News Media and Violence against Women: Understanding Framings of Stigma

Abstract

Discussions of Violence Against Women (VAW) in publicly accessible forums like online news media can influence the perceptions of people and organizations. Language reinforcing stigma around VAW can result in negative consequences such as unethical representation of survivors and trivialization of the act of violence. In this work, we study the presence of stigmatized framings in news media and how it differs based on media attributes like regionality, political leaning, veracity, and latent communities of news sources. We also investigate the interactions between VAW-based stigma and 14 issue-generic policies used to describe political communications. We found that articles from national, right-leaning, and conspiratorial news sources contain more stigma compared to their counterparts. Furthermore, alignment of articles to the issue-generic policies offers the highest explanation for the presence of stigma in news articles. We discuss implications for institutions to improve safe reporting guidelines on VAW.