When a man murders a woman, journalists ctrl f on their electronic thesaurus to dredge up every negative word available to slut shame, victim blame, erase, other and turn her into a household object (ie wheelie bin murder).
When a famous man from a famous football family rapes a woman twice, tampers with evidence and claims the case is ‘he said, she said’, journalists ctrl f their thesaurus to find all the corny superlatives they can throw into their article.
The reporting around the conviction of a man who raped a woman in Melbourne in 2024, over the past 24 hours, is a masterclass in how journalists do their best to build sympathy for violent abusers.
The words they used paint a picture of a broken man and broken family – in fact, if you take the context of their reporting out of the stories, you’d be forgiven for believing this man had suffered the worst possible thing any human can endure.
Imagine how the victim feels. She was raped twice. The defence tried to tell the jury she was deceptive. She was victim-blamed and slut-shamed by the legal process and by the media reporting of the circumstances leading up to his decision to harm her.
Journalists are under no obligation to report sympathetically on perpetrators. They lose their right to sympathy the minute they choose to harm another human.
When we compare their reporting of this rapist to the reporting of femicide in our country, it’s disgusting.
Femicide victims are reduced to nothing – often their names and their careers are just footnotes in stories that amplify the achievements of killers.
Femicide victims are victim-blamed (she was walking at night), slut-shamed (she was a sex worker), erased (not naming her when her name is available), othered (defined by her relationship to a man) or turned into an object (labelled the object related to her death).
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