“We Need Action at All Levels”: Analyzing Canadian News Coverage of Intimate Partner Femicide

• In Event: Media Portrayals of Violent Victimization

Abstract

News media have an important role to play in preventing intimate partner femicide (IPF), defined as the killing of a woman by her current or former intimate partner. This paper bridges intersectional feminist criminology with a public health social ecological framework to conduct a content analysis of media coverage of intimate partner femicide (IPF) from 2019 and 2021. After highlighting how we operationalize social ecological understandings of IPF in our coding, we describe patterns in news representation across 97 cases of IPF (approximately 2300 news articles). Specifically, we consider (1) whether and how news framing varies according to news source and (2) whether and how news framing occurs at each level of the social ecological framework (individual, relational, community, and societal). We consider the potential implications of these news constructions, as well as the pivotal role that journalist collaboration, education, and training plays in increasing the capacity of news media to operate as a site of primary prevention. Given the common practice of media portrayals to focus on individual and relationship-level factors related to IPF, we argue that an increased focus on community- and societal-level factors related to IPF is necessary to provide balanced, informative news coverage.

Authors

• Jordan Fairbairn, King's University College at Western University

• Ciara Boyd, University of Guelph

• Myrna Dawson, University of Guelph