Domestic Violence Coverage in American Magazines 1
Running head: DOMESTIC VIOLENCE COVERAGE IN AMERICAN MAGAZINES
American magazine coverage of domestic violence: Reflecting on 30 years of the public dialogue about intimate abuse
Kathryn P. Thill and Karen E. Dill
Lenoir-Rhyne College
“You cover up with makeup in the mirror, tell yourself that it’s never gonna happen again. You cry alone and then he swears he loves you… Do you feel like a man, when you push her around? Do you feel better now, as she falls to the ground?”
from Face Down by Red Jump Suit Apparatus
We don’t think of listening to a song or other forms of entertainment as a learning experience. Nevertheless, these lyrics from the hit song “Face Down” tell a story about domestic abuse that will provide many listeners with new information, and resonate with the experiences of others.
Of course, what we “learn” from the media may not be accurate. In a classic study, Ira Glasser[1](1988) probed what people thought about crime, police and legal procedures. Results showed something fascinating. What people believe has less to do with what actually happens in police stations or courtrooms than with what they see on TV, on shows like, Law and Order for instance. The popular view is that television reflects reality; in fact television also constructs reality.
In reading magazine accounts about DV, women learn about what can and does happen to other women and how victims respond to DV. Through this process, magazines normalize the stories of women. In other words, they teach people to think about abused women in certain ways (and not in other ways) and to expect them to exhibit certain behaviors if they are “truly” victims. As with TV images, this normalization process can have negative as well as positive consequences. On the positive side, readers may get important information, such as that abusers often apologize after an assault and that victims often mistakenly conclude perpetrators won’t hit them again. But a distorted picture can perpetuate public stereotypes that can affect a myriad of outcomes, including empathy for victims and public policy and funding for victim support. Distortions can also confuse abused women about how to understand or respond to what is happening to them. They may conclude their situation falls outside the spectrum of abuse, feel more isolated than before, and even make decisions, such as staying with an abusive partner, that increases their risk.
The reactions of viewers who watched The Burning Bed when it aired in 1984 should dispel any doubt that what we see on TV and read in magazines affects us. After the show:
Battered-wife centers from Boston to Los Angeles were inundated with calls for help – many from men seeking counseling. Still at least two people seemed to get a non-therapeutic message from the show. In Quincy, Mass., a husband angered by the movie beat his wife senseless. “He told her he wanted to get her before she got him,” said the director of a shelter that took her in. And in Chicago, a battered wife watched the show – then shot her husband[2].
This chapter looks at magazine coverage of domestic violence over the last three decades. We consider the extent to which domestic violence was covered, which types of magazines covered it most frequently and who constitutes the audiences of these magazines. In analyzing whether domestic violence coverage in American magazines changed over the years, we pay special attention to watershed events in the history of the public understanding of domestic violence and what affect these events had on magazine coverage of domestic violence issues.
Those who study mass media ask a variety of questions and employ a range of methods.Some study the content of a specific media source like a magazine; others focus on the effects of exposure to these media. This chapter discusses both the content of magazine articles on domestic violence and their probable effects. We begin with the issue communications scholars call “uses and gratifications,” or, in everyday terms, understanding why people read the magazines they do. Uses and gratifications theory suggests that magazine readers are active and motivated; they buy magazines to fulfill needs. The active role of the initial motive remains important even though the magazine doesn’t fulfill all their needs in this area and their magazine buying behavior may morph into being more habitual over time.
There are three basic motives for buying magazines: diversion (escapism); surveillance (information gathering) and developing personal identity (to reinforce or adopt beliefs and values). Diversionincludes reading to be happy, relax, to gain a sense of companionship and to help pass the time. Surveillance motives include reading to learn about common issues, to learn information needed for work, to keep abreast of events, and to understand what's going on in the world[3]. Finally, in reading magazines one can learn what beliefs and attitudes others value, what we personally value, what we can share with others, and one can enjoy the sense that one’s values are appreciated by others and important.
Related to what motivates readers of a magazine is how well magazines address their readers’ motives. Magazines that appeal solely to diversion readers may strictly limit the scope and informational content of what they publish to conform with the overall image of the magazine as well aswhat the paying advertisers want to see on the pages. In such magazines, stories that might increase public awareness about domestic violence or serve current or future victims, about domestic violence law enforcement, shelters, education focused on reducing violence or changing attitudes for instance, are least common. When diversion magazines cover issues like domestic violence, they tend to feature uplifting stories of empowered women who have successfully escaped their abusive relationship. These articles are “entertainment-driven” or “infotainment” because the stories are designed to provide diversion rather than accurate knowledge about the potentially depressing realities confronted by the millions of women who continue to be in abusive relationships.
At the same time, a number of the most popular “women’s magazines” such as Redbook or Good Housekeeping, appeal to all three motives. As media scholar Nancy Berns[4] points out, “Women’s magazines offer an interesting perspective on women’s issues, often introducing social problems and issues in more detail than other mass media. They also try to capture the changing roles and responsibilities of women.” Many women turn to these publications for information on topics that are not widely discussed. Young women in particular may use them to guide life-style choices, hence to create a sense of individuality, as well as to make their sub-cultural identity more precise. There is some evidence than independent reading may be a more vital source of education on sex, for instance, than parents, peers or schools. Like sex, domestic violence has been taboo.
Magazines have led the way in covering domestic violence cases involving major media figures, as well as in shaping the importance of these events and how they would be covered. For example coverage of the l994 O.J. Simpson trial raised public awareness that batterers can be deadly. As the Jet[5]article “O.J. Simpson’s case brings new focus on abuse of women” explains: “Battered women’s shelters were flooded with women following the murder (of Nicole Simpson, allegedly by ex-husband O.J.), apparently because many women realized that their situation was far more dangerous than they realized.” A January 1994 Newsweek article[6] addressed a related obsession: “Bobbitt fever: why Americans can’t seem to get enough.” This domestic violence story was a variation from the norm: the perpetrator and victim roles were hard to distinguish. Lorena Bobbitt claimed she was raped, and as we all know, her husband was infamously injured. The sensationalist focus on a male victim of domestic violence fueled a media-inspired “battle of the sexes.”
When Nancy Berns[7] (see her chapter in this volume) studied magazine coverage of domestic violence between 1970 and 1997, she uncovered a tendency to frame the issue as the woman’s problem and to place responsibility for solving it squarely on her shoulders. A prototypical example was a series published in Good Housekeeping magazine in the 1970s titled My Problem and How I Solved It. Apart from its victim-blaming connotations, we wonder how such a title would be interpreted in light of Lorena Bobbitt’s actions
The early years of domestic violence coverage painted the issue with a broad brush. This was appropriate because it was still unclear how many people were affected, whether it was primarily a women’s issue, a criminal justice problem or a dynamic in dysfunctional families primarily. These early articles laid out the terrain so to speak. However, as domestic violence emerged as a “known issue,” the focus of coverage shifted to specialized subareas and more particular, individual accounts. Like Berns, Loeske[8] found that the substance of domestic violence coverage became more personalized over time, as it was no longer necessary to justify the importance of the issue or define it. Unlike Berns, however, Loeseke found a tendency to define women as victims of a sexist society as well as of their husband’s violence.
Both Berns and Loeseke conclude that magazine portrayals do little to aid readers who are currently suffering domestic violence. Coverage highlights extreme cases of violence and dramatic escapes from abuse. One effect of this emphasis is to actually increase tolerance of typical, but much less extreme instances of abuse, and to elicit public policies that target extreme rather than more typical cases. Women who don’t fit the stereotype of extreme violence are referred to as “assaulted women” rather than as “abused wives” and there is almost no coverage of the core issues for victims, the emotional impact, the financial dilemmas created by abuse, the involvement of children, or the dangerous repercussions of trying to leave.
Sociologist Donileen Loseke (see chp in this volume) focused on the social construction of the term wife abuse in magazine articles published between l974 and l986. Like Berns, she documented the emphasis on “it happened to me” stories ending with simplistic advice to victims about how to solve their problem. Victims were urged to “Change your personality,” “Increase you self-esteem,” to “Take control of your life” and to “Refuse to be a victim.” The message was that “You have the power to end abuse.”
Our Study: Thirty Years of Domestic Violence Coverage in American Magazines
“…awareness of the problem is the first step toward prevention. Once named, violence against women, in its various forms, is no longer socially and culturally invisible...naming is power.” [9]
Though DV is a problem with a long-standing history in Western Europe and America, it entered contemporary public consciousness in the mid-1970s when it was referred to by terms such as “wife beating,” “wife battering,” and “wife abuse.” A landmark in this awareness was the publication in l974 of Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear by Erin Pizzey, the founder of the first official battered woman’s shelter in England. The cover pictured women with bruised and battered bodies, the result of spousal abuse. The earliest shelters in the U.S. were also started around this time. Though abuse had been widely tolerated for centuries, a public debate now ensued about how best to help victims and respond to perpetrators. The term “wife beating” first appeared in the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature in 1974.
The importance of 1974 in the history of DV makes it a natural starting point for our research. Our intention was to cover content from each of the decades that followed up to the present. Because important events in the history of DV also occurred in 1984 and 1994, we decided to sample magazine articles that appeared in print in 1974, 1984, 1994, and 2004. Table 1 summarizes these landmark events. These events raised public understanding and awareness about domestic violence issues and includes the opening of the first women’s shelters and landmark legislation relevant to DV.
(insert Table l approximately here)
Especially appropriate to this paper are key media events relevant to domestic violence. In 1984, The Burning Bed was released, considered by many to be one of the major events in raising awareness about domestic abuse. This film told the story of the abuse of Francine Hughes, a Michigan housewife who was judged to have been temporarily insane when she killed her ex-husband Mickey by lighting afire the bed where he had passed out drunk after an abusive rampage. 1994 marks the infamous trial of O.J. Simpson for killing his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, her friend. Although Simpson was acquitted of murder, the trial was a watershed in public awareness that abusers may kill their victims and prompted record numbers of women to seek help at shelters in 1994[10]. The resulting media frenzy may have expedited passage of the federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) that same year, the first large-scale federal effort to fund community-based services for victims and support the criminal justice response. As an article in Essence[11] pointed out at the time, “Following the Simpson horror… legislators throughout the nation have been scurrying to author laws and create support services to protect women from domestic violence.” Lorena Bobbitt was also acquitted in l994 for cutting off her husband John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis in reaction to years of abuse, including a forced abortion.
In 2004, Scott Peterson was convicted of murdering his wife Laci and their unborn son. While Peterson’s crime clearly involved violence against a wife and so was relevant to an understanding of domestic violence, we give it less importance than the other events because it involved a single dramatic instance rather than an ongoing pattern of abuse. The Laci Peterson murder did, however, draw attention given to partner violence during pregnancy, a particularly vulnerable time for victims of DV.
Following the methods used by other researchers, we used the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature to identify all magazine articles relevant to domestic violence published in the target years.
(Insert Table 2 approximately here)
This list of terms is interesting because it documents how the vocabulary used to describe DV changed over 30 years, as new titles and issues emerged. “Family Violence” was first used as a heading in 1984, replacing the earlier term “Wife Abuse.” In later years, however, “Family Violence” was restricted to child abuse and “domestic violence” and “wife abuse” were used to refer to partner violence. While the term “murder” generated some articles related to domestic violence, “Spouse Murder” proved to be the more relevant heading.
Table 2 lists the relevant headings found in the Readers’ Guide, the year they appeared, and the number of articles published underneath each heading. One can get a fairly clear picture of which topics were “hot” in domestic violence solely by looking at the headings in Table 2. The heading “Wife Beating” disappeared after 1974, for example, as increasing public education about abuse made its use politically incorrect. Nor, however, was “Domestic Violence” used in 1974, or 1984, as this issue was still emerging and lacked an adequate nomenclature. Thirteen articles were listed under “Marital Rape” in 1994, almost certainly because of the publicity received by the Bobbitt trial. But use of the new term declined soon after and was no longer used in 2004. “Spouse Murder” made its debut in 2004 with 17 articles, a result, in part, of the well-publicized murders of Laci Peterson, Lori Hacking, and others victims. Thus, simply from the headings and the number of articles in each, we can track how sensational events influence the portrayal of domestic violence in the mass media.
How many articles on domestic violence are being published?
The number of domestic violence articles published varied markedly with each decade, rising from the single article identified in l974, to l8 articles in l984, peaking in l994 with 67 articles and then falling off to 33 articles in 2004, a drop of over 50%. To gauge the relative importance of these numbers, we compared domestic violence coverage to coverage of abortion and breast cancer, two current issues affecting women, one controversial, one not. Domestic violence paled in importance compared to these concerns. In 1974, compared to the single article on partner abuse, 43 articles on abortion and 21 articles on breast cancer were published. In 1984, coverage of all three issues increased and the proportional coverage of domestic violence rose to 60% of breast cancer coverage (l8 vs. 30 articles) and to 20% of abortion coverage (l8 vs.92 articles). Coverage of all three issues increased again over the next decade, a reflection of women’s increasing importance as consumers. Domestic violence articles peaked at 67 in l994, a gain of almost 400% over the decade. But coverage was still relatively low, about 65% compared to breast cancer (n=101) or abortion (n=l03). By 2004, the gap between domestic violence and breast cancer had basically returned to the l984 ratio (33 vs. 63), while interest in abortion continued to rise (33 vs. 119), almost certainly because of increasing opposition to legalized abortion during this period.