Meta data of Femicide in South African news media (2012/2013): systematic review

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/26585

South Africa has a femicide rate that is six times the world average. Over 2,500 women aged 14 years or older are murdered every year, the majority of these women killed by an intimate partner. Despite the prevalence of femicide, less than 20% of these murders are ever reported in South African news media. Studies on news-media coverage of femicide reveal a subjective and obscure process of media selection and exclusion, which contribute to an archive of crime reporting that is not reflective of actual crime rates and which actively distort the nature and frequency of certain types of crime. This influences public perceptions and fear of violent crime, including notions of who is a suspect and who is most at risk. This study uses mixed-method approaches to document and analyse the content and extent of commercial news media coverage of femicides that took place in South Africa during the 2012/2013 crime reporting year, through an original media database listing 408 femicide victims associated with 5,778 press articles. Victim and incident information is compared with epidemiological and statistical data, including mortuary-based studies and police crime statistics. Media data is explored through various media effects models, including a mixed-methods framing analysis, and is also examined by title, and by language. These analyses reveal how media constructs and depicts particular notions of gender, violence, race, and crime in South Africa. contact Nechama.Brodie@wits.ac.zat

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    Exploring childhood, criminality and power in South African juvenile murderers' constructions of their offences
    (2018) Mostert, Alexa Ellen
    In instances of child-perpetrated crime or violence, normative constructions of the child contradict those of the criminal, creating an ambiguous discursive landscape in which juvenile-offenders have to situate themselves. The construct of the child is premised on the assumption of innocence, naivety and purity which are incompatible with aggressive constructions of perpetrators. The aim of this research was thus to explore juvenile-offenders’ use of discourses in producing or resisting the subject-position of a child-offender and in navigating the discursive conflict within this subject-position. Accordingly, this study targeted incarcerated South African juvenile-offenders who have been charged with murder. Participants in this study were aged between 18 and 21, and were all under the age of 19 at the time of the offence. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 incarcerated juvenile-offenders across several juvenile correctional facilities in South Africa. Thereafter the transcripts of these interviews were subjected to a Faircloughian (1989-1995) critical discourse analysis to portray how participants drew on conditions of childhood, vulnerability and victimisation to challenge their belonging to the category of ‘criminal’. Specifically, participants in this study utilised gendered discourse and normative constructions of crime, criminality and victimhood to restrict the category of ‘criminal’ being imposed upon them by the material condition of their incarcerations. In this way, the child as violent is made possible, while the child as criminal, particularly the child as a possible murderer, is resisted and marginalised. These findings challenge normative constructions of both childhood and violence, and consequently provide counter-knowledge for how we understand violence and criminality in contemporary theory and practice.
The data is sensitive but openly available. All the data is in the public domain. We encourage you to reuse this data. We will assist you in the reuse of this data where possible. Please cite Nechama Brodie Femicide in South African news media (2012/2013). Thesis attached can be found at http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/29294