Framing Of Violence Research Articles

Postgenocide and decolonizing approaches to peace education in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT This article addresses the intersection of genocide studies, climate change, and peace education. It does so by examining the state of these connections, and proposes a fresh concept for considering the entanglements of contemporary violence in the Anthropocene. A notion of postgenocide sees the elements of geopolitical order, warlordism, climate change and resource exploitation. Postgenocide is an approach to mass violence occurring beyond the usual framing of state violence and intent. It aims to enrich the ongoing decolonization of peace education, as well as empower peace educators in conveying these often-complex relations in a violence-prone and climate changing world. Thinking outside of legal constraints of genocide or emotive fuzziness of climate change, educators can broaden their appeals and promote decolonized thinking of how violence works, its agents, and who it impacts in the Anthropocene. Postgenocide offers a transformative research and praxis link frame beyond globalizing Holocaust education as a stand-in for human rights education. Peace educators can leverage global concepts like postgenocide to cut through and examine the complexity of such entanglements.

No Time for Justice? Obstetric Violence, Damages Claims and Prescription Periods in South African Law

Obstetric violence is currently not acknowledged as a form of gender-based violence in South African law. In this article I deal with the various issues associated with this failure to correctly categorise obstetric violence. One of the issues relates to access to legal recourse for survivors through delictual claims (torts). Delictual claims are wrongful acts or limitations of rights that can lead to legal liability in the form of monetary compensation. The current framing of obstetric violence as medical malpractice limits women's time to launch a case to only three years after the violation. To show how this issue of prescription (a legal principle where an outstanding debt can be extinguished after a prescribed time period) plays out, I focus on the 2020 report by the South African Commission for Gender Equality (CGE) on the forced or coerced sterilisation of women living with HIV at state healthcare facilities. I also examine the current case of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS), a university-based human rights law clinic, which represents over 40 women who have experienced different forms of obstetric violence at state-run facilities. In both of these examples, I explain how justice through legal recourse is denied to these victims or survivors through the mischaracterisation of obstetric violence as medical malpractice in current South African law. To show that the three-year ‘limit’ or prescription period to institute a legal claim is unjustifiable, I explore three reasons why women may not choose to or be able to proceed with a legal claim within that time period. The first of these relates to the ‘personal’ barrier women face around acknowledging they have experienced obstetric violence and bringing a claim against the state. The second, the ‘political’ barrier, includes the general and prevalent systemic gender discrimination experienced by women in South Africa and the specific barriers women face around access to dignified treatment in the country's public healthcare system. Finally, an ‘economic’ barrier is the general inaccessibility of legal representation for economically disadvantaged people in the country. Proceeding from the above, I then argue that by acknowledging obstetric violence as a form of gender-based violence and aligning it with legislation around prescription periods for other forms of gender-based violence (such as sexual offences), the burdens related to access to justice (at least in delict) can be lightened for survivors.

Bureaucratic and benign? The violent continuum of Home Office reporting in the UK

The border, the body, immigration reporting centres, and detention facilities, the violence of border regimes operates across these sites through a continuum, successively steering migrants towards subjugation, destitution and removal. Adopting a feminist framing of violence, which attends to the inherent interconnectedness between different sites and scales of violence, this paper focuses on immigration reporting to examine how its sites and practices enact various forms of violence over migrant bodies. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with asylum-seekers in Bristol and Salford, I argue that a host of spatiotemporal practices produce various forms of violence which become intimately inflicted and experienced, and yet which are inextricably tethered to the foundational logics of sovereign state politics. How reporting sites and processes function reflect the contemporary means through which violence is both imposed and concealed on those who have been categorised as ‘unwanted’ by the state.

The framing of contemporary violence policy in England and Wales: An examination of the contributing roles of alcohol and illegal drugs.

Background: In 2018, the UK Government published its Serious Violence Strategy setting out the Government's commitment to adopting a public health approach to 'serious violence' in England and Wales and encouraging a multi-agency, whole system public health approach to violence prevention. There has been very little research attention and commentary on the roles of alcohol and illegal drugs in the construction of "serious violence" within the Strategy. Method: Drawing on thematic analysis of key policy documents, the ways in which drugs and alcohol have been conceptualised in recent violence policy in the English and Welsh context are explored through the analytical framework of "framing". Results: The overwhelming emphasis on violence associated with the drugs market has skewed attention towards exceptional and sensationalist forms of "serious" violence and diverted it from more common and widespread forms of "everyday" violence, including domestic and alcohol-related violence. Omitting these from the policy purview has implications for those affected and how resources are allocated. Conclusion: To advance inclusive and holistic violence prevention, a wider framing of violence is required and both illegal drugs and alcohol need to be embedded for meaningful working across populations and organisational boundaries.

Men’s Violence against Women as Portrayed in the Swedish Media: The Construction of Victimhood and the Role of the Perpetrator

Men’s violence against women is an international problem and while global and national initiatives have been created to better the criminalization process, the influence of news reporting on violence against women has not been successfully addressed in such policy. The aim of this study is to contribute to understanding how media frames violence against women in the Swedish context, which is both highly protective of crime reporting and where violence against women is a central policy and public discussion issue. A mixed methods approach was used in the analysis of 295 digital news articles that were published by four media outlets (Aftonbladet, Expressen, Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter) within the period January 1st, 2019–December 31st, 2021. The study found that digital news articles first frame the issue of violence against women as episodic, but later transform into a thematic frame when follow-up articles were written on a given case. The study found a construction of victimhood by Swedish news media that allowed for two victim personas to be identified: the ideal victim and the ideal minority victim. In connection with the portrayal of the victim, the study also identified two different portrayals of the perpetrator: the ideal foreign perpetrator and the Swedish perpetrator. Both the description of the victim and perpetrator allowed for insights to be made regarding the role of racialization in news reporting and how this effects the framing of social issues. Finally, the study presented a set of news values that were most frequently found in articles that reveal several news factors of violence against women that contribute to the topic being seen as newsworthy.

Public health framing of firearm violence on local television news in Philadelphia, PA, USA: a quantitative content analysis

BackgroundFirearm violence is an intensifying public health problem in the United States. News reports shape the way the public and policy makers understand and respond to health threats, including firearm violence. To better understand how firearm violence is communicated to the public, we aimed to determine the extent to which firearm violence is framed as a public health problem on television news and to measure harmful news content as identified by firearm-injured people.MethodsThis is a quantitative content analysis of Philadelphia local television news stories about firearm violence using a database of 7,497 clips. We compiled a stratified sample of clips aired on two randomly selected days/month from January-June 2021 from the database (n = 192 clips). We created a codebook to measure public health frame elements and to assign a harmful content score for each story and then coded the clips. Characteristics of stories containing episodic frames that focus on single shooting events were compared to clips with thematic frames that include broader social context for violence.ResultsMost clips employed episodic frames (79.2%), presented law enforcement officials as primary narrators (50.5%), and included police imagery (79.2%). A total of 433 firearm-injured people were mentioned, with a mean of 2.8 individuals shot included in each story. Most of the firearm-injured people featured in the clips (67.4%) had no personal information presented apart from age and/or gender. The majority of clips (84.4%) contained at least one harmful content element. The mean harmful content score/clip was 2.6. Public health frame elements, including epidemiologic context, root causes, public health narrators and visuals, and solutions were missing from most clips. Thematic stories contained significantly more public health frame elements and less harmful content compared to episodic stories.ConclusionsLocal television news produces limited public health coverage of firearm violence, and harmful content is common. This reporting likely compounds trauma experienced by firearm-injured people and could impede support for effective public health responses to firearm violence. Journalists should work to minimize harmful news content and adopt a public health approach to reporting on firearm violence.

Violent incongruencies: Analyzing The New York Times’s discourse on George Floyd demonstrations and the Capitol riot

American news media outlets have a storied past of delegitimizing protest movements, particularly through violence. However, recent literature has suggested news media outlets in America are slowly beginning to pull away from this trend. Moreover, recent protest history has several memorable examples of this attempted course correction, such as CNN’s viral ‘fiery but mostly peaceful’ headline during the demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd. Along with this series of protest demonstrations, one of the most historically significant demonstrations of protest in the 2020s was the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021. This study utilized a discourse analysis methodology to explore textual and visual framing incongruencies of participant violence in The New York Times’s coverage of these historic demonstrations. Findings point to a consistent visual and textual framing of violence within the NYT’s coverage of George Floyd Demonstrations, but not within its coverage of the Capitol riot. Possible discrepancies in participant labeling were also observed.

Moving beyond masculine defensiveness and anxiety in the classroom: exploring gendered responses to sexual and gender based violence workshops in England and Ireland

ABSTRACT Increasing rates of gender-based and sexual abuse, coupled with a rise in misogynistic influencers online, have become a growing issue in UK and Irish schools. This paper reports on the findings of a postlockdown study in England and Ireland that piloted workshops on gender-based and sexual violence. While most student responses were positive, we found that roughly 10% of girls and 20% of boys were resistant. In this paper, we explore these critical responses, focusing specifically on male resistance. Our findings indicate that new strategies, which avoid the concept of ‘toxic masculinity’, are needed to help boys move from defensive to empathetic engagements. We also find that the neoliberal, meritocratic ethos of many schools has fostered a problematic framing of gender-based violence as genderneutral. We conclude that it is vital to adopt an intersectional, whole-school approach to educating about sexual violence, which acknowledges male victimhood, while also emphasizing gendered privileges.

"Teen Fled Danger into the Arms of Death": The Political Agenda Setting Effect of Australian News Media Framing of Violence Against Women.

News framing of violence against women (VAW) has important implications for public understanding of this epidemic problem in Australian society, and in turn, politicians' impetus to act. This article uses a frame-building model to analyze media reporting of three cases of VAW. The murder of Eurydice Dixon, who was killed by a stranger, was framed thematically and received substantial media attention. Conversely, Larissa Beilby and Qi Yu, who were killed in incidents of domestic violence (DV), were framed episodically and received less coverage. The impact of this differential media attention is compared to public and political responses to theorize that thematic frames create a larger political agenda-setting effect, despite DV presenting a larger societal problem than stranger violence.

Episodic versus thematic media framing of violence against social leaders and human rights defenders in Colombia.

Social leaders and human rights defenders (SLHRD) in Colombia have been under increasing attack for defending the rights of communities affected by violence. From 2016 to 2022, over 600 SLHRD were assassinated, resulting in a serious violation of both individual and community human rights. The media's portrayal of these attacks can shape public perceptions and influence efforts towards peacebuilding and promoting human rights. This study examines the media's framing of violence against SLHRD in Colombia between 2016 and 2020, a period marked by an escalation of violence after the signing of the 2016 peace accord between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). We analysed 1506 textual publications from seven media outlets using a lexicometric approach and identified two frames of news articles: episodic and thematic. Our findings suggest that the episodic media framing may present a simplistic and non-political perspective of the issue, which can impede peacebuilding efforts, while the thematic frame can raise awareness of violence against SLHRD and promote human rights defence. Our study highlights the media's significant role in shaping public opinion on violence against SLHRD, offering practical implications for advocacy and activism.

Stochastic terrorism: critical reflections on an emerging concept

ABSTRACT This paper critically discusses the recent concept, stochastic terrorism – broadly, the idea that influential individuals may demonise target groups or individuals, inspiring unknown actors to take up terroristic violence against them. I collect together different strains of thought on the emerging concept, reflecting critically on what a suitable definition of the phenomenon would look like (or whether it would be needed), what the social urge to coin the concept may reveal about authoritarian power and violence, and what makes this form of political violence possible. I argue that present commentary fails to emphasise sufficiently the role of mistruth and deceit in such rhetoric, as well as its historical and mainstream precedents. Moreover, I understand the phenomenon to be specifically authoritarian in nature, which not only demonises but dehumanises its targets. In light of this, I suggest that given both the mainstreaming of racist conspiracy theory and the historical and continuing presence of centrally constructed “folk devils”, the authoritarian problem which can manifest into stochastic violence is very much endemic to modern liberal democracies. With this framing of stochastic violence in mind, we ignore it simply as a buzzword at our peril: even if the theoretical issues I have highlighted continue to persist, even if we struggle to pin down the concept with desired clarity – it bears a phenomenological significance and reflects an ongoing political structure of violence.

“Just something that happened?”: Mental health impact of disclosure and framing of sexual violence in older victims

AbstractIntroductionDespite the important impact of sexual violence (SV) on mental health, few victims disclose their experiences. Although research in adult victims suggests that SV disclosure could protect against long‐term mental health problems, studies in older adults are lacking.ObjectivesTo establish the prevalence of depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), suicide attempts, and self‐harm, their association with SV disclosure, and the moderating effect of sociodemographic characteristics and SV framing in the relation between SV disclosure and the different mental health outcomes in older SV victims.MethodsData on sexual victimisation, mental health, SV framing, and disclosure were collected through structured face‐to‐face interviews with 171 randomly selected sexually victimised adults of 70 years and older living in Belgium. SV was measured using behaviourally specific questions based on a broad definition. Mental health outcomes were measured using validated scales.ResultsDepression, anxiety and PTSD were reported by 34%, 33% and 9% of participants respectively, 5% had attempted suicide and 1% reported self‐harm during lifetime. SV framing was associated with the kind of help victims consulted. SV disclosure was not linked with depression and anxiety, but was associated with an increase of PTSD symptoms in older victims with care dependency (p = 0.004) or a chronic illness and/or disability (p = 0.025).ConclusionsSV disclosure in itself does not protect against adverse mental health outcomes in old age. Capacity building of professionals trough training and development of clinical guidelines and care procedures may increase appropriate response to SV disclosure by older victims.

A Mixed-Method Analysis of the News Media Framing of Gender Non-Conforming Victims of Homicide in the U.S. from 2012 to 2022

Recent analyses of transgender homicide victims find that the news media often uses improper terminology, delegitimizes, and victim blames them. These analyses, while insightful, are limited as they have largely analyzed cases involving trans women and trans feminine individuals. The present study employs a mixed-method approach to analyze news media articles (N = 88) published in U.S. online news media outlets about 17 gender non-conforming victims killed between 2012 and 2022. We found that most articles did not delegitimize or victim blame. However, we find (1) victim blaming occurred when reporting on cases of officer-involved shootings, (2) certain victims receive more coverage and support, (3) confusion about terminology when discussing the gender of victims, and (4) episodic framing of transphobic violence. Implications and potential areas of research and practice are provided to address, challenge, increase, and improve news media reporting of these victims.

Jamaica’s transnational violence: when geography matters the most

ABSTRACT This article argues that effective policy initiatives aimed at reducing crime and violence require a focus on the global political economy of violence. It applies an exploratory research design using perception indices, crime statistical data, and newspaper articles to analyse the concept and application of violence in the Jamaican context. The study concludes that state and criminal non-state actors frame violence differently. The continued transformation of violence from a political act to a strategic economic tool requires closer inspection of violence as a product component in a global market, where geography influences trade, investments and economic activities.

Gender and Genre in Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette

This article argues that Hannah Gadsby’s 2018 Netflix stand-up special Nanette bundles a critique of the comedy industry and of gendered violence through genre transformations that expand the public sphere for survivor testimony. Though Gadsby was not the first to broach these topics in a public forum, she did so at a moment when audiences were primed to be newly receptive. While there was predictably some backlash from audience members who maintained that the special should not be considered comedy, there was also a fierce outpouring of enthusiasm. Nanette became a text with which one could publicly identify (or dis-identify), particularly around the framing of sexual violence and trauma, reminding us that we need popular cultural touchstones through which to shift the conversation. It may also be symptomatic of a widening of the range of perspectives and subject positions with which mainstream audiences are willing to sympathize.

Black Women's Physical, Mental, and Sexual Health in the Criminal Legal System: Influences of Victimization, Healthcare Access, and Living Conditions

This study examines pathways from gender-based, racialized violence to health outcomes among formerly incarcerated Black women. We frame violence as gender-based and racialized, with a theoretical stance that we live in a male-dominated society characterized by historic and contemporary race-based oppression. This secondary analysis focused on a subsample of Black women ( N = 288) from three U.S. cities (Oakland, CA; Kansas City, KS, MO; and Birmingham, AL) from March 2019 to June 2020 for the Tri-City Cervical Cancer Prevention Study among Women in the Justice System. Confirmatory factor analysis evaluated psychometric properties of hypothesized latent variables—violence victimization, living conditions, and healthcare access—and their observed indicators. Structural equation modeling estimated their relationships with physical, mental, and sexual health, controlling for sampling location. Violence victimization was associated with mental (β = 0.37, p = .000) and sexual health concerns (β = 0.31, p = .000). Healthcare access was associated with physical health concerns (β = 0.45 , p = .004). Although there were no direct relationships between living conditions and health concerns, mediation analysis indicated worse living conditions were associated with more violence victimization and less healthcare access, with violence victimization fully mediating a relationship with mental and physical health concerns. Regarding control variables, women in Kansas City reported more sexual health concerns (β = 0.19, p = .005). Findings have important implications for treatment and care for Black women with incarceration and violence victimization histories.

Explaining Anti-Asian Xenophobia to Chinese Audience: Coverage of Hate Incidents During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the PRC Press

This article explores the Chinese media coverage of anti-Asian hate incidents in the USA during the COVID-19 pandemic. It sheds light on how xenophobia against Asians has been presented and discussed in the PRC press. Qualitative thematic analysis is used to identify key themes in the coverage of anti-Asian hate incidents in the two CCP-controlled newspapers: People’s Daily and Global Times. This article demonstrates that hate crimes against Asian Americans, an undoubtedly severe and complex problem for US society and politics, provide CCP-controlled media with a convenient opportunity to criticise the Other and focus on issues important to China’s identity. While blaming the discriminatory attitude in the USA towards Asians, the Chinese newspapers also use racialised stereotyping of Asian Americans as a ‘model minority’ and support the idea of Asians being alien to the USA. Remarkably, the Chinese media rarely devote special attention to victims of Chinese origin. Our observations contradict some earlier findings about discursive and reporting practices used in Chinese newspapers, that is, framing of violence and protests and selection of news sources, and showcase that these practices are pretty flexible and can adapt to better fit the particular context.

Framing Revolution: Multiframe News Themes in Lebanon’s October 2019 Uprising

This study examines news framing of partisan media during uprisings. Through mixed methods, it studies the framing of Lebanon’s October 2019 protests, compares frames across political divides, and interprets story themes based on associations between multiple frames. First, the qualitative media framing analysis (MFA) inductively interprets issue-specific frames. Then, the quantitative content analysis deductively examines the developed issue-specific frames and the generic frames across five partisan news channels and tests the relationship between them and across the pro- and anti-protests media. Finally, multiple associated frames are grouped together into news story themes. Results from the MFA reveal six frames: solidarity, head-to-head, individualization, acknowledgment, disruption, and peace through violence frames. The study detected the frequent deployment of the solidarity, conflict, and acknowledgment frames and a significant framing difference between pro- and anti-protest channels. Pro-protest channels more often deployed the solidarity frame, while anti-protest channels more frequently used the conflict, acknowledgment, disruption, and economic consequence frames. Finally, the study developed four story themes based on associations between frames: Blame the protestors or the politicians; protestor violence begets government violence; divided they suffer; and politicians may not only be the culprits but also the solution. The resulting multiframe news themes offer nuanced meaning to generic frames that frequently appear with issue-specific frames and highlight the different roles a singular news frame can play when combined with other frames.

Representations of Violence, Representations as Violence: When the News Reports on Homicides of Disabled People

Ableist necropolitics can be seen no more starkly than in news portrayals of the murders of disabled people by family or caregivers. When such murders are reported in the news, disabled people as full subjects fade away, portrayed as objects of care and suffering; their murders are routinely presented as an understandable if tragic response by ‘overwhelmed’ carers. This article examines Australian news reporting on four cases of family murder–suicide involving disabled victims to explore news framings of violence as violence. We situate these representations within a spectrum of connected and overlapping ableist violence and conceptualise the harms they can produce and sanction. We argue that news portrayals of homicides involving disabled victims not only are frequently ableist and legitimising but also constitute a form of ableist epistemic violence that scaffolds ontological, structural and direct violence against disabled people.

‘Knowing’ Palestinian Women: Interrogating Western International Feminist Assumptions, Governance, and Social Science Discourses

This paper traces Palestinian women’s political mobilization for social change emphasizing historical and contemporary involvements in national struggles against colonial occupation and patriarchal oppression. Second, critical Middle Eastern feminists’ analyses, through their attunement to gendered orientalism, unmask a troubling pattern of culturizing categories of violence against women (VAW) within global feminist and human rights discourses. In particular, culturized framings of gender-based violence in the lives of Palestinian women ignores the multiple sources of violence and power of settler colonialism as ongoing everyday realities. Third, I share how social science instruments like the Conflicts Tactics Scale (CTS), criticized by US gender scholars, is widely used as a measure of VAW in the global South. By overestimating interpersonal gender-based violence among Palestinian women, Global feminist discourse and the otherness of women outside the West continue to reciprocally constitute each other. Thus covertlsolidifying global feminist discourse universalistic assumptions in scientific and objective forms.