Mass media has an outsized role in shaping how we perceive of Violence Against Women and with a few notable exceptions, mass media unfortunately tends to reinforce myths about rape, and murder and gender. In particular, analyses of newsmedia and reality TV find that rape and (non-sexual) murders of women tend to be conflated. Likewise, the rape and murder of women by strangers is emphasized so much that we tend to perceive of rapists as depraved deviants, and the murders of women as unusual crimes. These distortions are mainly due to episodic and sensationalist reporting that tends to omit context of social issues surrounding Violence Against Women and its extreme prevalence. For example, about 1 in 4 or 5 women are raped over their lifetime and most rape is committed by assailants known to the victim; moreover, domestic violence is the most (all too) common context in which women are murdered. This paper asks: in highly popular fictional narrative television, do these same distortions from news media and reality TV come forward? How often is domestic violence and rape portrayed in popular shows and in what frames? Do these popular shows address the issue of domestic violence as a social phenomenon, with greater attention to context, and how do they do so?
About the presenterRachel R. Reynolds
Rachel teaches in the Graduate Program in Communication, Culture & Media at Drexel University. (http://drexel.edu/coas/academics/gra...)
She does cultural studies work on African (Nigeria/Cameroon) national media and arts, as well as the representation of Africa and Africans in media worldwide. She also looks at immigrant media in the United States and especially immigrant youth and their influences within American culture. Her most recent project, however, investigates how popular and news media portrays Violence Against Women.