Indian journalists face distress while reporting on sexual violence, says study

Our Reporter
Dimapur, Feb. 9 (EMN): A study on sexual violence faced by journalists in India has revealed that almost 20% of respondents said they experienced significant distress while reporting on sexual violence and this factor is more pronounced among women than men. It added that 55% of women journalists said they had directly experienced or witnessed workplace sexual harassment or violence. 

This is mentioned in the report “Sexual violence and the news media” by Dr. Chindu Sreedharan and Professor Einar Thorsen. It is a research and capacity-building project led by Bournemouth University and UNESCO New Delhi, and provides comparative insights into the routines journalists follow and the challenges they face when they cover sexual violence, drawing on content analysis of 10 newspapers covering six languages, and semi-structured interviews with 257 journalists working across 14 languages.

A research dissemination workshop with journalists from across the country was held on Wednesday via Zoom, with the two authors as the presenters.

As per the findings of the study, there is a conspicuous lack of formal editorial guidelines across newsrooms in the country, with only 13% of respondents stating that they have access to written guidelines and 14% with no access to guidelines.

More than 50% of reporters said that they relied heavily on police reports and sources for their crime stories and generally approached other sources afterward; 27% of journalists cited hurdles from police as limiting their work; and 35% cited lack of access to victims as a hurdle when reporting on sexual violence.

Women reporters were overall less inclined than men to depend on police sources while some women experienced gender bias from the police, it said.

According to the study’s newsgathering challenges based on region, access to the victim was the lowest in the northeast region at 23.1% and hurdles from police at 7.7% was also the lowest in the country.

The study further revealed that news outlets tend to disproportionately publish unusual cases such as those involving extreme brutality or attack by strangers, thus presenting a misleading picture of how sexual violence usually manifests in India. Newspapers were typically concerned with rape in urban areas which was about 49% and only 22% were about incidents in rural areas.

“The majority of news reporting on rape and sexual violence was made up of spot news stories focusing on the details of the attack and lacking in content, while overt victim blaming was evident in only 2.2% cases, very rarely was there an attempt to provide a voice, direct or otherwise for the victim,” the authors stated.   

As per the study, majority of the journalists, about 78%, said they felt responsible for effecting change in relation to sexual violence. But despite this, very few stories below 7% focused on solutions. 

According to the findings of the study, the highest type of sexual violence was gang rape at 20.1%, sexual assault at 13.1%, rape at 13%, and aggravated rape at 10.9%.

Replying to a query if the state government/Ministry of Women and Child could get involved in framing guidelines for journalists covering such stories, Sreedharan said that “even if the government does so, it may not sit well with the journalists”.

Replying to another question on whether it would be better for the Press Council of India (PCI) to reframe/adopt guidelines and periodically train journalists on gender sensitisation and sexual and gender-based violence, he said that ‘it would be good to do so by the PCI’ and added that the organisation also has the responsibility to do the same for the journalists.