The study “Isolated Incidents. Media Reporting on Violence Against Women in the German Press” by Christine E. Meltzer from University of Music, Drama and Media, Hanover, looked at how media reports violence against women in Germany.
According to the World Health Organization, about one in three women have suffered from sexual or physical violence since the age of 15. In EU, this rate is also one-third, while in the US it is one-fourth. Most of the time, the perpetrator is someone known to the victim, often an intimate partner.
News media has the potential to contribute to the understanding of the problem and help in breaking social taboos. The author notes that as reporting affects the public’s perception of the prevalence of a problem, underreporting intimate partner violence as opposed to stranger violence may lead to the underestimation of the former problem.
Previous research suggests that violence against women is presented as an individual issue and focusing on individual deviancy, rather than as a thematic topic for thematic reporting. In other words, episodic framing is used, and focusing on the question of “what”, as opposed to thematic framing and focusing on the question of “why”.
Also, research focusing on the topic and race or ethnic minorities has shown that ethnic minorities often appear in negative context in news media, as perpetrators. Similarly, White victims are newsworthy, while migrant victims receive less attention. In the US, this is reflected as the tendency to excuse White perpetrators and pathologize Black perpetrators.
This study was based on quantitative analysis of press coverage on violence against women between January 1, 2015 to June 30, 2019. Four high-quality national papers with different political leanings, ten regional papers, and three tabloids were covered, for a total of 3489 analyzed articles.
Media reporting remained at a comparatively low level in 2015. The first notable ‘spike’ occurred in January 2016, when the events of New Year’s Eve in Cologne, where migrant men harassed women became public. Increases also occurred in December 2016, 2017, and 2018 – presumably related to reporting on countermeasures for New Year’s Eve.
Compared to police statistics, both violence committed in marriages/partnerships/families and violence committed by strangers seems underreported. The relationship between the victim and the perpetrator was not mentioned in half of the cases.
Crimes of homicide were overreported, especially true when looking at homicide committed in intimate relationships. Homicide against women was mentioned in two thirds of the articles about intimate violence, but only one fifth in articles about stranger violence.
Thematic reporting was very rare. It increased after the events of New Year’s Eve in Cologne (22 articles in January 2016), while remaining steadily low since – but raising periodically in November (one fourth of articles using thematic framing were in November). November 25th is the International Day to End Violence against Women and statistics are often published then.
When looking at the perpetrator’s nationality, about two percent of the 1922 articles mentioning a perpetrator or perpetrators mentioned German nationality. One-third mentioned non-German perpetrators, with 519 explicitly mentioning a nationality. Iraqi 11%, Syrian 7%, and Turkish 4% were the most common nationalities explicitly mentioned. 67 articles mentioned asylum seeker status. Not surprisingly, New Year’s Eve 2015/106 saw an increase in mentions of nationality which then became more common.
The Press Code was revised in 2017, which allowed for more liberal mentions, depending on the editor. Left-leaning outlets mentioned the perpetrators non-German origin a lot less often conservative outlets. Also, thematic framing was more common with non-German perpetrators.
In summary, the reporting generally increased from 2015 to 2019. Most articles were found on tabloids, whereas national outlets had the least reporting. Violence against women committed by an intimate partner is underreported, for it to cross the reporting threshold, the crime must be particularly brutal.
The vast majority of articles, four-fifths, use episodic framing, making no mention on the broader topic but reporting the case as an individual one. The mentions of origin were more common after New Year 2015/2016, specifically, non-German origin, and this was further facilitated by the revision of Press Code in 2017. Thematic framing was used more commonly in crimes committed by non-German perpetrators.
It was also shown that the topic of violence against women was not considered newsworthy on a national level. This is problematic along with the fact that it is generally underreported – and the public is shown a misleading picture of the issue by concealing the extent of intimate partner violence and framing it episodically.
The article “Isolated Incidents. Media Reporting on Violence Against Women in the German Press” by Christine E. Meltzer is in Journalism Practice. (free abstract).
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