pearson. Gilchrist, K. (2010) ‘“Newsworthy” victims?’, Feminist Media Studies, 10(4), pp. 373–390. Ho, R. (2015) ‘The bodies of the unseen: The imagined identities of Indigenous women’, Sojourners Undergraduate Journal of Sociology, 6/7, pp. 91–102. Jackson, M. (1989) ‘Locking up natives in Canada’, UBC Law Review, 23(3), pp. 215–300. Jewkes, R. and Morrell, R. (2018) ‘Hegemonic masculinity, violence and gender equality: Using latent class analysis to investigate the origins and correlates of differences among men’, Men and Masculinities, 21(4), pp. 547–571. Lacchin, J. M. (2015) ‘The “wretched of Canada”: Indigenous peoples and neo-colonialism’, Sociological Imagination, 4(1). Available at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1029&context=si (Accessed 4 October 2022). Mahoney, T. H., Jacob, J. and Hobson, H. (2017) Women and the criminal justice system. 6 June. Catalogue no. 89-503-X201500114785. Available at: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/pub/ 89-503-x/2015001/article/14785-eng.pdf?st=dXxqWB_s (Accessed 5 October 2022). Martin‐Hill, D. (2003) ‘She no speaks and other colonial constructs of “the traditional woman”’, in Lawrence, B. and Anderson, K. (eds.) Strong women stories: Native vision and community survival. Toronto, ON: Sumach Press, pp. 106–120. Milward, D. (2018) ‘Justice denied for Tina Fontaine and Colten Boushie: How their cases illustrate racism in Canadian courts’, CBC. 25 February. Available at: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ manitoba/tina-fontaine-colten-boushie-justice-denied-1.4549469 (Accessed: 4 October 2022). Moeke-Pickering, T., Cote-Meek, S. and Pegoraro, A. (2018) ‘Understanding the ways missing and murdered Indigenous women are framed and handled by social media users’, Media International Australia, 169(1), pp. 54–64. Mulligan, L., Axford, M. and Solecki, A. (2016). Homicide in Canada, 2015. Catalogue no. 85-002X201600114668. 23 November. Available at: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/85-002-x/ 2016001/article/14668-eng.htm (Accessed: 4 October 2022).

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Kandice Parker et al. The National Inquiry (2019). Reclaiming power and place: The final report of the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Available at: https://www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/ final-report/ (Accessed: 4 October 2022). NWAC (2010) What their stories tell us: Research findings from the Sisters In Spirit initiative. Native Women’s Association of Canada. Available at: https://nwac.ca/assets-knowledge-centre/2010_ What_Their_Stories_Tell_Us_Research_Findings_SIS_Initiative-1.pdf (Accessed: 4 October 2022). Parliament of Canada (2021). C-15 43rd Parliament, 2nd session (September 23, 2020, to August 15, 2021): An Act respecting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Available at: https://www.parl.ca/LegisInfo/en/bill/43-2/c-15 (Accessed: 4 October 2022). Parliament of Canada (2019). Vote No. 1293 42nd Parliament, 1st session: Sitting No. 402 – Wednesday April 10, 2019. Available at: https://www.ourcommons.ca/Members/en/votes/42/1/1293 (Accessed: 4 October 2022). Pearce, M. (2013) An awkward silence: Missing and murdered vulnerable women and the Canadian justice system. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses (NS27625). Proulx, C. (2000) ‘Current directions in Indigenous law/justice in Canada’, The Canadian Journal of Native Studies, 20(2), pp. 371–409. Royal Canadian Mounted Police (2014) Missing and murdered Indigenous women: A national operational overview. Catalogue no. PS64-115/2014E-PDF. Available at: https://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/ missing-and-murdered-aboriginal-women-national-operational-overview (Accessed: 4 October 2022). Strega, S., Janzen, C., Morgan, J., Brown, L., Thomas, R. and Carriére, J. (2014) ‘Never innocent victims: Street sex workers in Canadian print media’, Violence against Women, 20(1), pp. 6–25. United Nations (2007) United Nations declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples. Available at: https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2018/11/ UNDRIP_E_web.pdf (Accessed: 4 October 2022). UNODC (2013) Homicide and gender: 2015. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Available at: www.heuni.fi/material/attachments/heuni/projects/wd2vDSKcZ/Homicide_and_Gender.pdf (Accessed: 2 November 2017). Warick, J. (2019) ‘“Unconscionable”: Senator blasts rejection of bill she says would protect Indigenous women’, CBC. 12 April. Available at: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/senator-lilliandyck-blasts-rejection-indigenous-women-crime-bill-1.5096469 (Accessed: 4 October 2022).

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5 FAMILICIDE, GENDER AND “MENTAL ILLNESS” Beyond false dualisms Denise Buiten

Reading complex violences Amidst growing attention to domestic and family violence in policy, media and public discussion, some cases of family violence present as particularly knotty and difficult to interpret. Familicide – also known as “family annihilation” – is one such form of violence. Defined as the killing of an intimate partner and child(ren) (Wilson, Daly and Daniele, 1995) and frequently followed by suicide (Karlsson et al., 2021), familicide embodies a trifecta of violence (Buiten, 2022): against an intimate partner or former partner, against children and often against the self. It is a highly gendered crime, almost always committed by men against women and children, signalling the role of gender relations in its constitution (Karlsson et al., 2021; Websdale, 2010). What can sometimes make it difficult to interpret, however, is that as a phenomenon familicide has both distinct gendered markers that link it with the broader issue of domestic abuse and femicide (Mailloux, 2014) and others that situate it outside of more widespread forms of domestic violence. For instance, while domestic abuse, separation and custody disputes preceding familicide are common (Johnson, 2005; Karlsson et al., 2021; Mailloux, 2014), another category of familicide offenders have no known history of domestic abuse, appearing to be motivated by despair in the face of declining financial or reputational health and acting out of the pseudo-altruistic belief they are sparing their family pain (Websdale, 2010). While varied typologies have been deployed in familicide research, they tend to share this emphasis on two broad categories of offenders: one that fits with other forms of maleperpetrated domestic homicide and one that – at least on the face of it – does not. Given this, in contexts such as Australia and the United Kingdom, familicide is often rendered intelligible through competing frames (Buiten and Coe, 2022; Galvin, Quinn and Cleary, 2021). On the one hand, familicide is frequently assumed an anomaly, the outcome of a psychiatric disturbance best explained by individual circumstances; on the other, it is interpreted as part of a broader pattern of gendered domestic violence. Accounts informed by the psy-disciplines are more likely to understand familicide (and especially familicidesuicide) as the result of intense psychic pain, an act of desperation or delusional thinking. This reading can be seen in cultural representations (Buiten, 2022; Galvin, Quinn and

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-8

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Cleary, 2021) and research on familicide (Ewing, 1997; Schlesinger, 2000). Feministinformed accounts, on the other hand, generally position familicide side-by-side with other domestic femicides, as another manifestation of male power and control in the context of patriarchal norms and structures that produce and condone male violence against women. While there is little feminist work specifically on familicide as a social issue, such interpretations can be seen in feminist analyses of representations of familicide, in which psychiatric explanations are criticised and a domestic violence framing is endorsed (e.g. Galvin, Quinn and Cleary, 2021; Quinn, Prendergast and Galvin, 2019). These competing causal explanations play out acutely in news reporting on familicide, in which a dualism can often be observed between interpretations of familicide as an expression of either psychological pain or patriarchal power. This chapter presents a feminist sociological account of familicide that seeks to trouble this dualism in media and popular culture – and how it is scaffolded by the persistence of similar dualisms in some research and media advocacy. In this way, it points to how the process of interrogating media representations involves also being astute to the language used in research – including feminist research and activism – and the ways this can shape or legitimise limiting cultural tropes of sad or bad men. In the analytic approach suggested, gender and power remain at the centre of the analysis while taking seriously, and contextualising, experiences of distress that can accompany acts of violence against others (Websdale, 2010). Familicide can, accordingly, be understood and represented as both a form of gender-based violence deeply connected to other forms of male control of and violence against women and children and as an expression and mobilisation of intense feelings of distress and powerlessness produced in and through gendered power relations. Moving beyond the dualisms, I argue, is important both for understanding and contextualising familicide and for advancing an appreciation of the utility of a feminist lens for understanding complex forms of violence. This is particularly valuable in a context characterised by backlash against feminist theorisations, which are sometimes regarded as unidimensional and characterised by the silencing of psychological dimensions. First, I outline examples of the discursive dualism that is constructed around familicide in media, reflecting on some of the reasons this dualism endures and its connections to some elements of feminist scholarship and activism. Then, I discuss how a feminist sociological lens can be applied to interpret existing research on familicide in a way that illuminates the imbrication of gender and power with perpetrators’ experiences of distress – and how this is mobilised through violence.

Constructing dualisms In 2016, Alan Hawe brutally killed his wife, Clodagh, and their three sons Liam (13), Niall (11) and Ryan (6) in Count Cavan, Ireland, before killing himself. In the reporting that followed, a mental “illness/distress frame” (Buiten and Coe, 2022) was common in Irish news reporting (Galvin, Quinn and Cleary, 2021). Within this frame, familicide was interpreted directly as the outcome of diagnos(ed/able) “mental illness” such as depression, or more broadly as the outcome of a culmination of personal stresses. Alan Hawe was variously characterised in medical terms as an otherwise loving father suffering “chronic depression” and “serious mental health” issues, or as a man experiencing deep emotional conflict and disillusionment in the face of personal failures (Galvin, Quinn and Cleary, 2021). However, while a mental illness/distress frame was more common, “feminist 66

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counterpointing” news frames were also deployed, presenting the case as an instance of extreme domestic violence (Quinn, Prendergast and Galvin, 2019). This was especially true of social media commentary, much of which sought to reject the mental health lens commonly adopted in the news (Quinn, Prendergast and Galvin, 2019). Within news publications themselves, such feminist counterpointing was also present. As a writer for the Irish Examiner and journalism academic commented, reflecting the dialectic between media and academic discourses, while mental illness may have been present, “what we are not told is that murder-suicides are cases of extreme domestic violence” (Galvin, 2021). Here, Alan Hawe’s experience of mental illness was accepted as significant but seen as insufficient to account for his violence (Galvin, 2021). Others wholly rejected the notion that mental illness was in any way salient to the murders, particularly the implicit suggestion that mental illness may have diminished Hawe’s agency. A headline in The Sun reported, Alan Hawe “was evil and NOT mentally ill” (Fruen, 2016). Similar contestations occurred around the murder of Hannah Clark and her children Aaliyah (6), Laianah (4), and Trey (3) by Rowan Baxter in Brisbane, Australia, early in 2020. Rowan Baxter acted with unthinkable cruelty when he tracked down his estranged wife and three young children on their school run one morning, doused the inside of their car in petrol and set it alight. He took his own life soon after. In response to this act of violence, some commentators remarked that Baxter must have been mentally unwell (Chung, 2020). Others ferociously rejected such claims, insisting that Baxter was a “monster”, “putrid scum” (Chung, 2020) fully in control of his decisions, acting not out of distress but out of a quest for control after years of perpetrating domestic abuse. A media furore ensued when a detective inspector on the case suggested that police were looking into whether the murders reflected “an issue of a woman suffering significant domestic violence and her and her children perishing at the hands of her husband, or […] an instance of a husband being driven too far by issues that he’s suffered by certain circumstances” (Baird, 2020). The insinuation that Baxter’s agency may in some way have been diminished, that one explanation may be that he was “driven” to these acts of violence as an understandable response to life stressors, was swiftly and forcefully criticised in media commentary. Under pressure, the Detective Inspector who had made the comments stepped aside from the case. Some defenders saw the angry response to his comments as a sign of the misplaced outrage flowing from what were regarded narrow feminist frames that exclude all explanations of male violence outside the motivation for power and control. As politician Pauline Hanson was quoted in the media as saying, sarcastically, “How dare police deviate from the feminist script of seeking excuses and explanations when women [kill partners and children] but immediately judging a man in these circumstances as simply representing the evil violence that is in all men” (Hanson as cited in Graham, 2020). While Rowan Baxter had a known history of perpetrating coercive control, Fernando Manrique did not. In 2016 Manrique murdered his wife, Maria Lutz, and two children, Elisa (11) and Martin (10), by rigging their Sydney home with a poisonous gas system, killing the entire family as they slept. In this case, early interpretations as to motive speculated that Elisa and Martin’s disability played a central role and that the familicide was a symptom of overwhelming stress in the face of the presumed “burden” of raising autistic children (Buiten and Coe, 2022). When the coronial inquest revealed it was Maria’s plans to leave Manrique that triggered his decision and that Manrique had had a history of infidelity, news reporting re-characterised him unsympathetically as a selfish and controlling man. In this case, too, the binary constructed around mental illness and domestic violence 67

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as causes could be observed. As Harvey (2016) wrote in the Daily Telegraph, for instance, “This is not mental illness. This is domestic violence”. As is common around such cases, a tension existed around whether to interpret them as instances of domestic violence or mental illness or distress. In cases that map more cleanly onto feminist-informed understandings of domestic and family violence – for example, a known history of domestic abuse preceding murders in the context of separation or custody disputes – a domestic violence lens is more likely to be taken up. In cases that do not present this way, news media is more likely to adopt news frames that position familicide as mysterious, unsolvable tragedies; the clearest point of hope for finding answers is assumed to be the excavation of the troubled psyche of perpetrators. In both cases, what these constructions disallow is an examination of common gendered drivers of both mental distress and patterned male violence against women – and how both are profoundly intertwined.

Some roots to the polarity The polarity that often exists between psychiatric and gendered sociological readings of violence has a few driving factors. Indeed, the discourses observed in media and popular culture have a somewhat porous relationship with research, which can act as a resource through which to craft the intelligibility of different news frames. When it comes to familicide specifically, research is dominated by the psy-disciplines, with exceedingly little sociological and feminist research in this area. While feminist work on issues such as coercive control, domestic abuse and domestic homicide have amassed a growing evidence base of nuanced research that has become increasingly mainstreamed (if always still contested), when it comes to some other forms of family violence this is not the case. This is especially so for forms of family violence that deviate from certain gendered patterns in perpetration or motive, such as familicide which as discussed is not always preceded by a history of abuse, and filicide which is committed roughly as often by women as by men (Brown, Tyson and Fernandes Arias, 2018; O’Hagan, 2014). Media and public encounters with these issues, therefore, have not been furnished with the same feminist analytical frameworks as those offered to understand intimate partner homicide. This can create a gap into which psychiatric and – often – anti-feminist explanations can flourish (Fitzroy, 2001). Especially in the face of cases of violence seemingly committed out of the blue, the fall-back to psychopathology is common; violence presenting as less intelligible or speakable as a public issue is more likely to be attributed to the internal world of individuals (Guerin, 2017). While efforts to address violence against women have been largely feminist-informed in the last few decades (Kuskoff and Parsell, 2020), the area of mental illness has seen the continued dominance of psy-disciplines (Rimke, 2016). It is interesting to note, however, that despite this long history the hegemony of the psy-disciplines in understanding men’s mental struggles is not inevitable. Indeed, while conceptualisations of mental illness and health have a long history of being situated primarily as the purview of the disciplines and practices of the “psycomplex” (Rimke, 2016), there has been feminist sociological engagement with these issues. The 1970s and 1980s, for instance, saw a pronounced interest in feminist work in situating men’s emotional struggles as the product of restrictive gender norms – one of the diverse manifestations of patriarchy (Messner, 2016). However, since then a splintering has occurred with respect to men’s groups’ relationships with feminism: pro-feminist men’s groups seeking to focus primarily on challenging men’s structural privilege and anti-feminist groups 68

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continuing to engage with men’s mental health but in a way that recasts men’s troubles as evidence that patriarchy is a myth and/or that feminism is harming men (Messner, 2016). As a result, men’s experiences of poor mental health, when they are raised in relation to gender and feminism, are frequently weaponised to discredit feminist claims. This has complicated feminist engagement with issues around men’s mental health. Further, as Yates (2019) points out, the feminist-informed anti-domestic violence sector has a fraught relationship with other sectors that rely on more individualised, depoliticised accounts of social problems. Take for example the alcohol and other drugs (AOD) sector, which has had a complicated relationship with the anti-domestic violence sector when it comes to considering the role of addiction and substance abuse in the perpetration of violence (Yates, 2019). While, as Yates points out, there are some undeniable intersections between substance abuse and domestic violence, the different strategic objectives and treatment modalities of the two sectors have clashed. A key part of the work of the AOD sector has been to destigmatise sufferers and attribute their behaviours to an illness; the anti-domestic violence sector, on the other hand, has been focused on ensuring that the problematic behaviours and choices of perpetrators are centralised. So, while the AOD sector has historically positioned addiction and associated behaviours as the outcome of an illness sufferers are not personally responsible for, and for which individualised treatments are prescribed, the antidomestic violence sector has sought to hold men responsible for their violence and to politicise it as a social problem best remedied through cultural and structural change (Yates, 2019). Similarly, while mental illness and the perpetration of domestic violence can often intersect (Fitzpatrick et al., 2022), there is an understandable concern that highlighting men’s mental distress – especially seeking to attribute it some causal explanatory power with respect to domestic and family violence – will normalise and depoliticise men’s violence, divesting men of their responsibility in its perpetration (Smith, Bond and Jeffries, 2019). These different framings – and the treatment modalities that flow from them – make for a guarded feminist encounter with questions of men’s mental health in the context of domestic violence perpetration. However, while this guardedness is understandable, sidestepping the issue of men’s emotional distress in the context of their violence may not be productive either. Considering violent men’s distress need not ignore or sideline the role of gender and power; in fact, it is worth asking how patriarchal norms and structures contribute to producing distress – and to legitimating a violent response to it – among so many men including those who commit familicide. Rather than treating murder-suicide as either murder or suicide, as is often the case (McPhedran et al., 2018), the continuums and connections between them should be explored.

The motivations and context of familicide Familicide is a relatively rare form of violence. While comparable national statistics are difficult to establish, on average one familicide per year in Australia was been reported in the media between 2014 and 2020 (Buiten, 2022). Karlsson et al. (2021), in their systematic review of international literature on the issue, indicate that where statistics exist national incidence rates sit between 1 and 2.55 in different national contexts per year. Of course, familicide is a crime at the intersection of two more widespread forms of violence – intimate partner homicide and filicide. Some familicide offenders, therefore, share common traits of male filicide and intimate partner homicide perpetrators. Others, however, do not.

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I draw on Websdale’s (2010) typological distinction and terminology, which distinguishes between civil-reputable and livid-coercive perpetrators. Livid-coercive offenders generally have a history of perpetrating domestic abuse and tend to kill their families in the face of impending separation and/or custody disputes (Liem and Reichelmann, 2014; Websdale, 2010; Wilson, Daly and Daniele, 1995). They are usually described as controlling, jealous, angry and vengeful, acting out of the belief that if they cannot have their partner and family (in-tact), no one can (Wilson, Daly and Daniele, 1995). Feeling abandoned and rejected (Liem and Riechelmann, 2014), and facing the loss of control over their families, they kill, according to Websdale (2010, p. 127), to “dissipate or dissolve unbearable feelings of humiliated fury”. In many ways, these cases reflect patterns in intimate partner homicides (Monckton Smith, 2020) and filicides by men (O’Hagan, 2014), in which revenge and control are common motives. Civil-reputable familicide perpetrators, on the other hand, seldom have a known history of violence or abuse against their partners or children, often presenting before the killings as ideal husbands, fathers and community members (Websdale, 2010). Of course, many domestic abusers are not evident as such to those outside of the immediate family, making claims as to offenders’ non-violence rightfully subject to scrutiny. That said, while some familicide offenders may mistakenly be presumed within this category, in-depth coronial investigations in Australia (Barnes, 2015) and sociological research in the United States (Websdale, 2010) suggests that, compared to intimate partner homicide alone, familicides are more often committed by men who did not appear violent or abusive previously. These civil-reputable offenders plan familicide in the wake of an impending or perceived “fall from grace” (Websdale, 2010, p. 245) from which they wish (in their own thinking) to spare themselves and their families. They act out of a brooding sense of depression, discontent and mounting hopelessness often experiencing financial troubles or mental illness (Liem and Reichelmann, 2014; Oliffe et al., 2015; Websdale, 2010; Wilson, Daly and Daniele, 1995) and/or a “drastic and sudden change or loss that negatively and significantly impacts the ability of the family to sustain their current quality of living” (Mailloux, 2014, p. 923). Family annihilation is considered by such perpetrators the only viable solution to the loss, shame or fear they experience – “brought about by some form of spiralling decline, usually in arenas associated with masculinity such as finances, social status, or family leadership” (Buiten, 2022, p. 77). In both cases, argues Websdale (2010), potent feelings of shame and powerlessness are present. These pent-up emotions and relational conflicts, argues Schlesinger (2000), lead to escalating psychic tension and fixated thinking – a “catathymic process” that results in explosive violence as a way to expunge the tension. However, what such an account fails to ask is both how social contexts support the production of these painful feelings and why perpetrators seek to purge them through violence against others in ways that are uniquely gendered.

Gendering distress among perpetrators of familicide This section contextualises the distress of perpetrators of familicide in a way that shows its connection to many of the known drivers of male violence against women and moves beyond psychocentric (Rimke, 2016) accounts of mental illness/distress by considering the gendered aetiologies of violence. Specifically, a deep investment in normative gendered roles and institutions shapes feelings of distress at the prospect of being unable to achieve a particular vision of the gendered head of household perpetrators feel compelled and entitled to enact. Of course, mental illness or distress alone does not necessitate violence and violence is an uncommon feature of mental illness. However, to divorce violence from embodied emotion 70

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and emphasise the perpetration of violence only as an individual choice is to sidestep the feminist call to contextualise violence both culturally and structurally (Kuskoff and Parsell, 2020). Indeed, rates of mental illness are high among abusers and men’s suicide and use of interpersonal violence often co-occur (Fitzpatrick et al., 2022). Rather than assuming a oneway causal relationship between mental illness/distress and violence, looking at their cooccurrence in social context reveals the imbrication of gender and power in the emotional worlds and choices of perpetrators. More broadly, depression and suicide among men have been connected to a sense of failed or thwarted masculine accomplishment (Chandler, 2019; Scourfield, 2005). For familicide offenders, the intense escalation of internal pressure and spiralling sense of hopelessness experienced is also connected to a perceived spoiling of the masculine identities and functions they are deeply invested in (Websdale, 2010). Men who commit familicide commonly have a particularly deep attachment to their roles as heads of households, as breadwinners and as stoic protectors and/or commanders of the family (Mailloux, 2014). In this context, financial troubles are a common trigger, not as an explanation for the potency of their distress or violence so much as a symptom of this attachment to gender roles. Because investment in these roles and identities is so deep (Wood Harper and Voigt, 2007), threats to their achievement can be experienced as particularly scolding, even un-survivable. As Websdale (2010) argues, familicide perpetrators are characterised by intense shame and humiliation, not as mere inner pathology but as socially situated manifestations of the “restrictive and punishing standards of the gender regime” (p. 51), as it intersects with broader modern imperatives towards the repression of feeling – a feature heightened by normative masculinity (River and Flood, 2021). Many familicide offenders, especially those who appear to commit violence out of the blue, are men with strong social standing and/or positions in traditionally masculine roles such as military, finance and farming (e.g. Anderson, Sisask and Varnik, 2011). They are more likely than other homicide offenders to be middle-class (Karlsson et al., 2021) and to be part of what appears to be a normatively ideal nuclear family. While this makes their distress and violence seem unexpected, research on familicide suggests that this position can contribute to it, deepening the shame perpetrators feel in the face of a perceived decline, the stress-strain experience heightened by the betrayal of social expectations (Wood Harper and Voigt, 2007).

Gendering the mobilisation of distress by familicide perpetrators Embodied emotions, even intense ones, are not explanations for violence, however. Why, we should ask, would perpetrators of familicide consider the murder of an entire family – of those they profess to love – a reasonable solution to these feelings? It is worth pointing out that most familicides do not occur when a perpetrator “snaps”, as is often assumed, but are premeditated (Karlsson et al., 2021). “Emotions are not merely personal feelings”, explain River and Flood (2021), “but are also mobilised in social relations” (p. 911). There is a space between feeling and action. The feeling, the determination of how to respond to it and the moment of action are all socially situated. Familicide not only occurs within the context of gendered emotional distress but how this distress is responded to. It represents a particularly distilled expression of hegemonic masculinity, which can be vengefully or seemingly benevolently patriarchal. In both cases, “omnipotent control” is sought and enacted (Johnson and Sachmann, 2014, p. 108). While perpetrators may feel powerlessness, embedded within these acts is an entitlement to regain control over the situation and the family 71

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through a unilateral decision as “head of the household”. As research on men and suicide shows, the norm of masculine stoicism dissuades the disclosure of mounting difficult feelings and encourages their release through practices considered more masculine – one of which is violence (River and Flood, 2021). In other words, familicide offenders seek to diffuse intense tension and distress (Schlesinger, 2000) in ways that are shaped by the gendered assumption of the right to determine the course of the family (Oliffe et al., 2015; Wood Harper and Voigt, 2007) and through means coded as masculine. While control and domination as core to the act of familicide are more overtly evident in livid-coercive familicides, civil-reputable familicides also engender a profound sense of patriarchal entitlement to control specifically over women, children and the family – perceived as a unit. In order to be able to act in this way, perpetrators must position themselves as best situated to evaluate and make decisions as to the wellbeing and futures of their families to the extreme of determining life and death; even homicide becomes a rationalised means through which to “sustain control and prevent the breakup of the family” (Jaffe and Juodis, 2006, p.15). Familicide offenders feel not only deep shame but an entitled shame. This is akin to what researchers in the area of gender and mass violence have called an aggrieved entitlement (Kalish and Kimmel, 2010). As such, it is important to recognise that painful emotions, and the way they are responded to, are bound up in gendered power relations. In civil-reputable cases in which the initial impulse is suicide – where familicide is motivated by so-called altruism in the desire to prevent the emotional pain and/or financial repercussions their suicide would cause – homicide becomes a way of doing their role as heads of household in a unilaterally finite act as patriarch and “protector” (Wood Harper and Voigt, 2007). This, in part, helps to explain why it is almost always men who kill both their partner and children (Karlsson et al., 2021), while women do not. Though women do kill their children at almost equal rates to men, suggesting they hold proprietary attitudes towards children, men hold these towards both women and children – indeed towards the family as a construct itself (Walklate and Petrie, 2013). The deep investment in not only gender roles but also normative, gendered constructions of the nuclear family contributes to familicide (Johnson and Sachmann, 2014), through the notion that a family can only survive and thrive when it is in-tact in a particular sense – co-habiting, financially prosperous and with the enjoyment of community standing, for instance. Indeed, individual members of the family become subsumed under the unit of the family, over which familicide offenders strongly feel they must preside. Perceiving themselves as “the core of their families”, which are regarded as “extensions of themselves” (Jaffe and Juodis, 2006, p. 15), contributes to rendering the extreme response that familicide is a thinkable solution.

Conclusion It is tempting to divide violent men into murderous monsters or sad sufferers of personal circumstances and mental anguish. These framings continue to structure news reporting, at times deploying feminist discourses by challenging sympathetic portrayals of perpetrators, only to produce monsterising news tropes. However, these framings ignore key insights within feminist work around the normalisation of violence within common cultural scripts of masculinity and the capacity to disrupt this – that male violence is not inherent either in mental illness or as a manifestation of “evil”. When constructed in such binary terms, it divests both emotion and violent action of context. Such binaries discourage a careful consideration of how seemingly benevolent constructions of men as protectors and 72

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providers of a narrowly defined ideal of a family can harm not only men but legitimise some men’s decision to harm women and children they profess to love. There are common connections between the feelings of shame and powerlessness that familicide perpetrators commonly experience and the wielding of power over women and children, including through violence. Part of our work as feminist scholars is to challenge these binary framings not only in media representations but in research.

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Denise Buiten Harvey, C. (2016) ‘This wasn’t a murder-suicide. It was cold-blooded murder’, The Daily Telegraph, 23 October. Available at: https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/rendezview/this-wasnt-amurdersuicide-it-was-coldblooded-murder/news-story/27d387b57e997c3cddf09e298f83fc5c (Accessed: 2 December 2022). Jaffe, P. G. and Juodis, M. (2006) ‘Children as victims and witnesses of domestic homicide: Lessons learned from domestic violence death review committees’, Juvenile and Family Court Journal, 57(3), pp. 13–28. Johnson, C. H. (2005) Come with daddy: Child murder-suicide after family breakdown. Perth: University of Western Australia Publishing. Johnson, C. and Sachmann, M. (2014) ‘Familicide-suicide: From myth to hypothesis and toward understanding’, Family Court Review, 52(1), pp. 100–113. Kalish, R. and Kimmel, M. (2010) ‘Suicide by mass murder: Masculinity, aggrieved entitlement, and rampage school shootings’, Health Sociology Review, 19(4), pp. 451–464. Karlsson, L. C., Antfolk, J., Putkonen, H., Amon, S., da Silva, J., de Vogel, V. Flynn, S. and Weizmann-Henelius, G. (2021) ‘Familicide: A systematic literature review’, Trauma, Violence, and Abuse, 22(1), pp. 83–98. Kuskoff, E. and Parsell, C. (2020) ‘Preventing domestic violence by changing Australian gender relations: Issues and considerations’, Australian Social Work, 73(2), pp. 227–235. Liem, M., and Reichelmann, A. (2014) ‘Patterns of multiple family homicide’, Homicide Studies, 18(1), pp. 44–58. Mailloux, S. (2014) ‘Fatal families: Why children are killed in familicide occurrences’, Journal of Family Violence, 29(8), pp. 921–926. McPhedran, S., Eriksson, L., Mazerolle, P., De Leo, D., Johnson, H., and Wortley, R. (2018) ‘Characteristics of homicide-suicide in Australia: A comparison with homicide-only and suicideonly cases’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 33(11), pp. 1805–1829. Messner, M. A. (2016) ‘Forks in the road of men’s gender politics: Men’s rights vs feminist allies’, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 5(2), pp.6–20. Monckton Smith, J. (2020) ‘Intimate partner femicide: Using Foucauldian analysis to track an eight stage progression to homicide’, Violence Against Women, 26(11), pp.1267–1285. O’Hagan, K. (2014) Filicide-suicide: The killing of children in the context of separation, divorce and custody disputes. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Oliffe, J. L., Han, C. S. E., Drummond, M., Sta Maria, E., Bottorff, J. L. and Creighton, G. (2015) ‘Men, masculinities, and murder-suicide’, American Journal of Men’s Health, 9(6), pp. 473–485. Quinn, F., Prendergast, M. and Galvin, A. (2019) ‘Her name was Clodagh: Twitter and the news discourse of murder suicide’, Critical Discourse Studies, 16(3), pp. 312–329. Rimke, H. (2016) ‘Introduction: Mental and emotional distress as a social justice issue: Beyond psychocentrism’, Studies in Social Justice, 10(1), pp. 4–17. River, J., and Flood, M. (2021) ‘Masculinities, emotions and men’s suicide’, Sociology of Health and Illness, 43(4), pp. 910–927. Schlesinger, L. B. (2000) ‘Familicide, depression and catathymic process’, Journal of Forensic Sciences, 45(1), pp. 200–203. Scourfield, J. (2005) ‘Suicidal masculinities’, Sociological Research Online, 10(2), pp.1–10. Smith, A. L., Bond, C. E. and Jeffries, S. (2019) ‘Media discourses of intimate partner violence in Queensland newspapers’, Journal of Sociology, 55(3), pp. 571–586. Walklate, S., and Petrie, S. (2013) ‘Witnessing the pain of suffering: Exploring the relationship between media representations, public understandings and policy responses to filicide-suicide’, Crime Media Culture, 9(3), pp. 265 –279. Websdale, N. (2010) Familicidal hearts: The emotional styles of 211 killers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilson, M., Daly, M. and Daniele, A. (1995) ‘Familicide: The killing of spouse and children’, Aggressive Behavior, 21(4), pp. 275–291. Wood Harper, D., and Voigt, L. (2007) ‘Homicide followed by suicide: An integrated theoretical perspective’, Homicide Studies, 11(4), pp. 295–318. Yates, S. (2019) ‘“An exercise in careful diplomacy”: Talking about alcohol, drugs and family violence’, Policy Design and Practice, 2(3), pp. 258–274.

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6 FEMMINICIDIO IN ITALIAN TELEVISED NEWS A case study of La Vita in Diretta Federica Formato

Introduction In Italy, as well as in all other parts of the world, women continue to be murdered at the hands of men they know. The Italian Office for Statistics (ISTAT) found that 92% of the 106 women killed in known circumstances in 2020 were victims of male violence; more specifically, 51% were killed by their current partners/husbands, 6% by someone they were in a relationship with, 25% by a relative and 9.6% by someone else they knew. In 2021, men killed 116 women in Italy (ISTAT, 2021). In this chapter, I present a sociolinguistic analysis of five news reports of femminicidio, that is the killing of women by men known to them for reasons linked to gendered roles and expectations, during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020–2021. The reports aired on an afternoon television programme called La Vita in Diretta (Rai 1, 2000 – continuing): an infotainment programme that deals with political and other news, alongside hosting celebrities and discussing lighter content. This study aims to expand on previous work surrounding the language of femminicidio in Italian media (Busso, Combei, and Tordini, 2020; Formato, 2019) as well as femicide in other languages or contexts (Gillespie et al., 2013; Karlsson et al., 2021; Janzen, 2018; Lloyd and Ramon, 2017; Santaemilia and Maruenda, 2014). This is linked to Fowler (2013)’s argument, i.e., the news represent the world in a non-neutral reflection of facts, through what can be seen to be symbolic words/expressions. I argue that this is particularly true for violence against women, as narratives are usually found to perpetuate sexist, patriarchal myths and expectations (Easteal, Holland and Judd, 2015). In the next section, I present the background literature that is useful to understand how femicide is narrated in news. I then introduce the dataset and the methods of investigation, explaining how the texts are read through a discourse analytical approach, before presenting the results, divided into emerging patterns and presenting telling examples. Finally, I draw some conclusions.

Understanding femminicidio In this chapter, I use the term femminicidio acknowledging that other scholars have framed this crime with different terminology, including “intimate partner femicide” (Monckton DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-9

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Smith, 2020), “intimate terrorism” (Johnson, 1995) and “intimate murders” (Wykes, 1995) – terms which keep gender in view to differing degrees. The term femminicidio is convincingly defined by Bandelli and Porcelli “as an issue of intimate and domestic violence, rooted in culture, a phenomenon that erupted because of men’s incapability to accept women’s assertion of freedom” (2016, p. 9). This is a narrower definition than often applied to the English term femicide which does not, necessarily, refer exclusively to the context of intimate relationships. As with theorisations of other forms of men’s violence against women, feminist scholars of femicide have highlighted the gendered nature of this violence. Gender here encapsulates concepts such as (hegemonic) masculinities (Messerschmidt, 2017), rigid heteronormative identities, roles and relationships (Bondelli and Porcelli, 2016), as well as gendered social arrangements to which (perceived) male power is at the centre (Taylor and Jasinski, 2011). These concepts not only explain male violence against women (including femicide) but also provide a useful ground to see how people operate these values in society (Testoni et al., 2020). More specifically, in patriarchal societies, male violence against women is part of a status quo in heteronormative relations (Bandelli and Porcelli, 2016), reproducing unequal and fixed gender arrangements (male dominance vs female subordination, see Corradi et al., 2016). For instance, Messerschmidt (2017) discusses the connections between hegemonic masculinity (dominant values such as strength, toughness and power that are believed to belong to men and regulate societies) and emphasised femininity. I argue that this is paramount, both men and women in the femminicidio scenario must be seen through symbolic gender(ed) values: men (seeing themselves) as powerful and women confined as “complementary, compliant and accommodating” in the relationship (Messerschmidt, 2017, p. 72). The notion of male power is one of the main aspects of femicides; more specifically, the attempt to re-establish power and control (Taylor, 2009) following the belief that these were lost because of women’s choices. Specifically, men who kill their intimate partners are driven by the willingness to re-possess, through “a sense of ownership” (Radford and Russell, 1992, p. 3), what they believe belongs to them: in this view, women are mere objects, do not have freedom and are at the disposal of men. In other words, “women become the targets of the man’s attempt to re-assert his masculinity/identity” (Boonzaier, 2018, p. 201). The literature demonstrates that similar gendered notions of masculinities and femininities can be found around the world; however, Messerschmidt (2017) also urges to consider a focus on local embodiments of these values. Zara et al. (2019) investigated 86 cases of femicides in Northwest Italy from 1993 to 2013 and found that information on the crime (through, for instance, documents written by coroners) suggests that women’s decision to leave the relationships was the trigger for their killings in all cases. Also in Italy, Testoni et al. (2020) argue that sexist attitudes were the reasons provided by the nine male interviewees convicted of gendered violence. Finally, Bandelli and Porcelli (2016) discuss the idea of a “typical Italian family” in which roles are unequal and imbalanced (see also Formato, 2019). The local embodiments of these values are evidenced not only in social norms and legislation but also in media texts. There seems to be agreement on the idea that “media portrayals of violence against women provide a potential site for the reproduction of gender inequality” (Easteal, Holland and Judd, 2015, p. 104). Chapters by Buiten and Parker et al. in this volume discuss how femicide, and the related crime of familicide, is made meaningful – and which femicides “count” – in different national contexts. Karlsson et al. (2021), investigated seven Swedish newspapers and found that, among other factors, there was no recognition of the 76

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structural aspects of the gendered crime and that alternative theories as to why the killings occurred were proposed to justify the actions of those men who committed the crimes. In examining Spanish newspapers El Pais and El Mundo, Santaemilia and Maruenda (2014) found that the crimes were seen through abstract nouns (such as danger or drama), whilst Gillespie et al. (2013) argue that the news portrayed femicides as isolated incidents in US media. Returning to Italy, Busso, Combei and Tordini (2020) quantitatively compared the language used in a TV programme (Amore Criminale) and articles from four newspapers (from September 2013 to May 2014); they found that love is seen as a fundamental aspect of the media narrations of the gendered crime. In investigating 331 newspaper articles (2013–2016) through corpus linguistics techniques, I similarly found that gelosia (jealousy) was statistically significant among other patterns in what I defined as “forensic narratives” (Formato, 2019, p. 224). This brief review reminds us that what femminicidio means is continually under (local) negotiation and can reveal relevant aspects about gender, violence and power. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, much-existing commentary has focused on whether the rates of femminicido have increased, with contradictory evidence emerging (e.g., Weil, 2020; Standish and Weil, 2021; Aebi et al., 2021). Specifically, Aebi et al. (2021) discuss a “situational hypothesis”, i.e., the plausible scenario in which more women would feel unsafe in their homes, based on the simultaneity of reduced space (that is people sharing the same place for longer) and the likely absence of social control, thus generating an increase in cases. However, it is important not to reduce the seriousness of femminicidio to frequency exclusively. This study provides detailed scrutiny of a small number of television news stories to investigate some of the meanings attached to femminicidio in the context of the Italian lockdown and other restrictions to public life.

Methodology The aim of this section is twofold; namely, I present and discuss the collection of the dataset and I explain the methods carried out for the investigation. In conceptualising this chapter, I planned to use televised news from Rai 1, Rai 2 and Rai 3 (three channels of the national broadcaster), starting from the first Covid-19 lockdown (that is from March 2020), in order to explore whether/how the potentially distinctive risks to women during the pandemic shaped the understanding of femminicidio. However, I found that the main news programmes did not frequently report episodes of femminicidio: indeed, I could only find three reports. This was possibly due to the priority given to the pandemic and its consequences (e.g., the number of infections and government measures). However, this absence is telling, specifically in relation to the number of femicides that occurred in 2020 (106). What followed were attempts to re-frame the investigation, whilst maintaining the original focus on televised news stories and on specific episodes of femminicidio during the Covid-19 pandemic. In researching what the TV schedule could offer, I chose La Vita in Diretta, a programme which has aired since 2000 on the national channel, Rai 1, from 3–5 pm, with an audience share of around 14%–15% monthly (Auditel, 2022). The anchorman of this programme is Alberto Matano, a former journalist of the Rai 1 TV news; the programme is an infotainment one, meaning it deals with current affairs, from social issues to politics, to lighter content such as showbusiness. La Vita in Diretta was selected to enrich the established literature on print media and provide more insights into how language is used to frame femminicidio. 77

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Starting from the YouTube page of the channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/rai), I searched the name of the programme La Vita in Diretta together with the term femminicidio. This search identified 25 videos on the topic of femminicidio during the Covid19 pandemic period. Four of these reports were short (only 2–3 minutes) pre-recorded segments and were excluded on this basis. The remaining 21 videos addressed the topic in a range of ways. Whilst the majority of videos dealt with individual cases, there were four focused on femminicidio in more general terms, with reports hinging on interventions of the Head of State, other politicians or lawyers commenting on the topic. Of those focussing on individual cases, there were three narrating trials relating to femminicidi which occurred in the previous years; five reported on attempted femminicidi, that is when the victim survived the crime; four instances referred to women killed by other family members (e.g., a case where a woman was killed by her brother). The last five are the ones I investigate in this chapter, which focused on contemporary instances of femminicidi (see Table 6.1). In these five narratives, Matano either presents the report from another journalist or follows up the report with some questions for the journalists on the crime scenes. Some relatives or acquaintances of the victims are also interviewed; notably, none of the reports includes interviews with supporters of the perpetrator. In two episodes, we also see a criminologist, Roberta Bruzzone, explaining the dynamics of violence against women. Bruzzone does not exclusively specialise in violence against women and has also dealt with different types of crimes in her career. The qualitative investigation of the transcribed reports identified three key areas I will now go on to explore: • the absence of the term femminicidio in the narration • use of specific referential strategies, e.g., first names of both victims and perpetrators • focus on motives and emotional states and counternarratives of perpetrators. The analysis offered in the next section delves into these three patterns and presents telling examples (with my translations in English) from the dataset.

The linguistic framing of femminicidio in La Vita in Diretta In this section, I first investigate the absence of the term femminicidio. Before I discuss femminicidio, it is important to contextualise the term in relation to legal (mis)use. This term is not currently part of the Italian penal code (as also described in detail in Formato, 2019). This means that concerns arise in i) how femicides are counted and ii) how these cases are framed in court. Whilst the parliament passed a so-called femminicidio law in 2013, the term is never used in the text of this law (see Formato, 2019). The 2018–2022 parliament increased its engagement with the issue, having formed a Commissione parlamentare di inchiesta sul femminicidio, nonché su ogni forma di violenza di genere (Parliamentary committee on femminicidio as well as all other forms of gendered violence). Furthermore, it is believed that the term has been only once used in sentencing, in the case of a woman, Stefania Noce, killed at the hand of her ex-boyfriend in 2011. Yet, the term was later removed from the sentence because the judge defined it as “un brutto neologismo dal sapore sociologico” (an awful sociology-related neologism) (JNews, 2021). It is for these reasons that I investigated the ways in which the crime is labelled. On this topic, Bandelli and Porcelli (2016) suggest 78

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Jenny Cantarero

Elena Casanova

21 October 2021

13 December 2021

Piera Napoli

16 February 2021

Cecilia Juana Hazana Loayza

Loredana Scalone

25 November 2020

22 November 2021

Victim

Date A tradimento (Trecherously) Aveva paura (She was scared) Femminicidio Brescia: uccisa a martellate per strada, arrestato l’ex (Femicide Brescia: killed with a hammer on the street, ex- partner arrested) Cecilia, uccisa dall’ex per una foto sui social (Cecilia, killed by her ex because of a picture posted on social media) Uccisa dall’ex, caccia all’assassino di Jenny (Killed by her ex, hunt for Jenny’s murderer)

Video title

Table 6.1 Corpus of televised news recalling episodes of femminicido in La Vita in Diretta

https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=rX2naaVdwzs

https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=RMNK0ncA_Gc

https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=NE3m8OhYS8s https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=x7puXE6Fcnc https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=TGx8bz5iiSQ

URL

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that the use of femminicidio in Italian newspapers rose sharply in 2012; however, in my own previous work, I found a decrease in use from 2013 to 2016 (Formato, 2019). Despite the fact that femminicidio was used in creating the corpus of narratives to investigate, the actual reports selected only use the term once, in the case of Elena Casanova when Matano says: e poi Roberta, la cosa fondamentale è non sottovalutare questi segnali, perché tutte le volte che purtroppo noi parliamo di un femminicidio, c’è sempre poi un passato diciamo di gente and then Roberta, the important aspect is not to underestimate these flags, because all the times we talk about a femicide, there is always a past made of people. Matano is here interviewing Bruzzone, the criminologist, about the importance of witnesses and victims reporting abusive behaviour to the police as a way of preventing femminicidio. Here, the term is accompanied by the indeterminate article un (a), not referring to specific cases. This term is not used in any other episode. Instead, there is reference to omicidio (homicide) in four episodes, delitto or delitto premeditato (premeditated crime) in three, as well as individual instances of storia terribile (horrible story) and vicenda (episode). In the case of the former two, there seems to be a preference for legal terms, highlighting the severity of what happened. However, the wide use of the more neutral term omicidio maintains that the killing of a woman at the hand of a known person or an ex-partner equals any other killing that occurs for unspecified motives. In my view, one can see here a fierce resistance to disregard the social impact of the crime and, possibly, the political, social and cultural work needed to address this issue. Furthermore, in the latter pair (storia terribile and vicenda), the crime is arguably downgraded to a story or an episode, underestimating the criminal aspect as well as its structural aspect, confirming what was already suggested by Santaemilia and Maruenda (2014) and Gillespie et al. (2013). What emerges is that terms replacing femminicidio are disregarding the gender aspect, in keeping with a society that continuously renders women’s issues invisible. Strategies used to nominate or refer to people are always interesting as they can reveal how the people involved are seen in relation to distance and proximity, as well as how they are conceptualised based on age, gender, ethnicity and position in the story. To begin with, it is possibly unsurprising that the first name of the victim is used in all the episodes. In a previous study (Potts and Formato, 2021), we found that judges most often used the first name of the victim when reading sentences to perpetrators. We argue that this signalled the judges’ willingness to connect with the victims and those in court. However, the functions of these strategies might be different in relation to televised news: the proximity created here aims to present the victim as one of us, as someone to whom everybody could relate. Two interesting aspects emerge from the report of the femminicidio of a Peruvian-born woman, Cecilia Juana Hazana Loayza. Loayza’s origins are never disclosed in La Vita in Diretta but were easy to find in other news reports. Interestingly, Loayza was the only one of the five victims not to be referred to by her full name, as her surname is never mentioned. In addition, the journalist reporting from the scene alternates between Cecilia (used three times) and Juana (used twice) in the introductory part of the report, suggesting a certain instability in identifying the victim. These aspects are, in my view, telling in relation to perceptions around the nationality or rather the foreign-ness of the victim and are

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illustrative of what Sue et al. (2007, p. 273) refer to as microinequities when reporting on how people of colour are talked to or about. Differently from what is discussed above for victims, there are no consistent patterns in relation to how the men committing the femicides are referred to. The male perpetrators are mostly, and expectedly, described with kinship terms such as, for instance, marito (exhusband). In one episode, the killer is almost always referred to by his name and surname, to build a connection with his legal history (having been condemned for stalking and having been given a restrictive order); in two other episodes, they are also referred to with either alternating names and surnames or are referred to exclusively through their name. However, in the remaining two episodes their details are not shared, possibly framing a lack of responsibility given to the murderers. The final pattern investigated is a well-known issue in reporting male violence against women (see Formato, 2019; Busso, Combei and Tordini, 2020; Zara et al., 2019), that of attributing violence to the killer’s jealousy, unconditional love, or a sudden loss of control. In the report about the femicide of Piera Napoli, for instance, the journalist states “uccisa, lo ricordiamo, inflitta da più di 30 coltellate dal marito completamente impazzito dalla gelosia” ([she was] killed, just to remind you, suffering more than 30 stab wounds at the hand of her husband, totally driven crazy by jealousy). In translating into English, one very telling meaning seems to be lost: the verb infliggere (to inflict), here used to describe how the woman was killed, undermines the physical pain and focuses on the moral pain. Specifically, this verb is meant to convey a punishment given to someone. This, therefore, relates to jealousy as an accepted value (in heterosexual relationships) which seems to be the force behind the crime. In the same episode, the journalist invites the victim’s aunt to recount the story by saying “era geloso anche dei cugini” (he was jealous of her cousins too); in doing so, he seems to wish to strengthen the role of jealousy in this crime. Similarly, the killer of Elena Casanova is described as “geloso possessivo” (possessively jealous) whilst also recalling the words allegedly used by the killer in the police interview: “è stato un raptus” (I snapped), both contributing to a narrative that eases the killer’s responsibility as well as privileging his account of the crime. The anchorman describes the events around the murder of Loayza by suggesting that the killer “impazzisce” (has gone crazy) and we later are told of his “furia omicida” (homicidal rage). Whilst furia reflects an emotional state of short length (Treccani, 2021), the journalist pictures a different scenario than the one factually told, as this femicide was preceded by long-standing crimes such as stalking and other criminal behaviours towards the victim. Criminologist Bruzzone, whilst not challenging the anchorman or the journalists in this episode, explains that it is important to stop di parlare di soggetti folli, di gelosia, di raptus [ … ] questi sono soggetti che pianificano lucidamente e che puniscono le donne che osano lasciarli talking about crazy people, jealousy and losing control [ … ] [as] these are people who lucidly plan and who punish women who dare to split up with them. The exploitation of values associated with heterosexual relationships, such as love and jealousy through the maintenance of control from the man’s side, forms part of how these femicides have been narrated, contributing to reinforcing the status quo that Bruzzone’s comments seek to disrupt (Testoni et al., 2020; Taylor and Jasinski, 2011; Busso, Combei and Tordini, 2020).

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Conclusions This chapter aims to present a small-scale study of how the gendered crime of femminicidio is narrated in televised news within the two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. It explores five reports of the infotainment programme La Vita in Diretta, which airs on the first channel of the national TV Rai. The three linguistics aspects investigated – the absence of the term femminicidio, referential strategies, and motives as well as emotional states – suggest that the narratives are not balanced and are detrimental to women, confirming previous studies on the topic. These patterns undermine the seriousness of the crime and promote unfair justifications for those who commit the crime, based on emotional states and myths about heterosexual relations. Based on this, I concur with what has been pinpointed by Easteal, Holland and Judd (2015) in relation to gendered violence, that television is a medium that “cultivates the taste sensibilities of its audience” (2015, p. 204). The failure to reframe the narratives of the crime through structural and gender aspects is indicative of the societal, cultural, and legal imbalances in Italy, which still see women as subordinate to men.

References Aebi, M. F., Molnar, L. and Baquerizas, F. (2021) ‘Against all odds, femicide did not increase during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from six Spanish-speaking countries’, Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 37 (4), pp. 615–644. Auditel (2022) Public data. Available at: https://www.auditel.it/dati/ (Accessed: 7 October 2022). Bandelli, D. and Porcelli, G. (2016) ‘Femicide in Italy. “Femminicidio,” moral panic and progressivist discourse’, Sociologica, 2, pp. 1–34. Boonzaier, F. (2018) ‘Challenging risk: The production of knowledge on gendered violence in South Africa’, in Fitz-Gibbon, K., Walklate, S., McCulloch, J., and Maher, J. (eds.) Intimate partner violence, risk and security: Securing women’s lives in a global world. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, pp. 71–87. Busso, L., Combei, C. R. and Tordini, O. (2020) ‘The mediatization of femicide: A corpus-based study on the representation of gendered violence in Italian media’, Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria, 3, pp. 29–48. Corradi, C., Marcuello-Servós, C., Boira, S. and Weil, S. (2016) ‘Theories of femicide and their significance for social research’, Current Sociology, 64 (7), pp. 975–995. Easteal, P., Holland, K. and Judd, K. (2015) ‘Enduring themes and silences in media portrayals of violence against women’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 48, pp. 103–113. Formato, F. (2019) Gender discourse and ideology in Italian. Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan. Fowler, R. (2013). Language in the news: Discourse and ideology in the press. Abington: Routledge. Gillespie, L. K., Richards, T. N., Givens, E. M., and Smith, M. D. (2013) ‘Framing deadly domestic violence: Why the media’s spin matters in newspaper coverage of femicide’, Violence Against Women, 19 (2), pp. 222–245. ISTAT (2021) Omicidi di donne, 4 January. Available at: https://www.istat.it/it/violenza-sulle-donne/ il-fenomeno/omicidi-di-donne (Accessed: 27 October 2022). Janzen, C. (2018) ‘Safe distances and unbearable closeness: Cliché representations of violence against women in Canada’, Continuum, 32 (6), pp. 808–828. JNews (2021) 27 dicembre 2011 -Stefania Noce, attivista e femminista, viene uccisa suo fidanzato, JNews 28 December. Available at: https://www.napolitan.it/2021/12/28/115802/27-dicembre-2011stefania-noce-attivista-femminista-viene-uccisa-dal-suo-fidanzato/?fbclid=IwAR2vkQEX7d4nIbz 7g_oIsL4mHPPjclZnwHmeMgFcYPvTYhhIDgnzz6x4uiU (Accessed: 26 October 2022). Johnson, M. P. (1995) ‘Patriarchal terrorism and common couple violence: Two forms of violence against women’, Journal of Marriage and Family, 57, pp. 283–294. Karlsson, N., Lila, M., Gracia, E. and Wemrell, M. (2021) ‘Representation of intimate partner violence against women in Swedish news media: A discourse analysis’, Violence Against Women, 27 (10), pp. 1499–1524.

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Femminicidio in Italian televised news Lloyd, M. and Ramon, S. (2017) ‘Smoke and mirrors: UK newspaper representations of intimate partner domestic violence’, Violence against women, 23 (1), pp. 114–139. Messerschmidt, J. W. (2017) ‘Masculinities and femicide’, Qualitative Sociology Review, 13 (3), pp. 70–79. Monckton Smith, J. (2020) ‘Intimate partner femicide: Using Foucauldian analysis to track an eightstage progression to homicide’, Violence Against Women, 26 (11), pp. 1267–1285. Potts, A. and Formato, F. (2021) ‘Women victims of men who murder: XML mark-up for nomination, collocation and frequency analysis of language of the law’, in Baxter, J., and Anguri, J. (eds.) The handbook of language, gender and sexuality. Abington-on-Thames: Routledge, pp. 602–618. Radford, J. and Russell, D. E. H. (1992). Femicide: The politics of woman killing. New York: Twayne/ Gale Group. Santaemilia, J. and Maruenda, S. (2014) ‘The linguistic representation of gender violence in (written) media discourse’, Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict, 2 (2), pp. 249–273. Standish, K. and Weil, S. (2021) ‘Gendered pandemics: Suicide, femicide and COVID-19’, Journal of Gender Studies, 30 (7), pp. 1–13. Sue, D. W., Capodilupo, C. M., Torino, G. C., Bucceri, J. M., Holder, A., Nadal, K. L. and Esquilin, M. (2007) ‘Racial microaggressions in everyday life: Implications for clinical practice’, American Psychologist, 62 (4), pp. 271–286. Taylor, R. (2009) ‘Slain and slandered: A content analysis of the portrayal of femicide in crime news’, Homicide Studies, 13 (1), pp. 21–49. Taylor, R. and Jasinski, J. L. (2011) ‘Femicide and the feminist perspective’, Homicide Studies, 15 (4), pp. 341–362. Testoni, I., Pedot, M., Arbien, M., Keisari, S., Cataldo, E., Ubaldi, C. and Zamperini, A. (2020) ‘A gender-sensitive intervention in jail: A study of Italian men convicted of assaulting women or femicide’, The Arts in Psychotherapy, 71, pp. 101704. Treccani (29 October 2021) Furia. Available at: https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/furia_resf5c18eb9-dff0-11eb-94e0-00271042e8d9/ (Accessed: 21 December 2021). Weil, S. (2020) ‘Two global pandemics: Femicide and Covid-19’, Trauma and Memory, 8 (2), pp. 110–112. Wykes, M. (1995) ‘Passion, marriage and murder’, in Dobash, R. P., Noaks, L. and Dobash, R. Emerson (eds.) Gender and crime. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 49–76. Zara, G., Freilone, F., Veggi, S., Biondi, E., Ceccarelli, D. and Gino, S. (2019) ‘The medicolegal, psychocriminological, and epidemiological reality of intimate partner and non-intimate partner femicide in North-West Italy: Looking backwards to see forwards’, International Journal of Legal Medicine, 133 (4), pp. 1295–1307.

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7 CRUEL BENEVOLENCE Vulnerable menaces, menacing vulnerabilities and the white male vigilante trope Kathryn Claire Higgins

In 2007, a Sudanese Australian teenager named Liep Gony was murdered on a suburban Melbourne sidewalk. Two young white men, both unknown to Gony, beat him to death in broad daylight. In a 2018 episode of the Australian current affairs television program Four Corners, Liep’s mother, Martha, cries as she recounts her final moments with her son: I arrived and saw him getting lifted into the back of the ambulance. And we all rushed to hold him. His brother was trying to hold his legs and I was trying to hold him, but the paramedics pushed us back (Four Corners, 2018) Liep’s murder—an unambiguous instance of racist vigilante violence — was initially misreported by Australian journalists as an incident of gang-related violence within Melbourne’s Black African diasporic communities (Windle, 2008). Though corrected in later coverage, this early misrepresentation was nonetheless critical in precipitating a recurrent narrative in local crime reporting known as the “African gang crime” narrative (Majavu, 2020; Weber et al, 2021). Since 2007, this narrative has symbolically articulated Melbourne’s Black African1 communities with the problems of criminal violence, public disorder and social conflict regardless of whether as victims or perpetrators, with news media the primary site of this articulation (Windle, 2008; Majavu, 2020). Angry white men killed Liep Gony in a flurry of racist hatred — and yet, the murder become the foundation stone of a persistent discourse of Black African criminality. This incident was the first iteration of the story I trace in this chapter — a story about how the threat of white vigilantism has been weaponised, through media storytelling, to justify the criminalisation of Black African communities in Australia. While white male vigilantes are rarely subject to the same regimes of representation that give symbolic form to “criminalised” people and populations, they nonetheless recur in stories about crime and social conflict. As the alleged criminality of racialised subjects remains firmly in the foreground of the “African gang narrative”, the white male vigilante haunts the background. What is the political utility of this haunting? 84

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-10

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News stories about crime and social violence are “sites of vulnerability politics”, where different and oftentimes competing claims to different kinds of openness to harm — most basically, the harms of crime and the harms of the criminal legal system — confront one another in representation and “struggle for public recognition” (Higgins, 2022, p. 2114). Here, I inquire into the kinds of work that the figure of the white male vigilante performs within that politics. More precisely, I situate the vigilante trope within a broader cultural rise of “white male victimhood”, which increasingly positions moves towards social justice and equality as intolerable forms of injury for white male subjects (Banet-Weiser, 2021; Chouliaraki, 2021; Sengul, 2022). Most scholarship on the cultural significance of the vigilante within media storytelling accentuates his hypermasculine invulnerability and strength, conceptualising the trope as a site for critiques of the “weak” state and for the staging of alternative patriarchal fantasies. However, tracing the operations of the vigilante trope in crime reporting makes it undeniably clear that vulnerability is in fact central to its symbolic function. Ambivalently positioned between threat and threatened, the white male vigilante animates a politics of vulnerability that I describe as one of cruel benevolence — in which the vulnerability of racialised subjects like Liep and Martha to vigilante violence is authenticated as real and wrong, but for the ultimate purpose of morally animating practices of state violence against those same subjects.

Macho men, media and the emasculated state The vigilante is a long-established narrative trope within media representations of violence and social conflict, both fictional and journalistic. Almost always white and male, he is a citizen who has been moved (or “forced”) to “take matters into his own hands” in the face of the (self-perceived) dispossession, disempowerment and/or insecurity of his community. More specifically, vigilantism is understood as an “alternative means of controlling crime and providing safety where the state does not” (Gross, 2016, p. 239), and so too as both an indicator of and a response to a weakened state monopoly on the use of violence (Bjørgo and Mares, 2019). However, as Liep Gony’s murder makes all too clear, white male vigilantism also has roots in histories of lynching and racial punishment, the motivations for which are usually to inspire fear and forcefully re-assert white patriarchal power rather than to supplement a perceived lack of public safety (Senechal de la Roche, 1996). As a figure that circulates in media culture, the vigilante can be best understood as a site of expression for the fantasy lives of white masculinity, including fantasies of control, strength, heroism and valour (see Thobani, 2010; Frame, 2021; Sotirin, 2021). Historically, the primary arenas for the staging of these fantasies have been comic books and action films in which the emasculation of the state — signified through rampant criminal activity, ineffectual policing, state corruption, a porous border and intersecting anxieties about the moral degradation of (predominantly white) women and children — is countered with hypermasculine performances of protection and/or retribution by individual aggrieved men (Frame, 2021, p.169). Buttressing these performances, often, are dramatised representations of the vulnerability of (predominantly, white) women to criminal violence (Frame, 2021, p.171). These representations valourise vigilante violence while constructing a gendered backdrop of weakness and incapacity against which the hypermasculine strength of the vigilante can stand out. In this way, the vigilante trope connects with the long history of “white women’s 85

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tears” lending justificatory support to white men’s (fictional and factual) violence, especially against racialised communities (Phipps, 2020; Hamad, 2019), as well as the “altright lore” that it is “white, militarised, authoritarian masculinity” that must hold the line between order and chaos in modern societies (Frame, 2021, p.171; also Johnson, 2017; Wall, 2020). However, the white male vigilante is more than a caricature of masculine strength — the trope signifies vulnerability and woundedness as much as its inverse. Vigilantes inhabit liminal spaces between safety and violence, “frontier zones” where the imagined protective and/or ordering capacities of the state have petered out into anarchy (Abrahams, 1998). These spaces serve as staging sites of “masculine valor” but also as “[terrains that reveal] the hollowness of their masculinity as men come face to face with the utter vulnerability of their bodies to injury and death” (Thobani, 2010, p. 56). The white, militarised, authoritarian masculinity that the vigilante signifies is thus, at its core, a masculinity in crisis (SolomonGodeau, 1995, cited in Thobani, 2010, p.57) and this sense of crisis extends to the masculinist state that the trope both admonishes and reasserts (Brown, 1995). As icons of state failure, vigilantes accentuate the flimsiness and futility of law, border regimes and the strongman state, even as they simultaneously reinforce white supremacist patriarchy as an ideal of social organisation (Palmer, this volume). Vigilantes, therefore, exist in a deeply ambivalent normative relationship to state power (Bjørgo and Mares, 2019). As self-ordained agents of safety and justice, they are defined by the extrajudicial character of their actions — they are vigilantes precisely because they are not police officers, who are in turn often constructed as corrupt and/or ineffectual. However, as cultural figures, white male vigilantes propagate an imagination of how everyday security is built and maintained that is remarkably similar to the one that has historically bolstered the popular legitimacy of policing: that of the thin blue line. This is an imaginary which positions policing (and, I propose, vigilantism) as an alwaysalmost-failure in a social world characterised by a permanent, relentless and irreducible tilt towards violence (Wall, 2020). Historically, it has valourised police officers by placing them, imaginatively, on the frontlines of a permanent, everyday war against social decline. It is unsurprising, then, that the vigilante resonates culturally with the backlash masculinities that characterise many contemporary populist and far-right movements — movements which, in turn, often champion police officers even while denigrating other branches of liberal state power (Thobani, 2010, p.56–58; Banet-Weiser, 2018; Bratich, 2022; Sengul, 2022). This ambivalent positioning becomes even more pointed in non-fiction journalistic media, wherein the vigilante usually appears in the context of reporting on social conflict and crime. Stories about incel violence, white nationalist terrorism and citizen efforts at law enforcement all help comprise the milieu of contemporary mediated vigilantism. While the law offers an easy symbolic division between citizen vigilantes and police officers, my analysis below tracks a more complicated symbolic achievement: separating the figure of the white male vigilante from the figure of “the criminal”. Here, the vigilante trope is not simply a fantasy representation of masculine invulnerability, nor a celebratory representation of patriarchal protection. Rather, it is the vigilante’s constructed sense of moral ambivalence — his weak-strength, victim-villainy, right-wrongness — that underpins the trope’s symbolic function: to re-enshrine the necessity of prerogative state power (in the form of crime control) and so to reassert the moral legitimacy of the “protective” patriarchal state (Brown, 1995). 86

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Three “ordinary blokes”, two weeping women To unpick the work of the white male vigilante trope vis-à-vis the cultural legitimacy of state violence, I consider three examples of white men who appeared as vigilantes in Australian news reporting on so-called “African gang crime” and its social consequences. All three are from 2017–2019 — a period that saw the narrative revived with force in local crime journalism as conservative politician Matthew Guy sought to propagate concerns about “law and order” to unseat Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews in the 2018 state election (Weber et al., 2021). First, a television news report about a self-described “ordinary bloke” named Frank, who after a verbal confrontation with a group of teenagers (including some young Black African men) outside his home decided to hire two armed guards — at a cost of $1,000 per day — to “secure” his property (A Current Affair, 2019). Second, another television report is about a man named Giulio, who undertook a “citizen’s arrest” of a young Black African man in his neighbourhood after witnessing an incident of theft (9News, 2017). And third, a newspaper feature about a teenager named Xavier, who together with his friends took up baseball bats and confronted a group of Black African teenagers at a local train station the day after his phone was stolen by an unrelated group of Black African teens (Rose and Rooney, 2019). Presented alongside Frank’s story is that of a teenage girl named Alika. Crying, Alika testifies to her fear of being victimised by racist vigilante violence because she is Black. Like Martha above, she is allocated space within the “African gang crime” narrative to make her vulnerability emotionally intelligible to news audiences; her inclusion introduces moral ambivalence around the vigilante by clearly positioning him as a (potential) victimiser. However, as I proposed above, it is precisely this ambivalence that animates the vigilante within the cultural justification of state violence. Here, in contrast to the political uses of “white women’s tears” (Hamad, 2019; Phipps, 2020), Black women and girls’ tears play a crucial role in the logic of cruel benevolence. Within vigilante narratives, they are harnessed to morally condemn the vigilante, but only as a means of morally glorifying the coercive powers of the state. This is an allegorical good cop/bad cop in which racialised communities, despite their publicly mediated suffering, nonetheless find themselves at the constructed root of violence — and so, still, the ultimate targets of “protective” practices of state surveillance, punishment and control.

Vulnerable menaces The white male vigilante trope is framed by an ambivalent politics of vulnerability in which he is positioned as both a victim of intolerable vulnerability to violence and a potential agent of violence — simultaneously both a security subject and a security threat. In the first instance, maintaining this ambivalent positioning relies on representational work that thickens the moral distinction between vigilantism and criminal violence — principally, by finding ways to accentuate the white male vigilante as himself a vulnerable figure. As Sotirin (2021, p. 5) argues, the vigilante is a figure of “victim justice,” and so a constructed sense of victimhood is fundamental to making vigilantism ethically intelligible. In Australian news narratives, three symbolic strategies regularly recur to help fortify the vigilante/criminal boundary: deresponsibilisation, disempowerment and a discourse of service and sacrifice.

Deresponsibilisation First, the white male vigilante is deresponsibilised for his violence through representational strategies that move him into a reactive positionality vis-à-vis the actions of criminalised 87

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subjects. Vigilantes are described as being “pushed to breaking point”, “at their wits’ end”, “fed up”, “shaken” and “forced to take matters into their own hands”. Supporting this positionality in Australian crime reporting is a persistently uneven allocation of historicity between vigilantes and Black African youth. The vigilante’s actions, in other words, are always placed in context and the vigilante himself is routinely granted space to speak about his fears, motivations and anger — that is, to engage in justificatory discourse. The current affairs episode about Frank provides a pointed example of this strategy. Frank insists that it was an unacceptable threat of Black African violence that “forced” him to take up arms against members of his community. As Frank testifies to these conditions, we see images of broken bottles and toppled furniture, a small bruise on his girlfriend Jayde’s elbow and CCTV footage of a verbal confrontation scored with tense, dramatic music, suggesting escalating tension. While it might be said that Frank’s decision to hire armed guards to patrol his home has introduced the possibility of lethal violence to his neighbourhood, Jayde asserts the prior stakes of the conflict when she says: “they’re telling us they’re going to kill us … you know, really, really vulgar things”. This sense of existential danger is later reinforced by the reporter (who repeats that the pair “feared for their lives”) and the hired armed guard (who states that people in the neighbourhood are “scared to death”). By contrast, the actions of Black African teenagers are placed in a vacuum of meaning and motivation. We are not told, nor are we invited to care, who they are, what they want, or how they feel. Jayde claims that the teenagers “come in numbers and are just so angry”; the adverb “just” strips this anger of possible connections to past events or circumstances and the viewer is not invited to wonder why these teenagers might have been angry, or why they might have congregated around Frank’s house in particular. Their (reported) anger is presented as causeless, meaningless and even mindless. In this way, selective and uneven historicisation operates as a strategy of deresponsibilisation, insisting that vigilante violence should be morally interpreted only within the context of the (alleged) criminality of Black African youth — and not, for example, within the longer history of racism and antiimmigration sentiments in Australian society and culture. By denying complex historicity to the anger of Black African youth, the report subtly positions whiteness as that which distinguishes between defence and aggression, and so between “good” and bad” expressions of masculine power.

Disempowerment Working in concert with deresponsibilisation is disempowerment, which routinely positions the vigilante as “battling against the odds”. Xavier, as a child vigilante, offers a pointed example of this strategy. Though the images accompanying Xavier’s story show him and his friends physically encircling a group of Black African teenagers with bats in hand, the headline reads “Robbery shakes teens”, moving Xavier and his friends into a passive, victimised positionality. Moreover, a significant portion of the article is dedicated to describing Xavier’s own (motivating) experience of subjugation: a robbery at the same bus station the previous day during which “up to 20” people including two young men “of African appearance” stole his phone and his necklace. The ambiguity around numbers here is crucial: “twenty” is far more than the five white male youths visible in the accompanying photograph, positioning Xavier’s stand as an act of resistance from below, rather than dominance from above. This massification of Black African youth is also observable in Frank’s story — the teenagers who confronted him outside his home are first described as 88

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numbering “twenty or thirty”, then later as “fifty or sixty”, though no more than five are visible in the accompanying CCTV footage. Accompanying the report on Xavier’s vigilantism, on the same page, is another: a humanising, emotionally intimate interview with Xavier and his father. This report gives Xavier a name, face, family, desires, losses, fears — all of which are denied to the young Black African boys and men targeted by Xavier and his friends. Accompanying this report is another image: a portrait of Xavier sitting with his father and brother standing protectively over him. This image accentuates Xavier’s status as a child — intrinsically vulnerable and acting from a place of disempowerment. There is moral absolution here in Xavier’s constructed sense of political subjugation, which is subsequently authenticated through the extensive details of the crime against him offered in the report. Xavier attests to his own trauma: “I feel shaken … I feel scared”. His father corroborates his son’s disempowerment: “he’s turned to jelly”.

Discourses of service and sacrifice Finally, the figure of the white male vigilante is symbolically separated from the figure of “the criminal” through an implicit discourse of service and sacrifice animated by political whiteness (HoSang, 2010; Phipps, 2020). In a similar way to the “thin blue line” imaginary of policing, the vigilante is positioned as acting in response not only to his own vulnerability but also to those around him: “his” community, which always excludes young Black African boys and men. The story of Giulio and his “citizen’s arrest” provides an illustrative example. Here, the reporter weaves a second-person, present-tense narrative to extend an explicit imaginative invitation to the viewer and to imbue Giulio’s perception of his own community as “unsafe” and “unprotected” with a sense of emotional authenticity: Imagine you’re walking down this laneway. It’s broad daylight, and you’re in a nice area. There’s no need to be concerned, right? Wrong. Suddenly, you’re attacked. Lightning fast. Not by one person, not by two people, but a gang of thugs. It’s you against them, and you don’t stand a chance. Before you know it, you’ve lost your wallet, you’ve lost your keys, and you’ve lost your phone, and you’ve been beaten up, and they’re gone. It’s terrifying. The reality is now, though, it doesn’t matter if the sun’s out, it doesn’t matter what suburb you’re in. This could literally happen anywhere, at any time. (9News, 2017) This monologue is delivered in the present tense as the reporter walks down the laneway in question. The proliferating use of the second-person pronoun “you” (“you’re walking …” “You’re alone …” “You don’t stand a chance …”) performs two imaginative tasks simultaneously. First, it lends Giulio’s actions a sense of tacit moral approval by evoking the very sense of fear and (white) vulnerability that is narratively positioned as the precipitating “cause” of Giulio’s actions. Second and more obviously, it explicitly invites the viewer to identify with the “victim”, to imagine that this victim could be them. In this way, the vigilante is positioned as acting in response to communalised vulnerability rather than individual victimisation — with whiteness implicitly positioned as that which gives “the community” (and so, the claim to vulnerability) symbolic coherence through differentiation from the racialised “criminal” actor. *** The net achievement of these three strategies is to morally distinguish the vigilante from the “criminal” by constructing vigilantism as responding to conditions of intolerable 89

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vulnerability rather than simply creating or exacerbating those conditions for Black African subjects. Together, they help constitute a regime of representation in which the white male vigilante is not intolerant, but pushed to the breaking point of his tolerance; not a criminal, but an otherwise law-abiding citizen who has been forced by circumstance to the edges of the law; not powerful, but painfully disempowered, abandoned by the state and forced to “go it alone” against the growing threat of criminal violence. In this way, the white male vigilante is tacitly decriminalised.

Menacing vulnerabilities While the white male vigilante evades criminalisation through his positioning as disempowered, protective and with limited responsibility for his actions, he nonetheless remains subject to many of the same representational strategies that routinely construct “criminals” as figures of threat. While he is rarely shown enacting violence, his capacity for violence is routinely emphasised — and so, just as we are invited to feel for the vigilante, we are also invited to fear him. Regarding Frank’s decision to hire armed guards to patrol his property, the report emphasises how Frank’s actions have created (or, at the very least, exacerbated) a climate of danger in his neighbourhood: “Forget baseball bats. These weapons can kill”. The reference to baseball bats is significant, as many reports (as in Xavier’s story above) foreground the baseball bat as an icon of vigilantism: a symbol of amateur, under-resourced efforts of citizen self-defence. While police officers carry firearms in Australia, citizen ownership of handguns is rare. Here, the handgun becomes one of the protagonists of the story — out of place in the Melbourne suburbs, inanimate yet filled with lethal potential. The journalist reporting the story warns that the guard patrolling Frank’s home “will shoot if he needs to”, but does not specify what might constitute such a need. In this way, the vulnerability of the white male vigilante becomes, itself, menacing. The trope animates an imagination of intensifying insecurity within the community: a vision of violence begetting violence, with an escalating pattern extending into an uncertain future. And, perhaps counterintuitively, it is the suffering of Black African women and girls that is routinely called upon within these narratives to imbue this menacing quality with a sense of emotional authenticity and moral urgency. Martha weeps as she recalls her son’s murder and we are invited to feel for her — but her pain, we must remember, is only granted this public visibility in the context of a current affairs investigation into “African gang crime” (Four Corners, 2018). Similarly, when Alika cries, it is in the context of a story about Frank being “forced” to threaten members of the Black African community with lethal violence in order to “protect” his home. She tells the reporter: I feel scared to leave the house especially during at nighttime because people are going to start taking, like, things into their own hands … If it gets worse, I’m scared that … anybody in the Sudanese community might eventually get killed just for looking the way they are. (A Current Affair, 2019) The ambiguity of Alika’s use of the word “it” is of critical narrative significance: “it” may be white men’s propensity for violent retribution, or “it” may be the alleged phenomenon of “African gang crime” which the report has positioned as the cause of Frank’s actions. Either 90

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way, Alika’s testimony conjures an imaginary of everyday insecurity that is strikingly like that of the thin blue line: one in which violence is intrinsic to masculinity, with spectacles of women’s distress marking the boundary between its “good” and “bad” manifestations. As one crime journalist interviewed as part of the report about Giulio’s “citizen’s arrest” warns: We’re going to see more and more people tempted to take the law into their own hands. This is an example of that. This guy’s a brave guy, he’s a good guy. He’s done what he perceived to be the right thing. But of course, it could end in tears. This brief cautionary comment captures the key operations of the white male vigilante as a narrative trope. There is the promise of escalation and intensification in the repetitive descriptor “more and more”; there is the redistribution of agency and subject/object reversal in the description of the vigilante as “tempted”; there is a sense of inevitability in the use of the phrase “of course”; there is a deferral of moral condemnation away from Giulio and towards an imagined future vigilante through the use of the qualifier “this”, which positions Giulio as an exception in order to position vigilantism as individually righteous and heroic yet collectively dangerous and threatening. The euphemistic phrase “end in tears” gestures to the stakes of vigilantism as a source of insecurity but leaves these stakes ambiguous. Whose potential tears are we invited to fear or lament? What kind of injury or openness to injury does the word “tears” stand for metaphorically? Similar silences can be observed in the phrase “take matters into their own hands”. What kind of “matter” is being acted upon? Whose hands, if not those of the vigilante, is this matter supposed to be in?

Cruel benevolence Lauren Berlant (2011) coined the phrase “cruel optimism” to capture the kind of relation in which an object of one’s desire actively subverts or scuppers the needs, values and motivations which fuelled that desire in the first place. Following Berlant’s interpretation and application of the concept of cruelty, we can conceptualise the kind of justificatory logic that the white male vigilante trope activates as one of cruel benevolence: a relation within a symbolic politics of vulnerability in which one type of vulnerability — in this case, Black African women and girls’ vulnerability to racist vigilante violence — is appropriated as the justificatory basis for practices which will ultimately exacerbate or entrench the vulnerability of those same subjects. In the case of the white male vigilante trope, racialised vulnerabilities are authenticated only so that they may be repurposed to justify “protective” state interventions. This reflects, in Berlant’s terms, an optimistic attachment to the benevolence of law enforcement and the peacebuilding capacities of the strongman state. The subjects of this state protection, however, are not Black African communities but, ultimately, white citizens — sometimes, even vigilantes themselves. Frank’s testimony provides a pointed illustration: “But, ah, but those guards are there more for their protection, more than mine, because you know … if I do something stupid, what happens to me?” [Journalist: You go to jail] “That’s right, and I don’t want that.” This passing comment from Frank distils the logic of cruel benevolence. In the first instance, Frank casts Black African youth into a position of vulnerability and himself as a threatening 91

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force. However, the possibility of “something stupid” happening is, in the final instance, positioned as a threat to Frank: “… what happens to me?” he asks. The question of what happens to the people he might (it is implied) attack is seemingly inconsequential; vigilantism is a moral problem only insomuch as it exacerbates the vulnerability of the white citizen, in this case to the punitive mechanisms of the criminal legal system. Frank’s excess is recast as restraint and a zero-sum vision of public safety is enforced: Frank is not a “real” criminal, but he will nonetheless act and be treated as one if the “real” criminals — Black African boys and men — are not sought, stopped and punished. Cruel benevolence is cruel, then, in at least two key senses. First, because it takes up the vulnerability of racialised subjects as an object of moral concern, only to then refract this concern through the suffering of white citizens. The spectacle of racist vigilante violence is positioned as something to fear, but not on the basis of concern for the lives of Black African subjects. Instead, the trope positions racist vigilantism (and Black African suffering) as morally problematic primarily because of a) its potential to incriminate, in the most literal sense, individual white boys and men; or b) its net contribution to a generalised climate of social disorder and disharmony in Melbourne’s suburbs, in which white people are positioned as the primary victims. It is cruel in a second sense because it symbolically fortifies the moral case for the same state practices that would intensify the vulnerabilities and limit the freedoms of Australia’s Black African diaspora in the name of benevolent protection. The “wrongness” of vigilante violence is routinely constructed in ways that forcefully recentre policing and the criminal legal system as the “right” way to do things. Precariously teetering between hero and menace, the white male vigilante trope reproduces the mythology that it is white patriarchal power that must ultimately hold the line between a precariously “civilised” present and an intolerably violent future, but capitalises on moral ambivalence to reassert the state as the correct site for its exercise. Because vigilante violence is positioned as a reaction to the “real” threat of African gang violence, coercive state intervention against the latter is positioned as essential and effective action on the former. The result is that the various crime control practices invoked through “African gang crime” reporting — harsher sentences, zero-tolerance policies, preemptive policing — are imaginatively recast as forms of benevolent restraint. Even, as care.

Conclusion Cruel benevolence is the logic — upholding the public morality of state violence — that insists that you must, for your own good, be harmed. Writing about the rise of vigilante masculinities in post-9/11 North America, Thobani (2010) describes how “saving Muslim women” became a fig leaf for the racism and sexism inherent to the so-called War on Terror (also Abu-Lughod, 2015). “White American masculinity”, she writes, “redefined itself in the changed global order: the vigilante form was fed by fantasies of Islam as violent, and hence requiring a greater violence to be vanished” (Thobani, 2010, p. 65). In much the same way, Australian news media extend compassion and concern to Black African women and girls not to take seriously the intersecting dangers of white supremacy and patriarchy in contemporary Australia, but to position them as victims of police failure — and so, to co-opt their suffering for the moral justification of more, tougher, “better” policing. In news storytelling, cruel benevolence is reproduced by staging spectacles of racialised suffering alongside morally ambivalent accounts of white men’s violence, in order to symbolically reposition policing, incarceration and punitive deportation as practices with 92

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protective, even anti-racist, potential. Of course, visibilising white men’s violence through the news is an urgent and important task. Stories about white vigilantism and the threats it poses to racialised populations should and must be told. However, when such stories are framed by an optimistic attachment to white patriarchal protection, it is equally important to remain “vigilant” to the often-unintuitive forms of political work they can perform. News stories about white male vigilantes must a) responsibilise them for their violence; b) locate them narratively within the context of historical white supremacy; and c) resist their discourses of service and sacrifice to instead position them explicitly as agents of their own political self-interest.

Note 1

Following Majavu (2020), the descriptor “Black African” here refers not to a specific community nor to an articulation national identity, citizenship, belonging, and/or ancestry (as in the descriptors “Sudanese Australian” or “African Australian”) but rather to a specific kind of racialization that constructs its subjects as both Black and of African descent (see also Higgins, 2022, p. 2128).

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Kathryn Claire Higgins Rose, T. and Rooney, K. (2019) ‘Bat gang hit squad’ and ‘Robbery shakes teens’, Herald Sun, 29 January, p. 1, 6. Senechal de la Roche, R. (1996) ‘Collective violence as social control’, Sociological Forum, 11(1), pp. 97–128. Sengul, K. (2022) ‘“I cop this shit all the time and I’m sick of it”: Pauline Hanson, the far-right, and the politics of victimhood in Australia’, in Smith, E., Persian, J. and Fox, V. J. (eds.) Histories of fascism in Australia. London: Routledge, pp. 119–217. Solomon-Godeau, A. (1995) ‘Male trouble’, in Berger, M., Wallis, B. and Watson, S. (eds.) Constructing masculinity. New York: Routledge, pp. 69–77. Sotirin, P. (2021) ‘Introduction to feminist vigilance’, in Sotirin, P., Bergvall, V. L. and Shoos, D. I. (eds.) Feminist vigilance. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–22. Thobani, S. (2010) ‘Vigilante masculinity and the “War on Terror”’, in Ismael, T. Y. and Rippin, A. (eds.) Islam in the eyes of the west: Images and realities in an age of terror, London: Routledge, pp.64–85. Wall, T. (2020) ‘The police invention of humanity: Notes on the “thin blue line”’, Crime, Media, Culture, 16(3), pp. 319–336. Weber, L., Blaustein, J., Benier, K., Wickes, R. and Johns, D. (2021) Place, race and politics: Anatomy of a law and order crisis. Bingley: Emerald. Windle, J. (2008) ‘The racialisation of African youth in Australia’, Social Identities, 14(5), pp. 553–566.

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8 EXPLORING US NEWS MEDIA PORTRAYALS OF GIRLS’ VIOLENCE IN THE 1980S AND 1990S The emergence of a moral panic Tia S. Andersen, Jennifer Silcox, and Deena A. Isom Since the 1980s, feminist scholars have highlighted the news media’s sensationalist interest in girls’ violence (Andersen et al., 2018; Andersen et al., 2021; Chesney-Lind and Pasko, 2018). Despite news media reports indicating girls’ violence is on the rise, research across North America has shown that girls engage in considerably less violence than boys (Chesney-Lind and Pasko, 2018; Silcox, 2019), and girls’ increasing proportion of official arrest rates are likely due to more stringent policing of girls’ behaviours, especially the behaviours of girls of colour (Stevens et al., 2011). Empirical examinations of news media coverage of girls’ violence have suggested sensationalistic representations are reflective of a moral panic (e.g., Andersen et al., 2021; McQueeney and Girgenti-Malone, 2018). Stanley Cohen (1972) first used the term “moral panic” to describe the magnified media attention given to the “mods” and “rockers”, a youth subculture in Britain, in the 1960s. Moral panics are said to exist when the level of concern for a social event or social problem exceeds what is objectively reasonable given empirical data (Cohen, 1972). With the increased attention, the magnitude of the “condition, episode, person or group” becomes amplified and described in opposition to traditional values (ibid, p.9). Girls’ use of crime and violence has been portrayed in news media as a new and especially dangerous trend capable of disrupting families, schools and society at large (McQueeney and Girgenti-Malone, 2018). Folk devils, which refer to groups portrayed as direct threats to social norms, are typical of moral panics because they help to identify the enemy and source of the threat using deviant stereotypes in language and imagery (Cohen, 1972; Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 2009; see also Gill, and Nilsson, this volume). Troubled youth, especially youth of colour, have been popular folk devils to identify the threat of social change (Silcox, 2022). In the case of girls’ violence, the “bad girl” folk devil has been constructed to demonstrate the societal dangers when girls step outside of expected gender roles (Barron and Lacombe, 2005). The new violent girl is portrayed as dangerous because she is no longer beholden to societal rules of proper feminine behaviour. The violent girl folk devil has been characterised as a girl, devoid of traditional feminine virtue, that uses violence and aggression to get what she

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-11

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wants. Not only does she defy her gender, but she also actively embodies traits typically associated with masculinity (Chesney-Lind, 2006). Chesney-Lind and colleagues (2018) have highlighted the ways in which journalists writing about girls’ violence associate their violence with the loosening of traditional feminine gender norms and societal fears about women’s and girls’ increased freedoms. Although most moral panics are volatile and dissipate as quickly as they appear, moral panics involving women’s and girls’ violence have become institutionalised and persisted through many decades (Silcox, 2023). According to Goode and Ben-Yehuda (2009), moral panics become “routinised or institutionalised” when they have seemingly run their course yet reappear every so often in a similar form. Each iteration of the violent girl folk devil has embodied slightly different characteristics; however, the core of the portrayal remains the same: girls’ use of violence threatens essentialist gender norms. Expanding upon Faludi (2006), Chesney-Lind (2006) highlights the existence of a feminist backlash in American news media whereby violent women and girls, especially women and girls of colour, are represented as folk devils that threaten a nostalgic past where marginalised populations knew their place in the social hierarchy. Thus, the institutionalisation of the violent girl moral panic is indicative of a backlash against changing gender norms in media.

The current study Although there has been much discussion surrounding the media’s constructions of violent girls, there is a dearth of systematic empirical research on the topic. To date, only two known studies have empirically examined national coverage of girls’ violence, both of which focused exclusively on the coded language used to describe violent girls in the US and Canadian print media (Andersen et al., 2018; Andersen et al., 2021). Although feminist criminologists have provided compelling anecdotal evidence of the media hype surrounding girls’ violence (Chesney-Lind and Pasko, 2004), no known study has empirically investigated the emergence of the moral panic of girls’ violence in the 1980s and 1990s. We aim to fill this gap.

Methodology News coverage selection To examine the emergence of the moral panic of girls’ violence in the US print media, we retrieved print media articles published between January 1980 and December 1999 in the following top seven circulating daily newspapers and the top two circulating weekly news magazines (Cison Research, 2019; Mitchell and Rosenstiel, 2012): USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, Time and Newsweek. We chose a purposive sample of news outlets with large circulation to reflect the potentially significant impact of the stories on the opinions of the American news-consuming public. Articles were accessed through LexisNexis Academic, Factiva, ProQuest, and newspaper/magazine online archives using the search terms “girl(s)” with either “violent”, “arrest”, “gang”, “attack”, “aggression” or “crime”. We included only the articles that mentioned individuals or groups of girls in the context of their participation in violent offending and/or gang membership and excluded articles that focused exclusively on girls’ relational violence. We also excluded book and

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movie reviews from the analysis. A total of 97 articles met the inclusion criteria — 96 articles from daily newspapers and one article from a weekly news magazine.

Analysis Article transcriptions were entered into NVivo, a qualitative data analysis computer software program. We first created a file classification database containing each article’s title, publication date, publication outlet, word count and title. Next, we collaboratively developed a coding frame and analysis protocol. The first author then independently read all the article transcripts and used the constant comparative method to identify initial categories of descriptions of girls’ violence (Harding, 2018). These initial categories were then reviewed and grouped into salient conceptual themes, which were reviewed to identify patterns and connections in the data. Themes that did not apply to 15% or more of the analytical sample were not considered in the findings. Finally, because feminist criminologists (e.g., Andersen et al., 2021; Chesney-Lind and Pasko, 2018; Andersen et al., 2018) have called attention to racialised patterns in the news media’s constructions of violent girls, we also coded the race, ethnicity and social class of girls when it was either explicitly stated or could be inferred from coded language. We engaged in several standard methods for establishing validity and credibility in qualitative research. We maintained an audit trail to document our inquiry and decisionmaking processes (Creswell and Miller, 2000; Lincoln and Guba, 1985). Next, we employed investigator triangulation by using a collaborative research team, which provided different perspectives (Lincoln and Guba, 1985; Denzin, 1978; Miles et al., 2014). Finally, rigour was supported during coding and analysis by looking for and explaining negative evidence and the meaning of outliers (Miles et al., 2014) and connecting the study’s findings to theory and prior research (Patton, 2014).

Findings Table 8.1 presents descriptive information for all newspaper and magazine articles included in the analysis. Of the 97 articles identified related to girls’ physical violence, the majority were news/feature articles obtained from daily newspapers. A small number of articles were categorised as opinion articles (e.g., editorials, op-ed articles, opinion columns or letters to the editor). The word count of articles ranged from one hundred words to more than 4,300 words, Table 8.1 Description of the analytical sample of print news media articles (1980–1999) (n = 97)

Publication Type Daily newspaper articles Weekly news magazine articles Article Type News Opinion Word Count (range) Word Count (average)

97

n

(%)

96 1

(99.0%) (1.0%)

94 3 100–4365 785.6

(96.9%) (3.1%)

Tia S. Andersen, Jennifer Silcox, and Deena A. Isom Table 8.2 Print media coverage of girls’ violence over time (1980–1999) (n = 97)

Early 1980s (1980 – 1983) Mid 1980s (1984 – 1986) Late 1980s (1987 – 1989) Early 1990s (1990 – 1993) Mid 1990s (1994 – 1996) Late 1990s (1997 – 1999)

n

(%)

Total word count

2 7 9 33 19 27

(2.1%) (7.2%) (9.3%) (34.0%) (19.6%) (27.8%)

2,820 5,786 8,633 27,440 18,615 12,212

with an average of nearly 800 words. Table 8.2 presents the number of articles published on girls’ violence in the US print media per year and the respective total word counts. Though we identified two articles published on girls’ violence in the early 1980s, we found a notable increase in news media coverage of girls’ violence beginning in the mid-1980s and peaking in the early 1990s. Two themes emerged in our review of print media coverage of girls’ violence in the 1980s and 1990s, each capturing a different dimension of the violent girl moral panic: 1) girls in gangs and 2) girls’ gratuitous use of violence. For convenience, we present these themes as though they are separate. However, in practice, these themes sometimes overlapped in individual articles and are not mutually exclusive.

The panic surrounding the discovery of girls in gangs The most prevalent theme that emerged from our analysis was the panic surrounding girls’ gang membership, which almost exclusively focused on girls of colour living in marginalised, low-income communities. Though we identified a small number of articles mentioning girls’ gang violence published in the 1980s, the first detailed examination of girls’ gang violence in our sample was the 1990 New York Times article, “Life in Girls’ Gang: Colors and Bloody Noses” (Mydans, 1990). By the mid-1990s, such articles proliferated in the print media. Such articles often described particularly egregious incidents of girls’ gangrelated violence and were accompanied by a review of girls’ arrest rates showing an apparent increase in girls’ assaultive behaviour. These constructions often framed girls’ violence as increasing to epidemic levels and proclaimed that girls’ gang violence was more serious than boys’ gang violence. The following examples are illustrative of the general tone of these constructions: There are more girls in gangs, more girls in the drug trade, more girls carrying guns and knives, more girls in trouble. The rise in crime by girls 17 years old or younger, experts say, results from less supervision, the breakup of families and an increase in gang behavior. (Lee, 1991) Female gangs are every bit as ruthless as the boys. They’re shooting, stabbing, and they’re into drug sales and stickups. (Leslie, 1993)

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Such articles were often accompanied by quotes from police officers, social workers, or psychiatrists, such as the passage from a Chicago Tribune article, which quoted a police officer as saying, girl gang members in Chicago neighbourhoods were “the worst we have run into. The girl gangs are more vicious at times than the guys” (Smith, 1986). As exemplified by these excerpts, girls were portrayed as not only embracing masculine norms but doing so with a violent gusto beyond what was typical of boys. Consistent with observations by Chesney-Lind and Pasko (2018), many media accounts of girls’ gang membership in the early 1990s masculinised girls and suggested girls joined gangs to imitate boys. For instance, a Chicago Tribune article described a 17-year-old Latina gang member as, “being one of the bad boys” (Wilson, 1993). Also, consider the following excerpt from the Newsweek article, “Girls Will Be Girls”, which was accompanied by a photograph of a Black girl wearing a bandana around her face pointing a gun and captioned with, “some girls now carry guns. Others hide razor blades in their mouths” (Leslie, 1993). The article referred to “the plague of teen violence” as an “equal opportunity scourge” and described, Girls [are] breaking into the traditionally male world of gangs … The Kings, one of San Antonio’s largest gangs, recently started accepting young women. Where male gang members used to refer to the girls as ‘hos and bitches’, … they’re a little more reluctant now as those female gang members start to equal them in fights and drive-by-shootings. … Crime by girls is on the rise, or so various jurisdictions report. In Massachusetts, for instance, 15 percent of the crimes that girls were convicted of committing in 1987 were violent offenses. By 1991, that number had soared to 38 percent. (Leslie, 1993) Similarly, in the New York Times article “For Gold Earrings and Protection, More Girls Take the Road to Violence”, girls were described as increasingly joining “loosely organised gangs, imitations of the ones they see boys forming” and “trying to prove they are just as tough as the boys” (Lee, 1991). Interestingly, despite the repeated references to boys’ violence as a point of comparison, discussion of those “traditionally male” worlds was largely absent. This heightened the sense of gendered threat: girls’ violence was discursively linked with excess (more, more, more) with no sense as to whether this reflected broader increases in, or changes to the patterns of, crime reporting. In contrast, other constructions of girls’ gang membership often juxtaposed their violence against feminine stereotypes, as evidenced by a preoccupation with girls’ appearances, fashion choices, jewellery and other feminine accoutrements. The following example from the New York Times provides an illustration: [Her] road to crime has been paved with huge gold earrings and name-brand clothes … When these girl gangs are violent, the most common victims are other girls or young women. Fifteen-year-old [name redacted] was stabbed to death in Manhattan as she rode the subway home from school on Sept. 20 after refusing to give her gold hoop earrings to a pack of girls who surrounded her. (Lee, 1991) Media portrayals of Latina girls’ gang membership, in particular, often reinforced gender stereotypes of femininity by emphasising girls’ appearance. Consider the following description of a Latina gang initiation ceremony from the New York Times: 99

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It was Shadow’s coming out party, her initiation into the Tiny Diablas girls’ gang in the Watts district, and she was dressed in the height of gang fashion: narrow corduroy pants, a sweatshirt in the gang color purple, extravagantly teased hair and exaggerated black-red makeup … Small compacts were opened. A can of hair spray was passed around. Rings were redistributed to their owners. … The court-in, which mimics the similar but often more violent initiation ceremony of male gangs, is an expected event in the childhood of many girls in the inner city … Fashion was high tonight: baggy boys’ trousers sagging over corduroy bedroom slippers, boys’ black polo shirts, large hoops in ears and bunches of keys and trinkets hanging from waists. Lively chatter and clouds of Aqua Net hairspray filled the room as the girls applied dark lipstick, dark blush, black eyeliner and dark eyeshadow surrounded by white eyeshadow. (Mydans, 1990) The article went on to juxtapose the girls’ masculine apparel with their exaggeratedly feminine hair, makeup and jewellery while describing female gang members as offering “support in highly stereotyped female roles for the young men they call their homeboys” (Mydans, 1990). The messaging in these articles is clear: while girl gang members might adorn themselves in typical masculine gang attire and use violence when it suits them, girls ultimately maintain superficial feminine interests in fashion, gossip, and romantic relationships. In this type of reporting, girls are simultaneously criticised for adopting masculine norms and belittled for adhering to stereotypical feminine norms.

The panic surrounding the discovery of girls’ gratuitous violence The second major category that emerged from the analysis was the panic surrounding the discovery of girls’ gratuitous violence: a brutality that was characterised as unpredictable and excessive. Consistent with previous research (Chesney-Lind and Pasko, 2018; Chesney-Lind and Pasko, 2004; Silcox, 2023; Andersen et al., 2018), we found evidence of ill-contextualised sensational cases of girls’ violence being used as evidence of a widespread epidemic, thereby perpetuating the developing moral panic of girls’ violence. One article, for instance, listed several shocking incidents of violence involving young children, including “two 12-year-old [girls] who shot and killed a man ‘for no reason’”(Landers, 1995). Similarly, A 25-year-old woman died tonight after a severe beating by two teen-age girls who, the police said, assaulted her when she complained that their car was blocking the street. The authorities … said it was unusual for girls to commit so brutal a crime, although the county police said violence by teen-age girls and young women was on the rise throughout the area. Paul Ebert, the Commonwealth Attorney for Prince William County, said in an interview that the girls had administered ‘an unusually brutal beating with little justification’. (Janofsky, 1999) Such rhetoric reinforces the overarching moral panic that all girls were becoming unpredictably violent. Girls’ violence was framed as truly frightening, inexplicable and easily provoked by routine encounters. Through their lack of contextualisation, these stories framed isolated incidents of violence as exemplars of an epidemic of girls’ violence. 100

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Such media articles often framed the epidemic of girls’ violence as their uncontrollable rage. These narratives described girls as angry, dangerous, out of control and unpredictable. The following examples are typical and illustrate the general tone of these depictions: What is it that burns inside, that makes young girls so angry they pull out a knife or a gun? What is it that turns sugar and spice and everything nice into vengeance, violence and vice? Criminal violence used to be a guy thing. Now girls are joining the ranks of juvenile offenders in force. (Trafford, 1997) What was once considered the domain of boys--the inability to express rage in a safe way--is now, slowly but surely, becoming part of the lives of girls too … . Angry girls who can’t vent anger in safe ways grow up to be angry women who commit crimes. Consider the case of two 9th graders at Edison Senior High in Miami. The girls had had a violent argument at school. It escalated when one shot the other in front of classmates and a busload of horrified elementary school students. … Witnesses say [she] waited for [her] and then shot her at close range. Kicking her and kicking her. Think about it: kicking her when she was down. I don’t remember any fights like that in high school. Certainly not among girls. … [N]ow girls are as prone to do battle as their brothers. Violence is an equal opportunity recruiter. (Veciana-Suarez, 1997) It’s not just boys … some girls carry small guns in their purses and razor blades in their mouths, in case they need to protect themselves – or find a victim ripe for the taking. The plague of teen violence is an equal-opportunity scourge … ‘I’ve been amazed at the brutality of the beatings of girls by other girls,’ says Dr. Naftali Berrill, director of the New York Forensic Mental Health Group. The violence is a vicious, antisocial pack mentality aimed at a target who is incapable of fighting back, says Berrill. The pack smells weakness, and the situation turns into a free-for-all where no individual person feels responsible. … These young girls are very angry and very hostile. (Leslie, 1993) Similarly, in describing the growing proportion of juvenile court caseloads that involved girls, one Chicago Tribune article quoted a Florida International University criminal justice professor as saying, “it shows how angry these children are” (Veciana-Suarez, 1997). Girls’ anger was depicted as a ticking time bomb that erupts in gratuitous violence that is largely inexplicable and without major provocation. When girls’ behaviour was contextualised, it was often described as resulting from the erosion of traditional femininity. For instance, an article published in The New York Times described girls’ violence as stemming from their independence: “girls, in seeking the same freedoms as boys and getting them, are also emulating some of the most negative aspects of male rebellion” (Lee, 1991). In addition, several articles framed girls’ violence as stemming from changing gender roles, including the socialisation of girls to be aggressive and more mothers entering the workforce. Consider the following example from USA Today: Girls are increasingly willing to use physical aggression to get what they want, experts say. ‘Girls feel more free to be aggressive with other girls, and in some cases, even with 101

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smaller boys,’ … [G]irls ages 12–16 are increasingly apt to use their fists ‘to settle disputes or get attention. We’re seeing much more expressed aggression on the part of females … We are trying to teach girls to ‘be more assertive.’ … Some girls are ‘taking this one step further - to aggression.’ In addition ‘there is a deterioration in the support systems girls used to have,’ she says. There are fewer two-parent families, and more moms away working. (Peterson, 1993) Thus, in addition to reinforcing the overarching moral panic of girls’ growing violence, these stories framed isolated incidents of girls’ violence as exemplars of problems with contemporary girlhood and motherhood, further reinforcing the backlash against gender equity.

Discussion Moral panics often arise when social norms are threatened; to identify the threat, the media will often rely on the use of sensationalistic folk devils to easily demarcate the lines between “us” versus “them”. In moral panics, concern and consensus are often established using illcontextualised statistics or anecdotal observations interpreted by “expert” voices that reinforce the provided narrative in lieu of intricate social context. In the 1980s and 1990s print media, girls’ increasing arrest rates were often described as indicative of a larger social problem with girls’ physical violence by interviewed experts, such as child psychiatrists, law enforcement officials and academicians. Often, just as it feels like the social problem could not become more dire, the problem fades from public consciousness as quickly as it emerged. However, girls’ non-traditional behaviours, including crime and violence, have generated an institutionalised moral panic. Rather than dissipating quickly, the heightened concern about girls’ violence and the associated folk devils, have re-emerged consistently over the years in slightly different configurations. We argue that the institutionalised moral panic is reflective of a broader feminist backlash. During times of political advancement, Chesney-Lind (2006) argues that progressive and social change is met with conservative backlash whereby women and girls, especially women and girls of colour, are presented as threats to the social order. The enduring nature of the moral panic surrounding girls’ nontraditional behaviours is part of a larger backlash surrounding women’s rights movement and provides justification for additional oversight, control, oppression and marginalisation of girls. Little is known – empirically speaking – about the media’s role in guiding the hysteria of girls’ violence. This chapter fills that gap by examining the origins of the moral panic about girls’ violence in the US media. We highlight a systemic construction of girls’ violence that works to reinforce gendered and racialised expectations for girls’ behaviour, thus providing a firmer foundation for future investigations into media representations of girls’ aggression and violence. Two themes emerged from our inductive content analysis of articles published in top circulating print media outlets in the 1980s and 1990s, the first being concern for gang girls. Discussions of girls’ gang membership almost exclusively focused on girls of colour living in marginalised, low-income communities and either masculinised girls in gangs or juxtaposed their violence against stereotypes of girlhood and femininity. The second theme was the panic surrounding the discovery of girls’ gratuitous violence. These stories framed isolated incidents of sensational cases as exemplars of an epidemic of girls’ violence and reinforced the overarching moral panic that girls were suddenly becoming violent. These 102

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narratives often framed girls as angry and out of control and blamed girls’ violence on the erosion of traditional gender norms, contemporary girlhood and motherhood. Portrayals consistently described girls as embracing masculine norms and described girls’ violence as a product of weakening gender roles and gender equality. Girls in the 1980s and 1990s were also the first generation to reap the benefits of, as well as experience the backlash against, second-wave feminism, especially for women and girls breaking orthodox norms. Thus, this distinct cultural moment laid the foundation for the violent girl moral panic. While among the first to empirically examine the media’s construction of violent girls, this study still has several limitations. First, our sample was limited to print media articles found in top-circulating newspapers and weekly news magazines. While our sample reflected media constructions of girls’ violence in highly visible print media outlets, we presume that different themes would have emerged from the analysis of other media outlets. For example, online media or tabloid journalism may produce a more sensationalised construction of girls’ violence given the ubiquity of clickbait content used by online content publishers to direct traffic to their website and generate revenue. Second, because research suggests that youth of colour are less often seen as childlike than their White counterparts, our search terms (“girl” rather than “woman”) may overrepresent media coverage of violence committed by White girls (e.g., Goff et al., 2014). Finally, although racialised, classed and gendered media stereotypes may partially explain policy and practice changes that resulted in getting “harsher on girls” (Stevens et al., 2011), identifying a causal relationship is beyond the scope of this study. Future studies should also consider changes over time in media bombast with an emphasis on the specific cultural and historical contexts to assess if or how the framing established by the violent girl moral panic has persisted, shifted, or evolved. Through content analysis, we empirically examined 20 years of news coverage of girls’ violence to examine the media constructions of girls’ violence. By using a purposive national sample of newspapers and news magazines with the highest circulation and including all cases featuring girls’ violence, we shed light on the emergence of the moral panic of girls’ violence in the US media. We highlight a systemic construction of girls’ violence that works to reinforce gendered and racialised ideals, thus providing a firmer foundation for future investigations into media representations of girls’ aggression and violence.

References Andersen, T. S., Isom, S. D. and Collins, K. (2018) ‘Constructing the “Bad Girls” hype: An intersectional analysis of news media’s depictions of violent girls’, in McQueeney, K. and GirgentiMalone, A. (eds.) Female aggression and intersectionality: Transforming the discourse of “Mean Girls”. New York: Routledge, pp. 24–44. Andersen, T. S., Silcox, J. and Isom Scott, D. A. (2021) ‘Constructing “Bad Girls”: Representations of violent girls in the Canadian and US news media’, Deviant Behavior, 42(3), pp. 353–365. Barron, C., & Lacombe, D. (2005). Moral panic and the nasty girl. Canadian Review of Sociology/ Revue Canadienne De Sociologie, 42(1), pp. 51–69. Chesney-Lind, M. (2006) ‘Patriarchy, crime, and justice’, Feminist Criminology, 1(2), pp. 6–26. Chesney-Lind, M. and Pasko, L. (2004) The female offender: Girls, women, and crime. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications. Chesney-Lind, M. and Pasko, L. (2018) ‘Girls and violence: Moral panics and the policing of girlhood’, in Mcqueeney, K. and Girgenti-Malone, A. (eds.) Girls, aggression, and intersectionality: Transforming the discourse of “mean girls” in the United States. New York: Routledge, pp. 11–23. Cison Research (2019) Top 10 daily US newspapers. Available at: https://www.cision.com/2019/01/topten-us-daily-newspapers/ (Accessed: 1 April 2022).

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Tia S. Andersen, Jennifer Silcox, and Deena A. Isom Cohen, S. (1972) Folk devils and moral panics: The creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Creswell, J. W. & Miller, D. L. (2000) ‘Determining validity in qualitative inquiry’, Theory Into Practice, 39(3), pp. 124–130. Denzin, N. K. (1978) Sociological methods: A sourcebook. New York: McGraw-Hill. Faludi, S. (2006) Backlash: The undeclared war against American women. New York: Three Rivers Press. Goff, P. A., Jackson, M. C., Di Leone, B. A. L., Culotta, C. M. and Ditomasso, N. A. (2014) ‘The essence of innocence: Consequences of dehumanizing Black children’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106 (4), pp. 526–545. Goode, E. & Ben-Yehuda, N. (2009) Moral panics: The social construction of deviance. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Harding, J. (2018) Qualitative data analysis from start to finish. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Janofsky, M. (1999) ‘Woman dies after beating; girls are held’, New York Times, 2 July. Landers, A. (1995) ‘Many factors behind rise in gang violence’, Chicago Tribune, 26 March. Lee, F. R. (1991) ‘For gold earrings and protection, more girls take road to violence’, New York Times, 25 November. Leslie, C. (1993) ‘Girls will be girls’, Newsweek, 1 August. Lincoln, Y. S. and Guba, E. G. (1985) Naturalistic inquiry. Beverly Hills, California: Sage Publications. Mcqueeney, K. and Girgenti-Malone, A. (eds.) (2018) Girls, aggression, and intersectionality: Transforming the discourse of “mean girls” in the United States. New York: Routledge. Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M. and Saldana, J. (2014) Qualitative data analysis: A methods sourcebook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Mitchell, A. and Rosenstiel, T. (2012) The state of the news media 2012. Washington DC: The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Available at: https://www.pewresearch. org/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2017/05/state-of-the-news-media-report-2012-final.pdf (Accessed: 29 November 2022). Mydans, S. (1990) ‘Life in girls’ gang: Colors and bloody noses’, New York Times, 29 January. Patton, M. Q. (2014) Qualitative research and evaluation methods: Integrating theory and practice. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications. Peterson, K. S. (1993) ‘Girls are muscling in on the bully act’, USA Today, 11 August. Silcox, J. (2019) ‘Are Canadian girls becoming more violent? An examination of integrated criminal court survey statistics’, Criminal Justice and Policy Review, 30(3), pp. 477–502. Silcox, J. (2022) ‘Youth crime and depictions of youth crime in Canada: Are news depictions purely moral panic?’, Canadian Review of Sociology, 59(1), pp. 96–114. Silcox, J. (2023) ‘Institutionalized ‘bad girls’: adolescent female folk devils in Canadian newspapers between 1991 and 2012’, Feminist Media Studies, 1–17. Smith, W. (1986) ‘Girl gang batters teen’s body, but not her will’, Chicago Tribune, 3 May. Stevens, T., Morash, M. and Chesney-Lind, M. (2011) ‘Are girls getting tougher, or are we tougher on girls? Probability of arrest and juvenile court oversight in 1980 and 2000’, Justice Quarterly, 28(5), pp. 719–744. Trafford, A. (1997) ‘Girl rage’. The Washington Post, 27 May. Veciana-Suarez, A. (1997) ‘The costs of behaving like one of the boys’, Chicago Tribune, 2 March. Wilson, T. (1993) ‘Her life in gang leads to her life sentence in prison’, Chicago Tribune, 10 September.

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9 CHILD SEXUAL EXPLOITATION AND SCAPEGOATING MINORITY COMMUNITIES Aisha K. Gill

Introduction Over the last decade, the UK has been beset by a moral panic concerning South Asian men grooming white girls for sexual exploitation (Gill and Harrison, 2015). This moral panic emerged from a number of well-publicised sexual exploitation cases, the most infamous of which took place in Rochdale, Greater Manchester and in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. In the Rochdale case, a group of nine men — eight of Pakistani origin or descent — preyed on underage white girls for sex before trafficking them for prostitution. The men involved were convicted of rape and conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children, trafficking for sexual exploitation, sexual activity with a girl under 16, aiding and abetting rape, and sexual assault. Although sexual exploitation and grooming cases involving ethnically diverse perpetrators and survivors have been identified all over the UK, media attention has tended to overemphasise those in which Asian men have sexually exploited white girls in deindustrialised and socioeconomically deprived parts of northern England. While the true picture is significantly more complex than the media reporting suggests, what seems consistent in these cases is that young people — regardless of ethnicity — in working-class communities devoid of investment in key public services have found themselves vulnerable to sexual exploitation. This is due to a combination of school exclusions, ill-equipped safeguarding services and consequent exposure to the night-time economy, which, in some areas, disproportionately employs Asian men (Novara Media, 2019). However, the media consistently oversimplifies the narrative by highlighting that most of the perpetrators in well-publicised cases were Muslim men of Pakistani origin who preyed on white girls, thus linking public perception of sexual exploitation to race and culture (Sian, Law and Sayyid, 2012). Using an analysis of news coverage over a six-year period from 2012
2018, this chapter examines media portrayal of South Asian men — particularly Pakistani men — as predators who groom and sexually exploit white female children in the UK. It reveals how such portrayals simultaneously construct these men as “folk devils” and marginalise the violence and abuse experienced by Black and Asian women and girls from the same communities.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-12

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Grooming and sexual exploitation The term “grooming” commonly describes “the tactics used by child sex offenders in their efforts to sexually abuse children” (Craven, Brown and Gilchrist, 2006, p. 287). Salter (1995) conceptualises grooming as a range of actions performed by an offender during the initial stages of sexual abuse. Grooming strategies are intended to secure further opportunities for abuse while reducing the likelihood of the child’s disclosure, often by establishing trust with the child and/or their carer. According to McAlinden (2012, p. 11), grooming entails (1) the use of a variety of manipulative and controlling techniques; (2) with a vulnerable subject; (3) in a range of interpersonal and social settings; (4) in order to establish trust or normalise sexually harmful behaviour and (5) with the overall aim of facilitating exploitation and/or prohibiting exposure. The academic literature identifies three types of grooming: (1) self-grooming, (2) grooming the intended victim’s environment and significant others and (3) grooming the child (Craven, Brown and Gilchrist, 2006). As the scope of this article is limited to the grooming and sexual exploitation of underage girls, only the third type of grooming is discussed in detail. Child grooming usually involves both psychological and physical measures. Perpetrators use psychological grooming as a precursor to physical grooming, developing a relationship with the child and building trust before slowly beginning to breach physical and psychological boundaries. Psychological grooming also encourages the child not to disclose the abuse through tactics such as isolating her/him, making her/him feel responsible for the abuse, issuing bribes and/or making threats (Craven, Brown and Gilchrist, 2006). When physical grooming occurs, the perpetrator/victim relationship is gradually sexualised. As with the term “grooming”, the concept of child sexual exploitation (CSE) has no fixed definition, even in a policing context. Different forces use different terms for CSE, including “localised grooming”, “street grooming” and “internal trafficking”, and these all have slightly variant meanings (Cockbain, 2013). The National Working Group for Sexually Exploited Children and Young People (2008, n.p.) developed the definition most commonly used by the government: The sexual exploitation of children and young people under 18 involves exploitative situations, contexts and relationships where young people (or a third person or persons) receive ‘something’ (e.g. food, accommodation, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, affection, gifts, money) as a result of performing, and/or others performing on them, sexual activities. Child sexual exploitation can occur through the use of technology without the child’s immediate recognition, for example the persuasion to post sexual images on the internet/mobile phones with no immediate payment or gain. In all cases, those exploiting the child/young person have power over them by virtue of their age, gender, intellect, physical strength and/or economic or other resources. These variations in how CSE is defined have serious ramifications for victim/survivors. In 2011, British children’s charity Barnardos published Puppet on a String: The Urgent Need to Cut Children Free from Sexual Exploitation, noting the increasing sophistication of techniques for grooming children for sexual exploitation in the UK. Children were being “brainwashed by abusers in the most pernicious way … often transported between towns and cities to be subjected to multiple acts of abuse by groups of men” (Barnardos, 2011, p. 2). Despite several non-governmental organisations reporting that high numbers of

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sexual exploitation victims have accessed their services over the last decade, comparatively few prosecutions have been made. This is because a general lack of knowledge on the part of legal/service professionals about how to identify grooming, how it affects victims, or how it is perpetrated against children and young people in the UK complicates detecting, investigating and prosecuting such crimes. Despite this, there are signs that CSE is being more widely reported. From 2010 to 2016, the National Crime Agency saw an increase in referrals from 400 to 1,800 a month, with the Home Office noting a resultant increase in convictions from 4,982 in 2014 to 5,940 in 2015 (Home Office, 2017b) — although these figures indicate that attrition rates remain high. In 2017, the Centre for Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse found that 17,600 children nationally were recorded as being at risk of CSE; children’s services recorded a further 1,300 children as being at risk of trafficking (Kelly and Karsna, 2017). In response to this growing recognition of the scale of CSE, the Home Office recruited a network of analysts via the Police Transformation Fund and found that of the 8,995 victims identified by police as being at risk of CSE, the majority of offenders and victims were white: 59% of offenders were white, 12% Asian and 8% black; 70% of victims were white, 5% black and 2% Asian. Approximately one-fifth of the data for victim and perpetrator ethnicity was missing (NPCC, 2016). Since 2017, there has been a sharp increase in reporting of child sexual abuse offences to the police. In the year to March 2020, over 83,300 child sexual abuse offences were recorded by police, an increase of nearly 270% since 2013. In the same period, there were approximately 8,200 charges for CSA offences (Home Office, 2021). While research on the trafficking of women and children across international borders (Shelley, 2010) has received significant media and political attention, little is known about the extent of the problem in the UK. In 2017, the Home Office gave its most robust estimate: there are 4,000 victims of child trafficking nationally a year (Home Office, 2017a). In 2017, of the 2,118 children referred to the National Referral Mechanism (the current system for identifying trafficking victims), the most common forms of exploitation they experienced were labour exploitation (48%) and sexual exploitation (26%), followed by unknown exploitation (20%) and domestic servitude (6%) (Home Office, 2017a). However, the Crown Prosecution Service CPS (2013) acknowledges the lack of adequate information and research on sexual exploitation in the UK, explaining that practical and ethical issues complicate data collection and research on young people exploited in this manner.

Race, gender, crime and moral panics in the UK Early scholarship on intersections between race, ethnicity and gender challenged the notion that “race” is only relevant to the lived experience of minorities and that “white” as a racial category should be ignored (Afshar and Maynard, 1994). Discussions of race were limited to racism, construing the experiences of minority groups solely in terms of oppression. As a social construction, the meaning of “race” varies according to time, place, circumstances and relevant racialised categories (“Black” or “minority ethnic”) that are, in turn, influenced by historical, political, policy and cultural contexts. However, the term “race” has long been discredited as a pseudoscientific concept with roots in “race science”, a field that arbitrarily sought to create social hierarchies based on physical characteristics alone (Davis, 1984). Today, the term “ethnicity” is frequently used as an alternative to “race” in an attempt to reflect the cultural rather than physical variations between groups under discussion. This 107

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reliance on the term “ethnicity” has its own problems in terms of homogenising or problematising particular groups or communities. In the cases examined in this chapter, media coverage explicitly linked race and ethnicity with masculinity as well as violence. This coverage drew specifically on the concept of hegemonic masculinity, first developed by Connell (1995), referred to as “the most honoured way of being a man” requiring “all other men to position themselves in relation to it” and simultaneously legitimising “the global subordination of women to men” (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005, p. 832). Although Connell argued that hegemony is not synonymous with violence, she did contend that it is often “supported by force” (Connell, 1995, p. 258). The British media’s construction of a specifically South Asian notion of hegemonic masculinity began long before the recent spate of high-profile CSE and grooming cases. The Ouseley report (2001) on the Bradford race riots and the Cantle report (2001) on the Oldham, Burnley and Bradford riots focused on cultural difference as the primary causal factor in these events, maintaining that British South Asians and white Britons led “parallel lives”. Media coverage of the riots described angry young Asian men who were alienated from society and their own communities and became entangled in a life of crime and violence — a vision that provided the foundation for what Claire Alexander calls the “new Asian folk devil” (2000). Alexander argues that until these race riots, “Asian young men had been largely invisible, presumed to be the beneficiaries of a rigid system of male hierarchy and privilege, in which the concerns were about the women, not men, due to the issues surrounding arranged marriages” (Alexander, 2000, p. 5). Following the riots, emphasis on the criminality and deviance of the rioters reflected “the ongoing process of the criminalization of Asian youth and their increased visibility in the criminal justice system” (Alexander, 2004, p. 542). South Asian youth, particularly young South Asian males, came to be seen as living in “a pathologized culture of poverty to stand as a symbol of its failures and an increasing threat to wider society” (Alexander, 2004, p. 536). Since then, government concern with community cohesion has fuelled the media’s appetite for identifying South Asian men as a cause for moral panic — for example, reporting on “no-go” areas for whites (Bunyan, 2001) and Asian territorial brutality (Jones, 2005). At the same time, a culture of Islamophobia has also emerged, coinciding with more frequent coverage of “Muslim culture” in government documents and academic publications. This construction of a monolithic Muslim identity is rooted in dominant Western assumptions concerning “perceived racial, ethnic, or religious affiliation” (Alexander, 1999, p. 45), despite the diversity of Muslims and Muslim communities in the UK which is home to many long-established Muslim communities of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Somali descent, the members of which speak a wide range of languages, including Urdu, Bengali and Arabic (see Gill and Harrison, 2015). These negative media characterisations and the prevailing cultural attitude of Islamophobia that underpins them present a significant problem in terms of how South Asian men and communities are perceived by the wider population (Gill and Day, 2020). Foucault’s concept of problematisation directs attention to the ways in which a problem comes to be framed and the implications of this framing for how the “development of a given into a question … transform[s] a group of obstacles and difficulties into problems to which the diverse solutions will attempt to produce a response” (2000, p. 118). Using this concept to examine the British media’s portrayal of South Asian sex offenders underscores the underlying and often implicit assumptions behind the construction of South Asian men as a “problem” requiring an urgent solution. 108

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The news media’s role as an agent of moral indignation is often explored through the sociological lens of “moral panics”: a concept developed in the 1970s (Cohen, 1972) to explain the disproportionately high public concern over a perceived social problem. Concern generated in a moral panic arises from identifying a specific threat that has the potential to destroy important social values, norms or regulations, thus catalysing “a demand for greater social regulation or control and a demand for a return to ‘traditional values’” (Thompson, 1998, pp. 8–9). Moral panics thus reflect, and often reinforce, prevailing power relations and incite intensified hostility towards a particular group, category or cast of characters. According to Cohen’s early conceptualisation, the collective action a moral panic triggers is marked by “mass hysteria, delusion and panics” (1972, p. 11) that serve to direct public anxieties and fears towards a specific category of deviants identified as “folk devils”. The “discovery” of the group seen as threatening or harmful to the sanctity of society is accompanied by recasting the rest of society as defenders of their moral values. Therefore, shifting the relative power ratios between these groups is key to understanding the potential triggers of moral panics and the broader context within which they can develop (Rohloff, 2008). Seldom have the actions of dominant groups come under the necessary level of media scrutiny that can lead to a moral panic — instead, the media zeroes in on the actions and practices of marginalised groups, demonstrating the centrality of unequal power relations in generating moral panics. Media representation of specific crimes and the groups they affect likewise shapes the depiction of some crimes as part of a worrying pattern (for example, forced marriage), while others (for example, the murder of domestic partners) are often discussed in disaggregate form, with news reports treating relevant cases as isolated incidents (Gill and Walker, 2020). Assessing the precise impact of selective media coverage on broad social attitudes is challenging, because many people choose which newspaper to read on the basis of existing views rather than vice versa. Although there are longstanding concerns about how framing social issues in the media in a certain way can shape individuals’ attitudes, this remains a complex subject without definitive conclusions (Barker and Petley, 2001). Examining the link between media representations and policy-making is more amenable to empirical scrutiny. Therefore, this chapter considers how South Asian men, and Pakistani men in particular, have been constructed as folk devils by the British media in its depiction of recent cases involving South Asian men’s sexual exploitation of white girls. It focuses specifically on how five national newspapers represent grooming cases. Both conservative and liberal editorial media perspectives were studied: The Daily Telegraph/Sunday Telegraph, a right-of-centre broadsheet; The Guardian/Observer, a left-of-centre broadsheet; the Daily Mail/Mail on Sunday, a right-of-centre newspaper; The Times/Sunday Times, a moderate right-of-centre broadsheet; and The Sun, a right-wing tabloid (see Gill and Day, 2020).

The portrayal of victims Examining press reports of CSE and child sexual abuse cases over the last decade reveals that victims from multiple cases were most commonly discussed as a group in longer articles, whereas short reports concentrated on individual cases. Most articles described a victim’s experiences of sexual abuse and exploitation, then gave an account of how the victim had escaped the abuse, especially if that escape involved the police or social services. Reports of this kind were based primarily on court transcripts and/or interviews with victims; a subset also involved interviews with professionals in the statutory sector as well as 109

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non-statutory organisations working specifically on CSE who regularly work on these types of cases and/or the individuals involved in supporting victims in specific cases. A minority of articles discussed relevant court proceedings (see Gill and Day, 2020). Media portrayal of victims was overwhelmingly sympathetic, although the reports clarified that such views were not necessarily shared by statutory agencies — some articles stated that many of the professionals who worked with the young victims viewed them as having made “lifestyle choices” (Syal, 2013) by freely engaging in sexual activity involving Pakistani men; some labelled the girls, even those as young as 12, “prostitutes” (Syal, 2013). The Mail Online (Boyle, 2017) provided excerpts from an interview with survivor Caitlin Spencer (a pseudonym), who faced intense interrogation from the police following her disclosure to them and was refused their protection: “For that reason, I never took it further. The police told my mother that I was a known prostitute and to leave me to it, that I’d stop when I was ready”. Although public discourse has tended to focus on political correctness as the main deterrent to investigating these offences, the above quotation from Caitlin highlights how those being exploited were viewed by authorities. Class status for women (and girls) is often mediated through moral demarcations that emphasise respectable sexual behaviour and gender presentation (Armstrong et al., 2014; also Wood, this volume). A woman’s failure to maintain classed and gendered sexual standards often results in her being labelled a “slut” (or, in this case, a “prostitute”); women and girls thus face disproportionate responsibility to safeguard their own respectability by forgoing sexual relationships until they reach the appropriate age. Additionally, hegemonic masculinity has lionised white male masculinity while designating minority men as “hypersexual” and therefore subordinate and dangerous (Fischer, 2007). Historically, white women who engaged in sexual relationships outside their “race” have been viewed either as sexual deviants or as in need of rescue from a sexually violent “other”. Caitlin Spencer’s words indicate that early on in these cases, survivors were primarily viewed as the former: The Sunday Times explained how those working on these cases deployed “stock phrases: she’s making her own decisions or teenagers will do what they want to do” (Smith, 2012, p. 10). But alongside this media sympathy for victims was a corresponding demonisation of perpetrators.

Constructing child sexual exploitation as a cultural problem The more sympathy was engendered for victims, the more perpetrators were demonised and reviled in the media. Reports variously described the South Asian men involved in these cases as “evil” people who had undertaken “depraved acts” (Mogra, 2013). One characterised the girls in the Rochdale cases as being “recruited into sexual factory farming by Muslim men described as ‘pure evil’ by detectives” (Pearson, 2012). Further, in the same time period as the cases under discussion here, the Mail Online reported the murder of 17-year-old Laura Wilson by her 18-year-old boyfriend, Ashtiaq Ashgar, as Britain’s “first white honour killing” (Brennan, 2016). After Laura’s death, it was revealed that social workers were aware she had been exploited by groups of men since she was 11. It is not clear if her partner was involved in her exploitation, but to ascribe the name “honour killing” to a crime that bore all the hallmarks of a domestic homicide at the hands of an intimate partner conflates two tropes about South Asian men and evokes ideas of racial exceptionalism. This type of framing creates the conditions under which South Asian men in general can be constructed as folk devils. 110

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The second, and most significant, factor influencing the way the media framed these cases is the construction of sexual offending by South Asian men as a specific problem requiring an urgent response. During his two-year investigation for The Times, Norfolk (2012) claimed that he “revealed a crime model that police and care agencies refused to recognise — that most of the victims were white and a majority of those in identified abuse networks were men of Pakistani origin” (Deans 2013). Almost every newspaper reported that the perpetrators in most cases were South Asian men targeting white girls. For instance, the Daily Telegraph claimed that one of the victims in the Rochdale case “was singled out because she was white, vulnerable and under-age” (Ward and Bunyan 2012, p. 1). Viewed collectively, the British media’s coverage of the Rochdale case implied that one of its most shocking aspects was the fact that the abusers were Pakistani Muslim men while the girls they abused were white. Connected to this is the third factor influencing the media framing of the South Asian male “problem”: the notion that inadequate responses from statutory agencies are caused by a fear of those within such agencies being labelled racist. Careful analysis of articles revealed two primary arguments for the media’s positioning of these cases as representing a “cultural problem”. The first included newspaper reporting that stigmatised immigrant communities in general and Pakistani men in particular, constructing CSE as a cultural problem while ignoring its place on the broader continuum of violence against women and children. The second argument laid the blame on British multiculturalism, associating it with fear on the part of both relevant authorities and the general public that they would appear racist by identifying the cases as embodying imagined “cultural problems”. Articles advancing this argument paralleled those that focused on inadequate responses by statutory agencies. Despite these patterns, the representation of CSE by Pakistani men was far from uniform across the five newspapers. An overwhelming majority of articles were inflammatory towards the perpetrators, ascribing broad and uninformed cultural reproof: the Daily Mail and The Sun stigmatised Pakistani men and blamed multiculturalism, as did a significant proportion of the articles in The Telegraph. For instance, the Daily Mail referred to the “worrying trend of Asian men grooming and sexually exploiting vulnerable girls” (Greenwood, 2013a) and the “dangerous trend of Pakistani men grooming young white girls” (Greenwood, 2013b). The Daily Telegraph identified a “pattern of men from Pakistani backgrounds grooming young white girls for sex” (Marsden, 2013, p. 12). Surprisingly, given its political perspective, The Sun only published one article on the grooming cases in 2012 and 2013, though the reporter did argue that “White girls were targeted because they were not in the mainly Pakistani gangs’ community or religion” (Veevers, 2012, pp. 12–13). Articles in The Guardian were more likely to offer critical commentary though this was by no means consistent. In a number of these pieces (Laville, 2012; Martinson, 2012), reporters claimed that the UK has “an emerging model of CSE in which large groups of Asian men target vulnerable white girls on the streets” (Laville and Topping, 2013, p. 8). Indeed, one article claimed that “group grooming, as distinct from solitary sexual predators, tends to be by British Asians of Pakistani Muslim background living in poorer communities in the north” (White, 2012). One study by the CEOP exploring “localised grooming” found that of the 31% of cases where ethnicity was known, 49% of perpetrators were white and 46% of perpetrators were Asian. The Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England (OCCE) conducted a further study that included both online and offline CSE perpetrated in groups and found that of the 84% of cases where ethnicity was available, 43% of perpetrators were white and 33% were Asian (Home Office, 2021). However, despite the single 111

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largest group identified as perpetrating CSE consistently being white, media attention continues to suggest that the crime is uniquely related to the cultural practices of South Asian men. The insistence that such behaviour is antithetical to “British values” is challenged by the fact that one in three young girls in the UK report being sexually harassed while in school uniform (Southgate and Russell, 2018). Understanding the “Asian gangs” moral panic in this context raises questions about the apparent lack of concern for the majority-white perpetration of CSE, the sexual harassment of children or public discourse on the sexual desirability of underage girls.

Conclusion All the newspaper articles explored in this chapter underscored that the victims in high-profile street-grooming cases were white, while the majority of the perpetrators were of South Asian origin or descent. South Asian street-grooming gangs received disproportionate coverage at the expense of other, similar cases involving mostly white perpetrators and/or ethnic minority victims. This skewed media reporting fuelled a moral panic by linking ethnicity and CSE and constructs South Asian men as folk devils. Over-reporting cases in which South Asian men perpetrated grooming and sexual exploitation against white girls overlooks the broader statistics and causal socioeconomic factors — such as poverty and neglect — that are often at the root of sexual exploitation. Studies by organisations such as the CEOP, CSE and OCCE, the Home Office and the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) have demonstrated that child-grooming and sexual exploitation acts are statistically more likely to be carried out by white perpetrators. These reports have stressed that national conclusions about ethnicity cannot be drawn from the data because much of that data came from a limited number of geographic areas (Kelly and Karsna, 2017). When the OCCE published its Inquiry into Child Sexual Exploitation in Gangs and Groups in 2013, it found that the vast majority of perpetrators were men of widely varying ages: some were as young as 14, while others were elderly (Gill and Harrison, 2015). Where data were available, perpetrators and their victims were shown to be ethnically diverse. While some women’s groups in the UK have suggested that concern over South Asian sex offenders constitutes a “good” moral panic, since it raises awareness to protect girls from abuse, many also recognise that it distorts public perception of the prevalence of the problem across British society. Therefore, more must be done to combat the full scope of CSE and grooming cases, accounting for all potential perpetrators and victims. Raising moral outrage over this issue is a matter of priority, but it should be achieved without recourse to racial stereotyping — this is helpful to no one, least of all future victims.

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Child sexual exploitation and scapegoating minority communities Barker, M. and Petley. J. (eds.) (2001) Ill effects: The media/violence debate. London: Routledge. Barnardos (2011) Puppet on a string: The urgent need to cut children free from sexual exploitation. Barkingside: Barnardos. Boyle, D. (2017) ‘I was raped by THOUSANDS of men from the age of just 14, says victim of Asian grooming gang’, The Mail Online, 21 September. Available at: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ news/article-4905000/Asian-sex-gang-victim-writes-book-detailing-ordeal.html (Accessed 12 September 2022). Brennan, S. (2016) ‘The Rotherham whistleblower: Incredible story of the woman who risked everything to bring Asian men who groomed and raped white girls for TWO DECADES to justice’, The Mail Online, 29 March. Available at: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article3509707/Youth-worker-Janye-Senior-reveals-battled-two-decades-expose-shocking-Rotherhamscandal.html (Accessed 12 September 2022). Bunyan, N. (2001) ‘No‐go Asians attack veteran’, The Telegraph, 24 April. Available at http://www. telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1311141/No‐go‐Asians‐attack‐veteran.html. Cantle, T. (2001) Community cohesion [The Cantle Report]. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Cockbain, E. (2013) ‘Grooming and the “Asian sex gang predator”: The construction of a racial crime threat’, Race and Class, 54 (4), pp. 22–32. Cohen, S. (1972) Folk devils and moral panics. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Connell, R. (1995) Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Connell, R. and Messerschmidt, J. (2005) ‘Hegemonic masculinity rethinking the concept’, Gender & Society, 19 (6), pp. 829– 859. Craven, S., Brown, S. and Gilchrist, E. (2006) ‘Sexual grooming of children: Review of literature and theoretical considerations’, Journal of Sexual Aggression, 12(3), pp. 287–299. Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) (2013) ‘CPS publishes fundamental new approach to prosecuting cases of child sexual abuse as local government and family courts agree to share information for stronger prosecutions’, CPS News Centre, 17 October. Available at: http://www.cps.gov.uk/ news/latest_news/csa_guidelines_and_tpp/ (Accessed: 12 September 2022). Davis, D. (1984) Slavery and human progress. New York: Oxford University Press. Deans, J. (2013) ‘Andrew Norfolk of the Times wins Paul Foot award’, The Guardian, 27 February. Fischer, N. L. (2007) ‘Pollution and purity: Sex as a moral discourse’, in Seidman, S., Fischer, N. and Meeks, C. (Eds.), Handbook of the new sexuality studies. London: Routledge, pp. 56–64. Foucault, M. (2000) ‘Polemics, politics and problematizations: An interview with Michel Foucault’, in Rabinow P. (ed.) Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954‐84. London: Penguin, pp. 223–251. Gill, A. K. (2023) ‘Improving police responses to sexual abuse offences against British South Asian women’, in Monk, H., Atkinson, K., Barr, U. and Tucker. K. (eds.) Feminist responses to injustices of the state and its institutions: Politics, intervention, resistance. Bristol: Bristol University Press (forthcoming). Gill, A. K., and Day, A. S. (2020) ‘Moral panic in the media: Scapegoating South Asian men in cases of sexual exploitation and grooming’, in Ramon, S., Lloyd, M., Penhale, B. (2020). (eds). Gendered domestic violence and abuse in popular culture. Emerald: Bingley, pp.171–198. Gill, A. K. and Harrison, K. (2015) ‘Child grooming and sexual exploitation: Are South Asian men the UK media’s new folk devils?’, International Journal for Crime Justice and Social Democracy, 4 (2), pp. 34–49. Gill, A. K. and Walker, S. (2020) ‘On honour, culture and violence against women in black and minority ethnic communities’, in Walklate, S. and Fitz-Gibbon, K. (eds.) Emerald handbook of criminology, feminism and social change. Bingley: Emerald, pp.157–176. Greenwood, C. (2013a) ‘Call to tackle rise of Asian child sex gangs’. Daily Mail, 6 December. Greenwood, C. (2013b) ‘Stop tip‐toeing around race of grooming gangs, say MPs’, Daily Mail, 10 June. Available at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2338640/Stop-tip-toeing-racegrooming-gangs-say-MPs-Committee-says-police-prosecutors-able-raise-issue-accused-racism. html (Accessed: 12 September 2022). Home Office (2017a) 2017 UK annual report on modern slavery. Home Office: London. Home Office (2017b) Tackling child sexual exploitation: Progress report. London: Home Office. Home Office (2021) Characteristics of group-based sexual exploitation in the community: Literature review. October 2020, updated 23 December 2021. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/ government/publications/group-based-child-sexual-exploitation-characteristics-of-offending/

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Aisha K. Gill characteristics-of-group-based-child-sexual-exploitation-in-the-community-literature-reviewaccessible-version (Accessed: 27 October 2022). Jones, S. (2005) ‘Asian gang kicked man to death’, The Guardian, 23 November. Available at: http:// www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/nov/23/race.ukcrime (Accessed: 7 November 2022). Kelly, L. and Karsna, K. (2017) Measuring the scale and changing nature of child sexual abuse and child sexual exploitation. Scoping report. London: Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse. Laville, S. (2012) ‘Children prey to sexual abuse by easy access to porn, MPs warned’, The Guardian, 13 June, p. 6. Laville, S. and Topping, A. (2013) ‘Child sex abuse ring: Victims’ experiences: Vulnerable girls’ lives turned into a living hell’, The Guardian, 15 May, p. 8. Marsden S. (2013) ‘Police and social workers must recognise issue of sexual grooming by Pakistani men – MPs; Social workers and police must acknowledge that there is a pattern of men from Pakistani backgrounds grooming young white girls for sex, MPs warn today’, The Telegraph, 10 June. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10109139/Police-and-social-workersmust-recognise-issue-of-sexual-grooming-by-Pakistani-men-MPs.html (Accessed: 27 October 2022). Martinson, J. (2012) ‘The great silent crime: Focusing on the ethnicity of the men convicted of child sex offences in Rochdale detracts from the real issue: This was ultimately about the strong preying on the weak, says Jane Martinson’, The Guardian, 10 May, p. 6. McAlinden, A. (2012) ‘Grooming’ and the sexual abuse of children: Institutional, internet and familial dimensions. Clarendon Studies in Criminology, Oxford: OUP. Mogra, S. (2013) ‘Statement to Home Affairs: Minutes of evidence [HC 68]’, Home Affairs, UK Parliament, Session 2013–14. Available at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/ cmselect/cmhaff/68/130319.htm (Accessed: 12 September 2022). National Police Chiefs’ Council (2016) Problem profile: Child sexual exploitation offences across England and Wales. Available at: https://www.npcc.police.uk/documents/CSEProblemProfile. pdf (Accessed: 27 October 2022). National Working Group for Sexually Exploited Children and Young People (2008) What is child sexual exploitation? Derby, UK: NWG Network. Available at: https://www.ddscp.org.uk/staffand-volunteers/info-and-resources/child-sexual-exploitation/ (Accessed: 27 October 2022). Norfolk, A. (2012) ‘Asians pick me up. They get me drunk, they give me drugs and have sex with me. I want to move’, The Times, 9 May. Available at: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/crime/ article3408670.ece (Accessed: 12 September 2022). Novara Media (2019) Child sexual exploitation, ‘Asian grooming gangs’ and the Left, Novara Media. Available at: https://novaramedia.com/2019/06/12/child-sexual-exploitation-asian-groominggangs-and-the-left/ (Accessed: 12 October 2019). Ouseley, H. (2001) Community pride not prejudice. Bradford: Bradford Vision. Pearson, A. (2012) ‘Asian sex gang: Young girls betrayed by our fear of racism’, The Telegraph, 9 May. Available at: https://carnageandculture.blogspot.com/2012/05/asian-sex-gang-younggirls-betrayed-by.html (Accessed: 27 October 2022). Rohloff, A. (2008) ‘Moral panics as decivilising processes: Towards an Eliasian approach’, New Zealand Sociology, 23(1), pp. 66–76. Salter, A. (1995) Transforming trauma: A guide to understanding and treating adult survivors of child sexual abuse. Newbury Park, California: Sage. Sian, K., Law, I. and Sayyid, S. (2012) The media and Muslims in the UK. Leeds, UK: Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies, University of Leeds. Southgate, J. and Russell, L. (2018) Street harassment: It’s not OK – Girls’ experiences and views. Plan International UK. Available at: https://plan‐uk.org/street‐harassment/its‐not‐ok (Accessed: 1 May 2023). Shelley, L. (2010) Human trafficking: A global perspective. Cambridge: CUP. Smith, D. (2012) ‘Avoiding an ugly truth about abuse’, The Sunday Times, 25 November, p. 10. Syal, R. (2013) ‘Police errors let Rochdale sex gang flourish – report: Untrained detectives were used to interview victims: MP says GMP force needs to show better leadership’, The Guardian, 20 December, p. 8.

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Child sexual exploitation and scapegoating minority communities Thompson, K. (1998) Moral panic. London: Routledge. Veevers, L. (2012) ‘77 years sex beasts, 50 more on the loose’, The Sun, 10 May, pp. 12–13. Ward, V. and Bunyan, N. (2012) ‘Members of paedophile gang treated victims as ‘worthless”, The Telegraph, 9 May. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/9254232/ Members-of-paedophile-gang-treated-victims-as-worthless.html (Accessed: 27 October 2022). White, M. (2012) ‘In cases such as the Rochdale sex gang, do we ask too much of social services?’ The Guardian, 27 September. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/blog/2012/sep/27/ rochdale-asian-sex-gang-social-services (Accessed: 27 October 2022).

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10 HIDDEN OR HYPERVISIBLE? MAPPING THE MAKING OF A MORAL PANIC OVER FEMALE GENITAL MUTILATION/ CUTTING Emmaleena Käkelä Introduction The umbrella term female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) encompasses a variety of practices ranging from pricking to cutting and repositioning the labia minora or labia majora (WHO, 2022). FGM/C is practised in a variety of contexts for a range of different social, cultural, religious and psycho-sexual reasons. FGM/C can lead to several possible short-term and long-term consequences, including physical, mental, sexual and reproductive health complications (WHO, 2022). Although FGM/C is concentrated in around 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia1, since the beginning of international campaigning to end FGM/C, these practices have been commonly framed as an “African problem”. Critics argue that the contemporary international anti-FGM/C discourse represents a continuation of the historical homogenisation and demonisation of cultures of the Global South, perpetuating stereotypical and racist representations of Africa as primitive, savage and barbaric (Adebisi, 2015; Njambi, 2004). In examining media and political representations of FGM/C in the UK, this chapter seeks to illustrate both the colonial continuities and new exclusionary nationalisms which have been harnessed to fuel the moral panic over the continuation of FGM/C among migrant communities in Europe. With growing international migration, these practices are no longer confined to the Global South2; globally more than 200 million girls and women have been affected by FGM/C (WHO, 2022). In the last two decades, FGM/C has emerged as a “burning social problem” in Europe (Johnsdotter and Mestre i Mestre, 2017, p. 14). This can be seen in the proliferation of both national and international policies to tackle FGM/C (Johnsdotter and Mestre i Mestre, 2017; Connelly et al., 2018). As this chapter problematises, the emergence of these policy frameworks cannot simply be put down to the scale of the problem; rather, Western responses to FGM/C can be attributed to wider societal tensions over cultural diversity and national identity sparked by 9/11 and the European “refugee crisis”.

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News media has played a significant part in the making of the moral panic over FGM/C through its role in framing these practices and in informing public perceptions about the causes and solutions to ending them (Sobel, 2015). Moral panic refers to a societal overreaction as a response to a perceived, exaggerated and simplified threat to shared values (Cohen, 1972). The rising media interest in FGM/C in the UK culminated in 2015, when the left-wing newspaper The Guardian launched the Global Media Campaign to End FGM, with backing from high-profile organisations including the UN (Halonen, 2016). In utilising the lens of femonationalism (Farris, 2017) this chapter contextualises, illustrates and problematises the increased political and media attention on FGM/C. The chapter begins by illustrating the representations which have led critics to conclude that the Western media discursively colonises the complexities of FGM/C and the lives of affected communities. I will then present a case study of media and political discourses in Britain to demonstrate how FGM/C has become increasingly entangled with anti-immigration sentiments and exclusionary constructions of national identity and belonging.

Savages and saviours Contemporary depictions of FGM/C contribute to producing Western knowledge about African sexualities in ways that reinforce colonial stereotypes about backwardness, sexual deviance and racial inferiority. Despite the complexity of dynamics, meanings and lived experiences of FGM/C, analyses and representations of FGM/C in Europe and the US have largely concentrated on the impacts FGM/C has on women’s sexuality (Sobel, 2015), leading critics to accuse Western preoccupation with FGM/C of sensationalism and colonial voyeurism: The history of colonialism and neo-colonialism has afforded the more powerful west the right to intervene in the lives of its ‘third world’ Others; a right which is not reciprocal. And through the anti-FGM movement, the west has acquired yet another chance to gaze at African women’s genitals. (Njambi, 2004, p. 284) Although FGM/C has been recognised as child abuse, campaigning more often tackles these practices as a form of violence against women. Representations of FGM/C which primarily focus on destroyed female sexuality have been critiqued for objectifying women by reducing them to their genitalia (Boddy, 1998). FGM/C campaigns frequently utilise visual metaphors to portray female genitalia, often as infibulated flags or purses positioned to resemble vulvar tissue (Khoja-Moolji, 2020; 28 Too Many, 2017), bloodied or cut flowers (Footprints Foundation, 2017; End FGM European Network, 2020) or fruit resembling the shape of the vulva (Al Mansoury in Dawood, 2015). The reduction of the complex practice of FGM/C to female genitalia represents a continuation of imperialist caricatures of African sexualities; historically, African women’s bodies were portrayed in particular ways to convey primitivity and savagery to legitimise colonising, civilising missions by the West (Tamale, 2011). While other forms of violence against women have also been represented through problematic images, depictions of FGM/C are unique in their graphicness, often making either visual or written references to razor blades and blood (Forward UK, 2015). Although infibulation3 accounts for less than 10% of all worldwide FGM/C, media often focuses on suturing and “kitchen table circumcisions” in efforts to homogenise these depictions as “the 117

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reality” of FGM/C (Njambi, 2004, Johnsdotter and Mestre i Mestre, 2017). These selected framings of FGM/C as barbarity contribute to reproducing ideas about the underdeveloped “Third World” (Wade, 2009). It has been argued that depictions of FGM/C serve a strategic value in enforcing the gendered dichotomy between modern/backward which is entangled with notions about Western cultural superiority (Wade, 2009; Gruenbaum, 2020). Although depictions of primitivity and barbarity have become essential features of the anti-FGM/C discourse, these are not necessarily recognised by women who come from contexts where FGM/C is normalised or celebrated (Gruenbaum, 2020). As a result, first encounters with Western representations can spark feelings of shock, embarrassment and loss in women who are yet to make sense of what has happened to them (Käkelä, 2021). The international anti-FGM/C discourse has been criticised for dehumanising and infantilising African women (Tamale, 2011). Silencing of survivors and women’s lack of choice are frequent themes in visual depictions of FGM/C. The construction of an “ideal victim” who is powerless, voiceless and faceless has been central to representations of FGM/ C. Where women are visualised, posters often depict them as silenced, either with stitched or covered mouths (End FGM, 2020). Portrayals of children also centre around themes of lack of choice and consent; however, unlike posters of women, images of children often depict either sad or faceless children, without explicit references to sexual violence (Home Office, 2014; Harrow Council, 2017; Metropolitan Police, 2019). A recent World Vision Finland campaign poster (Little Black Book, 2022) represented a rare exception to this, presenting closed lips which had been inverted to resemble the shape of a vulva, with a text across the lips resembling stiches: “A girl is subjected to genital mutilation every ten seconds – speak out to end the violence”. Alternatively, recent campaigns have depicted defiant women with no lived experience of FGM/C (see for example Plan UK, 2014). The leading Guardian End FGM campaign has been problematised for presenting a dichotomy between selected brave activists who “give voice” to silenced victims (Halonen, 2016). These trends are notable, as anthropologists and Black feminists have long criticised the international movement for failing to recognise FGM/C-affected women’s capacity and efforts to challenge these practices themselves (Nnaemeka, 2005). Although FGM/C has been recognised as patriarchal violence, it notably differs from most other forms of violence against women in that it is perpetuated by women themselves. The complexity of women’s dual positionalities as survivors and perpetrators has rarely been well captured by campaigns. In addition to infantilisation, the wider international antiFGM/C discourse has also been criticised for victim-blaming and for portraying African women as bad mothers (Shweder, 2000). For instance, the Guardian media campaign has been critiqued for attributing the continuation of FGM/C to passive and incapable parents who are failing to protect their daughters (Halonen, 2016). Campaigning has tended to place a disproportionate onus of responsibility on women, portraying small children with slogans such as “be the mother who ends female genital mutilation in your family” (Home Office, 2014) or images of women with slogans such as “Now that you know, say no to FGM” (SafeHands for Mothers, 2015). Such victim-blaming attaches backwardness not only to practices but also to the people affected by them, overlooking the ways wider gendered inequalities constrain women’s spaces to resist FGM/C (Käkelä, 2020; Gruenbaum, 2020). Researchers have increasingly called for more nuanced representations of Black motherhood, arguing that women do not perpetuate FGM/C to do harm, but out of the best interests of the child in contexts where socio-cultural beliefs, peer pressure and women’s lower social position necessitate FGM/C as a strategy against social exclusion 118

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(Johnsdotter and Essén, 2016). However, it is worth noting good practice where it exists; despite the criticisms laid later in this chapter, more recent UK Government campaign materials stand out positively in depicting women and children in the context of the caring family relationships within which FGM/C often takes place (Home Office, 2018).

Tip of the iceberg? Rumours and anecdotal stories about the continuation of FGM/C are regularly reported in the European press (Johnsdotter and Mestre i Mestre, 2017). Media and campaigners have long described FGM/C as a “hidden problem” which persists due to a culture of secrecy and the failure of European states to take the problem seriously. Most recently, this has been demonstrated by a multi-award-winning campaign which sought to raise awareness about the number of women at risk of FGM/C in Europe by depicting infibulated European flags (Khoja-Moolji, 2020). However, although Western politicians, non-governmental organisations and media frequently refer to “girls at risk”, the methods for calculating likely prevalence and assessing risk are notoriously unreliable, thus arguably exaggerating the scale of the problem (Johnsdotter and Mestre i Mestre, 2017). Estimates for the prevalence of FGM/C among migrant communities in Europe largely overlook migration as an instigator of cultural change in the abandonment of FGM/C (ibid.). Despite popular representations about FGM/C as a hidden problem among migrant communities in Europe, it has been argued that a “typical” FGM/C case is one in which the practice is committed as an extra-territorial offence (ibid.). This has also been picked up by the media, which often features reports about FGM/C in relation to “cutting season” during school holidays (ibid.). These concerns are reflected in the emergence of safeguarding – or as argued by KhojaMoolji (2020), profiling – operations at the UK and other Western borders and intermittent suggestions to subject girls at risk to compulsory genital examinations as a preventative measure (Orange and Topping, 2014; Home Affairs Select Committee, 2016). Across Europe, there has been a notable consensus among governments, nongovernmental organisations and political parties on banning FGM/C (Johnsdotter and Mestre i Mestre, 2017; Bader and Mottier, 2020). Although in many European countries, FGM/C has been illegal either under dedicated or general criminal legislation since the 1980s, to date fewer than fifty FGM/C criminal court cases exist in Europe (Johnsdotter and Mestre i Mestre, 2017). While France stands out as a “shining example” with its relatively high number of FGM/C prosecutions (Baillot et al., 2018, p. 9), other countries have only seen a handful of prosecutions. In Sweden, 86 reports of FGM/C had led to only two court cases by 2017; as suggested by researchers, it is unlikely that police would simultaneously fail to identify large numbers of real cases of FGM/C, while investigating relatively high numbers of false reports (Johnsdotter and Mestre i Mestre, 2017). The UK has only seen one successful FGM/C prosecution in 2019, leading researchers to argue that the real prevalence of FGM/C is likely notably lower than presumed (Karlsen, et al., 2022).

Making of the moral panic on FGM/C in the UK In the UK, the zero-tolerance approach to FGM/C represents a rare area of political consensus. In 2014, the UK Government (a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition) made a commitment to end FGM/C within a generation. This political will has been partly fuelled by media and campaigners who have argued that the UK has some of the higher rates of 119

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FGM/C in Europe (Dirrie, 2022), despite the lack of reliable data on continued prevalence. Headlines about “FGM parties” where circumcisers are flown to the UK to cut several girls at once periodically appear in the news media (Rhodes, 2016; Travis, 2014). These rumours are not unique to the UK; in Sweden, a newspaper falsely reported that an entire school class of girls had undergone FGM/C (Johnsdotter and Essén, 2017). In addition to reliance on anecdotal evidence, UK media and political discourse frequently features a misuse of prevalence statistics. For example, an article featured in the right-wing newspaper The Sun: “Young girls are being mutilated at ‘FGM parties’ across Britain, charity claims” (Fruer, 2016) included a subheading referring to more than 8,000 identified victims. Nowhere in the article was there an acknowledgement that these repurposed NHS figures include firstgeneration migrant women who had experienced FGM/C prior to migration. This represents a wider pattern of misapprehensions, whereby identification of (usually adult) FGM/C survivors in health settings is associated with the presumed continued prevalence of FGM/C after migration (Johnsdotter and Mestre i Mestre, 2017; Bader and Mottier, 2020). Paradoxically, although increased global displacement has fuelled the emergence of the moral panic concerning FGM/C, media and politicians continue to overlook migration as the explanatory factor in the sudden rise of FGM/C-affected women seen by health and maternity services. Misuse of figures on FGM/C prevalence has trickled down from media to the policymaking realm to serve a strategic purpose to build support for punitive and bordering practices: According to a study based on census data4, there are around 20,000 girls in Britain who are at risk of female genital mutilation. One hospital in North London alone has recorded 450 cases of female genital mutilation in the last three years. But despite female genital mutilation being illegal for 25 years, there has still not been a single prosecution. (Browne, 2013) It sickens me to think that there were nearly 4,000 cases of FGM reported in our country last year alone. Four thousand cases; think about that … … We need more co-ordinated efforts to drive this out of our society. More prosecutions. No more turning a blind eye on the false basis of cultural sensitivities. (Cameron, 2015) The growing media pressure and selective use of evidence have been instrumental in the introduction of new legislation over the last decade. This has included the introduction of FGM Protection Orders through the Serious Crime Act 2015 in England and Wales and the corresponding Scottish legislation four years later (Female Genital Mutilation (Protection and Guidance) (Scotland) Act 2020). Although the law in England and Wales has gone further in introducing mandatory reporting duty for healthcare professionals and teachers, both pieces of legislation reflect the increased focus on FGM protection over the last decade. However, emerging evidence suggests that political pressures have driven hypervigilant responses to FGM/C which can alienate and traumatise communities and families (Käkelä, 2021; Karlsen et al., 2022). Notably, the punitive turn in FGM/C policy has not led to increasing numbers of cases being identified (Karlsen et al., 2022). At the same time, national FGM/C funding for support and outreach services has been reduced by 76% 120

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(Merrick, 2020). This is notable, considering that a significant majority of “reported cases” likely represent women who have experienced FGM/C before migration and who, when confronted by their own lived experiences of violence, would greatly benefit from such services (Käkelä, 2021).

Femonationalism in the UK anti FGM/C discourse Femonationalism refers to the ways gender equality is exploited within an otherwise xenophobic rhetoric (Farris, 2017). With the rise of the nationalist far-right, political actors have sought to advance anti-Islamic agendas under the guise of women’s rights (ibid.). This mobilisation has been nourished by a deployment of a discursive media apparatus which has reproduced Western cultural imagery of oppressive Islam, gender and sexuality in the Global South (ibid.). Femonationalist rhetoric, and especially the equation of Islam and gender oppression, has been instrumental in the widespread rejection of multicultural policymaking in Europe following 9/11. As demonstrated by the UK media and political discourses, femonationalist pursuits frequently misplace gender equality as inherent in Western cultures and societies (Farris, 2017). It has been argued that “female migrant bodies constitute particular targets for narratives of cultural incompatibility with national values” (Bader and Mottier, 2020, p. 646). The UK political discourse embodies an exclusionary rhetoric, as politicians have described FGM/C as “medieval” and “uncivilised” practices (Javid, 2018) which stand at odds with the “liberating force of our [British] values” (Cameron, 2015) and which act as a hindrance to the “emancipation revolution” in Britain (Browne, 2013). These descriptions form a part of a calculated attempt to locate FGM/C in the past and as oppositional to British culture. This juxtaposition between civilised/barbaric cultures has fuelled the rejection of state multiculturalism and the punitive turn in FGM/C policymaking. The UK media discourse has frequently placed blame on statutory services for multicultural sensitivities. This is exemplified by headlines featured in the BBC: “Female genital mutilation [is] ‘rising in soft-touch Scotland’” (Adams, 2013), the left-wing newspaper The Guardian: “Racism label should not deter British police from FGM fight, says officer” (Moorhead, 2017) and commentaries by right-wing politicians in The Scotsman: “Scotland has to wake up to reality of FGM abuse” (Monteith, 2017). Leading political actors have likewise pointed fingers at statutory services for undermining “the confidence to enforce our values for fear of causing offence” (Cameron, 2015) and for “nervousness amongst some professionals to confront the practice … head on” (Browne, 2013). It has been argued that such narratives about turning a blind eye explicitly seek to erase the racial hierarchies which have been a defining feature of FGM/C discourse (Khoja-Moolji, 2020). With increased international displacement and intercultural tensions in the West, the bodies of Black women have become a discursive tool for drawing the borders of the nation and belonging (Ticktin, 2016; Khoja-Moolji, 2020). The issue of violence against women has been harnessed selectively to demonise certain, mainly Black and Muslim, migrant groups in order to oppose accelerated forced migration from Africa and parts of the Middle East. The strategic use of FGM/C as an issue for the purposes of separating “us” from “them” can also be seen in the conflation of FGM/C and Islamic extremism. Although religion is a weak determinant for the prevalence of FGM/C, recent UK prime ministers have been quick to associate FGM/C with radical Islam (see for example Johnson, 2014; Cameron, 2015). Media have been likewise guilty of perpetuating the image of FGM/C as 121

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an Islamic problem; despite the complex relationship between religion and FGM/C, The Guardian campaign has attributed the continuation of FGM/C to Islamic fundamentalism, which elicits associations with terrorism (Halonen, 2016). However, while extremist organisations have weaponised other forms of violence against women, including forced marriage and rape, FGM/C is generally perpetuated by families and communities, rather than organised movements. The framing of FGM/C as an issue of extremism illustrates how claims to protect affected women have been increasingly couched in femonationalist rhetoric. For example, in a column for the Daily Telegraph Boris Johnson (at the time, Mayor of London) suggested: There are still Left-wing academics protesting that the war on FGM is a form of imperialism, and that we are wrong to impose our Western norms. I say that is utter rubbish, and a monstrous inversion of what I mean by liberalism. On the contrary: we need to be stronger and clearer in asserting our understanding of British values. That is nowhere more apparent in the daily job of those who protect us all from terror – and who are engaged in tackling the spread of extremist and radical Islam. (Johnson, 2014) This rhetoric linking FGM/C campaigning to a war, describing it as a “battle” or “combat”, is a recurrent feature across the political divide, also identified in analyses of the Guardian’s campaigning (Halonen, 2016, p. 48). This illustrates a recent shift in FGM/C campaigning, which first began by approaching FGM/C as a health issue or an illness that was to be “eradicated”, before re-framing FGM/C as a human rights violation (Shell-Duncan, 2008). In evoking the language of war, UK political and media discourse selectively enforces simplistic representations of (presumed Muslim) victims and perpetrators, overlooking the fact that FGM/C is most often performed by affected women themselves (Halonen, 2016). As demonstrated by Boris Johnson’s framing, FGM/C has become increasingly interwoven with concerns over national security, whereby calls to act are no longer only fuelled by the need to protect women but also the British culture and nation. In his speech on “Extremism” , David Cameron (2015) addressed FGM/C to position multiculturalism as a threat to the UK national security. Swiss political discourse has likewise framed FGM/C as a threat to the nation (Bader and Mottier, 2020). Campaigns have also been complicit in this; in depicting European flags which were roughly sewn together to resemble infibulation, the 28 Too Many posters framed FGM/C as a crime against not only women but also the predominantly white Western nation states (Khoja-Moolji, 2020). Cultural superiority perspectives have fuelled far-right nationalism and anti-immigration sentiments (Gruenbaum, 2020; Wade, 2009), contributing to the making of Fortress Europe. Although the then Home Secretary Amber Rudd (2016) claimed that the UK’s “compassion does not stop at the border” in her speech addressing FGM/C, the Home Office has been accused of exactly that. Despite commitments to protect girls and women from FGM/C, subsequent Home Secretaries have pushed forward with strategies of deterrence which have made it much harder for women to protect their daughters from FGM/C by claiming asylum (Käkelä, 2022). The contradictory responses to FGM/C are most pressingly illustrated by recent Home Secretary Priti Patel’s efforts to end FGM/C through increased development funding while attempting to return a girl at risk of FGM/C to an area of Sudan with a prevalence rate of over 97% (Summers, 2020). The situation is only likely to get worse, as the recently passed Nationality and Borders Act 2022 penalises 122

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women for delayed claims, which are often a result of women’s unawareness of their right to claim asylum on the grounds of FGM/C.

Conclusion This chapter has traced the making of a moral panic over FGM/C by illuminating the contradictions between available evidence and the dominant sensationalist representations of the prevalence of FGM/C among migrant communities in Europe. In doing so, this chapter has problematised the motivations which have underpinned the punitive turn in responses to FGM/C in the UK. The entanglement of anti-FGM/C campaigning and antiIslam rhetoric has taken place against a backdrop of longstanding stereotyping of Muslim women as powerless victims of multiple forms of culturally and religiously sanctioned violence against women (Farris, 2017). The UK anti-FGM/C discourse illuminates the ways the issue of FGM/C has been politicised to further anti-immigration and Islamophobic agendas, at the expense of recognising FGM/C-affected women’s intersectional vulnerabilities. Gruenbaum (2020) has argued that in the face of these increasingly exclusionary discourses, scholars are tasked with not only contributing to ending FGM/C, but also with preventing international hysteria which is turning FGM/C into a tool of fear and hatred. This chapter has sought to contribute to these ends by problematising the extent to which contemporary responses support FGM/C-affected women’s resistance and efforts to make sense of the violence which has been done to them.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Countries with the highest prevalence rates are all in Africa, but FGM/C is also practised in some parts of the Middle East and Asia Pacific Region. This chapter addresses the stereotyping of FGM/C as an “African” practice. However, it is important to recognise the history of clitoridectomy and labia removal also in Western medicine ( Gruenbaum, 2020). Infibulation involves the narrowing of the vaginal opening through the creation of a covering seal by cutting and repositioning the labia minora, or labia majora, sometimes through stitching, with or without removal of the clitoral prepuce/clitoral hood and glans ( WHO, 2022). UK Census data reports nationality, and ethnicity based on broad geographical categories (e.g. African). The Census data does not capture the great diversity of ethnic groups in Africa, some of which practice varying rates of FGM/C and some of which do not practice FGM/C at all.

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Emmaleena Käkelä Boddy, J. (1998) ‘Violence embodied? Circumcision, gender politics, and cultural aesthetics’ in Dobash, R. E. and Dobash, R. (eds.) Rethinking violence against women. London: SAGE, pp. 77–110. Browne, J. (2013) Speech by Jeremy Browne MP on female genital mutilation. [Speech] Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/speech-by-jeremy-browne-mp-on-female-genitalmutilation (Accessed: 30 May 2022). Cameron, D. (2015) Extremism: PM Speech. [Speech] Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/ speeches/extremism-pm-speech (Accessed: 30 May 2022). Cohen, S. (1972) Folk devils and moral panics: The creation of the Mods and Rockers. 3rd edn. Oxon: Routledge Classics. Connelly, E., Murray, N., Baillot, H. and Howard, N. (2018) ‘Missing from the debate? A qualitative study exploring the role of communities within interventions to address female genital mutilation in Europe’, BMJ Open, 8(6), p. e021430. Dawood, S. (2015) ‘Anti female genital mutilation’, Design Week, 29 July. Available at: https://www. designweek.co.uk/inspiration/anti-female-genital-mutilation-by-fatma-al-mansoury/ (Accessed: 26 August 2022). Dirrie, W. (2022) ‘Girls should be educated, not mutilated. The cutting of women must end, now’, The Guardian, 15 February. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/ commentisfree/2022/feb/15/girls-should-be-educated-not-mutilated-the-cutting-of-women-mustend-now (Accessed: 30 May 2022). End FGM (2020) ‘What is FGM?’ Available at: https://endfgm.co.uk/what-is-fgm/ (Accessed: 26 August 2022). End FGM European Network (2020) ‘#End FGM Myths Campaign Toolkit’. Available at: https:// www.endfgm.eu/editor/files/2020/02/EndFGMEU_Campaign-Toolkit.pdf (Accessed: 26 August 2022). Farris, S. R. (2017) In the name of women’s rights: The rise of femonationalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Footprints Foundation (2017) Stop female genital mutilation, Available at: http://footprintsfoundation.org/archives/tag/female-genital-mutilation (Accessed: 26 August 2022). Forward UK (2015) End FGM poster. Available at: https://www.forwarduk.org.uk/forwardpublications/end-fgm-poster/ (Accessed: 28 September 2022). Fruer, L. (2016) ‘Young girls are being mutilated at ‘FGM parties’ across Britain, charity claims’, The Sun, 13 December. Available at: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2386396/young-girls-are-beingmutilated-at-fgm-parties-across-britain-charity-claims/ (Accessed: 28 September 2022). Gruenbaum, E. (2020) ‘Tensions and movements: Female genital cutting in the Global North and South, then and now’, in Johnsdotter, S. (eds.) (2020) Female genital cutting: The Global North and South. Malmö: The Centre for Sexology and Sexuality Studies, Malmö University, pp. 23–58. Halonen, H. (2016) Beyond colonial imagery? Dynamics of religion, culture and agency in the Guardian’s End FGM global media campaign. Master’s dissertation, University of Helsinki. Harrow Council. (2017) A review of female genital mutilation in Harrow. Available at: https:// moderngov.harrow.gov.uk/ieIssueDetails.aspx?IId=92040&Opt=3 (Accessed: 3 October 2022). Home Affairs Select Committee (2016) Female genital mutilation: Abuse unchecked. 6 September. Available at: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201617/cmselect/cmhaff/390/390.pdf (Accessed: 24 June 2022). Home Office (2014) ‘New campaign calls on mothers and carers to end Female Genital Mutilation’. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-campaign-calls-on-mothers-andcarers-to-end-female-genital-mutilation (Accessed: 26 August 2022). Home Office (2018) ‘Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) Partner brief and campaign materials’. Available at: https://www.middlesbrough.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Home-Office-FGMcampaign-pack.pdf (Accessed: 26 August 2022). Javid, S. (2018) Policy for progress: Ending FGM and forced marriage. [Speech]. Available at: https:// www.gov.uk/government/speeches/policy-for-progress-ending-fgm-and-forced-marriage (Accessed: 30 May 2022). Johnsdotter, S., and Essén, B. (2016) ‘Cultural change after migration: Circumcision of girls in Western migrant communities’, Best Practice & Research Clinical Obstetrics & Gynaecology, 32, pp. 15–25.

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Hidden or hypervisible? Johnsdotter, S. and Essén, B. (2017) ‘UK FGM parties hoax reached Sweden’, Shifting Sands, 13 March. Available at: https://www.shiftingsands.org.uk/fgm-parties-hoax-has-reachedsweden/ (Accessed: 26 August 2022). Johnsdotter, S. and Mestre i Mestre, R. M. (2017) ‘Female genital mutilation in Europe: Public discourse versus empirical evidence’, International Journal of Law Crime and Justice, 51, pp. 14–23. Johnson, B. (2014) ‘The children taught at home about murder and bombings’, The Telegraph, 2 March. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10671841/The-childrentaught-at-home-about-murder-and-bombings.html (Accessed: 29 August 2022). Karlsen, S., Howard, J., Carver, N., Mogilnicka, M. and Pantazis, C. (2022) ‘Available evidence suggests that prevalence and risk of female genital cutting/mutilation in the UK is much lower than widely presumed – Policies based on exaggerated estimates are harmful to girls and women from affected communities’, International Journal of Impotence Research, Online first, 15 January: 10.1038/s41443-021-00526-4 Khoja-Moolji, S. (2020) ‘Death by benevolence: Third world girls and the contemporary politics of humanitarianism’, Feminist Theory, 21(1), pp. 65–90. Käkelä, E. (2020) ‘Rethinking female genital cutting: From culturalist to structuralist framework for challenging violence against women’, in Johnsdotter, S. (eds.) Female Genital Cutting: The Global North and South. Malmö: The Centre for Sexology and Sexuality Studies, Malmö University, pp. 79–102. Ka
kela
, E. (2021) Negotiating intersecting forms of oppression: Female genital cutting (FGC) and cultural change after migration. PhD Thesis, University of Strathclyde. Käkelä, E. (2022) ‘Strategies of denial: Women’s experiences of culture of disbelief and discreditation in the treatment of asylum claims on the grounds of female genital cutting (FGC)’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 48(3), pp. 560–577. Little Black Book (2022) ‘Powerful campaign encourages you to speak up to end one of the world’s most violent traditions’. 7 February. Available at: https://www.lbbonline.com/news/powerfulcampaign-encourages-you-to-speak-up-to-end-one-of-the-worlds-most-violent-traditions (Accessed: 29 August 2022). Merrick, R. (2020) ‘Funding to stop female genital mutilation reduced by 76 per cent despite hundreds of new cases each month’, The Independent, 20 July. Available at: https://www.independent.co. uk/news/uk/politics/funding-female-genital-mutilation-abuse-victims-uk-a9622916.html (Accessed: 30 May 2022). Metropolitan Police (2019) ‘Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) is happening across the UK (…)’, [Twitter] 9 April. Available at: https://twitter.com/metpoliceuk/status/1115586532830842882 (Accessed: 3 October 2022). Monteith, B. (2017) ‘Scotland has to wake up to reality of FGM abuse’, The Scotsman, 13 February. Available at: https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/brian-monteith-scotland-haswake-reality-fgm-abuse-1456146 (Accessed: 30 May 2022). Moorhead, J. (2017) ‘Racism label should not deter British police from FGM fight, says officer’, The Guardian, 21 September. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/21/fearracism-label-deter-british-police-tackling-fgm-female-genital-mutilation (Accessed: 30 May 2022). Njambi, W. N. (2004) ‘Dualisms and female bodies in representations of African female circumcision: A feminist critique’, Feminist Theory, 5(3), pp. 281–303. Nnaemeka, O. (2005) Female circumcision and the politics of knowledge: African women in imperialist discourses. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Orange, R. and Topping, A. (2014) ‘FGM specialist calls for gynaecological checks for all girls in Sweden’, The Guardian, 27 June. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jun/27/femalegenital-mutilation-fgm-specialist-sweden-gynaecological-checks-children (Accessed: 26 August 2022). Plan UK (2014) ‘Stars back Face Up campaign’. 1 October. Available at: https://plan-uk.org/blogs/ stars-back-face-up-campaign (Accessed: 29 August 2022). Rhodes, D. (2016) ‘Charity warns of FGM “parties” taking place in England’, BBC News, 13 December. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-38290888 (Accessed: 27 May 2022). Rudd, A. (2016) Speech to Conservative Party Conference 2016. [Speech] Available at: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=LuvQCOn_908 (Accessed: 30 May 2022).

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Emmaleena Käkelä SafeHands for Mothers. (2015) Now that you know, say NO to FGM. Available at: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=a_GBZbEwO8I (Accessed: 3 October 2022). Shell‐Duncan, B. (2008) ‘From health to human rights: Female genital cutting and the politics of intervention’, American Anthropologist, 110(2), pp. 225–236. Shweder, R. A. (2000) ‘What about “female genital mutilation”? And why understanding culture matters in the first place’, Daedalus, 129(4), pp. 209–232. Sobel, M. (2015) ‘Female genital cutting in the news media: A content analysis’, International Communication Gazette, 77(4), pp. 384–405. Summers, H. (2020) ‘Priti Patel accused of ‘shameful’ bid to deport girl at risk of FGM’, The Guardian, 3 July. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/jul/03/priti-patelaccused-of-shameful-bid-to-deport-girl-at-risk-of-fgm (Accessed: 30 May 2022). Tamale, S. (2011) ‘Researching and theorising sexualities in Africa’, in Tamale, S. (eds.) African sexualities: A reader. Cape Town: Pambazuka Press, pp. 11–36. Ticktin, M. (2016) ‘Sexual violence as the language of border control: Protecting exceptional difference’, Feministische Studien, 34(2), pp. 284–304. Travis, A. (2014) ‘Female genital mutilation parties being held in the UK, MPs told’, The Guardian, 6 May. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/may/06/female-genitalmutilation-parties-uk-mps (Accessed: 26 August 2022). 28 Too Many. (2017) The price of FGM. Available at: https://www.adsoftheworld.com/campaigns/theprice-of-fgm (Accessed: 26 August 2022). Wade, L. (2009) ‘Defining gendered oppression in U.S. newspapers: The strategic value of “Female Genital Mutilation”’, Gender & Society, 23(3), pp. 293–314. WHO. (2022) Female genital mutilation. Available at: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/ detail/female-genital-mutilation (Accessed: 27 May 2022).

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11 EXAMINING THE ZIMBABWEAN NEWS MEDIA’S FRAMING OF MEN AS VICTIMS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT Mthokozisi Phathisani Ndhlovu Introduction Studies on the news media’s framing of sexual assault have predominantly interrogated women as victims and men as perpetrators (Benedict, 1992; Meyers, 1997; Turkewitz, 2010; Ndhlovu, 2020). This chapter seeks to expand the discussion by using the case studies of three Zimbabwean daily newspapers, The Herald, Chronicle and NewsDay, to examine the news media’s framing of sexual assault when men are victims and women are perpetrators. Even though cases of sexual assault of men are not as widespread as of women, they have been reported in Zimbabwe. This article argues that the manner in which the news media talk about these cases shapes how we understand sexual assault, especially when the victim is male. Consequently, this article uses frame analysis to analyse the stories of sexual assault of men published by the three publications from 2010 to 2020.

News media’s framing of sexual assault in Zimbabwe and beyond Sexual assault refers to non-consensual sexual acts that range from “touching and groping to penetrative sex” (Lehmiller, 2018, p. 391). Such cases are widespread in Zimbabwe and most of the reported cases involve women as victims and men as perpetrators. In Zimbabwe, 43% of women have experienced physical, emotional and/or sexual abuse at some point in time (Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency, 2012) while an average of 22 women are raped every day (Sithole, 2019). It is, however, difficult to obtain figures of sexual assault of men since in Zimbabwe, like the rest of Africa, this form of abuse is regarded as taboo (Shumba, 2004). This subsequently, “explains why there is scant literature showing the lived experiences of male survivors of rape perpetrated by women” (Musevenzi, 2017, p. 2). In Zimbabwe, previous studies on news coverage of sexual assault have explored women as victims and men as perpetrators. For instance, Ndhlovu (2020) established that the Zimbabwean news media strip rape of criminality through accusing women of inviting sexual exploitation through misguided behaviours. These findings are consistent with global literature on media’s framing of sexual assault.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-14

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Benedict (1992) established that the media blame women for enticing their assailants by their looks and sexuality while male perpetrators are depicted as helpless, driven beyond self-control by lust. Such narratives, which are shaped by language and rape myths, are destructive to rape victims and to the public’s understanding of sexual assault (Benedict, 1992). Similarly, Meyers (1997, pp. 61–62) argues that the media blame victims of sexual assault for engaging in “questionable activities” or exhibiting behaviour “outside the traditional role of women”. Patriarchy has been blamed for perpetuating sexual violence against women (Murnen, Wright and Kaluzny, 2002) as it legalises social power imbalances between genders (Winn, 2018) and confines women to subordinate positions (Kambarami, 2006) to normalise men’s predatory behaviour (Nyathi and Ndhlovu, 2021). The media, on the other hand, have been accused of promoting patriarchal dominance through biased reporting of sexual assault (Turkewitz, 2010). While this literature provides insightful contributions to understanding the role of the media in promoting patriarchy and discrediting victims of sexual abuse, it is fundamental to examine how the media frame sexual assault when the roles are reversed – men as victims and women and perpetrators.

Men as victims of sexual assault Even though cases of women sexually violating men have been reported in Zimbabwe and other countries, people remain sceptical about them. In fact, Davies and Rogers (2006, p. 372), while reviewing literature on sexual assault of men, argue that since “people are socialised to believe that women are sexually passive and men are sexual initiators, it is difficult to imagine a dominant woman coercing an unwilling man to have sex”. So, when women sexually violate men, people apportion blame to male victims and even accuse them of deriving pleasure from the act (Davies and Rogers, 2006). As a result, some male victims of sexual assault avoid reporting their cases to the police in fear that they will experience negative treatment, be disbelieved, or blamed for their assault (Walker, Archer and Davies, 2005). Those who are brave enough to report their cases to the police face an enormous legal battle since only a handful of cases result in conviction (Davies and Rogers, 2006). The situation is even worse in Zimbabwe as the law does not recognise that women can rape men: instead, women are charged with aggravated indecent assault – a crime that carries the same penalty as rape (Gwarisa, 2020). The Zimbabwean law defines rape as deep penetration, meaning that “at law only men can rape women and men can only be raped if there is penetration through their anuses” (Marongwe, Tobias and Mawere, 2019, p. 76). Despite the limitations of the Zimbabwean law, there is some research evidence pointing to an increase in cases of women raping men in Zimbabwe. For instance, Marongwe, Tobias and Mawere (2019) argue that between 2011 and 2017 there was an increase in cases of women raping men in Zimbabwe allegedly for sperm harvesting or performing rituals. Previous studies in Zimbabwe and beyond highlight society’s negative perception of male victims of sexual assault (Marongwe, Tobias and Mawere, 2019; Walker, Archer and Davies, 2005; Davies and Rogers, 2006). Generally, men who are abused by women are regarded as weak and effeminate (Marongwe, Tobias and Mawere, 2019). Consequently, male victims of sexual assault struggle to reconcile their masculine identity with their ordeal (Riccardi, 2010). While some previous studies might have focused on men who were raped by men, they provide insights into the psychological effects of sexual assault on male victims. Some of the long-term effects include depression, anxiety, self-blame, vulnerability and emotional distancing (Walker, Archer and Davies, 2005). Marongwe, Tobias and Mawere 128

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(2019, p. 88) argue that: “The trauma that the victims suffered could be associated with the reversal of sexual roles, where the affected men felt feminized”. It is against this background that I examine how the Zimbabwean news media talk about the sexual assault of men and the psychological and physical trauma associated with it. Following Riccardi’s (2010) caution against simply applying research findings from female victims to male victims, this study highlights the specificity of men’s victimisation and the ways this is handled in news media, whilst keeping in view the broader arguments about gender, violence and representation outlined in this introduction.

Methodology This study focuses on the representation of men as victims of sexual assault in three Zimbabwean newspapers: The Herald, Chronicle and NewsDay. I purposely selected the three publications because they are the leading daily newspapers in Zimbabwe and they serve different geographic regions. The Herald and NewsDay are largely circulated in the northern and eastern parts of Zimbabwe while the Chronicle is predominantly circulated in the southern parts of the country. The print version of The Herald is accessed by 49% of the population while the Chronicle and NewsDay’s hardcopies are accessed by 28% and 13% of the population, respectively (ZAMPS, 2021). On the other hand, the online version of The Herald is accessed by 43% of the population while the online versions of the Chronicle and NewsDay are accessed by 25% and 23% of the population, respectively (ZAMPS, 2021). Within the period under study (2010–2020), the three daily newspapers published 84 stories on the sexual assault of men – The Herald had 27 stories, NewsDay 32 and Chronicle 25. I accessed these stories by searching for “female rapists”, “indecent assault” and “male sexual abuse” on the websites of the three publications. I then excluded stories that focused on men as perpetrators and women as victims of sexual assault. An initial read-through of the articles allowed me to inductively generate framing categories (Connolly-Ahern and Broadway, 2008), determining “for each text which elements and propositions can possibly function as framing or reasoning devices” (van Gorp, 2007, p. 72). A frame refers to “a central organising idea or storyline that provides meaning to an unfolding strip of events” (Gamson and Modigliani, quoted in Scheufele, 1999, p. 106). Three key framing categories were identified: discrediting the narratives of male victims, sensationalising sexual assault of men and humanising female perpetrators. All 84 stories fit into one of these frames, with 22 stories discrediting the narratives of male victims, 39 sensationalising the assault and 23 humanising female perpetrators. There were no significant differences between the three papers in terms of the frames chosen. In what follows, I unpack how each of these frames operates.

Discrediting the narratives of male victims of sexual assault An analysis of the sampled stories reveals how the three publications discredit the narratives of men who are victims of sexual assault, citing sceptical sources, conflating rape with sex and depicting sexual assault of men as extraordinary and unusual. To start with, the three publications discredit the narratives of male victims of sexual assault by citing sources sceptical of women’s capabilities of sexually violating men. This is noted in the NewsDay story titled “Female rapists – men never saw it coming” (NewsDay, 2010). The article uses popular opinion to discuss a news phenomenon. As suggested in the headline, it takes a 129

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rather scurrilous and incredulous tone, reinforced in the opening of the article which describes women raping men as a “bizarre trend”. The journalist initially turns to “social commentators” – specifically, two male academics from the University of Zimbabwe – for their views. The men are not presented as research experts in this particular area but rather offer very generic comments about the breakdown of society and the dominance of superstition, explaining the phenomenon as linked to the harvesting of semen for rituals. The story concludes with the views of three ordinary men – a vegetable vendor, a traditional leader and a university student – all of whom are sceptical of the narratives of male victims. That this scepticism spans such differently positioned men arguably gives it more credibility. The vegetable vendor is quoted saying, “I still don’t believe these stories. I suspect that these men are just making up such stories when they stay out from home”. Moreover, in the same story the writer even notes that when the “initial” cases of women raping men were reported, there was a “joke that these were men making excuses for their philandering activities to avoid conflict at home”. Whilst the article does note that in a “patriarchal society like Zimbabwe” men admitting to victimisation is “just taboo”, the tone of the article does little to tackle this and provides scant context for the reports at the heart of this “bizarre trend”. The discrediting of male victims of sexual assault is also evident in The Herald story titled “Local female rapists inspire Hollywood drama series” (Phiri, 2014). Notably, this story is written by an entertainment reporter and concentrates on how the American drama series Being Mary Jane deals with the issue. The article concludes with the “mixed reactions” to the show from viewers, noting “in some instances, viewers make jokes about the assaults with some wishing to be in the shoes of the rape victims”. The assumption is that men derive pleasure from being raped by women – a “joke” which is also referenced in the headline of the NewsDay article, with the double entendre of “coming”. Whilst in The Herald article this is contrasted with views that “rape directed at any human being is no laughing matter”, the article concludes by noting that “none of the cases have ever been proved and no arrests have been made in spite of all the publicity”. This article thus speaks to the newsworthiness of female sexual assault of men at the same time casting doubt on the veracity of men’s claims, with criminal justice used as a measure of authenticity. Moreover, the three publications discredit the narratives of male victims of sexual assault by conflating rape with sex: this is already evident in the examples above, where sexual assault is presented as a potentially desirable and pleasurable experience for men. In addition, the three publications frequently use the phrase “had sex without his consent” to describe instances when female perpetrators raped male victims. Conflating sex with rape is problematic since it eliminates the violence and emotional trauma associated with rape. In fact, Turkewitz (2010) argues that without consent the act cannot be referred to as sex. This is consistent with the reluctance by The Herald and Chronicle to use rape to describe acts of women forcing men to be intimate with them. I observed that whenever the two publications used the words “rape” and “rapist”, they ensured that these words were enclosed in quotation marks. Enclosing a word in quotation marks might indicate the author’s disagreement with its use (Van Gelder, 2021). As such, it can be argued that the two publications have reservations about classifying these acts as rape or even calling women committing such acts rapists, although (as discussed above) this is consistent with the legal connotations of their usage. The Zimbabwean law uses indecent assault instead of rape to refer to acts of women forcing men to be intimate with them (Gwarisa, 2020). 130

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The three publications can be argued to be discrediting the narratives of male victims of sexual assault by blaming them for inviting their ordeal. This can be noted in the Chronicle story entitled “Women try to rape ‘well endowed’ man” (Mondela, 2017). In the story, one of the women is quoted saying she wanted to have sex with the man since he had a big penis: such a narrative shifts the blame to the male victim. Moreover, the extent to which the victim conforms to a hegemonic construction of masculinity (wellendowed) renders him an incredible victim capable of driving women beyond control. Previous studies examining the news media’s framing of women as victims of sexual assault established that the news media blame female victims for inviting their ordeal with their conduct (Benedict, 1992; Meyers, 1997). Even though this article focuses on male victims of sexual assault, it also observed that the news media blame them for their ordeal. Lastly, the three publications discredit the narratives of male victims of sexual assault by depicting cases of sexual assault of men as extraordinary and unusual events. Notably, the three publications frame sexual assault of men by women as “bizarre” (NewsDay, 2010), an unusual occurrence (Phiri, 2014) and shocking (The Herald, 2011). What makes these stories “bizarre” or unusual is precisely the overturning of gender norms and this is emphasised in these reports in contradictory ways: the assertion of what men should be can either cast doubt on the victim’s status as a man or as a victim.

Sensationalising male sexual abuse Even though sexual assault of men is of serious concern, it was sensationalised by the three publications. Media sensationalism, here, refers to the news media’s tendency to exaggerate issues in order to attract audiences, but also to name and construct a “social problem” in moralistic ways. Here, it is particularly important to highlight the way that ideas about “superstition” and “ritual” were mobilised in a number of articles, to suggest that women’s motivations for assaulting men were to “harvest” sperm. This can be seen in NewsDay headlines like “Sperm harvesters strike again” (NewsDay, 2013a) and “Sperm harvesters pounce” (NewsDay, 2013b) as well as in the use of terms such as “sperm thieves” and “condom women” (NewsDay, 2011) to refer to women who rape men to collect their semen. This language removes the violence and emotional trauma associated with rape. It further repositions rape from a crime of violence to a crime of theft while also shifting focus from male victims to the fate of the stolen ejaculate. Moreover, the sensationalising of rape was noted through the use of unnecessary graphic descriptions. For instance, in the Chronicle’s story about the “well endowed” man considered above (Mondela, 2017), it is reported that “a court heard on Thursday that the duo fondled his penis until he became aroused”. This example brings together many of the points I have made so far: it emphasises sex over violence and focuses on evidence of the man’s physical arousal to cast doubt on the authenticity of the assault claim. However, Fisher and Pina (2013, p. 57) argue that “an erection can be induced by fear and is not necessarily indicative of pleasure or consent”. There are clear parallels here with the way female victims of sexual assault are treated in the media (Soothill and Walby, 1991; Turkewitz, 2010; Korn and Efrat, 2004). I argue that the three newspapers sensationalise sexual assault of men to please their audiences since in Zimbabwe, male victims of sexual assault are ridiculed for being weak and effeminate while their cases are treated with suspicion (Marongwe, Tobias and Mawere, 2019). 131

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Humanising female perpetrators An analysis of the three publications’ stories reveals how they humanised the accused women by focusing on extenuating circumstances. One example of this is the Chronicle story “Female rapist jailed” (Mpofu, 2014), which focuses on a 24-year-old female perpetrator sentenced to prison for 5 years for raping a minor. The story describes the accused as a “married mum-of-two” and (as with other stories) places the accusation that she “raped” the boy in quotation marks. Given she has been found guilty, it is also notable that the report continues to describe her actions as “alleged”, and the reference to her children further humanises her. The Chronicle, in including such details, shifts the story’s focus from the minor who has been sexually violated to the predicament the perpetrator’s children will be subjected to if she is given a lengthy sentence. The article also cites the abused boy’s grandmother describing the abuse as “sickening”, but this is counterbalanced by the salacious detail that is given about the assault. Furthermore, the Chronicle, in a story titled “Woman jailed 12 years for indecent assault” (Murape, 2011), humanises a female perpetrator who is alleged to have raped a 14-year-old boy. It is written that the woman, who is 32-years-old and married to an octogenarian, sexually abused the 14-year-old. One can argue that the publication through referring to the husband as an octogenarian shifts focus from the accused woman to the circumstances that might have forced her to commit the crime. The age difference between the woman and her husband suggests that she might have been a victim of child marriage. In addition, one can also conclude that the octogenarian husband was failing to perform well in the bedroom, leaving the woman with no choice but to sexually abuse the 14-year-old. Moreover, the three publications humanise female perpetrators through attributing their crimes to external factors. This is noted in the NewsDay story titled “Female rapists – men never saw it coming” already discussed above (NewsDay, 2010). The reporter cites a social commentator who attributes the cases of women raping men to poverty. Some people in Zimbabwe allegedly use semen for rituals that claim to make people wealthy (Vickers, 2011). The story further notes that “women will have been instructed by a traditional healer to collect semen and the only way is to rape an unsuspecting man”. It can therefore be argued that this statement draws the readers’ attention to economic conditions forcing women to rape men to collect semen in order for them to be rich. As such, the focus of the story shifts from the sexual abuse of men to the circumstances of female perpetrators, positioning them as good people forced by circumstances to sexually abuse men. In addition, the behaviour of female perpetrators is contextualised with reference to men’s sexual abuse of women. Reference can be made to The Herald story titled “Female rape suspects: Scores besiege police station” (The Herald, 2011). In the story, it is noted that cases of women raping men show “that tables have turned”, suggesting that female perpetrators are responding to male violence. This suggests that cases of females raping men are the cost of equality. In rare cases, where the news media sympathise with the male victims, that sympathy is sensationalised. This is noted in the NewsDay story titled “Female rapists pounce on Beatrice man” (Saunyama, 2019). In the story, it is reported that the raped man was taken to hospital after he sustained “bruises in his manhood”. While the story solicits sympathy for the man who was raped by three women and dumped by the roadside, it only focuses on the bruises he sustained without highlighting the emotional and psychological trauma he experienced. This is consistent with most of the analysed stories as the three publications failed to explain the emotional and psychological effects of sexual abuse on male victims.

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This study reveals something of the ways in which representations of male victims and female perpetrators engage with ideas about appropriate gender behaviour to variously humanise perpetrators and to direct our sympathies. A question remains over which women (and men) are more likely to be sympathetically treated in the Zimbabwean media. This research has already gestured towards some of the areas worth consideration – such as the age, marital status or geographical location of the perpetrator. From the examples presented here, there is a suggestion that sympathy will be generated for female perpetrators on the basis of their proximity to “ideal” womanhood (e.g. marriage, motherhood, age). There are echoes here of existing feminist debates about the conditions under which certain male perpetrators of abuse are granted “himpathy” (Manne, 2018) in news coverage that reveal the continued investment in traditional gender relations which are at stake in reporting gender-based violence of all kinds.

Conclusion While previous studies showed that Zimbabwean society ridicules male victims of sexual abuse for being weak and effeminate (Marongwe, Tobias and Mawere, 2019), this study has demonstrated that such attitudes are also rife in news reporting which discredits the narratives of male victims, sensationalises sexual assault of men and humanises female perpetrators. The failure to take women’s violence against men seriously is also evidenced by the way these reports downplay the emotional, psychological and physical trauma endured by male victims and shift focus from the accused woman to the circumstances that might have forced her to commit the crime. Although there are some parallels here with the ways in which female victim/survivors of sexual assault are treated by news media, there are also important differences, linked to ideals about masculinity. In both cases, however, rape reporting works to uphold traditional gender ideologies and limits societal understanding of crimes and their victims.

References Benedict, H. (1992) Virgin or vamp: How the press covers sex crimes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Connolly-Ahern, C. and Broadway, C. B. (2008) ‘To booze or not to booze? Newspaper coverage of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders’, Science Communication, 29(3), pp. 362–385. Davies, M. and Rogers, P. (2006) ‘Perceptions of male victims in depicted sexual assaults: A review of the literature’, Aggression and Violent Behavior, 11(4), pp. 367–377. Fisher, N. L. and Pina, A. (2013) ‘An overview of the literature on female-perpetrated adult male sexual victimization’, Aggression and Violent Behavior, 18(1), pp. 54–61. Gwarisa, M. (2020) ‘Women can’t rape men according to Zimbabwean law’, The Health Times, 30 October. Available at: https://healthtimes.co.zw/2020/10/30/women-cant-rape-menaccording-to-zimbabwean-law/ (Accessed: 25 January 2022). Kambarami, M. (2006) Femininity, sexuality and culture: Patriarchy and female subordination in Zimbabwe. Available at: http://www.arsrc.org/downloads/uhsss/kmabarami.pdf (Accessed: 29 January 2022). Korn, A. and Efrat, S. (2004) ‘The coverage of rape in the Israeli popular press’, Violence Against Women, 10(9), pp. 1056–1074. Lehmiller, J. L. (2018) The psychology of human sexuality. 2nd edn. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Manne, K. (2018) Down girl: The logic of misogyny. New York: Oxford University Press. Marongwe, N., Tobias, D. and Mawere, T. (2019) ‘Female rapists and sperm harvesting: Narratives, violence and occultism in post-colonial Zimbabwe’, in Marongwe, M., Duri, T. F. P. and Mawere, M. (eds.) Violence, peace and everyday modes of justice and healing in post-colonial Africa. Bamenda: Laanga Research and Publishing, pp. 73–94.

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Mthokozisi Phathisani Ndhlovu Meyers, M. (1997) News coverage of violence against women: Engendering blame. London: Sage Publications. Mondela, C. (2017) ‘Women try to rape “well endowed” man’, Chronicle, 25 September. Available at: https://www.chronicle.co.zw/women-try-to-rape-well-endowed-man/ (Accessed: 20 January 2021). Mpofu, A. (2014) ‘Female rapist jailed’, Chronicle, 16 April. Available at: https://www.chronicle.co. zw/female-rapist-jailed. (Accessed: 20 January 2021). Murape, W. (2011) ‘Woman jailed 12 years for indecent assault’, Chronicle, 5 June. Available at: https:// www.chronicle.co.zw/woman-jailed-12-years-for-indecent-assault/ (Accessed: 20 January 2021). Murnen, S. K., Wright, C. and Kaluzny, G. (2002) ‘If “boys will be boys”, then girls will be victims? A meta-analytic review of the research that relates masculine ideology to sexual aggression’, Sex Roles, 46(11), pp. 359–375. Musevenzi, M. (2017) Male rape in Zimbabwe! The lived experiences of male survivors. The case of adult rape clinic at Parirenyatwa Hospital. Available at: http://www.library.uz.ac.zw/bitstream/ handle/10646/4265/MMusevenzi_Male_rape_in_Zimbabwe.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (Accessed: 26 June 2022). Ndhlovu, M. P. (2020) ‘Examining media discourses on religious rape in Zimbabwe’, Feminist Media Studies, 20(6), pp. 801–812. NewsDay (2010) ‘Female rapists – men never saw it coming’, 13 September. Available at: https:// www.newsday.co.zw/2010/09/2010-09-13-female-rapists-men-never-saw-it-coming/ (Accessed: 20 January 2021). NewsDay (2011) Mystery surrounds fate of ‘female rapists’, 13 October. Available at: https://www. newsday.co.zw/2011/10/2011-10-13-mystery-surrounds-fate-of-female-rapists. (Assessed: 20 January 2021). NewsDay (2013a) ‘Sperm harvesters strike again’, 1 May. Available at: https://www.newsday.co.zw/ 2013/05/sperm-harvesters-strike-again. (Accessed: 20 January 2021). NewsDay (2013b) ‘Sperm harvesters pounce’, 2 April. Available at: https://www.newsday.co.zw/2013/ 04/sperm-harvesters-pounce. (Accessed: 20 January 2021). Nyathi, S. S. and Ndhlovu, M. P. (2021) ‘Zimbabwean news media discourses on the intersection of abortion, religion, health and the law’, Media, Culture & Society, 43(8), pp. 1466–1479. Phiri, B. (2014) ‘Local female rapists inspire Hollywood drama series’, The Herald, 30 April. Available at: https://www.herald.co.zw/local-female-rapists-inspire-hollywood-drama-series/ (Accessed: 20 January 2022). Riccardi, P. (2010) ‘Male rape: The silent victim and the gender of the listener’, Primary Care Companion Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/ articles/PMC3067991/# (Accessed: 20 January 2022). Saunyama, J. (2019) ‘Female rapists pounce on Beatrice man’, NewsDay, 20 September. Available at: https://newsday.co.zw/amp/news/article/52303/female-rapists-pounce-on-beatrice-man (Accessed: 20 January 2021). Scheufele, D. (1999) ‘Framing as a theory of media effects’, Journal of Communication, 49(1), pp. 103–122. Shumba, A. (2004) ‘Male sexual abuse by female and male perpetrators in Zimbabwean schools’, Child Abuse Review, 13(5), pp. 353–359. Sithole, S. (2019) ‘22 women raped daily: Gender Commission’, NewsDay, 21 November. Available at: https://www.newsday.co.zw/2019/11/22-women-raped-daily-gender-commission/ (Accessed: 26 June 2022). Soothill, K. and Walby, S. (1991) Sex crime in the news. London: Routledge. The Herald (2011) ‘Female rape suspect: Score besiege police station’, The Herald, 11 October. https://www. herald.co.zw/female-rape-suspects-scores-besiege-police-station/ (Accessed: 20 January 2021). Turkewitz, R. (2010) All the news that’s fit to print? A content analysis of newspapers’ portrayal of rape and sexual assault. Bachelor of Arts. Wesleyan University. Available at: https://digitalcollections. wesleyan.edu/object/ir-1605 (Accessed: 20 January 2022). Van Gelder, H. (2021) Ground sea: Photography and the right to be reborn. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Van Gorp, B. (2007) ‘The constructionist approach to framing: Bringing culture back in’, Journal of Communication, 57(1), pp. 60–78.

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Zimbabwean news media’s framing of men as victims Vickers, S. (2011) ‘Zimbabwe women accused of raping men “for rituals”’, BBC, 28 November. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-15876968 (Accessed: 27 June 2022). Walker, J., Archer, J. and Davies, M. (2005) ‘Effects of rape on men: A descriptive analysis’, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 34(1), pp. 69–80. Winn, H. (2018) ‘Thursdays in black: Localized responses to rape culture and gender violence in Aotearoa New Zealand’, in Blyth, C., Colgan, E. and Edwards, K. B. (eds.) Rape culture, gender violence, and religion: Interdisciplinary perspectives. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 51–70. Zimbabwe All Media Products Survey (ZAMPS). (2021). Harare: Zimbabwe advertising research foundation. Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency. (2012) Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Survey 2010–11. Harare: Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency.

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12 THE HIV MAN, ALEXANDRA MAN AND HOTBOY Swedish news coverage of rape as a folklore of fear Gabriella Nilsson

Introduction The news media figure of “HIV man”, which would reappear several times in subsequent decades (1998, 2000, 2007 and 2008), was first introduced in Swedish news reports about rape in 1992. The case involved an HIV-infected man who, according to the tabloid Expressen, exposed a woman to “twenty hours of terror” (Brännström, 1992), in the form of repeated vaginal, oral and anal rape, thereby also infecting her with HIV.1 Another newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, reported that the woman’s only concern, while being raped, was “not to be touched by his body fluids” (Nauman, 1992). This reporting was supplemented by facts about HIV and AIDS, including the rate of HIV infection among Swedes and the current tally of AIDSrelated deaths. Thus, from the very beginning, the rape of the “twenty hours of terror” was downplayed. News media rather dwelled on the apparently deliberate spread of HIV infection, “the new social and legal problem facing AIDS” (Expressen, 1992). This chapter is based on news reports about two separate “HIV men” and one similar news media figure, the “Alexandra man”, who appeared in Swedish news media between 1990 and 2010.2 The analysed cases all began as rape reports, but seemingly greater dangers, “the HIV virus” and “the Internet”, were identified and prioritised over rape in the news. Based on the overarching question “How is rape portrayed in the news media?” the objective is to analyse how these news media figures were “utilised” by their contemporaries. In my previous work, I have shown that news reports on rape function as placeholders in news media for the continued reporting and debate of other issues; more specifically, various rape genres have served different societal functions and rapists or rape cases are labelled in the news with reference to these intended issues (Nilsson, 2019a, 2019b, 2020). The rape cases analysed in this chapter stand out because they are labelled to indicate contemporary fears of, respectively, infection (HIV) and new technology, namely, the fear of Internet pseudonyms (Alexandra). Thus, these labels determined what issues would be discussed in the media space accumulated by rape cases and, consequently, what issues would not be discussed (such as the causes and consequences of rape). In the present chapter, I first analyse how the three rape cases are described. I suggest that news reports implicate a “politics of emotion” (Ahmed, 2004) and form a “folklore of fear” (Stattin, 1984), which functions as a way of dealing with

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“liquid modernity” (Bauman, 2006). In conclusion, I reflect on the consequences of this for the possibilities of counteracting rape. Zygmunt Bauman argues that “liquid modernity” is constituted by the most menacing aspect of our fear, namely our ignorance of what dangers threaten us. In Liquid Fear, Bauman writes: Fear is at its most fearsome when it is diffuse, scattered, unclear, unattached, unanchored, free-floating, with no clear address or cause; when it haunts us with no visible rhyme or reason, when the menace we should be afraid of can be glimpsed everywhere but is nowhere to be seen. (2006, p. 2) Two pervasive phenomena, quite literally glimpsed everywhere but nowhere to be seen, are viruses and the Internet. Consisting of microparticles that spread unhindered and invisible, in different periods both viruses and the Internet have induced fear. According to Bauman, liquid fear does not hold shape long enough for us to identify its origin, let alone manage its causes. One way of countering liquid fear would be to use a catalyst to force it to manifest in some tangible form, preferably the human body. I will argue here that “the rapist” is such a human-shaped catalyst. Traditionally, folklore, more than any other form, served to personify the fearful invisible forces of nature as human-type beings. Swedish folklorist Jochum Stattin (1990) writes that, while certain frightening situations are so concretely and obviously dangerous that they do not need to be described with the help of folklore, other, more vague and disturbing situations are dangerous in ways that must be clarified through a folklore of fear. This folklore of fear functions not only as a concretisation of the elusive but also combats “evil” by identifying scapegoats in human form (Stattin, 1990, p. 168). I would argue that the news media is one arena where the folklore (or perhaps media-lore) of fear is shaped and reproduced, and that this explains the regular reappearance of “HIV men” and similar media figures. Sara Ahmed (2004) shows that emotions are produced through chains of associations; when two phenomena are presented together, a connection emerges that evokes either positive or negative emotions. Associations are then reinforced by repetition until they become “sticky”. Following Ahmed, the reporting on these news media figures can be analysed as the political act of “sticking” the fear of infection and technology to the rapist’s body. Thus, the politics of emotion work to evoke fear that can legitimise certain actions against certain persons (and phenomena) (Ahmed, 2004, p. 12).

The HIV man When the availability of an effective antiretroviral medication, in 1996, ended the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s in Sweden, dramatisation of AIDS infection and political interest both decreased (Thorsén, 2013, Ljung, 2001). Nevertheless, fear of infection still lacked a clear form. In fact, I would suggest that once “gay men” no longer embodied public AIDS stereotypes, fear of infection became fluid and sought a catalyst. Regarding HIV, one threat was particularly manifest in both media and contemporary folklore, namely the narrative of HIV-infected persons driven by vindictiveness and a desire to deliberately infect others. One globally spread tale includes the experience of waking up alone after having had sexual intercourse with a newly acquainted person, to the terrifying message “Welcome to the 137

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Wonderful World of AIDS” written on the bathroom mirror in red lipstick (Fine, 1987). The rapist was a figure who embodied this fear. Given the question “How does a society protect itself against HIV-infected persons who […] commit rape?” (Expressen, 1992), a terrifying scenario was implicated in the news coverage of the HIV man. The most hyper-mediatised Swedish HIV man was introduced in September 1998, when a 45-year-old man was accused of rape. Upon searching the man’s apartment, the police found antiretroviral HIV medication and a notebook with the names of 190 women. Later was it revealed that, over a ten-year period, he had had intercourse with, and in several cases drugged and sexually exploited, over a hundred women without using prophylactics. By that time, HIV infection was considered a chronic condition rather than a deadly disease but, according to the news media, the police were “hunting down a murderer” (Cantwell, 1998a). The HIV man was lethal, a vindictive, hyper-sexual psychopath with a killer instinct, who took revenge on women for the injustice of his illness (Cantwell, 1998b; TT, 1998b). More than anything, the large number of victimised women aroused immense fear. Headlines stated that “HIV panic” was spreading (Helsingborgs dagblad, 1998), as “hundreds of desperate women contacted the police out of concern that they had contracted the deadly infection” (TT, 1998a). Although none of the 130 women and 2 men with whom the HIV man had intercourse were infected, the media narrative was not altered. “The fact that no one was infected does not mean that it is harmless. […] Many of the younger women did not dare to request he used a condom. Those who were picked up in his car were frightened when the car drove to his apartment instead of to their home” (Hougner, 1998). The quote refers to a clear act of sexual coercion, in which a man abducted and sexually abused scared young women, but this is not addressed further. The HIV man’s acts of sexual violence were not considered an issue relative to his deliberate attempt to spread of infection. Stattin writes that an effective way to keep certain groups at a distance is to regard them as criminals (Stattin, 1990, p. 120). Since publicly scapegoating HIV-affected groups, done since the 1980s, was no longer acceptable, the rapist offered a legitimate surface on which to project fears of infection and distance oneself from the infected. By situating the spread of infection in the rapist’s body, it was possible to denounce the spreader of infection as criminal. Some bodies are sticky, writes Ahmed (2004), which means that negative emotions (in this case fear) are associated more easily with certain bodies than others, depending on previous associations. The HIV man’s reappearance in the news media exemplifies the stickiness of the rapist. In fact, in addition to the HIV men mentioned here, two different “Hepatitis men” (1999 and 2008) also appear in news reports about rape. By transforming the invisible threat of infection into a human-shaped rapist, the threat was made visible and the spread of infection could be condemned and managed (with the police force). This highlights that emotions are not (just) psychological states, but also political actions (Ahmed, 2004). However, sticking fear of infection to the rapist’s body downplays the criminality of rape. It was even hypothesised that the virus caused brain damage that made the HIV man’s sexuality difficult to manage (Ljung, 2001, p. 95). The Communicable Diseases Act became law in Sweden in 1989, making it a crime for HIV-infected persons to fail to seek medical care and available treatment (Ljung, 2001, p. 35). Thus, the issue associating the spread of infection with criminality was further emphasised in the media when the HIV man escaped the police, and remained in hiding, without access to antiretroviral drugs. The antiretroviral drugs, it was explained, reduced his risk of infecting others and, more generally, explained: “why AIDS did not become the explosive epidemic that many feared a few years ago” (Larsson, 1998). But now, according 138

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to the folklore of fear that news media reproduced, the HIV man stopped taking his antiretroviral medicines. A friend disclosed that “he did not bring his medicine when he fled from his apartment, and now he is getting thinner and thinner. Right now, he is very confused’” (Wallin, 1998). The description of a desperate and “lethal” HIV-infected man on the run without antiretroviral drugs was accompanied in the media by a photo depicting a “severely emaciated man with large, slightly protruding, staring eyes” (Ljung, 2001, p. 92) and the headline “The HIV man’s true face” (Harne, 1998). Finally, the body inhabited by the invisible virus could be distinguished by the naked eye. As Bauman writes, after a long time of discomfort and darkness (in this case, ten years in which women unknowingly were endangered) sudden confrontation with the HIV man, the embodiment of the liquid fear of infection, seemed to provide relief (Bauman, 2006).

The Alexandra man In the spring of 2005, the “Alexandra man” was introduced in Swedish news media, and identified as a 30-year-old man arrested and accused of raping two girls. When the police searched the man’s computer, they found the pictures and contact information of up to 150 girls between the ages of 12 to 18. Alexandra man contacted these girls on various digital platforms, including the rapidly growing chat forum Lunarstorm, and pretended to be a woman named Alexandra. As “a friend” and by offering money or modelling careers, “Alexandra” induced the girls to take sexually explicit pictures of themselves and to meet up with a man (namely himself) for sex. He was later sentenced to ten years in prison for the sexual exploitation of minors, sexual abuse and the rape of 58 girls. However, the case catalysed liquid fear of “the Internet”. Fear of new technology is nothing exceptional. The steam engine, electricity and the computer all gave rise to the same anxiety, and consequently, to a folklore of fear. New technology, writes Stattin, moves us into a borderlands (Stattin, 1990, p. 122). In some contemporary narratives of the Internet, these borderlands are seen to offer emancipatory possibilities to experiment with identity, but, in news coverage of the Alexandra man, this same freedom presented the threat and explained the rapes. More specifically, the Internet inspired a liquid fear of who “lurked behind the screen” (Sundsvalls tidning, 2006). The perception of the Internet as a dangerous place was pervasive in reporting of the case “We are facing an explosion in the number of online seductions” (Palmkvist, J. 2006); “Internet development and especially computers with built-in webcams play right into the perpetrators’ hands”; and “Children and young people today are just a click away from men” (Nord, 2007) were some of the concerns expressed. Thus, coverage of the rapes implied that digital technology (built-in webcams) and computer use (the “clicking”) constituted the danger, not men who rape children. Particularly fearful was the recurring image of perpetrators in Internet borderlands reaching into the children’s bedrooms without parents’ awareness: “Online abuse can take place while the parents watch TV in the next room” (Letmark, 2007). In a similar rape case, labelled the “Internet doctor” (2019) by the media, this fear took a further angle, when a paediatrician, via his online care facility, was revealed to have persuaded parents to perform actions on their children that were subsequently classified as sexual abuse. When large-scale Internet use began in Sweden, in the mid-1990s, the Internet was understood as a place for young people. In particular, the digital platform Lunarstorm, one of the world’s first and largest chat forums with over a million members, came to symbolise the young people’s Internet (New York Times, 2005). The Internet’s danger to young people 139

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was warned of early on. “Young people live dangerously online” read headlines when Lunarstorm was mentioned (Svärdkrona, 2006). Youth culture has always been considered a threat to morality and public order (Frykman, 1988), from jazz music in the 1930s, through death metal and video violence in the 1980s, to online chat forums like Lunarstorm in the 2000s. These phenomena are similar in posing, if any, a danger that is unclear. I would argue that youth culture’s disruptive danger is such a vague and disturbing situation, in need of clarification through a folklore of fear (Stattin, 1990, p. 168). Thus, a pervasive theme of numerous folktales, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, was highlighted in the news reports about the Alexandra man. “He used a female alias to avoid scaring the girls away” (Hansson, 2006); “The girls thought they were chatting with a woman and therefore felt safe” (Palmkvist, P., 2006); “In long conversations on the Internet, ‘she’ lulled the girls into safety” (Barkman, 2006). In reality, the Alexandra man was a cynical sex predator, an online paedophile, a rapist and a parent’s “worst nightmare” (El Rafie, 2006, Andersson, 2006). “His goal was to have sex with 1,000 girls before his 30th birthday. He took to the Internet to help him” (Härdmark, 2006). Without the Internet, it seems, the abuse would not have happened. It is clear that, per Cohen (2002), the Alexandra man was evoked as a “folk devil” within the moral panic that characterised contemporary views of the Internet. Although not typical of “grooming” cases – most perpetrators do not assume an alias or hide their sexual intentions (Rogland & Christianson, 2016) – the Alexandra man came to embody the fear of the unknown and invisible Internet; the fear that a person is not who he pretends to be. However, the media narrative failed to elaborate on the problems of rape while, once more, an admittedly dangerous and evil rapist figure served as a catalyst, and his acts as a placeholder, for dwelling on other fears.

Hotboy I have illustrated how the liquid fear of invisible deadly viruses and unknown digital borderlands were “held together” by the pre-established criminal figure of the rapist. The rapist, in the form of the HIV man and the Alexandra man, was utilised as both embodiment and placeholder for news media to dwell on the dangers of HIV and the Internet. In regard to the case of yet another “HIV man”, labelled “Hotboy” by the media after his online alias, both these fears were intertwined since it was revealed that HIV-infected Hotboy had primarily operated online. In June 2007, a young woman told police that a 32-year-old man, calling himself Hotboy, had sexually assaulted her. During the investigation, police found that the man had been in contact with another 130 teenage girls, some as young as 12, via various Internet chat forums. Under false pretences, he lured girls to hotel rooms, where he offered them alcohol and filmed them having unprotected sex, in some cases raping them. At least two girls were infected with HIV (Olsson, 2008, Darin, 2007, Wahldén, 2007, Hellberg, 2007). Again, not the numerous sexual assaults but the growing threat of infection via Internet contact evoked the floating fear. Like HIV man and Alexandra man, Hotboy was described as “a wandering, intelligent virus, a human insecure weapon, a self-destructiveness aimed at dragging the outside world down into the abyss” (Rayman, 2009). There are apparent similarities between the folklore of fear analysed here and the figures that appear in traditional folklore, not least the dangerous male water creature Näcken (Nixie) who, in Scandinavian folklore, lured victims into the water by playing the violin. He was especially dangerous to women, whom he tried to seduce or in other ways harm by, for example, adopting false identities 140

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(Stattin, 1984, p. 26). Jochum Stattin describes how, despite adults’ disbelief in Näcken, stories about the creature served to induce a fear of water in children, which prevented them from drowning (Stattin, 1984, p. 35). Likewise, fearful news media figures like Hotboy should make young women change their behaviour. But what behaviour? Cohen claims that, during a moral panic that designates certain phenomena as a threat to fundamental societal values, “moral entrepreneurs” intervene at a certain level of moral indignation to demand action (Cohen, 2002). Interestingly, in the case of Hotboy, moral opinion was divided. Hotboy, as he embodied two separate liquid fears, seemed to require two parallel news media narratives. One narrative highlighted the phenomenon of grooming, once again putting girls’ behaviour on “youth sites” like Lunarstorm in the limelight. “The Internet involves special risks: it is easier [for girls, presumably] to push the boundaries when you are at home in your own room, in front of a screen and a webcam” (Rebas, 2007). This contemporary danger was contrasted with the presumed less dangerous past. “Meeting Peter by the haystack in the old days, you knew who you tumbled with. But today, the good-looking, young and blonde Peter whom you meet on the Internet, may turn out to be a 37-year-old paedophile” (Rebas, 2007). Once again, not rape but fake identities posed the real threat, against which girls needed to uphold their (moral) boundaries, even at home. The other narrative highlighted the fear of the deliberate spread of the HIV virus. “None of his sex partners knew about his dark secret” (Hellberg, 2007). In a dramatic tone, it was disclosed that Hotboy had been infected as a teenager, but “despite that, he had sex with many girls without using a condom. It may be a revenge for his lost life” (Metro, 2007). Again, while HIV was treatable and considered a chronic condition, infection was presented as a “dark secret” and a “lost life”. This narrative is clearly part of a folklore of fear, seemingly aiming to promote the use of prophylactics, not counteracting rape. “There are remarkably few discussions with teenagers about sexually transmitted diseases. There is an increased need for this” (Wahldén, 2007), was the conclusion drawn by the media. Both narratives diminish the significance of sexual violence, and the perpetrator’s responsibility, placing responsibility on his (potential) victims. Consequently, both narratives highlight a divide between those moral entrepreneurs who warned of the consequences of an “Internet panic” (Rebas, 2007) and those who feared a renewed “HIV panic” (Sydsvenskan, 2007). One side stressed that “[Hotboy] had unprotected sex with some of the girls. At least two of them were infected with HIV. One would think that the subsequent reporting would be about risk awareness and condom use. Instead, attention is once again on the dangers lurking online. While some of the tips are sensible […] the fear also leads to overreactions, such as parents giving their children an Internet ban” (Rebas, 2007). The other side pointed out that “despite justified concerns over how the young girls were treated [by Hotboy], it is important to calm the debate. The deed of individual criminals must not lead to the nearly 4,000 HIV-infected people living in Sweden being considered pariahs. Under no circumstances must Sweden return to the mood that prevailed during the first half of the 1980s, when […] it could be said that people living with HIV should be isolated on a desert island” (Sydsvenskan, 2007). Stattin writes that practices used to protect oneself from Näcken and other figures reveal something about contemporary challenges (Stattin, 1984, p. 27). In the case of Hotboy, however, it seems unclear what these challenges were – the need to protect oneself against infection or the Internet. The quotes above highlight a struggle over how the rapist figure should be utilised in the news reports about Hotboy and, more specifically, which associations 141

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should be attached to the rapist’s sticky body and which should not. Thus, following Ahmed (2004), we can conclude that the politics of emotion is an ongoing, antagonistic operation.

Discussion Undeniably, sexual violence has received increased visibility in the public sphere over the last few years, especially in the media, and, to some extent, in crime statistics (Alcoff, 2018; Andersson et al., 2019). It is well-studied that news coverage of rape reproduces previous news narratives, using familiar themes that are repeated over time (Bird, 2003; Simkin, 2013). Extensive research shows that these narratives perpetuate myths and stereotypes about rape, rapists and rape victims (Burt, 1980; Franiuk, Seefelt, and Vandello, 2008; Bonnes, 2013; Worthington, 2013; Waterhouse-Watson, 2016). A commonly used narrative tool is the way that victims are described as either deserving or innocent; presented as virgins attacked by monsters, or promiscuous women who brought the rape upon themselves (Benedict, 1992; Aldridge, 1995; Meyer, 2010; O’Hara, 2012). Perpetrators of sexual violence are regularly described as “beasts” or “perverts” and as such distanced from “ordinary men” (Mason and Monckton-Smith, 2008; Boshoff and Prinsloo, 2015). However, this chapter has highlighted and elaborated on the paradox that I have touched upon in previous work, namely that even though the news media report rape cases extensively and increasingly, rape itself is hardly considered in the news. Rather, I have shown that most rape genres, above all, serve as placeholders to accumulate news media space for discussion and management of other, seemingly more urgent issues, such as migration, national identity, city planning or celebrity (Nilsson, 2019a, 2019b, 2020) and, as in this chapter, the liquid fears of viruses and the Internet. More generally, and historically, rape serves as a metaphor for the devastation of honour and human dignity, as well as of natural resources and national territories (Nilsson and Lövkrona, 2020). Rape, as a concept, is obviously a cultural, multifunctional tool more than anything else; a Swiss Army knife used to manage all kinds of societal problems (except, perhaps, patriarchy). In fact, rape is reminiscent of a root metaphor, in Sherry Ortner’s classic sense (1973); by establishing a certain view of the world, it implicitly suggests certain valid and effective ways of acting upon it. That such a strong root metaphor becomes sticky and therefore widely useful is not surprising. My main point, however, is that attaching various dangers and fears to the rapist displaces other societal problems, such as the act of rape itself, who rapes whom, how and why. What consequences does this have for society’s perception and management of rape? We know for a fact that, even in relatively gender-equal countries, rape is not becoming rarer, but more common. As Linda Martín Alcoff (2018) has argued, the political effects of the increased visibility of sexual violence have been highly variable. In addition, we know that rape does not usually take place as described in the news media (Nilsson and Lövkrona, 2020). I would suggest that the seemingly great interest in rape, measured in the number of sensationalised media reports and published articles, implicitly hides a failure to address rape’s gender and violence aspect and specifically women’s exposure to rape by men. In this chapter, I have compared news narratives to folklore to highlight how this “hiding” occurs in news coverage of rape. Folklore, by definition, consists of paraphrases. The fear of Näcken, as Stattin shows, does not emphasise the danger of Näcken himself, but that of nature. This is the problem with news reports taking shape as a folklore of fear. Fear of the HIV men and the Alexandra man emphasises the danger of infection and false identities at the expense of rape. 142

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Notes 1 2

All quotations from print media have been translated from Swedish by the author. The chapter is based on Swedish news media material collected within the study Rape in Sweden 1990–2015, carried out between 2015 and 2020 and financed by the Swedish Research Council. Initially, all news articles about rape published in the tabloid Expressen during the period 1990–2015 were retrieved. Based on these articles, specific cases were selected for further analysis with various objectives, after which articles about these cases were collected from all major Swedish newspapers.

References Ahmed, S. (2004) The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Alcoff, L. M. (2018) Rape and resistance. Cambridge: Polity Press. Aldridge, M. (1995) ‘Contemplating the monster: UK national press treatment of the Frank Beck Affair’, The Sociological Review 1995. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell publishers. Andersson, J. (2006) ‘Alexandramannen dömd - fick 11 års fängelse för sexbrott’, Expressen, 15 July. Andersson, U., Edgren, M., Karlsson, L., & Nilsson, G. (eds.) (2019). Rape narratives in motion. Palgrave Macmillan. Barkman, T. (2006) ‘Polisen glömde bort Alexandra-utredning’, Sydsvenskan, 11 February. Bauman, Z. (2006) Liquid fear. Cambridge: Polity Press. Benedict, H. (1992) Virgin or vamp: How the press covers sex crimes. New York: Oxford University Press. Bird, S. E. (2003). The audience in everyday life: Living in a media world. Routledge. Bonnes, S. (2013) ‘Gender and racial stereotyping in rape coverage. An analysis of rape coverage in a South African newspaper, Grocott’s Mail’, Feminist Media Studies, 12 (2), pp. 208–227. Boshoff, P. and Prinsloo, J. (2015) ‘Expurgating the monstrous: An analysis of the South African Daily Sun’s coverage of gang rape’, Feminist Media Studies, 15 (2), pp. 208–222. Brännström, L. (1992) ‘Våldtäktsman åtalas - smittade kvinna med hiv’, Expressen, 3 January. Burt, R. M. (1980). ’Cultural Myths and supports for rape. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38 (2), pp. 217–230. Cantwell, O. (1998a) ‘Här raggade hiv-mannen’, Aftonbladet, 20 October. Cantwell, O. (1998b) ‘Han gömde sig på hotell’, Aftonbladet, 21 October. Cohen, S. (2002) Folk devils and moral panics. New York: Routledge. Darin, J. (2007) ‘Polisen: Vi kan inte övervaka nättrafiken’, Expressen, 8 June. Expressen (1992) ‘Efter hiv-rättegången: Inget koppeltvång’. 11 January. El Rafie, Y. (2006) ‘Alexandramannen fick 11 år’, Svenska Dagbladet, 15 July. Fine, G. A. (1987) ‘Welcome to the world of AIDS: Fantasies of female revenge’, Western Folklore, 46 (3), pp. 192–197. Franiuk, R., Seefelt, J. L. and Vandello, J. A. (2008) ‘Prevalence of rape myth in headlines and their effects on attitudes toward rape’, Sex Roles, 58, pp. 790–801. Frykman, J. (1988). Dansbaneeländet: ungdomen, populärkulturen och opinionen. Stockholm: Natur och Kultur. Hansson, O. (2006) ‘Elva nya offer för”Alexandra”’, Kvällsposten, 17 February. Harne, A. (1998) ‘Jag sa inte att jag var hiv-smittad’, Aftonbladet, 22 October. Hellberg, M. (2007) ‘Han lockade sina sexoffer med likör’, Expressen, 20 October. Helsingborgs Dagblad (1998) ‘Hiv-paniken sprider sig’, 21 October. Hougner, C. (1998) ‘132 personer hade sex med hivmannen’, Aftonbladet, 2 December. Härdmark, E. (2006) ‘Nätpedofil kan få tolv års fängelse’, Svenska Dagbladet, 1 June. Larsson, A. H. (1998) ‘Ingen smittades av hiv-mannen’, Expressen, 24 November. Letmark, P. (2007) ‘Barn lägger ut sexbilder’, Dagens Nyheter, 24 February. Ljung, A. (2001) Bortom oskuldens tid. En etnologisk studie av moral, trygghet och otrygghet i skuggan av hiv. Uppsala: Etnolore 23. Mason, P., Monckton-Smith, J. (2008) Conflation, collocation and confusion: British press coverage of the sexual murder of women. Journalism, 9 (6), pp. 691–710.

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Gabriella Nilsson Metro (2007) ‘Hämndbegär kan ha drivit hiv-man’. 4 October. Meyer, A. (2010) ‘“Too drunk to say no”. Binge drinking, rape and the Daily Mail’, Feminist Media Studies, 10 (1), pp. 19–34. Nauman, C. (1992) ‘Våldtagen smittad av hiv’, Dagens Nyheter, 11 January. New York Times (2005) ‘Online community takes Sweden by storm’. 28 November. Nilsson, G. (2019a) ‘Rape in the news: On rape genres in Swedish news coverage’, Feminist Media Studies, 19, pp. 1178–1194. Nilsson, G. (2019b) ‘Narrating the moral geography of rape in Swedish newspapers’, in Andersson, U., Edgren, M., Karlsson, L. and Nilsson, G. (eds.) Rape narratives in motion. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 119–146. Nilsson, G. (2020) ‘Towards voluntariness in Swedish rape law: Hyper-medialised group rape cases and the shift in the legal discourse’, in Bruvik Heinskou, M., Skilbrei, M.-L. and Stefansen, K. (eds.) Rape in the Nordic countries: Continuity and change. Abingdon and New York. pp. 101–119. Nilsson, G. and Lövkrona, I. (2020) Våldets kön. Kulturella föreställningar, funktioner och konsekvenser. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Nord, M. (2007) ‘Unga tjejers prostitution kan börja hemma i flickrummet’, Aftonbladet, 20 May. O’Hara, S. (2012) ‘Monsters, playboys, virgins and whores. Rape myths in the news media’s coverage of sexual violence’, Language and Literature, 21 (3), pp. 247–259. Olsson, T. (2008) ‘Hiv-man fick 14 års fängelse’, Svenska Dagbladet, 2 February. Ortner, S. (1973) ‘On key symbols’, American Anthropologist, 75 (5), pp. 1338–1346. Palmkvist, P. (2006) ‘“Alexandramannen” förhörd i rätten’, Göteborgs-Posten, 17 January. Palmkvist, J. (2006) ‘Barn raggar ofta barn på nätet’, Sydsvenskan, 8 May. Rayman, S. (2009) ‘Det är svårt att omfördela ett moraliskt ansvar’, Svenska dagbladet, 18 January. Rebas, K. (2007) ‘Internetpanik’, Dagens Nyheter, 13 June. Rogland, U. and Christianson, S-Å. (2016) Vad är grooming? Malmö: Arx förlag AB. Simkin, S. (2013) ‘“Actually evil. Not high school evil”: Amanda Knox, sex and celebrity crime’, Celebrity Studies, 4 (1), pp. 33–45. Stattin, J. (1984) Näcken. Spelman eller gräsvakt? Malmö: Liber. Stattin, J. (1990) Från gastkramning till gatuvåld. En etnologisk studie av svenska rädslor. Stockholm: Carlssons. Sundsvalls tidning (2006) ‘Unga lever farligt på nätet’, 23 November. Svärdkrona, Z. (2006) ‘Härligt – men också farligt’, Aftonbladet, 19 November. Sydsvenskan (2007) ‘Hiv-panik löser inga problem’, 17 June. Thorsén, D. (2013) Den svenska aidsepidemin. Ankomst, bemötande, innebörd. Uppsala: Uppsala Studies in History of Ideas. TT, Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå (1998a) ‘Hundratals kvinnor i skräck för hiv-mannen’, 20 October. TT, Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå (1998b) ‘Nätet dras åt kring hiv-mannen’, 26 October. Wahldén, Ch. (2007) ‘Unga varnas för nätdejter’, Svenska Dagbladet, 9 June. Wallin, U. (1998) ‘På flykt med 30 000 kr - men ingen medicin’, Aftonbladet, 23 October. Waterhouse-Watson, D. (2016) ‘News media on trial: Towards a feminist ethics of reporting footballer sexual assault trials’, Feminist Media Studies, 16 (6), pp. 952–967. Worthington, N. (2013) ‘Explaining gang rape in a “rough town”: Diverse voices in gender violence news online’, Communication, Culture & Critique, 6 (1), pp. 103–120.

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13 FORWARD AND BACKWARDS Sexual violence in Portuguese news media Júlia Garraio, Inês Amaral, Rita Basílio Simões, and Sofia José Santos

Introduction In the last two decades, Portugal witnessed deep social-cultural transformations regarding gender norms and is currently on par with the EU in terms of legislation concerning the compliance towards international regimes of gender equality and the protection of women’s rights (Poiares, 2016; Wall et al., 2016). Media visibility of gender-based violence and public awareness of the seriousness of sexual violence have also been increasing (Simões, 2016; Cerqueira and Gomes, 2017). Nonetheless, sexual violence is still pervasive in the country and the journalistic practices that cover it are marked by diversity, tensions, contradictions, improvements and setbacks. While providing an overview of trends and patterns of sexual violence news coverage in Portugal, we will focus our attention on four of the most mediatic rape stories in the first two decades of the 21st century: the Casa Pia ring of sexual exploitation of minors, the Telheiras rapist, the Gaia verdict and the rape allegation against the national football icon Cristiano Ronaldo. Stemming from a critical, intersectional and feminist perspective, we will analyse how these stories were covered by mainstream media and map the diversity of journalism practices that were mobilised aiming to explore how rape stories are framed and mediated in Portuguese media. We will examine whether and how hierarchies of privilege and discrimination regarding class, gender, race and nationality inform Portuguese media coverage of sexual violence and explore its implications concerning the (re)production of patriarchal imaginaries in today’s neo-liberal age.1

Sexual violence in Portugal: Law, media training and media coverage Portuguese authorities have committed to tackling violence against women in tandem with efforts to promote equality between women and men, especially following the country’s ratification of the Istanbul Convention in 2013 (GREVIO, 2019). The Portuguese legislative framework to address sexual violence from the approach of the Istanbul Convention has been built and improved, but essential gaps remain. A critical area is the definition of the crime of rape, punished with a penalty of one to six years (article 164 from the Portuguese Penal Code). Despite the successive amendments (1995, 1998, 2007, 2015 and 2019) that this

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-16

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crime has undergone, before and after the entry into force of the Convention, the definition of rape continues to be based on the absence of freely given consent and requires the use of “constraint”. Likewise, only some limited forms of sexual harassment are addressed by the criminal legislation. In 2015, some types of verbal sexual abuse were included in Article 170 of the Penal Code (on “Importunação Sexual”), but, as Simões and Silveirinha (2022, p. 623) contend, “there is still no specific street-harassment legislation that would create more targeted provisions to address and acknowledge the abuse that women and girls disproportionately face in public spaces”. The responses by law-enforcement institutions and the criminal justice sector are another area of concern. For scholars, “inertia and resistance are still felt at the level of social norms and organisational cultures of those applying the law” (Torres et al., 2018, pp. 69–70). Thus, the legal discourse often considers that the victims of sexual violence are co-responsible for the (circumstances leading to the) violence inflicted on them and creates narratives that do not communicate the way victims experience rape (Ventura, 2018). One of the landmarks of the (criticism of the) sexism in the Portuguese judiciary, and society more broadly, dates back to 1989 when the verdict involving the rape of two foreign tourists visiting Portugal prompted strong feminist criticism and gained considerable media visibility. The judge considered that the women were co-responsible for the rape because they must have been aware of the risks of hitchhiking in the “hunt area of the Iberian male” (Ventura, 2015). The case is still remembered as a landmark to check the advances and setbacks in the prosecution of rape and in women’s struggles (Câncio, 2014). Indeed, the prosecution of sexual crimes in Portuguese courts exposes the continued pervasiveness of entrenched rape myths and scripts which obfuscate sexual violence as a social phenomenon embedded in traditional notions of sexuality and gender inequality (Simões, 2016; Ventura, 2014, 2017, 2018). Hence, Simões argues (2016, p. 276) that this is the reason why it is so important to feminist analysis to remove sex from rape. This would allow intervening in a positive way, namely in the legal treatment of female victims. For Simões, as long as a discursivity marked by a phallocentric culture predominates, victims will continue to be seen, at least in part, as coresponsible for their victimisation. Patriarchal conceptions of masculinity, femininity and sexual morality and the enacting of traditional hierarchies of privilege and discrimination regarding class, gender, race and nationality continue to determine who is perceived as a sexual offender and who is credible as a rape victim. As Silveirinha, Simões and Santos (2020, p. 212) argue, “women can face rape’s ‘double jeopardy’. This means the victim is ‘scrutinized for the veracity of her story, in terms of her perceived character, her sexual history, mode of dress or attitudes which may be seen as contextual to rape’”. Using intersectional lenses, on the victim’s side, women whose accusations are validated in court tend to conform to a specific pattern: modesty regarding dress code and social attitudes, no signs of “sexual promiscuity”, the exhibition of marks of inflicted violence proving physical resistance, a social status that is superior to the rapist’s. On the perpetrator’s side, men convicted of sexual crimes tend to be associated with marginality, deviancy and/or social subalternity (unemployed, low-paid jobs, single, without sexual appeal, from minorities, psychotic and/or uneducated) (Ventura, 2014, 2017, 2018). The two patterns converge in the validation of expectations regarding sexuality that pervade Portuguese society: the assumption that a particular type of woman would not engage in sex voluntarily with a particular type of man is central to the credibility of a rape allegation. Therefore, accusations targeting men with considerable social, economic and sexual capital tend to be met with suspicion. 146

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Journalism validates many of these rape myths and scripts. A study based on a sample of news from the period 2007–2014 (Ventura, 2014) observed the following trends in Portuguese newspapers: tendency to mediate rape stories as police cases and individual dramas derived from the sexual aggressor’s dysfunctionality and/or monstrosity; predominance of short texts which do not include inputs from specialists and scientific literature nor a discussion of legal procedures to prosecute rape; absence of information regarding institutions that offer support services for victims. Sexual violence as a social phenomenon related to other forms of violence against women hence remains largely unarticulated. Perceived as single events, sex crimes are mostly relegated to sections devoted to crime in sensationalist media with voyeuristic perspectives. Titles are aimed at catching the reader’s attention through shock and awe: “Obliges her daughter to live with the rapist after the assaults” (Fonseca, 2016), “Predator rapes girlfriend’s disabled granddaughter for seven years” (Curado, 2021). As Benedict (1992) observed elsewhere, sexual aggressors tend to be depicted as deviant masculinities and imbued with traits of monstrosity. Rape stories with particular gruesome details involving physical violence and/or the transgression of (family) morals (incest, paedophilia) are therefore more likely to catch media attention. Sexual violence is rendered visible as a social and/or pathological deviancy, especially among deprived classes, and commodified as a spectacle of horrors, which ultimately recomforts society and its social norms: the rapist is the Other among us, who may have succeeded in hiding his monstrosity for a long period, but who ultimately does not represent “our” models of sexuality and masculinity. Some of the reasons for this phenomenon lie in the fact that journalism is only conventionally perceived as “good journalism” when unbiased with different terms sustaining this claim – neutrality, objectivity, accuracy. As some of us have argued elsewhere, “if today’s societies are based upon generalised (even if at times shifting) patriarchal structures, ‘objective-based’ sexual violence coverage is more prone to choose the side of the perpetrator” (Santos et al., 2022, p. 3). Furthermore, in Portugal, journalism education and the employment conditions of journalists have tended to reproduce these structures, with limited opportunities for critical reflection. Additionally, journalism activity was, for decades, subordinated to a dictatorial regime (Cascais, 2004), delaying all sorts of initiatives of formal education when compared to the rest of Europe. The first higher education programmes in communication were created in the 1970s and 1980s and only in the following decade did we witness the progressive emergence of journalism as an autonomous area of education, with the launch of the first Journalism degree at the University of Coimbra. At the end of the 1990s, the formative offer at the national level in the public and private sectors increased substantially. Nevertheless, approaches to critical issues in contemporary societies such as civic and critical literacy, gender, racism, xenophobia or the different dimensions of violence are practically invisible in the curriculum of undergraduate degrees in journalism. Some non-formal learning programmes have been able to “compensate for the gaps” in integrating gender mainstreaming in undergraduate degrees, such as the Gender Observatory, created under the scope of the Global Media Monitoring Project (Simões, Amaral and Santos, 2021). Still, in general, the integration of gender issues in programmes results solely from the research interests of particular lecturers. Basically, the above-mentioned quest for objectivity (Santos et al., 2022) has deprived journalism training of critical perspectives of inclusion, diversity and nondiscrimination (Cerqueira et al., 2014), as well as the promotion of critical and civic literacies that articulate journalism and democracy in its broad aspects, namely a “diversified 147

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reflection on civic contexts” that impact on societies (Brites, Amaral and Silva, 2019, p. 11). Our analysis of the media coverage of four rape stories signals precisely some effects of the absence of the promotion of civic literacies in dominant journalist training and practices. The reproduction of rape scripts and myths in Portuguese media is not unchallenged though. There are many examples of media practices that frame rape as a social problem related to broader cultural practices, gender inequality and patriarchal thinking. Fernanda Câncio (born 1964) (Diário de Notícias), Paula Cosme Pinto (born 1984) (Expresso) and Aline Flor (born 1990) (Público), to name just a few, are respected well-known journalists who work for the most important national newspapers contributing with their investigative journalism and their columns to the informed discussion of gender-based violence and the deconstruction of rape myths. Their prominence in Portuguese media results from the evolution of democratic Portugal, namely the increasing participation of women in the labour market, the fact that female students outnumber male students in journalism courses (Miranda and Camponez, 2021), a situation which changed the gender (in)balance in newsrooms and paved the way for women with feminist sensibilities to reach positions where their voices could be heard. The process was met with some resistance. For instance, Cosme Pinto reports that her initial work on sexualities and gender-based violence was perceived by some colleagues as a “bit slutty”. She notes though that the mood in newsrooms has changed in the last decade and now there is more openness to address gender-based violence through feminist lenses. However, the kind of verbal abuse and body shaming that she faces in the section for readers persists.2 The analysis of four of the most mediatic cases of rape (allegations) of the first two decades of twenty-first century Portugal exposes precisely these tensions. The Casa Pia investigation and the Telheiras’s rapist reveal the strength of the monstrosity/deviancy script even when the (alleged) aggressors do not conform to the dominant imaginary of rapist. The comparative examination of two highly mediatised 2018 cases, the Gaia verdict and the rape allegation against Cristiano Ronaldo, signal the instability of rape in Portuguese media coverage, i.e., how the reproduction of rape myths co-exists with journalism’s practices that challenge these assumptions.

The Casa Pia case Sexual violence gained great attention in Portuguese media when, in 2002, allegations of a ring of sexual abuse and trafficking of minors run by employees of Casa Pia, a state-run institution for orphans and poor children, led to an investigation and a highly mediatic trial that lasted more than five years and culminated in the conviction in 2010 of, among others, a media celebrity and a former ambassador. A former minister was detained in the course of the investigation, but the charges against him were dropped. Since the case involved powerful and famous men, the media had to deconstruct the perception of the paedophile as a monster who could be identified on the streets while depicting the suspected paedophiles as sneaky monsters (Ventura, 2014). However, precisely because the media focussed the most mediatic personalities involved in the investigation, public opinion remained deeply polarised and absorbed by the political meaning of the trial: on the one hand, those who downplayed the allegations as a trap or as being instrumentalised to attack powerful politicians and, on the other, those who assumed that the case was the tip of an iceberg exposing the impunity of national (political) elites. 148

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The Telheiras case The coverage of the Telheiras rapist exemplifies the difficulty in imagining sexual offenders beyond the above-mentioned profile identified by Ventura (2014, 2017, 2018). This serial rapist admitted having committed around 40 rapes at knife-point in the Great Lisbon area in 2008–2009; most victims were underage girls. Though the media had reported on the crimes before his arrest on 5 March 2010, the peak of the coverage occurred afterwards and in association with the bewilderment triggered by the disclosure of his identity. He was a 30-year-old data analyst who was studying the chemical industry and who was living in a recently purchased flat with his long-term girlfriend, whom he was planning to marry. “Henrique Sotero: ID, life, interests, crimes, evidence, investigation and punishment”, a piece published in the mainstream newspaper Diário de Notícias (2010), juxtaposes a detailed portrait of him as a respectable and well-integrated “normal man” (job, good grades, hobbies, healthy habits, long term relationship, etc.) with the violence of his crimes. The reference to what might have been experienced in his childhood as the traumatic divorce of his parents, alongside the reference to his schizophrenic mother, offers readers a way of making sense of that discursive dissonance through pathologisation. Indeed, the media coverage focused, on the one hand, on the shock experienced by his family and acquaintances and, on the other, on the explanation of his deeds through psychology. The fact that he himself had sought a psychologist in 2009 to try to control his sexual urges reinforced this narrative. By not inquiring about the (long-term) effects on his victims, the reasons why many of them did not even file a police report, nor critically discussing the widespread bewilderment caused by the revelation of his identity, the media did not challenge the rape myths which exclude successful and integrated men like him from the imaginary of the rapist. The Telheiras rapist gave considerable media visibility to sexual violence; however, since the media framed the story as a tragedy falling upon his inner circle and himself as a victim of his pathology, sexual violence as a social phenomenon entangled in constructions of masculinity and sexuality remained largely unarticulated.

The Gaia case On 20 September 2018, the centre-left daily newspaper Público reported that a barkeeper and a bouncer in a disco in Vila Nova de Gaia, a city near Oporto, were sentenced for sexual abuse, instead of rape, for having had “sex” with a woman in an alcoholic coma. The title “They raped her when she was unconscious, but the court understood that wrongdoing is not ‘high’” (Viana, 2018) signals that the piece challenges the verdict, which referred as mitigating factors the fact that the woman did not suffer serious physical injuries, there had been a climate of seduction before the crime and the aggressors were well integrated with society. The verdict seemed to echo the broad understandings of much of the national culture of gender relations. At the same time, it was met with widespread anger and criticism of the judiciary. The media coverage, especially if we consider quality media outlets such as Público, reveals that there were efforts to discuss the implications of the verdict and raise awareness of the problem of sexual violence. The case was used to scrutinise prevailing legal practices and a significant part of the coverage focused on feminist protests, reproducing activists’ criticism and understandings of rape (Santos et al., 2022). Our interviews conducted in 2020 with 31 journalists3 suggest that media professionals have an extremely negative perception of the main judge involved in the case, associating him with outdated

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morals. The wording to describe him included “mediaeval”, “cavernous”, “outdated”, “out of step with reality”, “ignorant”, “sexist” and “what we have to change”.

The Mayorga/Ronaldo case Nine days after the first news about the Gaia verdict, the German magazine Spiegel published an investigative report based on documents disclosed by football leaks and on an interview with Kathryn Mayorga, an American woman who accused Cristiano Ronaldo of having raped her in 2009. Portuguese coverage and discussion of the allegation were accompanied by a strong wave of support for the national icon in social media and among personalities from the most diverse areas and political spectrum. The President, government members, politicians, celebrities and sports personalities were asked to comment on the case. Many avoided discussing the rape allegation, and preferred to stress Ronaldo’s talent, accomplishments and status as a national hero, while others openly expressed their support for the footballer. A study based on a sample of 140 news stories and opinion columns from mainstream newspapers concluded that, given the high-profile of the case and “its capacity to generate considerable awareness”, the Portuguese media coverage “seems to have lost a good opportunity to highlight rape allegations as a serious matter”. On the contrary, media coverage “mostly stressed the improbability of the allegations” (Silveirinha, Simões and Santos, 2020). Support for Ronaldo resulted in the (re)enactment of rape myths such as “a man like him does not need to rape” and “a woman who follows a man to his place wants sex”; and of what has been coined as narrative immunity, i.e., the construction of narratives “that shift blame away from footballers and onto the women involved, frequently ascribing sole agency for anything that occurred to the women” (Waterhouse-Watson, 2013, p. 4). As we argued before (Garraio et al., 2020), it operated through three intertwined strategies: the construction of Ronaldo as a positive model of masculinity (the hero of a “rags to riches” story; the good son, the good father, the sexy athlete and the generous charity spender); the depiction of #MeToo, the context framing Mayorga’s interview, as a platform for opportunists, false allegations and American puritanism; and the discrediting of Mayorga as an unreliable woman. Support for Mayorga was rare, but several feminists, though refraining from commenting on the rape allegation, denounced the activation, dissemination and normalisation of rape myths through the discussion of the case. Ana Sá Lopes, for instance, entitled her Público editorial “Saint Ronaldo and the prostitutes” (Lopes, 2018) to denounce the sexism pervading the debate. With her piece “Only 3%, 4% of the reported situations are simulations” (Flor, 2018), journalist Aline Flor tried to rebuke the myth of the “false allegations” which pervaded the debate about Ronaldo/Mayorga, i.e., the assumption that a significant part of police investigations for rape are triggered by forged claims. In sum, while the coverage of the Gaia verdict denoted openness towards feminist understandings of sexual violence, refrained from activating rape myths and tended to frame the global #MeToo as a moment of a deeper awareness of violence against women, the inverse situation can be observed with Ronaldo/Mayorga’s case. This comparative analysis suggests that rape myths function as a repository which can be activated on specific occasions, in accordance with the symbolic power of the (alleged) aggressors, because the understanding of rape remains unstable. Both cases occurred in a broader context of the negotiation of gender and sexual norms in Portugal, a country that continues to be framed by sexism and pervasive patriarchal structures and practices, but where legislation for gender equality and justice has 150

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been consistently implemented for the last decades and where international media’s feminist mainstreaming is now disseminated. The tensions resulting from these aspects make sexual violence a contested space for the negotiation of meanings concerning what is “real rape”, with the concomitant contestation or activation of ingrained rape myths. The comparative analysis of the divergent reactions to the Gaia verdict and the allegation against Ronaldo emblematically expose these tensions. In this unstable context, what makes a situation perceived as sexual violence and a man as a rapist has to do not only with the credibility of the evidence but also with the (credibility of the) identities at stake. The Gaia verdict echoes the dominant rape script identified by Ventura: though both men were apparently working class, the fact that they knew the victim and had jobs worked decisively in their favour. The vitality of the protests and the media visibility granted to feminist voices signals, however, that this script was being contested in some sectors of society at least as long as it did not involve men in positions of power and/or with strong symbolic capital. That was precisely the case with Ronaldo. Whannel observed that it “is in relation to the nation that sport-related morality is most conspicuously determined by positionality”, i.e., by our national identity (2002, p. 163). Pedro Almeida Sande’s op-ed in the conservative newspaper Observador echoed the mood among large sectors of Portuguese society: “Cristiano Ronaldo is one of Portugal’s modern heroes, perhaps his greatest name, and that’s why the Portuguese, more than any other people, should make a profession of faith in his innocence” (Sande, 2018). In a country pervaded by imaginaries of past colonial grandeur (Cardina, 2016), which contrast with the country’s reality as a poor peripheric EU member, Ronaldo embodies nationalist aspirations as well as dreams of social mobility and (sexual) consumerism. In an extremely unequal Portuguese society, he embodies aspirations of enrichment through professional success and a world of glamour (cars, yachts, villas and beautiful women) which are practically unattainable for the people who share his origins, the working classes, as well as the middle classes. His popularity emblematically mobilises the intersection of banal nationalism (Billig, 1995) with vortextuality (how celebrities represent our fantasies of lifestyle, luxury, conspicuous consumption and display) (Whannel, 2002). In sum, his status as a national icon, world celebrity and sex symbol, is incompatible with the dominant imaginary of the rapist, making the rape allegation inconceivable for wider sectors of Portuguese society. Our 2020 interviews with journalists highlight precisely Ronaldo’s enduring good reputation. The majority praised Ronaldo: “an example”, “intelligent”, “perfectionist”, “talent”, “genius”, “national hero”, “super-hero”, “champion”, “dedication”, “tenacity”, “work”. Criticism was rare and subtle: “super-manly” (while laughing) and “too much self-esteem”. Only one woman journalist known for her work in gender equality alluded to the rape allegation by describing him as “the one who got away with that situation”.

Final remarks A broader analysis of sexual violence news coverage in Portugal exposes a heterogenous picture marked by the co-existence of divergent and contradictory practices: On the one hand, sensationalism, voyeurism, reproduction of ingrained rape myths and lack of commitment to social change; on the other, efforts to mediate rape through feminist lenses as a social problem related to gender inequality and broader forms of violence against women. Deficient and/or absent training of the majority of media professionals in reporting on gender-based violence, contingencies concerning the political economy of the media (labour 151

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precarity, immediacy in the production of news, commercial impositions), lack of gendersensitive public regulation and editorial policies, the sensationalism and voyeurism of the popular press and the pervasiveness of sexism in Portuguese society underpin the perpetuation of deficient practices of producing news about sexual violence. However, the increasing participation of women journalists in newsrooms, greater opposition to gender inequality and gender-based violence in Portuguese society and feminist mainstreaming have been contributing to the adoption and dissemination of practices aimed at combating sexual violence as a social problem. This is the outcome of social contingencies (women with feminist sensibilities have been getting access to newsrooms) and often of the “good will” of editors, who are aware that social norms and perceptions of gender-based violence are changing in Portugal and therefore accept/welcome innovation in the coverage of sexual violence. Scholars and journalists have already produced material in Portuguese that can be used in the training of professionals (Ventura, 2014; Ventura and Ferreira, 2017). What is missing though is the systematic introduction of gender mainstreaming in journalism practices and the thorough adoption of international norms and recommendations by newsrooms.

Notes 1

2 3

This chapter is informed by our research at the project “DeCodeM (De)Coding Masculinities: Towards an enhanced understanding of media’s role in shaping perceptions of masculinities in Portugal”, Grant PTDC/COM-CSS/31740/2017, Foundation for Science and Technology (Portugal). This project included a thematic area which explored how pervasive conceptions and ideals of masculinities in the Portuguese mediascape contributed to include, refrain or exclude the debates on masculinities, sexual violence and sexual harassment generated around #MeToo. We also draw on the 31 interviews with journalists that Júlia Garraio conducted in 2020 in the course of the project. The selection of the interviewees was gender-balanced and aimed at including professionals covering areas such as politics, economics, society, culture and sports. Interviewees were mostly from Portuguese mainstream newspapers and TV channels. There were also freelancers and journalists working for investigative information sites. Interview conducted by Júlia Garraio for the project DeCodeM on 16 June 2020. Our interviews with journalists included a section with a list of Portuguese public figures. Interviewees, with the guarantee of confidentiality, were asked to say a word or sentence expressing their perceptions of each personality.

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14 REPRESENTATIONS OF GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE AGAINST CHILDREN IN NIGERIA Onyinyechi Nancy Nwaolikpe Introduction Gender-based violence (GBV) against children occurs everywhere, including in and around schools, in homes, communities, religious groups and gatherings, neighbourhoods and on social media platforms (UNESCO, 2020). This affects millions of children in different countries around the world and can include verbal abuse, bullying, sexual abuse, harassment, coercion, assault and rape which are “perpetrated as a result of gender norms and stereotypes and enforced by unequal power dynamics” (UNESCO, 2016, p. 13). Harmful social and gender norms, household poverty and weak infrastructure are part of what drives gender-based violence against children (Alexander-Scott, Bell and Holden, 2016). Although national actions address violence against children and adolescents, they often give inadequate attention to gender-based violence against children and adolescents (and against girls in particular) (UNICEF, 2020). According to studies by UNICEF (2015, 2022), Nigeria is considered to have the largest number of child brides in Africa and one of the highest prevalence rates in the world, with more than 23 million girls married off as children. UN Women (2016) showed that 43.5% of girls in Nigeria are married by the age of 15. Similarly, Nigeria has the third highest absolute number of women and girls (19.9 million) who have undergone Female Genital Mutilation/ Cutting (FGM/C). The same studies also found that six out of every ten children in Nigeria experience some form of violence. One in four girls and 10% of boys have been victims of sexual violence (and this figure does not include child marriage or FGM/C) and of the children who reported violence, fewer than five out of 100 received any form of support. Furthermore, of children that experienced physical violence in childhood, over half had their first experience between the ages of six and 11. Approximately, one in ten children first experience genderbased violence under the age of five (UNICEF, 2015). Intrastate and interstate conflicts in Nigeria have increased gender-based violence against children. Children are abducted, kidnapped, raped and forced into marriage, especially in the North-East (UNODC, 2022). Whilst, in Nigeria as elsewhere, gender-based violence against children is disproportionately – and sometimes exclusively – aimed at girls (e.g. dowry-related violence,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-17

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child marriage, female genital mutilation), there are some forms of violence that disproportionately impact boy children worldwide, most notably child soldiering. Genderbased violence against children has negative short-term and long-term consequences, including some forms of harm that are specific to children, such as reduced school academic performance and impaired brain development (UNICEF, 2017). Understanding these forms of violence against children as gender-based requires an analysis that considers gender violence as part and parcel of gendered inequalities more generally. Social and cultural expectations and norms define the different and unequal roles men and women play in Nigeria. Studies of gender-based violence against girls in Nigeria both echo what is known about the abuse of adult women and highlight specificities in girl children’s experiences. For example, Esere, Idowu and Omotosho’s (2009) study on genderbased domestic violence against children in Nigeria found that the majority of girl children experienced more physical and psychological violence than sexual abuse in their homes. In addition to detailing the kinds of violence experienced, the study found that the reasons given for abusing girl children highlighted their gendered and generational subordination: girl children are beaten and humiliated for refusing to allow their genitals to be cut or mutilated and physically abused when they report that the man of the house raped them or wanted to rape them. Nnadi’s (2014) work on child marriage – practised especially in the Northern region of Nigeria – details some of the physical harms of this violation, including early pregnancies which lead to vesicovaginal fistula sickness. This traditional practice violates the girl-child and it is also a violation of child rights and human rights. Existing research has also pointed to widespread acceptance of some forms of genderbased violence, including on the part of victims, because it is seen to reinforce family structures (Odimegwu, Okemgbo and Ayila, 2010). Similarly, mothers of raped girls are blamed for not training their girl children to be morally sound and strongly resist sexual advances. Instead, the raped girls are blamed for behaving immorally and causing the abuse (Odimegwu, Okemgbo and Ayila, 2010). In 2015, Nigeria enacted the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act to eliminate violence in private and public life, prohibit all forms of violence against persons and provide maximum protection and effective remedies for victims and punishments of offenders. Relatedly, the Trafficking in Persons (Prohibition Enforcement and Administration) Act, enacted into law in 2003 and amended in 2005 and 2015, was designed to provide an effective and comprehensive legal and institutional framework for the prohibition, prevention, detection, prosecution and punishment of human trafficking and related offences in Nigeria, to protect victims of human trafficking and to promote and facilitate national and international cooperation. These Acts were enacted to stop violence against children, especially sexual exploitation, domestic and physical violence, and the use of rape and forced marriage in the context of armed conflict. Despite these legislative changes, genderbased violence against children continues to be pervasive, demonstrating the importance of tackling the issue on multiple fronts. As observed by Heise (1998), male dominance is the foundation for any realistic theory of violence anywhere in the world. This is by no means unique to Nigeria, though it is also important to understand the specificities of the Nigerian context in order to effect change. This chapter contributes to this effort by exploring the role of the national media in supporting – or challenging – norms relating to gendered inequalities and gender-based violence against children. It presents a content analysis of stories about gender-based violence against girls in two of Nigeria’s leading newspapers –The Punch and The Guardian – throughout 2021. It 156

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seeks to determine the volume of news stories on gender-based violence against children published by the selected newspapers; ascertain the prominence given to these stories; and explore if and how these news stories engage with gender stereotypes and victim-blaming through the content and language usage.

Methodology In Nigeria, there are over a hundred local and national newspapers and publications. Some of the daily Nigerian newspapers, about 20 of them, have national coverage, circulation and readership (Okwori and Adeyanju, 2006) including The Punch and The Guardian which are the focus of this study. These two papers are privately owned, both have been in existence for more than 20 years and have professional staff who report and provide in-depth analysis of national issues ranging from education, health, politics, arts and sports (Okidu, 2013). There is no accurate and reliable statistical data on newspaper circulation in Nigeria and it is recognised that more people now read the leading titles online than in print (Patrick, 2015). However, The Guardian and The Punch are recognised to be among the country’s most widely-circulated titles, with The Guardian circulating 217,000 copies a day (Olaniyan, 2019) and The Punch over 80,000 copies daily (Ahmed and Jimoh, n.d). This study examined representations of gender-based violence against children in The Guardian and The Punch from January to December 2021. The twelve months were stratified into four subgroups of three months each. One month was selected from each of the groups using a simple random sampling technique: the selected months were January, May, July and November, giving 123 editions of each paper for analysis. All articles focusing on gender-based violence against children were then selected: this included articles on rape, sexual, physical and psychological violence, trafficking, child soldiering, child maltreatment and physical/cyberbullying; however, articles on female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) and the Boko Haram abductions and kidnappings were excluded. Although (as noted above), FGM/C and gender-based violence in the context of armed conflict (specifically in relation to Boko Haram’s abductions of girls) are significant aspects of gender-based violence in Nigeria, I have excluded reports on these issues from my sample as these are not typically reported as forms of interpersonal violence, but rather as violence perpetuated by communities and/or organised groups. For each of the stories in the sample, I coded key information about the placement of the story (size, prominence) before moving on to code the kind of GBV reported on and the gender of the victim/survivor. I then considered evidence of gender-stereotyping (for example, victim-blaming language usage portraying girls as those that triggered the abuse done to them, gender-based violence content showing gender discriminatory stories and contents displaying female subordination); whether the story took a survivor-centred approach (focusing on victim/survivors); whether there was a call-to-action issued (e.g. for readers to challenge gender-based violence against children); and whether the article included information about local support services.

Discussion of findings The first thing to note about the sample is the relative lack of attention devoted to genderbased violence against children in these papers. A total of 75 stories on GBV against children were analysed: 40 in Punch and 35 in The Guardian. These stories were typically 157

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relatively short: 56% (n = 42) took up a quarter of a page or less, though 16% (n=12) were full-page stories and 28% (n = 21) were half-page. The majority of the stories were reported on inside pages (52%, n = 38), though gender-based violence against children did make the front (25.3%, n = 19) and back (16%, n = 12) pages and there was a small number of centerspreads (6.7%, n = 5). In terms of the kinds of gender-based violence against children reported: sexual harassment/violence/rape was reported most (29.3% of all stories, n = 22), followed by trafficking (16%, n = 12), physical abuse (14.6%, n = 11), physical/cyberbullying (13.3%, n = 10), child marriage (12%, n=9), child maltreatment (9.3%, n = 7) and child soldiering (5.3%, n = 4). The stories given the most prominence were those on bullying (all ten stories about bullying made the front page) and trafficking (nine stories – or three-quarters of the articles on trafficking – made the front page). Stories about human trafficking were also among those reported in the most detail, with three stories taking up a full page.1 Other stories explored in depth over a full-page article included five articles on sexual harassment/violence (reported on the inside pages) and two articles on child maltreatment. A significant number of the articles offered general accounts of gender-based violence – for instance, in relation to the release of statistical information or reports from relevant agencies – or linked a number of different cases together. Given the high rates of genderbased violence in Nigeria discussed above, it is perhaps not surprising that prevalence should be a recurring concern in the reports and that the overwhelming emphasis (in 89.3% of stories) was on men’s violence towards girls. One of the interesting effects of this style of reporting is that the abuse of adult women and girl children are at times linked together, as in a report in The Punch on the “rape pandemic” (George, 2021). Although this article leads with details of a number of individual cases of rape and murder of girls and women between the ages of 13 and 26, it situates these in a wider context, citing the Minister of Women Affairs (who “said that over two million Nigerians were raped every year”), a national survey by the Women at Risk International Foundation (which “showed that 24.8 per cent of females from ages 18 to 24 experienced sexual abuse prior to the age of 18”), and a recent World Population Review which declared Nigeria “the seventh most dangerous country for women to live in” (George, 2021). This is by no means an isolated report. Another example includes a report on recorded rape cases in Enugu in which the manager of the Tamar Sexual Assault Referral Centre describes cases with victims ranging in age from five to 88 (NAN, 2021a). Similarly, an interview with politician Professor Remi Soniaya is headlined “50% of secondary school girls I interacted with last year had been raped – Kowa presidential candidate, Sonaiya”, but the article deals with men’s violence against women more broadly (Edema, 2020). This is in notable contrast to studies of child sexual abuse reporting in other contexts, including the UK (Boyle, 2018a, 2018b; Kelly, 1996), where the “paedophile” is constructed as a distinct and notably non-gendered category. Nevertheless, it is notable that the reports in my sample tend to focus on the abuse – including sexual abuse – of girl children outside of the family. Indeed, where a domestic context is indicated – as, for instance, in a report on the arrest of a male professor on child sexual abuse charges (Oshodi, 2021) – the relationship of the perpetrator to their victim is not a familial one. In this report, the perpetrator’s professional standing is emphasised in the opening paragraph, where we are told his subject (Geophysics) as well as his place of work (Alex Ekwueme Federal University). Only later is it implied that the victim had been living with him: “The practice of child workers in the homes of non-biological parents because that child comes from a needy family must stop as it keeps child sexual predators in 158

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‘business’” (Oshodi, 2021). Interestingly, this report is entitled “Stop Child Abuse” and it is attentive to the social conditions which create vulnerability, as well as being critical of the ineffectiveness of police and courts: “This is not surprising in a society like Nigeria where the police and the courts have not been known for being aggressive and applying protective measures in their moves against criminal sexual offences” (Oshodi, 2021). As suggested by the “Stop Child Abuse” headline, there was a call to action evident in a significant minority (23.3%) of stories. However, the calls to action tended to be framed in very general terms – challenging attitudes, encouraging reporting – rather than offering any concrete solutions or suggested interventions. Although a range of support agencies was mentioned, no direct links to those organisations were provided in any of the reports. Nevertheless, some stories did address survivors in the audience, for instance, by suggesting that people who have been sexually abused speak to therapists to avoid depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (George, 2021). They were also encouraged to seek justice and some suggestions were provided as to which organisations can support this, including the Ministry of Women Affairs, Ministry of Justice and the Police Force (Ayeni, 2021). Such stories are not unproblematic from a feminist perspective particularly because of the emphasis placed on the “innocence” of victims and the way that girls are presented as objects of the stories and not the subjects, with an emphasis on girls as perpetual victims, not survivors. Although there was an emphasis on the experiences of girls and women in a majority of the stories, it would be a stretch to describe these as survivor-centred as they typically focused on moments of victimisation and the effects on victims and their loved ones. Perhaps because of an emphasis on extreme cases, resulting in the death of the victim, as well as because of the enduring stigma associated with sexual assault (which is indeed acknowledged in some of the reports – see George, 2021), survivors are not typically quoted directly. Of course, engaging with child survivors would be ethically problematic, but it is notable that the voices of adult survivors of child abuse are not included. Instead, the testimony of family members is set alongside commentary from social media users and other members of the public. These non-expert voices demonstrate that victim-blaming attitudes remain very much in evidence, with the onus placed on women to stop men’s violence. For instance, the “rape pandemic” article discussed above included a quote from a Twitter user which suggested that the murder of Iniubong Umoren may have been prevented if other women had spoken up: “Other ladies who had experienced and escaped these guys could have saved Ini if they had come out with their stories. She wouldn’t have gone to the same place if she was aware others had spoken against it. Learn to speak up to save others”. (George, 2021) However, victim-blaming attitudes were less evidenced in the words of the journalists. Finally, reports on the abuse of boy children – which focused on child soldiering, sexual abuse and bullying – were less likely to be framed in gendered terms. Here it is worth noting that one of the highest profile cases reported in Nigeria in 2020–2021 involved the sexualised bullying of a boy child – Don Davies – and that this case was more often used to discuss bullying, particularly in relation to schools, rather than focusing on the gendered and sexualised aspects of the case (Odey, 2021). Nevertheless, there were reports which mentioned this case in the context of broader reports. For instance, a story in The Guardian entitled “Taming menace of sexual abuse in schools” (Adebumit, 2021) leads with statistics 159

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about the prevalence of sexual abuse of children in educational settings from reports by UNICEF and Positive Action for Treatment Access. It does mention the Davies case, but this ensures it is seen in a broader context both nationally and locally: for instance, the report also mentions that the centre where Davies was taken for medical examination stated that they had treated ten sexually abused boys in the last three years.

Conclusion The study concludes that gender-based violence against children by the two national newspapers was underreported and not representative of the number of cases of genderbased violence against children as reported by the Police, the Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development and State Sexual Assault Referral Centre. The stories which did make it into these national newspapers were, interestingly, likely to focus on gender-based violence against girls as part of a wider pattern of men’s violence against women of all ages. Many of the reports included statistical information to put references to individual cases into context – highlighting the alarming prevalence of gender-based violence in Nigeria more broadly – and drew upon a range of expert organisations working on gender-based violence with no clear distinction made between services for adult women and girl (and boy) children. At times, there was a tension observed in the articles between reporting on wider attitudes towards men’s violence against women and reinforcing those attitudes, through victim-blaming strategies such as focusing on girls’ clothing and behaviour, but, overall, the stories were sympathetic to victim/survivors even if they did not – typically – centre individual survivors. The articles included some calls to action but missed the opportunity to provide information about locally available support and protective services. The picture which emerges from this study then is a contradictory one where the reporting which does exist is broadly critical of gender-based violence against children and willing to see it as a structural, societal problem. However, at the same time, given the prevalence of genderbased violence against children in Nigeria, the relative lack of attention devoted to these issues is a significant concern and some problematic victim blaming persists.

Note 1

These figures are based on a study of the print copies of the papers. In what follows, where I give specific examples from individual stories I have used the online version of these stories where possible to facilitate access for international readers.

References Adebumiti, A. (2021) ‘Taming menace of sexual abuse in schools’, The Guardian, 11 November. Available at: https://guardian.ng/features/education/taming-menace-of-sexual-abuse-in-schools/ (Accessed: 3 September 2022). Ahmed, G. and Jimoh, I. (n.d) ‘The new media and the survival of newspapers in Nigeria: A study of Daily Trust and Punch newspapers (2000–2014)’. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/ 33752811/The_New_Media_and_the_Survival_of_Newspapers_in_Nigeria_a_study_of_Daily_ Trust_and_Punch_Newspapers_2000_2014 (Accessed: 15 June 2022). Alexander-Scott, M., Bell, E. and Holden, J. (2016) DFID Guidance note: Shifting social norms to tackle violence against women and girls (VAWG). London: VAWG Helpdesk. Available at: https://assets. publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/507845/ Shifting-Social-Norms-tackle-Violence-against-Women-Girls3.pdf (Accessed: 15 October 2021).

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Gender‐based violence against children in Nigeria Ayeni, V. (2021) ‘329 women, men suffered domestic violence, says govt’, The Punch, 5 May. Available at: https://punchng.com/329-women-men-suffered-domestic-violence-says-govt/ (Accessed: 7 November 2022). Boyle, K. (2018a) ‘Hiding in plain sight: Gender, sexism and press coverage of the Jimmy Savile case’, Journalism Studies, 19 (11), pp. 1562–1578. Boyle, K. (2018b) ‘Television and/as testimony in the Jimmy Savile Case’, Critical Studies in Television, 13 (4), pp. 387–404. Edema, G. (2020) ‘50% of secondary school girls I interacted with last year had been raped –Kowa presidential candidate, Sonaiya’, The Punch, 26 June. Available at: https://punchng.com/50-ofsecondary-school-girls-i-interacted-with-last-year-had-been-raped-kowa-presidential-candidatesonaiya/ (Accessed: 23 June 2022). Esere, M. O., Idowu, A. I. and Omotosho, J. A. (2009) ‘Gender-based domestic violence against children: Experiences of girl-children in Nigeria’, Journal of Psychology in Africa, 19(1), pp. 107–111. George, G. (2021) ‘Rape pandemic: Wheel of justice turns slowly as cases rise’, The Punch, 14 May. Available at: https://punchng.com/rape-pandemicwheel-of-justice-turns-slowly-as-cases-rise/ (Accessed: 21 September 2022). Heise, L. L. (1998) ‘Violence against women: An integrated, ecological framework’, Violence Against Women, 4(3), pp. 262–290. Kelly, L. (1996) ‘Weasel words: Paedophiles and the cycle of abuse’, Trouble and Strife, 33. Available at: http://www.troubleandstrife.org/articles/issue-33/weasel-words-paedophiles-and-the-cycleof-abuse/ (Accessed: 4 October 2022). NAN (2021a) ‘Enugu records 25 rape cases in 3 months’, The Guardian, 15 May. Available at: https:// guardian.ng/news/enugu-records-25-rape-cases-in-3-months/ (Accessed: 21 September 2022). Nnadi, I. (2014) ‘Early marriage: Gender-based violence and violation of women’s human rights in Nigeria’, Journal of Politics and Law, 7(3), pp. 35–40. Odey, P. (2021) ‘Alleged sexual molestation: Victim’s parents write Deeper Life school, demand N100m compensation’, The Punch, 2 January. Available at: https://punchng.com/alleged-sexualmolestation-victims-parents-write-deeper-life-school-demand-n100m-compensation/ (Accessed: 23 June 2022). Odimegwu, C., Okemgbo, C. N. and Ayila, R. (2010) ‘Dynamics of gender-based violence among the Tivs of North Central Nigeria’, African Population Studies, 24(3), pp. 238–258. Okidu, O. (2013) ‘A comparative study of two communication models in HIV/AIDS coverage in selected Nigerian newspapers’, Global Health Action, 6 (30 January), 10.3402/gha.v610.18993. Okwori, J. Z. and Adeyanju,, A. M. (2006) ‘African media Development initiative: Nigeria research findings and conclusions’. Available at: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/trust/pdf/ AMDI/nigeria/amdi_nigeria_full_report.pdf (Accessed: 15 June 2022). Olaniyan, A. (2019) ‘How many copies are Nigerian newspapers selling?’ Available at: https://akinolaniyan. com/how-many-copies-are-nigerian-newspapers-selling/ (Accessed: 14 September 2022). Oshodi, J. E. (2021) ‘Stop child sexual abuse’, The Punch, 24 November. Available at: https://punchng. com/stop-child-sexual-abuse/ (Accessed: 23 June 2022). Patrick, N. (2015) ‘Assessment of patterns of readership of online newspapers in selected Nigerian universities’, International Journal of Linguistics and Communication, 3(2), pp. 35–46. UN WOMEN (2016) Global database on violence against women. Available at: https://evaw-globaldatabase.unwomen.org/fr/countries/africa/nigeria (Accessed: 15 October 2021). UNESCO (2020) School-related gender-based violence (SRGBV) – A human rights violation and a threat to inclusive and equitable quality education for all. Available at: https://unesdoc.unesco. org/ark:/48223/pf0000374509 (Accessed: 15 June 2022). UNESCO (2016) Global guidance on addressing school-related gender-based violence. Available at https:// www.unicef.org/media/66506/file/Global-Guidance-SRGBV.pdf. (Accessed: 5 November 2021). UNICEF (2022) Child protection. Available at: https://www.unicef.org/nigeria/child-protection (Accessed: 17 February 2022). UNICEF (2020) Gender dimensions of violence against children and adolescents. Available at: https:// www.unicef.org/media/92376/file/Child-Protection-Gender-Dimensions-of-VACAG-2021.pdf (Accessed: 20 December 2021).

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15 MEDIA, COURTS AND “#RICEBUNNY” TESTIMONIES IN CHINA Li Jun

On 23 April 2019, Southern Metropolis Daily (
, SMD), a local media outlet in Guangdong, China, posted a story on its WeChat media platform about Liu Qiangdong (  , AKA Richard Liu), the tycoon and owner of China’s largest e-commerce company Jingdong (JD.com), who had been charged with rape in the United States. The charge was related to the August 2018 sexual assault of a female student from China named “Jingyao”, following a business dinner. Although the Minneapolis City Attorney’s Office decided not to prosecute Liu because of evidentiary issues, “Jingyao” filed a civil lawsuit in April 2019 alleging rape by Liu and naming Jingdong as a defendant. It was at that point that SMD picked up the story, publishing a heavily edited, anonymously received audio recording of a conversation between “Jingyao” and Liu’s attorney, giving the impression “Jingyao” was blackmailing Liu. No fact-checking was done prior to the release of the recording by SMD and no response from either party was sought. The post was removed after it drew public criticism, nevertheless, its impact remains. Once one of China’s most economically successful localised media outlets, SMD was known for its bold investigative reporting, pointed commentary and stance on pushing for social reform. SMD’s release of the edited “Jingyao” recording reflects the degradation of social responsibility, professionalism and ethical standards of mainstream Chinese news organisations in just a few years. It is also a quintessential moment that reflects the complex role that news organisations have played in the mixed media environment and political dynamics in which the MeToo movement is embedded. The inter-relationships of news and social media in relation to #MeToo have been well documented. This research has typically identified the possibilities of mainstream news coverage for hashtag feminism, whilst also pointing to the limitations of that coverage, particularly in relation to whose stories are amplified in mainstream spaces (e.g. Pollack, 2019; De Benedictis, Orgad and Rottenberg, 2019; Tambe, 2018). The backlash against – or suspicion of – #MeToo in mainstream media is also well documented. For instance, in a study of broadcast media in India, Sambaraju (2020) found that attributing reports of harassment and abuse to #MeToo raised concerns that complainants had been unduly influenced by the movement, resulting in untrue allegations and pile ons.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003200871-18

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As in other parts of the world, China’s version of #MeToo – #RiceBunny – demonstrates the immense power of social media, but also the interdependence of news and social media. Also inherent in #RiceBunny is an acknowledgement of the risk of speaking out about sexual harassment and abuse: Rice Bunny( ) is pronounced the same as MeToo in English and this localised version of #MeToo was adopted by Chinese feminists to evade censorship. Yet, as this chapter will demonstrate, women speaking out against privileged abusers have borne significant risks which have been compounded by their differential access to media platforms and limited ability to control how their stories were shared and used.

#RiceBunny in court #RiceBunny began in 2018 with victims speaking out to expose sexual assault through social media platforms such as Weibo and WeChat. In its first four years, #RiceBunny has exposed perpetrators in four main fields: media, non-profit, education and business. In education, the mobilisation of more than 10,000 people at 80 universities, led university authorities to take disciplinary action in some cases involving multiple complainants. In the media, non-profit and business sectors, on the other hand, few alleged perpetrators were disciplined by their employers and civil litigation was concentrated in these areas. Since 2018, there have been public accusations against approximately 80 men. Fourteen cases have reached the courts: with nine civil lawsuits and five criminal cases. In criminal cases (Johnson, 2018; Zhang, 2020; BBC, 2022; Tor, 2022; Associated Press in Beijing, 2021) the involvement of police and criminal justice and relatively high standard of evidence has, to an extent, legitimated the victim/survivors’ accounts and this is reflected in public responses. This chapter focuses on the nine civil lawsuits, six of which were filed by the alleged perpetrators. The use of civil law by alleged perpetrators is not new: according to Yuanzhong Women’s Law Center ) between 2010 and 2017 34 sexual harassment-related civil cases were filed in China; 55.9% of these were reputation infringement suits or wrongful discharge suits lodged by alleged perpetrators; in only two cases were the plaintiffs the alleged victims. In the nine #RiceBunny suits, only one victim has won so far, when Liu Meng, the head of a social work organisation, was recognised by the court for sexual harassment and ordered to apologise to the victim. In addition, the case of Guangzhou sanitation worker Huang Wei ended in a settlement which saw the perpetrator removed from his employment. This case is somewhat exceptional: not only was the sexual harassment initially exposed through the news media rather than social media, but the survivor was also a working-class woman. While all the #RiceBunny cases that made it to court have received some attention, three cases involving celebrities are more high-profile. The first of these is the case against Liu Qiangdong in the US, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Discussion of his USbased case has never been prohibited by the Chinese government. However, as this article was being finalised, Liu settled with his accuser out of court, meaning the transparency in reporting which had been anticipated will not now come to pass (Davidson, 2022). Even so, media discussion surrounding this case is most indicative of the extent to which the Chinese media is influenced by commercial interests and how the rape culture framework is used against silence breakers. The second case involves Zhu Jun, one of China’s most famous state television presenters, who was accused by a then-intern (given the nickname Xianzi on social media) who had a long chain of evidence against him. Xianzi soon reported the harassment to the police in 2014, 164

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when the incident occurred, with the support of a female professor and one of her classmates. However, the police illegally put pressure on Xianzi’s parents to coerce her to withdraw the accusation. Four years later, Xianzi told the story in a post in her private WeChat Moments to comfort a friend who had been sexually assaulted. Unexpectedly, an enthusiastic former journalist (with the Weibo account “MaiShao Tongxue” ) posted it to the public Twitter-like platform Weibo, causing the story to go viral. In September 2018, Zhu filed a civil lawsuit in a Beijing court for “infringement of reputation”, naming Xianzi and “MaiShao Tongxue” as defendants. Xianzi later sued him for sexual harassment in the same court. Xianzi’s Weibo account “Xianzi and her friends” ( !") has gradually accumulated over 300,000 followers and became an opinion leader for #RiceBunny, as well as commenting on other social issues. She also became the core of an extensive support network for victim/survivors associated with #RiceBunny. In late 2020, when Xianzi’s case first came to court, hundreds of supporters gathered in front of the courthouse (Figure 15.1). The unprecedented mobilisation around her case, the involvement of human rights lawyers and the prominence of the alleged perpetrator in the propaganda system politicised the matter. Her Weibo account was banned for a whole year and a large number of Weibo accounts that supported her and retweeted information about her trial were also banned or cancelled. Deng Fei (#$), the plaintiff in the third celebrity lawsuit, is a well-known former journalist and a celebrity philanthropist with millions of Weibo followers. In 2018, when several of his former volunteers and peers accused him of sexual harassment, He Qian (%&), a professor in the US and former intern at the magazine Phoenix Weekly ('()*) where Deng used to work, wrote a long article about how Deng took her to a hotel and tried to sexually assault her.

Figure 15.1

Xianzi and her supporters before the first trial. Her placard reads “Must Win”. Photography: Zhang Yiyi

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Figure 15.2

Xianzi and other feminists show support for He Qian and Zou Sicong during the Deng Fei trial. Photo provided by Xianzi

Several former journalists and editors published open letters in support of He Qian, but she and the journalist Zou Sicong (who helped disseminate the article) were sued by Deng for infringement of his right to reputation. Although Deng made false statements in court (his claim that he did not know the victim was disproven), the court ruled that He’s statements were “insufficient to establish beyond a reasonable doubt” that sexual harassment had occurred and ruled that He and Zou must apologise to Deng; he was also awarded compensation. The victims in all three cases were members of a victim network centred on Xianzi and supporters of this feminist network were frequently present in the courthouse, passing on information about the progress of the cases through social media (Figure 15.2).

Censorship, professional codes and interpersonal networks To better understand the interrelationships of social media and news it is first necessary to sketch the wider news media context in China. In China, the collection and reporting of news require authorisation from the General Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television and the Internet Information Office. The media organisations with rights to “news gathering and editing” are almost exclusively affiliated with party committees and government departments: in this chapter, I refer to them as “news media/ organisations”. Organisations that would be called (internet) news providers in other contexts are, in China, more commonly referred to as “nonfiction writing platforms”:

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because they do not have “news gathering and editing rights”, they cannot be called “news media” and their staff cannot be called “journalists” – even though it has become the norm for journalists to change jobs between recognised and unrecognised (news) media outlets. These nonfiction writing platforms usually follow journalistic norms and have generous editorial budgets, albeit without news gathering and editing rights. To avoid regulatory violations, nonfiction writing platforms mainly produce softer content, such as feature-type stories. Citizen media are run by NGOs or volunteer groups. Their human and financial resources are weak compared to news media and nonfiction platforms, but they can report in-depth on the issues they are involved in. In addition, hundreds of millions of social media accounts of companies, NGOs and individuals have been involved in the dissemination and discussion of #RiceBunny. The Zhu Jun case has been one of the most heavily censored cases. Caixin Media (+,- .), known for its bold investigative reporting, was the first media outlet to report on Zhu’s case, interviewing all news sources related to the case reported to the police back in 2014 and seeking a response from the police and Zhu. Five hours after publication, they were commanded by the propaganda department to delete the article; the relevant content on Xianzi and “MaiShao Tongxue”’s Weibo accounts was also hidden by the platform. After Zhu issued a lawyer’s statement and sued Xianzi and “MaiShao Tongxue”, there were signs of relaxed censorship regarding the story: their social media content was unblocked and there was a wave of coverage by news outlets that amplified Xianzi’s story. However, as the case became increasingly sensitive, news outlets became more cautious, deleting previous reports and not covering developments regularly. Despite this, Xianzi won the support of journalists. A journalist of the New Beijing News (,/)1 told the author that when the case finally went to trial after two years, all news organisations were notified of the ban on reporting, but “almost every journalist I know was there (in front of the court)”. That Zhu’s reputation was so closely linked to state media was the main reason the case could not be reported. Deng Fei, in contrast, worked largely outside this system and did not have the same institutional status or state protection. Even so, very few news organisations reported on Deng’s case. Despite the fact that several female journalists have complained that he sexually harassed them, Deng is well networked in the industry. His tactics were to find (male) acquaintances at news organisations and demand that the story not be reported; for non-fictional media and social media posts, he constantly pressured for deletion by threatening to sue.2 These demands were often successful, as one editor-in-chief of a Beijingbased news outlet told the author, news organisations complied “for the sake of fellowship”. The same editor added: “Besides, we really can’t confirm that what is claimed to have happened 10 years ago really happened”.3 Caixin Media’s legal reporting team set up a special group to collect #RiceBunny leads. But the principle of objectivity still discouraged journalists. A journalist who interviewed Deng’s complainant He explained her reasons for not eventually reporting on the case: … I was, I’m not saying I didn’t believe her, I was sensing an (emotional) unusual … anyway, I was very confused at the time and I probably just wanted to get a deposition-type thing … We must write out both sides of the argument in the driest language possible0 and send out one of the driest pieces, no emotions, no tendencies, that kind of thing.4

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Reports of acquaintance sexual assault are not traditionally a mainstream area of investigative reporting and the cases uncovered in #RiceBunny often lack evidence beyond the victims’ oral accounts. The views expressed by the journalist in the quote above are representative of many I have spoken with who are troubled by the question of “proof” in reporting sexual harassment. The problem, then, lies not only in government censorship but also in wider journalistic cultures (see also Thorsen and Sreedharan, this volume). For instance, Zou, the young journalist who helped share the reports of Deng’s alleged behaviour, described pressure from male “seniors” in the industry (who claimed to believe He’s account) to delete articles exposing Deng’s alleged wrongdoing.5 This reflects the other side of China’s “golden age” of media – a culture of gender and hierarchy in journalism that is still male-dominated. With at least seven prominent journalists and editors accused in #RiceBunny sexual harassment is as prevalent in the media as it is in any other industry, and the alliance of powerful men is part of the backlash against those who speak out.

Disinformation becomes a weapon for the accused Beyond censorship, information manipulation becomes a tactic for privileged men to respond to accusations. This is very prominent in the Liu Qiangdong case (the civil case was launched in the US), where a social media “water army” (so called, because they are ready and willing to “flood” the internet for whoever is willing to pay), news agencies, portals and Weibo platforms worked together. Before the release of the audio recording by Southern Metropolis Daily mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, a newly registered Weibo account, State of Minnesota Chronicle (1234, SMC) posted two edited and misleading videos edited from surveillance footage of the three-hour business dinner and of Liu accompanying the student back to her apartment. These videos created the impression that the woman proactively approached Liu and invited him into her apartment. Initially, the information war was fought on social-media accounts of news-oriented organisations, including International Student Daily North America (56789) as well as SMD and SMC. These outlets consistently used victim-blaming rhetoric and strategies. In April 2019, Caixin Media’s US correspondent conducted an exclusive interview with Jingyao and published the article “Exclusive: The female subject of the Liu Qiangdong case responds: ‘I have been in denial’” (Zhang, 2019). This was tampered with by Phoenix Net Technology ('(:;[Tx) and Baidu Video (yz{|). As female users on social media platforms become active content consumers, producing content that is meaningful to them is very important to the Internet companies’ key performance indicators. For example, the editor-in-chief of one of these platforms told me that 70% of their readers on the WeChat media platform are women which is an important reason for them to keep producing relevant content in the #RiceBunny movement8 by, for example, collecting readers’ stories of sexual assault. At the same time, most of the writers and editors on these platforms are women and many of them are sensitive to women’s rights issues. Often, to avoid violating regulations, they resort to the tactic of telling personal stories when both news organisations and social media have encountered serious censorship. For example, at Zhu’s first hearing, hundreds of people showed up to support Xianzi, resulting in a rally in front of the courthouse. This made the case even more sensitive and news outlets were banned from reporting on it. The final published stories were from nonfiction platforms. Feature articles were published by a WeChat media account affiliated with People and by the feminist in-depth reporting platform Aquarius Era focusing on the stories of the people who supported each other in the case. Soft stories are also often widely disseminated when information is heavily censored. Because of the depth of coverage, they can also have an accountability effect. When the sanitation worker Huang Wei’s lawsuit was stalled and the grassroots administration reinstated the perpetrator, All Now published an indepth report exposing the cronyism surrounding the sanitation station (Yao, 2020). The day after the report was published, a series of meetings were initiated by community cadres and the sanitation station’s hardline attitude toward the lawsuit took a turn and began to demand a settlement with Huang. Eventually, the station manager’s position was removed. However, because of their fragile legitimacy, these pieces do not survive for long. For example, a detailed report on the outcome of the second trial of Deng Fei’s case in the Daily People (]9[\) had to be deleted following requests from the alleged perpetrator’s side as a possible court case or a report to the Internet information authority could cause significant problems for the editorial office. To give another example, All Now’s WeChat account, with hundreds of thousands of followers, was deleted because of a tip-off from a government-backed anti-feminist nationalist blogger.

Citizen media: report to change For the reasons mentioned above, the amount of Chinese media coverage of #RiceBunny is disproportionate to its newsworthiness: the coverage lacks continuity and is difficult to accumulate and retain. It is even difficult to search news databases to find stories that have never been published. Given these difficulties, it is mainly the survivors’ and their supporters’ 170

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social media and citizen media that maintain the momentum of #RiceBunny. In the case of Zhu Jun and Deng Fei, the most detailed accounts of the cases’ progress came from Xianzi’s, He Qian’s and Zou Sicong’s social media posts. Xianzi used her Weibo account to support many of the silence breakers in #RiceBunny. However, the role of citizen media is even more critical for those silence breakers who are relatively less culturally capitalised or “newsworthy”. The case of Liu Meng, the head of a social work organisation, initially attracted little attention and no mainstream media coverage. It was the feminist citizen media Women Awakening Network ,.}~) (WAN) which helped to give survivors a voice and provide updates on the lawsuit. The influence of citizen media is not only its better communication power in feminist and NGO circles but also its role as an intermediary between the silence breakers and the mainstream media. The power of citizen media also comes from the network of activists behind it – not just reporting, but more importantly, intervening for change. The case of sanitation worker Huang Wei is typical. She was able to get help from pro bono lawyers because of the longstanding local action network focused on sanitation workers’ rights and anti-discrimination. News about her case was disseminated in a traditional way: the lawyers helped her contact the media for coverage after she sued. The All Now reporter who published the investigative story that led to the employer’s compromise was previously a reporter for the citizen media NGOCN, whose network of information on workers’ rights issues and action networks enabled her to produce the most influential story on the case. Citizen media also plays a major role in the fight against disinformation. When information manipulation against Jingyao emerged, the pro-Jingyao Presenting Team (i€ ) released a full video and translated US court documents to counter the malicious information and WAN clarified how the audio recording released by SMD was edited (Women Awakening Network, 2019). Coverage of the civil court case against Liu Qiangdong has been provided primarily by WeSupport Jingyao (‚"ƒ„ Jingyao), a Weibo account run by feminist volunteers among Chinese students in North America, which has provided video and written reports and analyses of the court proceedings. In the case of Xianzi and Jingyao, Echo (…††††) – the successor to the citizen media Feminist Voices (‡ˆ†) which had been removed from the internet by the internet information department – played an important role. Echo’s work includes reporting on the progress of the case, combating disinformation and mobilising public support and encouragement for silence breakers.

Conclusion In the Chinese Me Too movement, we see the strengths and weaknesses of social media. #RiceBunny has seen women breaking through cultural norms that silence victims of sexual violence to speak out and organise. But the Chinese context is complicated. Journalism has continued to weaken under censorship, and technological and commercial shifts, while at the same time facing information manipulation in the social media environment. Mainstream news organisations have largely supported accused perpetrators, reflecting not only the presence of censorship but also the influence of networks of people within news organisations. In contrast, Internet content-producing organisations and citizen media that do not have the legitimacy to report, are leading more positive developments. Citizen participation seems to be more important in the Chinese case than the cooperation between news media and social media which has been identified in other national contexts (Guha, 2015). It was citizen media, 171

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not news organisations, that helped survivors get greater visibility and counter the disinformation imposed by powerful perpetrators. However, as this chapter has also demonstrated, this is not an equally-resourced battle.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Interview conducted 8 October 2021, Beijing. All translations by the author. Sources: Staff from NEW Beijing News We Video (,/‚"{|), All Now (hij), Women Awakening Network (,.}~), and blogger “Dangpu”. Personal communication, 29 December 2021, Beijing. Interview conducted 19 July 2022, via WeChat Voice Call. Interview conducted 29 December 2021; via WeChat Voice Call. Personal communication, 29 July 2022, Guangzhou. Personal communication, 29 July 2022, Guangzhou. Interview conducted 2 December 2020; via WeChat Voice Call.

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