An Analysis of Newspapers’ Modes of Representing the Women’s Victimization

This paper will analyze the news contents of the press to show how women’s victimization is being represented. In order to do so, a sample of four newspapers that were published during the period of April 21, 2009 and January 20, 2010, namely Hamshahri, Iran, Mardom-Salari, and Etemad were selected and studied. Since there is a difference between women victimization as opposed to other groups, the primary question we attempted to address here was how does the print media depict victimization of women? By drawing on ideas proposed by Stewart Hall and Connell, as well as Forsich’s theory, we conducted a qualitative analysis of the aforementioned four newspapers as they claimed to have been representing women’s cases of victimization. Some of the findings indicate that women have always been depicted as victims while men have been shown to be perpetrators. In addition, the press media generally adopt two approaches to represent women’s victimization: (1) the normal and unaware women who became subject to victimization and fell victim unknowingly and with no previous awareness of the danger (e.g. women who take unregistered and authorized cabs); (2) women who go to the dangerous places or have relations to dangerous strangers. The findings also suggest that such newspapers do not reflect views of the victimized women as they focus mostly on statements of defendants who attempt to place responsibility on the victimized women. It should also be noted that the press try to show that victims’ own actions leads to such crimes, rather than providing sympathy for the victims. In all such news, the focus is on masculinity while femininity is marginalized.