Media coverage of violence against women in India: a systematic study of a high profile rape case

BMC Women's Health

Research Article

Nazar Puthukudy¹  Rajeev Jetly¹  Fargol Mostofian¹  Kim Madden¹  Mohit Bhandari²  Mark Phillips³ 

[1] Department of Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics, McMaster University, 293 Wellington St. N, Suite 110, L8L 8E7, Hamilton, ON, Canada;Department of Clinical Epidemiology & Biostatistics, McMaster University, 293 Wellington St. N, Suite 110, L8L 8E7, Hamilton, ON, Canada;Division of Orthopaedic Surgery, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada;Department of Life Science, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada;

关键词: Delhi;    Gang-rape;    Media coverage;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12905-015-0161-x

 received in 2014-08-11, accepted in 2015-01-05,  发布年份 2015

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundOn December 16, 2012 a 23 year old female was gang-raped on a bus in Delhi. We systematically reviewed professional online media sources used to inform the timing, breadth of coverage, opinions and consistency in the depiction of events surrounding the gang-rape.MethodsWe searched two news databases (LexisNexis Academic and Factivia) and individual newspapers for English-language published media reports covering the gang-rape. Two reviewers screened the media reports and extracted data regarding the time, location and content of each report. Results were summarized qualitatively.ResultsWe identified 534 published media reports. Of these, 351 met our eligibility criteria. Based on a time chart, the total number of reports published increased steadily through December, but plateaued to a steady rate of articles per day by the first week of January. Content analysis revealed significant discrepancies between various media reports. From the 57 articles which discussed opinions about the victim, 56% applauded her bravery, 40% discussed outrage over the events and 11% discussed cases of victim-blaming.ConclusionsThe global media response of the December 16th gang-rape in India resulted in highly inconsistent depiction of the events. These findings suggest that although the spread of information through media is fast, it has major limitations.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Phillips et al.; licensee BioMed Central. 2015. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.