Truth In Reporting

The media has always had a responsibility to report the truth, as best as they can, and to remain as neutral as possible to their position. Domestic violence reporting in this country should be quite simple. A person is injured or killed, report the facts and call it for what it was. Domestic violence.

That's how things would be in a perfect world, and when domestic violence exists, the world is clearly not perfect, and neither is its reporting.

Since Malcolm Turnbull announced a ten-year campaign to end violence against women and their children, domestic violence reporting has made a rather dramatic change. A government-funded organisation, known as Our Watch (Our women and children), was created to focus on highlighting violence women face in society.

One of its weapons in its lethal arsenal was the use of the media.

Numerous awareness campaigns have been created highlighting the apparent gendered nature of domestic violence and have attempted to change social attitudes by way of education. This is all well and good as long as it doesn't affect the truth in reporting. And this is where the issue starts.

A Shift In How Stories Are Told

Since the ten-year violence against women and their children campaign started, domestic violence reporting has had a major shift in the way incidents are described. And it's all about gender.

You would no doubt have noticed that when the victim of a domestic violence incident happens to be female, the phrase "domestic violence" is heavily, sometimes excessively, used in the reporting. I have counted up to ten mentions of the phrase in a single article.

According to government-funded domestic violence campaigns such as Our Watch, ANROWS and White Ribbon, domestic violence does not discriminate and men can also be victims. However, someone seems to have forgotten to mention this to the media.

When a male is the victim of a domestic violence incident, or the female is the perpetrator, the phrase "domestic violence" is often omitted from the article entirely. A lot of the time, the relationship between the male victim and the female perpetrator is not mentioned either. Instead, reports tend to describe the relationship by stating "it's believed the man and the woman were known to each other."

Why the reluctance to state their relationship? In some cases, the articles are even written from the perspective of the female being the victim.

Why This Matters

So why is this a problem? Because the media is powerful. The Nazis' rise to power was largely achieved through the use of propaganda in the newspapers and print of the time. The media has a responsibility to report the news and to attempt to remain apolitical.

By reporting domestic violence in this fashion, we are misleading the Australian public. People are associating the words "domestic violence" with female victims, and female victims alone.

Female victims are also heavily focused on. When Eurydice Dixon was murdered in 2018, the reports lasted for days. During that same period, two men were killed by their female partners — one was set on fire in a shocking case of domestic violence. It received almost no mainstream coverage.

The media has also moved into the realm of cyberspace, and even Google appears to be in on it. When I have gone to re-look at old cases of female perpetrators, I am often unable to find the articles in Google searches. It seems that Google suppresses the information. Try it for yourself.

Awards And Incentives

So why does the media fail to provide truth in reporting? One can only speculate.

Our Watch runs a yearly media award known as the Walkley awards — a prestigious recognition given to journalists who best raise awareness of, and focus on, reporting violence against women. What better way to do that than to completely exclude men from the story? It's just a theory, but a sound one.

The Walkley awards. Everybody wants one.