Media Coverage of Violence Against Women

Last Friday, a New Zealand jury returned a guilty verdict in the Grace Millane murder trial. The 21-year-old British woman was killed by a 26-year-old man in his Auckland apartment in December 2018.

The high-profile trial drew criticism for its attention to Millane’s sexual history and its attempt to argue that she had consented to the violent act that caused her death.

I attended the trial and argue that bold misunderstandings about gender, power, sex, and violence were allowed to shape a defence case in ways that disrespected Millane, likely harmed courtroom witnesses and may have come close to thwarting justice.

The murder trial for Grace Millane’s killer poignantly demonstrated it is still possible to question a woman’s behaviour without understanding the specifically gendered nature of violence against women. I observed many ways this happened, as defence lawyers crafted a case that was heavy on the myth of egalitarian sexual adventure and light on the reality of gendered power that still shapes the contemporary heterosexual landscape.

Contrary to the picture they painted, study after study shows that both young men and young women still expect that men will pressure women to have sex when they don’t want it, and to engage in sexual acts they are not keen on.

Failing to understand these dynamics of men’s violence against women makes the path to courtroom justice unnecessarily rocky. It makes it potentially traumatic for surviving women who take the witness stand, and in a high profile case like this it feeds into social attitudes that misrepresent and minimise gendered violence.

A month before he killed Grace Millane, the man convicted of her murder non-fatally suffocated another woman. With his knees on the side of the bed, facing her feet, he pinned down her forearms with all his weight and sat on her face with so much force that she could not breathe. She was terrified she was going to die.

This woman was cross-examined relentlessly by the defence lawyer, who dissected her behaviour during and immediately after the attack, and in the month afterwards. He told her she had “exaggerated” what happened and asked her repeatedly why she did not leave earlier. He interrogated her about why she maintained regular text message contact with him over the following month.

The woman on the witness stand was impressive, articulate and bold. At one point, after being told yet again that she was not a reliable witness to her own experience, she told the lawyer, “You can’t minimise what happened to me. It happened.”

As the lawyer persevered with this line of questioning, it became clear just how little he understood about the dynamics of men’s violence against women. He judged her experience from his own masculine point of view, perhaps imagining what he would have done in that situation.

He failed to understand how threat manifests differently for a woman who has been violently assaulted by a man. He appeared not to comprehend that a woman might behave differently in assessing danger, safety and risk.

As this woman pointed out through her evidence, the defendant knew a lot about her and her movements. She knew he would be able to find her, and she worried that if she cut him off cold he would show up in her life. As a New Zealand Law Commission report notes, strangulation or suffocation “is a uniquely effective form of intimidation, coercion and control”, as it demonstrates “he can kill”.

Encountering a violent man on a Tinder date is a modern form of risk. We need to better understand what survival skills would look like in that particular kind of relationship, formed in isolation from off-line social networks and through communication technologies that can leave a person exposed through the trails of their online activity.

As this woman later worked to placate the man who attacked her, keeping him at a safe distance, while managing to avoid him in person, she was able to diffuse or delay the risk of him stalking her or turning up in person. These actions make perfect sense as a modern form of self-defence for our technology-mediated social world.

What other choices did she have? Keeping in mind that, as we now know, she had accurately assessed the defendant as a tinderbox man, prone to unpredictable, explosive, and as it turned out deadly, violence.

Moving forward, we have the opportunity to learn from this case and work for improvements. Many voices are calling for a rethink of the rules of evidence that place no limits on publicly airing deeply personal private information about the victim in a murder trial.

We also need to insist that lawyers and judges get up to date with the current state of knowledge about the nature and impact of men’s violence against women.

While defence lawyers have a duty to zealously defend their clients’ legal rights, we must debate the ethical questions about how far that can reasonably be pushed, and at what cost to justice for innocent and victimised others.

Grace Millane’s Murder Trial Shows Social Attitudes Continue to Minimise Gendered Violence. By Nicola Garvey. The Conversation , November 27, 2019.

In the first 48 hours after the guilty verdict in the Grace Millane murder case, Fiona Mackenzie received 50 interview requests from the media in the UK, US and New Zealand. In the previous week, as Millane’s killer claimed she had died in a “sex game gone wrong”, Mackenzie, founder of We Can’t Consent to This, which campaigns against the “rough sex” defence, had managed to recruit a voluntary press officer to help with the deluge. Between them, they had juggled BBC Breakfast, ITN, Sky, Channel 5, local TV and radio stations, with Mackenzie also covering her full-time corporate job as an actuary.

“My employers have been very accommodating,” she says. “I’m still claiming that this doesn’t take up much time – though I’ve had to give up computer games and reading novels.” She’s not complaining about the extra work. “For the first half of this year, it was a real struggle to get much interest at all. I think the Grace Millane murder has really changed things.”

It wasn’t just the murder that has sparked rage – though the details are horrifying. Millane was a British graduate who arrived in New Zealand on a round-the-world trip; she agreed to a date with someone she matched with on the dating app Tinder, then was strangled. Later she was contorted into a suitcase and buried in the woods – though not before her killer had photographed her naked body, watched some porn and gone on another date. Despite these horrifying facts, the trial focused on Millane herself, her sexual history and use of dating apps like Tinder and Whiplr, shifting responsibility away from the murderer and on to the victim.

Newspapers ran headlines such as “Naïve and trusting”, “Strangled tourist liked being choked” and “Grace Millane ‘encouraged date to choke her during sex and apply more force’”. “After the murder, the trial and the way it was reported,” says Mackenzie, “I think there’s a new understanding of the ‘rough sex’ defence and a level of anger that wasn’t there before.”

What Mackenzie calls the “rough sex” defence is the claim in murder cases that the victim consented to violent sex, which led to their death.

Mackenzie launched We Can’t Consent to This last December, building the website over Christmas. “To be honest,” she says, “I’d gone on holiday on my own and was quite bored.” She was soon joined by a handful of volunteers – an old school friend, some fellow Lib Dem campaigners and some women she had met on Mumsnet: “I don’t have children but had originally gone on looking for running tips and found an incredible group of feminists.”

The trigger for Mackenzie was the case of Natalie Connolly who was brutally killed in December 2016 by John Broadhurst. Broadhurst, her partner of a few months, left the 26-year-old bleeding to death at the bottom of the stairs in the home they shared with her eight-year-old daughter. Connolly suffered multiple blunt-force injuries but Broadhurst claimed it was the result of “rough sex”, and was found guilty of manslaughter. He was sentenced to three years, eight months. Earlier this month, he appealed to have his jail time cut but was unsuccessful. “Some people raged against the verdict but in the main, there seemed to be astonishing levels of acceptance,” says Mackenzie. “People somehow believed it, saw it as a weird one-off and thought the victim must be to blame for the riskiness of her behaviour.”

For Mackenzie, this stirred difficult memories of a case that took place near Aberdeen, where she was at university studying maths, in 2000. The body of Mandy Barclay, a 32-year-old mother of two, had been found in the local woods. She had died of asphyxia and severe rectal injuries, and her husband, Niall McDonald, was charged with murder. In court, the defence claimed that Barclay had died while practising the kind of sex “that narrow-minded people would call kinky”. As a student, Mackenzie followed the details offered up by McDonald (whip, French maid outfit, rooftop sex) and when he was found guilty of the lesser charge of culpable homicide and sentenced to seven years, Mackenzie admits that she believed on some level the victim was somehow culpable.

“With the Broadhurst trial, I felt people were reacting the way I had,” she says. “I wondered how many other cases there were and wanted to bring them together to show they weren’t isolated incidents.”

This wasn’t easy. There are no official statistics. Cases aren’t collected or categorised under the defence, so Mackenzie has trawled through media reports and legal archives to find them. By the end of that first Christmas holiday, she had 35. She is now aware of 59, although the true figure is probably higher – and doesn’t include the vast number of non-fatal alleged assaults in which “rough sex” was argued as a defence. The homicides listed on We Can’t Consent to This stretch back to 1972, each one a terrible testament to lessons not learned. “Though pleading consent has no status in English law, juries seem to accept it,” says Mackenzie. “We’ve found that it has resulted in a lesser charge, lighter sentence, or acquittals in 45% of the cases.”

In 1979, to pick one example, 19-year-old Vivien Scott was strangled by 21-year-old DJ John Dudgeon (aka John Taylor) in what he claimed was “slap and tickle”. Dudgeon’s defence argued that his “one mistake” had been not seeking help immediately. He was found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to four years. After serving just 17 months he was out, and attempted to rape and murder a woman in her home. When released a second time, he murdered 32-year-old Susan McNamara.

In another case from 1991, Stuart Williamson received a three-year sentence for the manslaughter of his girlfriend Honor Matthews, 20. Despite his previous convictions for violence, his defence claimed that the “deeply attached” couple had been engaged in “pseudo-masochistic’ ‘neck compression” aimed at “giving pleasure”. After his release, Williamson abused his new partner and killed his mother.

One of the earliest recorded “rough sex” defences took place in 1961 and even this carries overtones of the Grace Millane murder. It took place in Kenya and involved a man called Sharmpal Shikh who claimed his pregnant wife Ajeet had been killed during a “sexual embrace” – she had died from internal injuries to the neck and chest. He had then embarked on an elaborate deception, taking Ajeet’s body to the courtyard and stabbing her to make it resemble a robbery. As in the Millane case, the prosecution argued that the behaviour after the killing was the action of a murderer, while the defence countered that it was done in fear, shock and panic. Shikh was believed and the verdict was manslaughter. Rather like Broadhurst, he made an unsuccesful appeal to be acquitted of this.

Seeing parallels and repeats through the decades, it’s clear that the “rough sex” defence often sits within a long history of blaming women for their own killings, of looking away from perpetrators to see how victims brought it on themselves. Claiming they actually consented is the logical endpoint.

Hallie Rubenhold, social historian and author of The Five, the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper, has no doubt there’s a pattern here that has been going on for centuries. In her book, which last week won the Baillie Gifford prize, Rubenhold re-examines the lives of the ripper’s victims. She finds no credible evidence that three had ever worked as prostitutes, but shows instead how all, born female and working class, lived and died with the cards stacked against them.

The press coverage at the time was often wildly inaccurate, and the entire mythology around “ripperology” since has painted the victims as vulnerable prostitutes, faceless “fallen women” who lived recklessly. After one of the murders, a letter to the Times from a senior civil servant even thanked the “unknown surgical genius” for clearing the East End of its “vicious inhabitants”.

“What it came down to, just as it did with Grace Millane, is victim-blaming,” says Rubenhold. “It’s so deeply ingrained, it’s almost in society’s DNA. Instead of looking at what happened and why, we’re geared to look at the women instead. Just as rape victims are asked about their sexual history, what they were wearing, what they had been drinking, the knee-jerk reaction with Grace Millane was, ‘Oh well, she was far away, on Tinder, looking for a hook-up – what kind of woman does that?’ The whole point is it doesn’t matter. They don’t deserve to die.”

Why, finally, are we waking up? Mackenzie believes it is partly the rising tide of cases. There has been a 90 per cent increase in the last decade.

More than this, though, is the growing sense among women that this could happen to them – we might all be one “bad date”, one “Tinder match” away from dying like this. While the Millane trial was dominated by male voices – the judge, defence, prosecution, former boyfriend – the fury on social media came from women. A typical tweet with the #gracemillane hashtag read: “If I’m ever murdered by someone I’m having sex with, I’d like it on record that I will not have consented to being choked so hard that I DIE.”

In the last fortnight, Mackenzie has added an “our stories” section to her site with women sharing their own experiences of assault and “rough sex”. Over 100 have contributed. One describes falling in love with an “educated, gentle, kind professional gent” who could only climax with his hands round her neck. Another only managed to free herself from a choke-hold by hitting the man with a lamp: “He was really upset – had thought we were having ‘great sex’,” she writes.

Change is coming, however. The MP Harriet Harman is confident that her two amendments to the domestic abuse bill – designed to reinforce the fact that consent can be no defence for death – will be seen through in the new year, despite the unlawful suspension of parliament in September and the election causing frustrating delays.

Meanwhile, Mackenzie is chasing the Crown Prosecution Service to properly log and track these cases and enforce Harman’s amendments when they are passed. “Changing the law is the easy bit,” she says. “The hard part is making sure it works in practice. I also want to keep raising awareness and pushing for policy responses to the appalling normalisation of unbidden violence against women during sex.” Next year, she thinks she will formalise her campaign with official charitable status, because relying on a handful of volunteers is becoming tricky. “I’m not a professional campaigner,” she says. “I’m learning as I go.” How does it feel to know people are now listening? “I’m just really relieved,” she replies.

This article was amended on 28 November 2019 to remove an incorrect assertion that the founder of We Can’t Consent to This uncovered “two so-called ‘rough sex’ killings from 1996. A decade on, she has found 20 a year.'” Those figures related to cases involving deaths and injuries to women, not just deaths, in 1996 and 2016.

'There's a New Level of Anger': the Women Fighting to End the 'Rough Sex' Defence. By Anna moore. The Guardian , November 27, 2019. 

WE CAN'T CONSENT TO THIS. website

The murder of Grace Millane in 2018 seized front pages of media outlets worldwide, with article after article fixated on details of her personal history. These details implied that the sexually violent nature of Millane’s death was somehow a product of her own actions, and this treatment is itself part of a much larger media trend in how violence against women is represented.

From the day that her family reported her missing on December 5 to the discovery of her body on December 9, media outlets reported unremittingly on the circumstances surrounding Millane’s disappearance, in a manner that should no longer be acceptable.

On November 4 2019, the trial began and the man charged with her death entered a “not guilty” plea. The media latched on to the trial, covering the defence’s attempt to form an alternative narrative that could throw doubt on just “what kind of girl” Millane had been.

They argued their client had not intended to kill Millane. Instead, he had simply followed her instructions and it was she who had initiated violent sex, as she was “a fan of 50 Shades of Grey” and had learned from an ex-partner.

From this moment, the media coverage of Millane’s murder trial focused almost exclusively on details of her sexual preferences, previous partners, and alleged proclivity for BDSM.

Headlines broadcasted interviews with Millane’s friends and ex-boyfriends who had been interrogated by the defence. Articles were preoccupied with her “kinky fetishes,” “other sexual partners” and described her as a “naive and trusting girl.”

By sensationalising Millane’s murder and directing focus towards her intimate preferences and not her killing, media outlets continue to contribute to and perpetuate societal attitudes of victim blaming.

Unfortunately, this kind of journalism isn’t new. It was seen in the coverage of the murder of Mary Nichols, the first victim of Jack the Ripper, more than 100 years ago. Papers included extensive descriptions of Nichols’ injuries – even mentioning that her body was “warm” when discovered - and focused upon her alleged prostitution and alcoholism. It continues to be seen today, as within a 2018 listicle of the most horrific Valentine’s Day crimes, almost all of which featured the murder of a woman by a male partner.

Journalistic efforts to responsibly cover stories of violence against women have unrelentingly failed. Sadly, profit is and always has been the solitary pursuit of any given news outlet, and cultural appetites for stories featuring details of violence against women are seemingly insatiable.

It is known that the media’s treatments of female victims of violence differs radically to male counterparts. For instance, research by Marian Meyers in 1996 demonstrated that women are more likely to be infantilised and referred to in articles by their first names (a journalistic practice predominantly reserved for pets and children).

Articles also rarely present violence against women as a systemic societal issue. Instead, the focus is largely episodic, which implies that violence against women occurs within individual situations, instead of as part of women’s everyday lives. Data published in 2018 by the Office for National Statistics found that the majority of victims are female, with about 560,000 female victims and 140,000 male victims in 2017.

As in the case of Millane, there is a tendency within the media to sensationalise and make abstract the bodies of abused, assaulted, and murdered women. These women are dehumanised by reporting that decontextualises them from their day-to-day lives as loving daughters, dedicated students, and loyal friends. This often means that they are remembered through the limited lens that the media places on them after death.

These women, who are physically and metaphorically voiceless, cannot defend themselves, and so myths around women who “ask for it” are subsequently upheld. By focusing on her sexual preferences, and the way in which she “naively” messaged men on fetish dating apps, articles surrounding Millane’s murder framed her as partially responsible for her own brutalisation.

The implicit journalistic messaging throughout the coverage of the trial was that “women should be more careful” as opposed to “men should not murder.” This is evident within headlines surrounding Millane’s murder which prioritise the defence’s argument that she encouraged her killer to apply more force and that her “ex-lover” knew she liked to be choked. This is also seen within the publication of photographs of her in supposedly “revealing” clothing alongside the suitcase her body was buried in.

It is also unmistakeable in the kind of linguistic model used to describe her murder. Instead of cultivating phrases that refer to the actions of the perpetrator who killed Millane, articles repeatedly use passive syntax to describe Millane as having “been killed”. By employing this kind of language, women themselves are consistently framed as inactive victims with no individualisation or agency. Continually, the focus of this kind of media coverage shifts the blame back to the victim, instead of the perpetrator.

Between 2000 and 2015, the number of articles concerning violence against women rose from 2,000 to 25,000. As the frequency of this kind of reporting has increased, groups have formed to highlight the injustice and indignity of this kind of coverage.

We Can’t Consent to This is a campaign striving to dispel myths around “the increasing numbers of women and girls killed in violence claimed to be consensual”. While We Level Up focuses on lobbying media for more responsible reporting of domestic abuse cases. Such cases often depict male perpetrators as the “perfect family men” despite their histories of violence and their crimes.

In fact, a 2015 study found that media outlets not only distort depictions of domestic violence cases, foregrounding the most provocative details, but are also more likely to report on female perpetrators of domestic violence. This is despite the fact that two women per week are murdered by male partners in the UK.

As women’s charity Our Watch states: newspapers focus on the method of the murder rather than histories of violence, as if it is “more important for readers to know how but not why men kill their partners”.

Despite arguing that her death was a “sex game gone wrong”, Millane’s murderer was found unanimously guilty on November 22 2019. As Brian Dickey, crown prosecutor for the trial, concluded: “You can’t consent to your own murder.”

These women also cannot consent to the ways in which their intimate histories are manipulated by press coverage. The inclusion of irrelevant details within stories of women who have been murdered by men preserves the idea that these women are not real people. Instead, it paints them as a composite of body parts designed to be ogled, and a series of private decisions designed to be scrutinised.

Women like Millane are wrongly immortalised by news outlets obsessed with sexualising and objectifying their every move even after death, while articles focused on male victims somehow manage to offer the deceased a relative degree of respect. The name of Millane’s killer was surpressed (some outlets have gone on to leak his name) while hers has been tarnished. This is wholly and unashamedly wrong. Millane deserved better, and the media must do better.

Grace Millane’s Trial Exposes a Dark Trend in Media Coverage of Violence Against Women.

By Daisy Richards. The Conversation , November  26, 2019. 

Violence against women is one of New Zealand’s most significant and pressing social issues. Every day police respond to hundreds of family violence incidents, and women continue to die as a result of men’s violence. In December 2018 New Zealand recognised the severity of a specific offence – strangulation – and implemented legislative reform to address its pervasiveness. Five arrests for strangulation were reported a day in February 2019 . I mention all of this because of the Grace Millane murder trial.

On 21 December 2018 she was strangled to death while visiting New Zealand. Her body was later found in a suitcase, buried, in the Waitakere ranges in Auckland. The man accused of her murder claimed her death was the result of consensual rough sex that had “gone wrong”. After a three-week trial, a jury of five men and seven women found him guilty of murder after less than six hours of deliberation.

While a guilty verdict has been established, this does not detract from the distressing nature of this murder trial – distressing for myriad reasons: distressing because a young woman lost her life in a country where she should have been safe; because it quickly became a trial about a young woman’s sexual history and interests instead of the actions of a violent man; because while the defence said Millane was not to blame for what happened that night, the case it built suggested she was somehow blameworthy.

Millane was violently murdered by a man who strangled her, took intimate photographs of her, lied to police and buried her in the bush. It is these actions that should have been the focus of the trial. Unfortunately his despicable actions seemed to get lost in a sea of interest in her sexual history. None of this should have happened because the issue this case is actually about is men’s violence against women. Women’s sexual histories have no place in a murder trial.

As the trial progressed, the world became privy to some of the most intimate aspects of Millane’s life in a way that no woman would ever wish to experience. There were many aspects that felt like a rape trial. In rape trials victims report feeling blamed and shamed for their experiences of trauma and violence due to gruelling cross-examinations by defence lawyers. Women’s sexual histories are carefully dissected in ways that allude to the type of woman she might be. Women are asked about the clothes they wore, who they had previously had sex with, and why they allowed themselves to get drunk.

The experience in a rape trial is so traumatic that some women report it feeling like a second rape. Is it any wonder that only a minority of sexual violence cases are reported to police, fewer result in charges, fewer again make it to court and a dismal number result in a conviction?

The same issues of blame, shame and harrowing cross-examinations were present in Millane’s murder trial. They should not have been. The defence’s cross-examination of a brave young woman who had previously had sex with Millane’s murderer was shocking. She was accused of being “melodramatic” and it was suggested she was making up her disclosure of his sexually violent behaviour. All of this was to discredit her evidence and to help shape a version of Millane’s murderer as a good guy who just “panicked”.

The treatment of Millane’s sexual life was just as disturbing. The defence heard evidence from Millane’s long-term ex-boyfriend, a previous sexual partner, and men she had connected with – but never met – on dating sites. Millane’s sexual history was dissected in public for everyone to see, but she had no ability to respond. The jury heard about Millane’s supposed interest in “rough sex” or BDSM. The jury was told about Millane’s presence on dating sites such as Tinder, Fetlife and Whiplr, as if to suggest her presence on the latter two was evidence of her rough-sex interests.

Millane’s sexual history, her dating life and her use of dating apps should not, and will not, be used against her. Whether Millane liked rough sex or not is irrelevant because nobody can consent to murder. The jury confirmed this in their delivery of a guilty verdict. Yet Millane’s sexual history remains deeply embedded in online and print media coverage, serving as a painful reminder of the problems involved in the “rough sex gone wrong” defence. While removing Millane’s digital footprint is now impossible, what we can ensure is we remember that women are not the ones responsible for violence they experience at the hands of men.

Women’s Sexual Histories Have No Place in a Murder Trial, as Grace Millane Case Shows. By Samantha Keene. The Guardian,  November 24, 2019. 

The winner of the UK’s most prestigious literary award for non-fiction has hit out at the media, singling out their “appalling” coverage of Anastasia Yeshchenko’s recent murder.

Hallie Rubenhold, who won the Baillie Gifford prize for her study of the women murdered by Jack the Ripper, said that today’s media continue to focus on murderers and the gory details of their crimes, disregarding their victims’ lives. “We can see this pattern occurring over and over again,” said Rubenhold.

Speaking the morning after her book The Five won the £50,000 award, the author suggested that the media were almost “going for the comical side” in their coverage of Yeshchenko’s killing in Russia.

“Here’s this crazy mad professor of Napoleonic studies who dresses like Napoleon, who was found wading in a frozen river in St Petersburg trying to dispose of a bag of body parts of his lover,” she said. “Then it goes on and on about who he is – I’m not even going to mention his name. I was literally just going through everything I could find in the English language press and I found nothing about her and I couldn’t believe it. I thought: ‘Here it is again, this is what’s happening again.’”

The historian said her next book would look at Dr Crippen’s notorious 1910 murder of his wife Cora from the latter’s point of view. “Especially with women, reports go in for the salacious angle – how was she carved up, how was she disposed of, how did he kill her?” she said. “What about: ‘Who was she? What effect did her death have on her family and her community?’ That’s a much more important story. We have to start asking those questions. At the moment we’re just following the narrative of the murderer; it’s a whodunnit rather than a whydunnit.”

In The Five, Rubenhold shows how, despite popular belief to the contrary, “there is no hard evidence to suggest that three of [the Ripper’s] five victims were prostitutes at all”. The chair of the Baillie Gifford judges, Stig Abell, hailed the book as a “great moral act, reclaiming the voices of these women”.

Rubenhold said her approach has led to a swathe of attacks on her and her book from people interested in the Ripper murders.

“In spite of the fact my book is footnoted,” she said, “in spite of the fact there are so many Victorianists and experts in the history of prostitution and women’s history who have read my book and said it absolutely stands up, there are a hardcore group … who say what I have done is to doctor documents … They say I lied, that I suppressed evidence, redacted evidence.”

People who are interested in the murders care about the women’s occupations, she explained, “because they have built their egos on the back of trying to figure out who Jack the Ripper was.”

“The one thing the Ripperology community can agree on among themselves is that he killed prostitutes,” she said. “I’m pulling a thread out of something and everything comes unravelled. In effect what I’m doing is saying Ripperology is unviable because we will never solve these murders … if you look at it from a historian’s point of view, there isn’t evidence.”

Rubenhold added that to have experts and academics validate her work with the prize felt like vindication, after so much abuse. “I’m sure [my critics] are going to be going absolutely mental when they find out,” she said.

Jack the Ripper Historian Says Media Still Disregard Murder Victims. By Alison Flood. The Guardian, November 20, 2019. 

Russian Historian Found with Body Parts Accused of Murder. By Sarah Rainsford. BBC, November 11, 2019.

In July 2013 a woman called Tracy Connelly was murdered in Melbourne. It made headlines in most of the national newspapers, all of which used some variation of the phrase “St Kilda prostitute killed”. The story dropped off the front page of every website within a day.

Less than a year before Tracy’s murder, another woman, Jill Meagher, was murdered. Remember Jill? How could we forget her? So young, so beautiful, so beloved, so normal. The reporting reached saturation with a gorgeous photo of her happy, smiling face. We saw footage of her poor, heartbroken husband and heard the shocked and trembling voices of her colleagues at the ABC. The coverage went on for weeks. It made her a real person to everyone who read about her murder.

But what about the “St Kilda prostitute”? Was she not just as much a person as Jill? Tracy Connelly was 40 years old when she was murdered. She lived just a few streets from my house. Tracy was real; she was a person, she had a community who valued her and a boyfriend who loved her. Why was she so dehumanised in the coverage of her murder?

The answer is, of course, all too obvious. She wasn’t a person, she was a “prostitute”. The reporting on the man who is charged with murdering Michaela Dunn mostly avoided the pejorative term “prostitute” and replaced it with “sex worker” but the dehumanising of another woman killed by a violent man showed nothing much has changed in seven years. News stories sensationalised the work both women did and ignored the parts of their lives that made them a person; the coverage of Jill Meagher’s murder, on the other hand, humanised her thoroughly.

The way the media chose to frame Tracy’s story, by constantly referring to her as a “prostitute”, suggested that in some way she deserved what happened to her. That she should have known better, and that she was asking for trouble by doing the work she did.

The opening lines of a story about her murder in the Age in July 2013 read:

   “Tracy Connelly had walked St Kilda’s red light district for at least a decade and knew her work was dangerous. In 2005, her minder was run over by a man who was angry that she refused to get in his car, Ms Connelly once told a court.”

What if, instead of “St Kilda prostitute brutally murdered”, the headline had been: “Tracy Connelly brutally murdered in her home”?

What if they’d led with a photogenic image of Tracy’s beautiful, pale, smiling face and this paragraph:

   “Tracy Connelly’s traumatised boyfriend discovered her body in their home yesterday afternoon. There was no sign of forced entry and police believe she may have been killed by someone she knew. Tearful friends talked about what a caring, loving person Tracy was, and how devastated their community is by this horrible crime.”

Would Tracy be a person to us then? Would she be so easily forgotten? Or would we have to wait until her killer, like Adrian Bayley, attacked a white, middle-class woman for the world to remember that a murdered woman is a person? That no person asks for or deserves murder, or any other form of attack. That blaming the victim is never acceptable, regardless of their profession, clothing, activities or housing circumstances.

Being a sex worker is dangerous. But it’s not as though sex workers are surrounded by dangerous chemicals or heavy machinery or wild animals. It’s dangerous because they are working with men. Their work makes them vulnerable to the sort of men who want to be violent to women who have little means of defending themselves. It’s not the people who do sex work who cause the danger. It’s the men who take advantage of their circumstances to commit violence. But the underlying assumption, that sex workers are responsible for the violence done to them, is reproduced and exacerbated by news media reports.

The media (both mainstream and social) are easy to blame because they are our only source of information about what happens in the wider world, beyond our immediate circle. The way they frame that information – the words they use, the level of coverage and importance given to a story, the type of details that might be emphasised or omitted – influences how we think of it. Jill Meagher, ABC staffer, was one of their own. They reported her death as the tragic event it was. Tracy was not one of their own – her life was very different from the vast majority of mainstream journalists’ lives – so she was reduced to a stereotype.

The simplicity of the Fixed It project, where I take a red pen to headlines, hadn’t occurred to me back then, but I wrote for the King’s Tribune about Tracy and how her murder had been portrayed in the media. The response was overwhelming. People in her community got in touch to tell me about the rage they felt seeing Tracy dehumanised by every newspaper in the country. Women from all over the world sent me headlines from their local news outlets, saying journalists turned murdered women into salacious, sensationalised clickbait. The most heartbreaking were the people who knew and loved a murdered woman, and had to watch as the media blamed her for her own murder and made excuses for the man who killed her.

“Why don’t journalists think women are people?” read the subject line of one email.

After Tracy’s murder and the contemptible way it was reported in the press, I started seeing it everywhere. Not just in crime reports but also in political reporting, sports reporting, even articles about musicians and artists. Women are not people in the eyes of the news, at least not the way men are. Women are tits and arse, they’re glamorous or fat, they’re wives or mothers or stupid or demanding or nagging or annoying or sweet or pretty. Men, on the other hand, are fully-rounded, complex people – as long as they’re not too “womanlike”.

After responding to the treatment of Tracy in the media, I continued writing articles and blogposts about it, but nothing ever really cut through. Then, in September 2015, one of the major news sites in Australia published an article about a man who murdered his ex-girlfriend under the headline: “Townsville police say selfie could have led to alleged stabbing murder”. I pulled out my phone, fixed the headline and snapped it back on Twitter. Fixed It was born.

Within a few months I was regularly scanning news sites and by the beginning of 2016 I had set up daily Google alerts for any news story about men’s violence against women. I was making the fixes on a daily basis and posting them on a website I had originally set up as a focal point for my freelance writing. Over the next two years Fixed It gained a strong social media following and I found myself regularly speaking at public events and writing articles about the way the media reports men’s violence against women. I incorporated it into my master’s degree and spent hundreds of hours researching the cause and effect of this kind of reporting. My book of the same name is the culmination of all that work.

There have been hundreds of headlines in Fixed It over that time. Drunk teenagers getting themselves raped, lying sex workers, houses committing rape, brooms beating women, loving fathers killing their children, Susan Sarandon being old in public, broken hearts causing murder, women too stupid to understand superannuation, Bill Clinton’s wife running for president, 40-year-old men in “sexual relationships” with 12-year-old girls, the prime minister of England’s legs, women too old to be hot while playing football, domestic violence “stunts”, “sex romps” killing MPs, countless invisible murderers and endless victim blaming.

In all that time, only one editor has ever got in touch to ask how they could write stories about women differently. Otherwise, journalists and editors don’t engage. And I understand. No one likes to be publicly smacked down, and it can be frustrating and humiliating to be accused of sexism or victim blaming – particularly if the journalists involved think I don’t understand the pressures they’re under or the legal restraints they must work within. This was certainly true in the early days of Fixed It. But now I have a much better understanding of and more sympathy for court reporters and editors of online news who have to do far too much with far too little. I also recognise the limitations of reporting on crimes that have not been through the court. You can’t call someone a rapist if he has not been convicted of rape.

But even taking into account these limitations, there are ways to rethink how we report such crimes. For example, you can (and should) call it an “alleged rape” instead of “sex”. The presumption of innocence does not prevent someone describing an alleged crime. No reporter would ever write that an accused car thief was driving their own car home because it hadn’t yet been proven in court that he stole it.

Sexual violence, however, appears to present reporters and editors with difficulties that don’t occur in any other criminal act. Far too often, alleged rape is reported as “sex”, which is not a crime. Rape is not sex and no one has ever been charged with having consensual sex. “Kris Kafoops faces court over sex claim” is as inaccurate in reporting on an alleged rape as “Kris Kafoops faces court over driving a car claim” would be in reporting on an alleged car theft.

The rules of sub judice contempt require that journalists cannot report someone is guilty of a crime before they are convicted, which is why the word “alleged” is so ubiquitous in crime reporting. This does not explain or excuse the way rape is so often described as sex, as if the words are interchangeable. They’re not. It happens because all the myths about violence are so deeply embedded in our culture, and further entrenched by journalism.

There was a vast difference in how Tracy Connelly and Jill Meagher were treated. Tracy was dehumanised, Jill was not, and this is not unique to Australia or even to modern reporting. For millennia, women have been divided into “good women” – wives and mothers, sweetly pretty, conservatively dressed nice girls – and “bad women” – sirens and sex workers, drug addicts, page three models and drunken, promiscuous sluts. Good women are helpless victims but bad women ask for trouble. The reality is that there is no type of woman who could conceivably deserve violence but this entrenched division of good and bad women still strongly influences how traditional media report on complex issues, and reduces women to these arbitrary categories.

Journalism needs more voices and more faces. It needs to widen its perception of the world and understand that women, people of colour, people with disabilities and people of different genders and sexualities are all news consumers. And they are not interested in news that ignores their existence or dismisses them as archaic stereotypes.

Rape is Not 'Sex', and 'Broken Hearts' don't Cause Murder. Women are Dying – and Language Matters. By Jane Gilmore. The Guardian, August 31, 2019.

Fixed It : Fixing media reports of male violence against women