One in four Australian women have suffered physical and/or sexual violence by a current or former intimate partner since age 15. Intimate partner homicide is the most common form of homicide in Australia. One in twelve women living with a partner experienced physical violence when the pandemic started.
News media plays a critical role in establishing public opinions regarding topics of key concern to the Australian population. How are these devastating truths being framed by news reports in Australia?
Framing in the context of journalism
Framing refers to the angle or perspective from which a news story is told. With roots in Erving Goffman’s work from the early 1970s, framing has become a critical thread used to interweave journalistic practice with public opinion. Media scholar Robert Entman defined the far-reaching impact of framing succinctly as ‘calling attention to some aspects of reality, while obscuring others’.
This tension between illuminating certain facts while concealing others may lead audiences to have vastly different reactions to, and interpretations of, news stories. Without considering multiple points of view when framing stories, journalists run the risk of producing biased work.
Inherent biases in news content consumed by large audiences can encourage polarisation in opinion. This is critically important when considering the impact of news reporting on an issue such as domestic violence, where public opinion can influence access to resources, perpetuate stigma, limit community understanding and create misunderstanding.
Framing domestic violence in Australia
A damning report released in 2021 found Australian media is failing to cover domestic violence in the right way. Drawing on data from 23 newspapers over a period of 20 years, this research supports the belief that the news media has continuously failed to frame domestic violence incidents as a systemic issue. Over three-quarters of the articles analysed characterised cases as isolated incidents rather than reflective of a nation-wide problem.
Despite the fact that domestic violence encompasses a wide range of behaviours, Australian media places considerable focus on physical violence and homicide while inadvertently overshadowing other forms of abuse. More than 90 per cent of articles discussed physical violence and homicide, reflecting the pervasive lack of attention towards the many more nuanced manifestations of domestic violence.
This new research also found more than half the articles used mitigating circumstances to explain instances of crime, including mental illness, character flaws, criminality, financial difficulties or jealousy. The resulting inference is that these crimes are one-off offences, further detracting from the severity of the issue.
These findings have been reinforced by a plethora of Australian studies, particularly noting the infrequent inclusion of help-seeking services in articles and the disproportionate emphasis on law enforcement and criminal justice perspectives over the voices of survivors, advocates and experts.
The combined findings of these studies reveals a tendency to frame domestic violence in a way that shifts blame away from the perpetrator, does not enhance public understanding of the complexity of the issue, sensationalises and omits certain forms of domestic violence.
The Rosie Batty effect
Although framing of family violence in Australia has not adapted to critical advancements in knowledge regarding the true nature of these crimes, there has been an improvement in ‘constructive messaging’ in recent years.
When 11-year-old Australian boy Luke Batty was brutally killed by his father in 2014, his mother Rosie Batty began a high profile campaign to address family violence inaction. As Batty rose to prominence as a family violence campaigner, changes in the ways these issues were discussed in the news became apparent.
A remarkable study released in 2018 analysing the variations in framing found in news coverage in the 20 months following Luke Batty’s death revealed the enduring legacy of his mother’s persistent fight. Rosie Batty’s campaigning helped shift the debate towards emphasising the responsibility of offenders rather than victims. In turn, this allowed family violence to be discussed in news coverage as a national problem rather than as a private situation that occurs behind closed doors.
The speed in which these changes appeared in news coverage serves as a hopeful indication of news professionals’ willingness to advance their framing of issues with great importance to the Australian public.
How can journalists continue to make progress?
Although slow steps in the right direction are being made, journalists have a long way to go to succeed in reporting about domestic violence in a way that upholds the needs of victims above all else. In an effort to contribute to this goal, journalists can follow guidelines developed by not-for-profit Our Watch, including eight tips for reporting on violence against women in a constructive way. Encouraging help-seeking behaviour should always be a priority while keeping the offender in view and using language that clearly defines the perpetrator as an active participant in the crime.
Intersectionality in the context of domestic violence is also critically important. Gender, race and class are factors that heavily impact portrayals of violence against women and abuse within the home. Initiating the process of breaking racial stereotypes and class biases are imperative to improving outcomes for marginalised communities.
Journalists wield great power to influence public opinion. Through the effective application of framing techniques, societal shifts in understanding, supporting and preventing domestic violence and other systemic issues become possible.
Featured image: Framing domestic violence in Australia in news media is improving, but we still have a long way to go. Photo: By Tiago Bandeira on Unsplash
The Australian media has failed to cover family violence in a way that accurately portrays its pervasiveness, in all its manifestations, within our society. I loathe to compare incidents of family violence as more or less serious than one another, however, the media naturally reports on the most extreme cases involving loss of life. Just as more stories are being told about mental health, the media need to tell more stories about family violence to continue to raise awareness and educate our society about how varied, and how insidious, family violence really is.
This is such an important topic to address. We as journalists have an obligation to inform the public but also share people’s stories. Domestic violence is something that we all hear about but is so much more than just a statement/factual piece about what happened. Highlighting the issue and its history, why it is happening and what can be done, is crucial. It is interesting though as to why journalists stray away from noting domestic violence as a systemic issue. Is it because they don’t want to get further into the topic because it is too sensitive? Are they informed by media companies frame it in a certain way or to not mention it at all?
It’s becoming more evident to me that journalism is rarely, perhaps never, free of some kind of framing by the author. While journalists strive to report objectively on events, nobody is free of their own biases, and we are all influenced by forces around us, unconsciously or consciously. Should we then give up the potentially fruitless endeavour to become truly objective in our reporting, and rather focus on understanding our influences and writing news more honest to our own perspective and the views of those we ask for comment? Obviously, this is a slippery slope into welcoming bias into reporting, but I can’t help but feel like there is a bit of naivety in journalists’ suggestion that reporting can be wholly objective.
Reflecting on framing and balanced reporting, I wonder how we, as emerging journalists, can effectively use framing techniques to craft truly balanced stories. Like family violence, there are so many other social injustices, gendered and non-gendered, with communities that have preferred identification terms and reference language. The line to me is sometimes blurred. As journalists, I believe we should be advocates for marginalised voices and respectful of their community preferences. But can this framing hinder balanced reporting? Or is this where we, as journalists, show our inherent biases within our framing choices?
The power of framing in shaping the public’s understanding and view of an issue cannot be underestimated. Unfortunately, in the case of domestic violence, it doesn’t take much digging to find articles which focuses on the mitigating factors of offenders, or which uses language which disassociates the perpetrator from their actions. It’s also inarguable (and of crucial importance) that the media take a more nuanced and sophisticated view of domestic violence to include emotional abuse – that domestic violence does not always equal visible harm. It’s true that the way that the Amber Heard vs Johnny Depp defamation case has been framed by much of the media is supremely problematic. It not only influences the way that the public view domestic violence, but also the messaging that victims of domestic violence absorb through the media coverage – that it is their fault, that if they speak out they will not be believed, that there will not be support.
This issue of framing reported incidents as aberrations rather than systemic problems seems to me widespread, particularly in crime journalism. We can see almost identical issues with reportage of mass shootings versus terrorism in the U.S, where each incident is framed by the assailants race, class, religion or gender. I think there’s an inherent limitation to single incident crime reporting, because it sits as a decontextualised event for the reader if it’s not linked with more macro, systemic analysis. While it’s important to highlight horrific events that the community wants to know about, it needs to be responsibly reported and always linked to other reporting that explains the deeper issues at play.
This is such an important issue to consider. So often when we think about framing it is in the most basic sense of presenting just the facts, presenting the ‘truth’. But when journalists don’t consider their own biases and how their words can contribute to the continuation of problematic cultural norms, the damage can be deadly. The development of guidelines for reporting on socially sensitive issues such as family violence, disability, and mental health it a very important step in the right direction, I think. But unless journalists take responsibility for the part they play in influencing the public any efforts may be futile.