Berkeley Media Studies GroupVideo: Testimony of Pamela Mejia: How the news portrays domestic violence

Video: Testimony of Pamela Mejia: How the news portrays domestic violence

Wednesday, October 15, 2014At an October 14, 2014, hearing of the California Assembly Select Committee on Domestic Violence, BMSG Senior Media Researcher Pamela Mejia speaks about the influence of news coverage on the public's and policymakers' understanding of domestic violence and how to address it. The hearing, "Changing the Culture of Abuse," was held about a month after the media received footage of NFL running back Ray Rice attacking his then-fiancée, Janay Palmer, in an Atlantic City elevator — an act that prompted widespread news coverage and increased calls, including from CBS sportscaster James Brown, for domestic violence awareness and prevention. Mejia's testimony begins at 3:15, following a video of Brown's remarks. A full transcript of her testimony appears below.

Testimony

Good afternoon. And I want to thank Assemblymember Gomez and this committee for holding the hearing and giving me an opportunity to speak today. As was mentioned, my name is Pamela Mejia, and I head the research program at the Berkeley Media Studies Group, which is based in Northern California. At BMSG, we study the stories that the news tells — and also the stories that it doesn't tell — about public health and safety. And we do that because the news has a tremendous impact on how the public and policymakers understand public health and safety problems; and the news also shapes their understanding — our understanding — of how to solve those problems. We know that news coverage impacts how the public and policymakers view domestic violence.^1,2 In fact, part — not all, but part — of the reason that we are here today is because news outlets received and reported on three and a half minutes of elevator footage from an Atlantic City casino. The statement we just heard from James Brown before the Baltimore Ravens took the field corroborates some patterns that research has consistently documented in the news coverage of violence against women, and domestic violence in particular.

As Kathy said earlier, we know that intimate partner violence happens every day, but it's rarely reported in the news.^{3, 4}
When it is reported, it's seldom framed or described as domestic violence or intimate partner violence^{5, 6, 7} — readers and viewers are left to "draw their own conclusions".⁶ Now, since domestic violence is both a legal and a colloquial term, reporters are understandably somewhat reluctant to use it to characterize a crime before a verdict has been reached. But calling crimes — labeling them as domestic violence serves an important role in helping news readers and viewers understand isolated incidents as part of a greater social problem to be solved, and it also gives them some language and some vocabulary to use to start talking about that problem.⁸
The absence of context around domestic violence is especially problematic when news stories include details that humanize or exonerate the perpetrator,⁹ or that imply that violence is mutual or provoked⁹ — and we know that that happens more often in news coverage of domestic violence than in any other kind of violence reporting.⁴ These patterns can subtly shift the blame to victims of intimate partner violence,^{6, 9} and in so doing reinforce the problematic norms around masculinity and power ¹⁰ that James Brown so powerfully denounced in the clip that we just saw.
When news organizations report on domestic violence, they usually focus on isolated incidents,^{3, 7, 11} especially those incidents that are extreme the ones that end in murder, the ones that feature a well-known celebrity; ^{3, 7, 12}
To put it another way, domestic violence as a whole is UNDERREPORTED, but extreme acts are OVERREPORTED.³ In a study that we at Berkeley Media Studies Group did of intimate partner violence news coverage in California papers, we found that domestic violence reporting is more "murder-oriented" than any other kind of violence reporting.⁴ Now, it's important to report on those extreme acts, but when that's all that happens, the picture of domestic violence that emerges is incomplete and distorted — it ignores, for example, the non-physical aspects of domestic violence,³ the coercive control behaviors that we know are part of that range. We can't expect good, comprehensive public policy around domestic violence to result if it's based on an understanding of the problem that is itself not comprehensive.

Now, obviously, the news can't report on every incident of domestic violence — unfortunately, there would be no room in the news for anything else. But the patterns that I just enumerated, which we know have held constant for decades, tell us that a big part of the story is missing. The news about domestic violence is often leaving out, for example,

the non-physical components of intimate partner violence,^{6, 7} the coercive control behaviors, the verbal and emotional abuse;
it's leaving out the larger context in which domestic violence occurs^{3, 5, 6};
it's leaving out the impact of intimate partner violence on survivors, on perpetrators, on their families, on their communities⁴;

Without accurate news coverage of the reality of domestic violence, society goes unwarned and uninformed. Elected officials don't get the information that they need to put in place, once for all, the policies that could end this silent, horrifying and costly epidemic. The challenge for reporters, producers and editors, then, is: How can news coverage give the public a more complete picture of domestic violence and what to do about it? Effective coverage should address the context in which domestic violence occurs; it should discuss consequences and risk factors; and it should provide resources for individuals and communities. Now, I know I only have a minute, but I want to say here that we do periodically see effective and compelling coverage of domestic violence — in fact, the current media spotlight has yielded some fantastic examples that, for example, look at the cultural context that normalizes and accepts violence against women,¹³ or stories that talk about the unique consequences and risk factors for survivors in communities of color.¹⁴ But, unfortunately, those stories, strong as they are, are few and far between. The organizers of today's panel have built on the current interest in and attention to domestic violence resulting from the recent media spotlight to convene this panel that's exploring the problem, and how to end it. How to end domestic violence — now, that's something we don't see much discussion of in news coverage, not what that will take, not what a world could look like in which dignity and respect in relationships are the norm. As we envision the future we want to see, and the news coverage we want to see about it, we need to ask ourselves what the impetus will be for the next time we, or others like us, gather together to talk about domestic violence. Will we be, yet again, responding to another video from another elevator? Now, sometimes those incidents do give us the opportunity to talk about prevention, and about solutions — as in the story that we saw earlier in which James Brown bravely addresses those cultural norms that promote a problematic culture of violence against women that we must address if we are ever to truly prevent perpetration of intimate partner violence. But prevention advocates and practitioners themselves will also have to create opportunities for reporters to tell stories that aren't just attached to acts of violence that have already occurred, but are about preventing violence before it happens. Put another way, we know that the news will pay attention to the gruesome facts and details of domestic violence. But how can we here today — lawmakers lawyers, practitioners, survivors — how can we make ending domestic violence headline news? I want to thank you, again, Assemblymember Gomez, for convening this hearing and continuing to investigate this critical issue.

References

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