It’s a Problem of Culture (for Them): Orientalist Framing in News on Violence Against Women

Abstract

This research examines chronological patterns in the social construction of violence against women in the United States and abroad as represented by coverage in the New York Times. It is found that while criminal justice–oriented discourse dominates coverage, the news is less often applying a social problem frame to violence against women occurring in the United States and increasingly linking such violence to culture when it happens in Islamic societies. Thus, coverage contributes to cultural acceptance of an Orientalist binary that juxtaposes “progressive” Western nations with “backward” Eastern ones. Such a finding is consistent with feminist scholarship on Orientalism and discourse surrounding violence against women. This article concludes by considering how such Orientalism serves contemporary neoliberal governmentality.

Keywords

violence against women National Crime Victimization Survey 120 media Islamaphobia neoliberalism domestic violence victimization

Feminists successfully politicized violence against women (VAW) throughout the 20th century, but has that progress-generated troubling unintended consequences? Woman abuse was initially framed as a domestic social problem, but as we progress through the 21st century, recognition of this as a global issue is growing. Attention to the worldwide pervasiveness of VAW is important, yet this article examines the pitfalls of globalized discourse on gender violence. Specifically, I examine how mainstream media coverage resonates with an existing cultural script, an Orientalist binary juxtaposing a “progressive” West and a “backward” East (Said, 1979).

Several decades ago, Said’s (1979) path breaking work on Orientalism illuminated how Western societies look upon Eastern ones with an ethnocentric, racist gaze, predicated upon assumptions about the advanced and progressive nature of the West. Said showed how, among various racist ideas, a narrative of barbaric violence was applied to Middle Eastern societies, one which framed them as in need of civilizing and control by the West. Said’s work remains influential today, particularly in an era marked by heightened Islamophobia and a “war on terror.”

Feminist scholars have contributed much to the postcolonial project that Said started. One novel contribution has been the work of transnational feminists exposing widespread racist discourse about woman abuse in Islamic societies (Ferguson, 2005; Reimers, 2007; Shier & Shor, 2016). This discourse not only exacerbates prejudice but can also cultivate support for imperialistic interventions (Ferguson, 2005).

This article builds on transnational feminist work regarding Orientalist discourse, tracing patterns in news coverage over approximately two decades and further theorizing the significance of these developments, particularly in relation to neoliberal governmentality. In the sections that follow, I briefly review the literatures upon which this study was founded, then, using a frame analysis of newspaper stories on woman abuse, I focus on three patterns in New York Times coverage. First, I document how this news is dominated by criminal justice discourse. Then, I show how social problem framing has decreased in coverage while another frame, the deviant culture frame, has increased, particularly since 9/11. These patterns resonate with a preexisting cultural scrip, a narrative posing Islamic societies as more violently and regressively patriarchal than Western ones. Moreover, such discourse buttresses neoliberal ideology. I conclude by considering in detail how Orientalist discourse resonates with neoliberal governmentality.

Literature Review

Crime as a Social Problem

Some of the most well-recognized sociological scholarship on the media comes from social problems scholars examining representations of crime. These scholars posit that social problems are constructed, meaning that collective knowledge and symbolic representations, rather than personal experience, provide the basis for most individuals’ sense of the issues (Best, 1990; Blumer, 1971; Spector & Kitsuse, 1973). Crime is no exception, and because the media supply robust crime content, they have a dominant role in the social construction of crime (Best, 1990; Jewkes, 2010; Surette, 2006). Yet studies have continually shown that news about crime in Western nations is misleading. The thematic parameters of crime news construct a snapshot of crime that is at odds with its empirical reality (Surette, 2006). For example, crime news tends to exaggerate the threat posed by violent street crime, vilify the poor and marginalized, ignore the crimes of the powerful, and mystify the complex social relations underpinning crime and violence (Greer & Reiner, 2012; Jewkes, 2010; Surette, 2006).

VAW in the Media

The above critiques apply to crime in general, but feminists identify distinctive issues in the way that media (particularly news media) cover crimes against women, such as domestic violence, rape, and femicide. As in general crime news, official sources dominate this news, yet experts and feminist voices are rarely featured (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998). Moreover, historically, the press implicates women in the violence they suffer at the hands of men (Benedict, 1992; Berns, 2004; Brownmiller, 1975; Meyers, 1994; Taylor, 2009), though this phenomenon—victim blaming—may be less common today than it once was (Berns, 2004). Women and other marginalized groups (the poor, racialized others, those with nonnormative sexual identities, etc.) are often disparaged in coverage while privileged groups (particularly White men) are treated more sympathetically by the press (blinded for review Chagnon, 2014a; Chancer, 1994; Meyers, 1994, 2004).

In a broader sense, the social construction of VAW paints a selective portrait. Frame analyses provide valuable insight on this partiality. At one point, VAW was treated as a nonproblem or a private issue (Benedict, 1992; Brownmiller, 1975). Today though, it is a recognized social problem (Berns, 2004; Schechter, 1982). Various studies have found that contemporary news coverage at times employs a “social problem frame” (Berns, 2004; blinded for review; Gillespie, Richards, Givens, & Smith, 2013). However, social problem framing is the exception rather than the rule. Scholars such as Websdale and Alvarez (1998) point out that most news content on VAW focuses on minutiae of singular incidents including descriptions of wounds, crime locations, and weapons, rather than social context. Bullock and Cubert (2002) characterize this as the “police frame.” The police frame functions basically as a police report translated into a news story, supplying the details law enforcement investigators would focus on when attempting to solve an individual crime but little or no social context. This tells the public, as Websdale and Alvarez point out, “more and more about less and less” (p. 126). Various studies have pointed to the dominance of such discourse (Bullock & Cubert, 2002; Chagnon, 2014; Taylor, 2009; Websdale & Alvarez, 1998).

In sum, research on the topic has found that news reporting on woman abuse generally distracts from causal factors such as patriarchy and privilege by avoiding discussions of those factors and disparaging victims. On the other hand, reporting plays up racist, classist, and sexist notions, and focuses on the role of the criminal justice system in addressing these crimes, at the expense of other analysis.

Orientalism, Feminism, and Violence

As mentioned earlier, Said’s (1979) work on Orientalism has been broadly influential but has served as a theoretical touchstone for much transnational feminist work. Said’s work illuminated how the colonial projects of European empire states produced much scholarship on what was termed, “the Orient.” These studies were conducted with an ethnocentric assumption of Western superiority and arrived at self-fulfilling conclusions about the “backwardness” of Eastern societies.

Today, feminist work increasingly operates from a global or transnational perspective (Chesney-Lind and Chagnon, 2017). One product of this turn is enhanced consternation over gendered oppression in Islamic nations. Practices such as veiling, arranged marriages, forced marriages of rape victims, and honor killings have been cited as evidence that Muslim women suffer a particularly dominating form of patriarchy (Zine, 2006). The relative pervasiveness and intensity of patriarchal domination in the East as compared to the West deserves consideration and debate, more than is possible in the scope of this article. It is important to note though that these are existing practices that oppress, violate, and kill women. Western takes on these conditions often ascribe them to traditional elements in Islamic society. In reality, however, much of this is, at least partially, in response to Western cultural, political, and economic imperialism (Zine, 2006). Thus, these phenomena are a product of the intersection of fundamentalist religious elements with secular Western forces. Yet, various scholars have argued that Western observers of Islamic societies often practice Orientalism, framing Islamic societies as inherently backward and brutish and, in particular, ignoring the role Western imperialism has played in the spread of fundamentalist Islam (Ferguson, 2005; Said, 1979; Shier & Shor, 2016; Zine, 2006).

It is not only feminists who have decried VAW in Islamic societies. In fact, these critiques have been widely coopted (Eisenstein, 2010; Ferguson, 2005). Claims about harsh oppression and rampant VAW has been used by politicians to justify Western imperialist projects to “rescue” Muslim women (Ferguson, 2005). For instance, the George W. Bush administration actively embraced Orientalist discourse on VAW in countries like Afghanistan, using it to justify the war on terror.

This cooptation of feminist discourse has two important consequences beyond the obvious effect of perpetuating racial stereotyping and xenophobia. First, as the above suggests, it becomes a resource for justifying and legitimizing state violence, by reframing war as a feminist crusade (Ferguson, 2005). Second, it dampens discussions and concerns over the persistence of VAW in Western nations (Shier & Shor, 2016). In comparison to the ostensibly terrible treatment of women in Islamic societies, Westerners may be led to believe they live in gender-egalitarian utopias and thus will be less likely to push for further gender equality.

Mainstream press coverage of VAW among Islamic societies is one outlet for Orientalist discourse. Much research done on this press coverage has focused on what are termed “honor killings,” perpetrated among immigrant families in Western nations, finding that media tend to focus on cultural or religious explanations, at the expense of more individualized ones used commonly while reporting on similar violence committed in Western families (Reimers, 2007; Shier & Shor, 2016). One recent study, by Shier and Shor (2016) compared femicides, deemed “honor killings” by the press, to those characterized as family murders (ones committed by non-Muslim men). These authors found that though both honor killings and “family murders” were similar forms of patriarchal violence, press coverage in Canada treated them in fundamentally different ways. The authors assert that cultural/religious explanations dominated coverage of honor killings while explanations based on personal shortcomings characterized family murder coverage.

Work on Orientalist feminism intersects with another important body of work on neoliberalism and criminal justice (Gottschalk, 2014; Wacquant, 2009). Many scholars have written about the expansion of criminal justice agencies that has occurred in many Western democracies since the 1970s (Garland, 2002; Gottschalk, 2014; Simon, 2009; Wacquant, 2009), and several have explicitly linked this development to neoliberalism (Gottschalk, 2014; Harvey, 2007; Wacquant, 2009). Wacquant’s (2009) Punishing the Poor offers a thorough argument to this regard. Wacquant shows how as the social welfare state shrank under neoliberal governmental regimes, more coercive arms of the state, particularly the criminal justice system, expanded. Wacquant offers a gendered analysis of this change, contrasting the welfare state, which he characterizes as feminized or nurturing, with the “carceral” state, which he characterizes as masculinized. Although this literature does not directly engage with press coverage of patriarchal violence, or corresponding feminist critiques, I will show how these insights can inform a feminist analysis of press coverage in my discussion section.

The Current Study

This study seeks to build upon extant work regarding media, VAW, and Islamic culture. The content analysis of New York Times coverage that is performed here offers a window into national coverage of the issue during the approximate two-decade period (1992–2013) under consideration, with specific attention paid to story framing and changes over time.

While there is a modest body of research on VAW, Muslim communities, and the media, it is a nascent research area. To this author’s knowledge no studies have examined such press coverage longitudinally, looked at its place within the larger body of media discourse surrounding VAW, or fully theorized how this coverage supports dominant modes of governmentality such as neoliberalism. In what follows, I use the results from the aforementioned content analysis toward those goals.

Method and Data

Data

The data and findings presented in this article come from a larger study examining press coverage of VAW from 1992 to 2013. The study used several content and discourse analyses to examine multiple forms of media coverage (newspaper, TV, web news, etc.), but the data in this article come from a content analysis of New York Times coverage on rape/sex assault, domestic violence, and femicide during even-numbered years from 1992 to 2012.

The New York Times (2013) was chosen because it is considered a “newspaper of record” for the United States and is loosely representative of routine coverage of VAW generated in national U.S. newspapers. Moreover, the New York Times is a frequently used source of data in studies examining national news coverage. To sample the data, I searched the LexisNexis New York Times print news archive for several key terms for each type of crime limiting the time period from January 1 1992 to December 31, 2012. Keywords used in the search included but were not limited to, “sex assault,” “rape,” “wife battering,” “domestic violence,” and “family murder.” This search yielded voluminous data. However, searching merely the body of the text generated thousands of false returns. Thus, in order to make the sample more manageable, I used a selected sample of these data, specifically all articles from even-numbered years during the time period, with keywords in the headline, producing a sample of 1,223 articles.

Rather than focusing solely on hard news articles, I included all article types in my search. Thus, the sample included editorials, letters to the editor, and policy/trend pieces in addition to incident-based hard news. These other articles were included because, while incident-based reports constitute the majority of coverage, other types of coverage, including “soft” human interest news, may illuminate collective social reactions to crimes as social issues rather than singular episodes of deviance (Greer & Reiner, 2012; Hall, 1978; Innes, 2004).

Analysis

While analyzing these data, I employed an iterative coding strategy, informed by an initial pilot study (Altheide, 1996; Patton, 2002). The first step I took was to perform a pilot analysis, using the Microsoft Access Database software package to code 123 articles in the New York Times from 1993. In accordance with the ethnographic content analysis approach outlined by Altheide (1996), I began this pilot study with several key variables, such as story frame, offender and victim characteristics, sources cited, and so on. I then carefully read and coded each story, adding variables for those elements that seemed particularly prominent or common. For example, I added fields relating to the discussion of drug use by victims and/or offenders and added fields to document the presence of multiple offenders in cases of gang rape. I continued this pilot analysis until I was confident that the resultant coding scheme encompassed all of the appropriate elements of coverage that had emerged thus far.

After this, I began the main analysis, coding New York Times using the scheme developed from the pilot analysis. The primary wave of coding consisted of reading each article carefully twice, highlighting and notating prominent or theoretically relevant themes in articles, then entering each article in the database. In addition to the primary wave of coding, several other waves of coding were necessary. Several key themes emerged during the primary coding wave, making it necessary to create additional variable fields. For example, I added a memo field for racializing markers included in coverage, and dummy variables for international news and the presence of pro-feminist discourse.

All told, this analysis comprised a primary wave of coding and at least six additional waves of coding. The data collected included quantitative (numeric and categorical) and qualitative variables (see Appendix A for a complete coding scheme) generating diverse findings that illuminated the general parameters and characteristics of routine newspaper coverage of VAW during the sampling time frame.

The findings presented in this article are a result of a frame analysis that was at the core of my broader analysis. Frame analyses are among the most important components of media research. The conceptual use of framing is pervasive in media research and such analysis is often central to these studies (Johnson-Cartee, 2005). Although there is no standardized definition of framing, many researchers would agree that framing consists of the basic characterizations made in a news story, which tell readers what category of phenomena a story belongs to and sets the boundaries of discussion relating to said event (Goffman, 1974; Hall, 1974; Iyengar, 1994; Johnson-Cartee, 2005). Essentially, framing informs readers’ answers to three questions—what is this a case of, what are its causes, and what can/should be done to address it (Iyengar, 1994)?

In what follows, aside from the qualitative data, I supply to illustrate various frames, I use some rudimentary statistical analyses in order to quantify the results of the frame analysis. Specifically, I use frequencies to illustrate proportions of coverage that incorporate various components. Additionally, I use a moving 3-year average to present chronological patterns in the data. Compared to basic frequencies, a moving average better displays longer term patterns by smoothing out shorter term variations. Thus, it is a more effective tool for illustrating the chronological patterns that these analyses uncovered.

Findings

Frames Used in VAW Coverage

Table 1 presents the results of my frame analysis, providing a brief description of each frame, along with its frequency within the sample. I identified 10 distinct frames in all. A comprehensive discussion of these frames is beyond the scope of this article. But, here, I focus on the bolded rows relating to the four most common frames: the policing, courts, social problem, and deviant culture frames.

Table 1.

Story Frames in New York Times Reporting.

Frame		N (%)	Average Words
Policing	Focus on police actions	453 (37.0)	248.3
Courts	Focus on judicial matters	200 (16.4)	564.4
Domestic social problem	Focus one crime a social problem in the United States	120 (9.8)	635.1
Deviant culture	Focus on role of foreign culture	74 (6.1)	634.0
Aberrant/novel crime	Focus on unexpected elements	56 (4.6)	545.8
Celebrity/official scandal	Focus on scandal involving prominent individuals/groups	53 (4.3)	547.9
System failure	Focus on errors in criminal justice	52 (4.3)	677.3
Institutional problem	Focus on crime on campus or in military	41 (3.4)	711.5
Politics	Focus on political events regarding VAW	34 (2.8)	654.4
False accusation	Focus on untrue allegations	24 (2.0)	379.8
Other	N/A	116 (9.5)	582.0
Total		1,223 (100.0)	504.7

Note. VAW = violence against women.

Criminal justice framing

One thing that is starkly apparent is the preponderance of the policing and courts frames in these data. The two most common frames—the policing and courts frames—were present in 53.4% of all articles. The next most common frames, on which this article focuses—the domestic social problem and deviant culture frames—were far less common, making up 15.9% of the sample aggregately.

As Table 1 indicates, the most common mode of reporting in these data focused on the actions and perspectives of law enforcement agents responding to singular incidents of VAW. This is what Bullock and Cubert (2002) have identified as the “policing frame,” a manner of reporting comprising of relatively unceremonious reporting on police investigations. It also exemplifies what Websdale and Alvarez (1998) call forensic reporting. As mentioned previously, these stories provided a “who, what, where” and little else, focusing on the minute, but mundane details of crimes that comprise a police investigation.

The following passages, from an article titled, “Charges in Rape After Tip to Police,” provide an example of the policing frame. The story begins, “A man was arraigned Sunday on charges stemming from the rape and robbery of a 21-year-old woman in Upper Manhattan last week, police said” (“Charges in Rape After Tip to Police,” 2010). This lead sets the tone for the rest of the article, tipping the reader off that this story is about a single crime incident and the apprehension of the offender by police. It continues,

The police said the man, Lawrence Elliot, 47, followed the woman into her apartment building near St. Nicholas Park about 1:30 pm on Thursday and, claiming he had a gun, forced her into her apartment, where he sexually assaulted her. A bank card and a cellphone were reported stolen…

This material gives substantial detail, but it is limited to forensic bits of information about the crime, such as items stolen from the victim and the time of the incident. Finally, adding a small amount of context, the story concludes by discussing the offender’s criminal record,

The police said Mr. Elliot had a criminal record that included arrests on charges of rape, possession of a weapon and property crimes; some of the arrests were in Syracuse. A police spokesman said Sunday that the dispositions of the earlier cases were not clear.

Such reporting gives the reader a good amount of information about what exactly happened in this incident but provides no social context (Websdale & Alvarez, 1998). Furthermore, the police are the main source of the story, and their perspective dominates the story.

The second most common frame employed in this sample was the “courts” frame. Much like the policing frame, the name of this frame is self-explanatory. The courts frame was used to discuss judicial proceedings. The courts and policing frame share many commonalities: both involve routine reporting on the actions of the criminal justice system, both entail a focus on minute detail, and neither provide much social context. However, the courts frame differs in at least two ways.

One, courts articles were over twice as long as policing articles on average (564.4 vs. 248.3 words). This is understandable for an obvious reason. Cases that have progressed to the courts provide journalists with more information. Documents presented at trial as well as additional sources (e.g., defense attorneys) allow journalists to delve more deeply into stories and thus write longer stories. Moreover, it is fair to assume that some cases progressing to trial are more contentious compared to those adjudicated through plea bargains and thus provide more newsworthy stories. The other difference between the courts and the policing frame is that courts framing focuses on judicial matters rather than policing. While the two institutions are closely related, they do have significant differences. For example, police concentrate more on apprehending offenders, while prosecutors are tasked with convicting them. Thus, I found it worthwhile to conceptualize stories focusing on each branch of the system as framed separately. The following excerpt, which discusses a dispute over evidentiary rules in a rape trial, from a story titled, “Evidence is Reinstated in a Brooklyn Rape Case,” illustrates the courts frame and its distinctiveness.

Acting Justice David Friedman of State Supreme Court maintained that in allowing the evidence, he was not reversing his earlier ruling, because that ruling had been correct under state law, given the information he had at the time…

Deputy District Attorney Michael F. Vecchinone told the judge that his office had not initially challenged the erroneous information provided by the defense because of a failure of communication between a prosecutor and a police officer…

The case is the sort that normally receives little, if any public attention, but it attracted notice because of a general debate in New York over suppression of evidence by the courts (Fried, 1996).

As the excerpt shows, the story centers largely on issues of legal procedures and statutes. The central conflict within the article is among attorneys and the judge. Little attention is paid to the actual crime or its social significance. Readers are helped to understand some nuance concerning the suppression of evidence but are given no information about VAW as a social problem. Generally, this frame conveys elements like charges, verdicts, punishments, and/or the perspectives of attorneys. In some ways, the courts frame provides more context than the policing frame. Attorneys, at times, may do more interpretive work in relation to criminal incidents, creating theories of crimes, communicating the importance of cases, making appeals to public punitive sentiments, and so on.¹ Thus, journalism covering legal proceedings may provide more depth than policing journalism. However, this depth is limited in that it articulates with social issues based on how they are codified and institutionalized by the judicial system. Since prosecutors are a dominant source in such stories, coverage is largely based on official perspectives. Basically, the courts frame may supply a bit more intellectual depth than the policing frame, yet that heft is still situated within the same criminal justice paradigm.

Although they differ somewhat, the routine crime/policing and courts frames share fundamental similarities that locate them in the same category of frame, what could be called criminal justice institutional frames. These findings show that criminal justice institutional frames pervade coverage, defining over half of the articles in the sample. Thus, they are the principle way in which journalists communicate to the public about VAW. As I noted above, such frames give readers little information about the events in question as instances of social problems, but individualize them while suggesting their resolution is the province of the criminal justice system. Other scholars have pointed to a law and order and episodic orientation in regard to more general crime coverage (Iyengar, 1994; Surette, 2006). However, it is important to note that this is true not just for general street crime but also for VAW, a crime category which has only been socially constructed in the past few decades (Schechter, 1982). The news focus on criminal justice perspectives is understandable given the professional conventions of journalism (e.g., valuing official sources), but there are implications suggesting this approach to reporting constrains public knowledge and debate on the issue. Most importantly, this discourse implies that the dominant crime control strategies used for street crime are also appropriate responses to VAW. This effectively grants ownership of the issue to the criminal justice system, and by covering the successful apprehension or punishment of perpetrators, cultivates the impression that it is an effective response to this social problem. As I will discuss later, while a criminal justice response may offer security for some, it promises to do little to alleviate the patriarchal stratification and ideology that plays a prime role in the etiology of woman abuse.

Social problem framing

The second most common frame employed in these data (9.8% of articles), the social problem frame, is a noteworthy counterweight to the criminal justice institutional frames. It constituted nearly one in 10 articles and was longer than the average article in this sample (635.1 words per story). This frame discussed VAW in a contextualized and/or relational manner that acknowledged the pervasiveness of VAW; the relations among its various forms; or the social, rather than individual, etiology of the violence. The following passage from a piece on a rape awareness program titled, “Rape Worn Not on a Sleeve, But Right Over the Heart,” illustrates domestic social problem framing.

That T-shirt was one of a few that Ms. Baumgardner had considered, and rejected, as a key component of a multimedia rape awareness project she has initiated…

Abortion and rape are subjects that are secreted away and are also surprisingly common, Ms. Baumgardner said. One in six women is a victim of sexual assault, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, a nonprofit sexual assault prevention and education group. According to the Department of Justice, 60% of sexual assaults go unreported…

Eliminating the hushed tones that surround the subject might help more women talk about their experiences (and possibly seek prosecution of their attackers), she said (Dominus, 2008).

As this excerpt indicates, the social problem frame characterizes VAW as a noteworthy social problem, often supplying contextualizing materials such as statistics and expert knowledge. Instead of focusing on individual criminal justice cases, by using a more socially oriented approach to reporting, articles employing this frame positioned VAW as an issue that requires a collective response. This finding mirrors those from previous studies that also concluded that social problem framing was a significant part of contemporary media coverage (Berns, 2004; Gillespie et al., 2013). One might note though that even in this example of social problem framing, criminal justice logic is a presence, as the author links rising awareness of rape with the objective of enhanced prosecution. Still the use of social problem framing is encouraging in that it suggests that the press covers VAW in a contextualized manner, and as other scholars have pointed out, that feminist perspectives have made inroads to the popular discourse (Bernstein, 2012; Chermak, 1995; Gillespie et al., 2013). However, that success is qualified considering it seems that the press only employs this frame one in ten times, and, as I will discuss later, the usage of such framing is declining.

Deviant culture framing

The fourth most common frame in these data, the “deviant culture” frame, was not pervasive, present in only 6.1% of cases but did tend to be longer than the average article (634.0 words per story). It was most often used to report on VAW in Islamic societies.² The deviant culture frame is similar to the social problem frame in that it poses VAW as a collective, rather than individual, issue. Furthermore, it borrows from feminist insight about such violence, linking it to cultural features. However, it differs from the social problem frame in that it links VAW to non-Western cultures and Islamic religious practices. The following excerpt, from an article titled, “Seeing No Justice, a Rape Victim Chooses Death” illustrates this.

Naseem Mai told the police she would kill herself if the man who raped her was not arrested…Then before her eyes, across a cotton field, the rapist escaped from the policemen who were trying—not very hard, her family says—to arrest him…

A week later, the police did arrest the man. Then again the police here are under enormous pressure. Just one village away lives Mukhtaran Bibi, who had been raped by four men on order from a tribal council, a case that repulsed Pakistan and put a rare, harsh spotlight on the widespread incidence of rape here…

She said it was highly unlikely that a woman in Pakistan would invent rape charges. Pakistani society, she said, places deep value on a woman’s honor and chastity, both of which evaporate as soon as she accuses someone of rape…. (Fisher, 2002)

While the words “Islam” or “Muslim” are not used, the association of Pakistan with pervasive rape and half-hearted efforts to address it leads readers to understand this as a problem tied to Islamic cultural features. The article implies authorities are ambivalent toward the violence, remarks about the widespread nature of the violence, references another rape ordered by officials, and comments on harshly patriarchal valuation of chastity. The article does also mention that the previous rape “repulsed Pakistan,” avoiding a wholesale generalization about Pakistani society. However, the overall passage portrays a society that judges women harshly; has an ineffective or uninterested official response to rape; is characterized by pervasive and under-acknowledged violence; and links the violence to traditionalist cultural groups/forces. The following excerpt from another article, about a woman convicted of adultery after being raped, illustrates this frame further:

The case reached the court when Ms. Zafran, who is about 26, accused her brother in law of raping her in the remote village in northwestern Pakistan where they lived.

No charges were brought against the brother in law because under the Islamic statutes in use here, called zina, rape can only be proved with the testimony of four male witnesses, a standard that is almost impossible to meet.

The fact that Ms. Zafran was convicted of adultery as a result of being raped was not unusual in Pakistan. Human rights groups say as many as half the women who report a rape are charged with breaking the laws of zina, which forbid any sexual contact outside marriage.

Here, the nature of deviant culture framing comes into sharper focus. This article clearly implicates Islam and outlines how the integration of such values in Pakistani legal practices. It is important to note that this was another case occurring in a tribal region, and reporters distinguished between such regions and more modernized secular ones. Thus, this is not a blanket characterization about all of Pakistan. However, the frame clearly links VAW to fundamentalist cultural elements within Islamic societies.

Reporters likely employ this frame intending to draw attention to global human rights abuses. In this sense, journalistic focus on the issue is logical and defensible. However, the presence of this frame and its resonance with more broadly circulating Orientalist tropes has some troubling implications (Said, 1979; Zine, 2006). I will discuss these implications in detail after outlining two related patterns of chronological change.

Patterns of Change

As these data comprise an extended time period, they can tell us something about chronological change. Overall, my analyses revealed little noteworthy change. For instance, criminal justice framing remained the dominant mode of reporting throughout the time frame. However, the data did reveal two dramatic patterns of change in the use of social problem and deviant culture framing. Figure 1 below presents these patterns using moving 3-year averages for each frame.

Figure 1.

Three-year moving averages for social problem and deviant culture frames.

Figure 1 shows a decrease in social problem framing and a complementary increase in the deviant culture frame across the 1990s and 2000s. The data indicate that the social problem frame was far more frequently used in 1990s than it was after 2000. While the use of the social problem frame was relatively common during the early- to mid-1990s, its use has since decreased substantially. The 1994 3-year average for the use of this frame was 17.2%, while the 2010 average was 4.3%. Concurrently, Figure 1 shows a consistent upward trend in the use of the deviant culture frame. However, the moving 3-year average flattens one very sharp change that is apparent in the year-by-year frequencies, which is important to note. While Figure 1 seems to show a steady increase over the entire sample frame, there was a sharp increase in the frequency of this frame in 2002. In 2000, the deviant sub/culture frame was present in only 3.2% of articles, and in 2002, it was present in 10.9% of articles. Unsurprisingly, this increase correlates with the 9/11 terrorist attacks, suggesting that the New York Times began paying more attention to VAW in Islamic nations after 9/11.

Thus, two patterns are clear. During roughly the same period when reporters began less frequently framing VAW as a product of U.S. culture, they began more frequently linking it to elements within foreign cultures. While there is no evidence in these data to suggest a causal relationship between the two patterns, they complement each other. The media seem to be increasingly emphasizing cultural components in VAW in othered communities, while they increasingly downplay the role of culture in Western society. The implications of this complementarity are discussed below, but simply put, this pattern contributes to a broader Orientalist cultural current, consisting of claims that Islamic societies feature more patriarchal oppression of women (Zine, 2006).

To summarize, there are three key findings here. First, criminal justice discourse pervades media coverage of VAW. This is unsurprising, but it is important to note that such coverage effectively grants issue ownership to the criminal justice system. Second, the media sometimes employ alternative, sociologically oriented frames. Sometimes this means coverage that explores VAW as a social problem in Western societies, and at other times, it means exploring the same in foreign societies, especially Islamic ones. Third, chronological patterns indicated that the media are less often focusing on this social problem domestically and more often are focusing on it in abroad. This pattern contributes to a broader Orientalist tendency in the press and mainstream culture that was growing in the wake of 9/11 (Ferguson, 2005; Zine, 2006).

Discussion

The findings discussed above are noteworthy on their face value but take on more gravity when considering how they articulate with dominant modes of governmentality. Since news media provide a civic education to the public, they do important work to buttress or criticize key institutions like the government (Bennett, Lawrence, & Livingston, 2008). The remainder of this article explores those implications.

Regarding the dominance of a criminal justice paradigm, this focus is unsurprising, but thinking carefully about what this means is worthwhile. First, this coverage does legitimation work for the criminal justice system both because VAW is a relatively novel social problem and because criminal justice agents are often portrayed as successful in efforts to apprehend and punish. Media reporting gives the system symbolic ownership over a novel social problem and implies it is actively responding. Not only does that encourage public support for the justice system, it encourages its expansion. Logically, as the system must confront new issues, it follows that greater resources should be allocated for a growing criminal justice mission.

The criminal justice system has a particularly salient place in the contemporary neoliberal state. As Wacquant (2009) points out, criminal justice is a cornerstone of neoliberal governance and what he calls the “masculinized state.” The rescission of the welfare state has translated into a need for stepped up social control through the criminal justice system. Following Wacquant, this is a major reason for the expansion of prisons and policing throughout the neoliberal era. Much like discourse on traditional street crimes, news discourse on VAW provides support for this prominence and expansion of the criminal justice system.

A focus on criminal justice is understandable in light of mainstream journalistic conventions such as a reliance on official sources. However, the dominance of such discourse is, among other reasons, problematic because it far overshadows the alternatives like social problem framing. The paucity of social problem–oriented coverage stifles considerations of the need for social change to eradicate VAW. The findings above indicate not only the dominance of criminal justice discourse but also that the media are less often employing discourse that links this violence to fundamental social arrangements. Moreover, by posing the criminal justice system as an interested and effective actor in responding to the problem, and ignoring its social etiology, the media perpetuate the assumption that transformation of heteropatriarchal capitalism is unnecessary to end VAW. Instead what remains are the carceral politics that have brought about the current era of mass incarceration.

At the same time that the media are less often indicting Western culture as a cause of VAW, they are increasingly citing the role of culture in Islamic societies. These patterns encourage an “Orientalist” gaze—one assuming a dichotomy between Western and Eastern nations, posing the West as progressive and egalitarian against a backward and oppressive East (Said, 1979). New York Times coverage cannot be singularly blamed for promoting an Orientalist gaze. One must consider its relation to other elements of coverage and its resonance with narratives circulating in wider culture.

When considering the finding that the majority of these data comprise coverage reporting on how U.S. state agencies are actively combatting VAW in conjunction with the increase in the deviant culture frame, one can see how readers might often draw the conclusion that Eastern nations lag far behind the United States in addressing gender violence. As well, one must consider how the deviant culture frame resonates with narratives circulating more widely. Studies reviewed above show that, at the time these data were created, other press outlets, politicians, and some within the academy were emphasizing a linkage between Islamic cultural practices and VAW, cultivating a widely held impression that Islamic societies were more oppressively patriarchal than Western ones (Ferguson, 2005; Reimers, 2007; Zine, 2006). Because press coverage enters a discursive universe characterized by feedback loops, resonance, spiraling, and amplification cycles, New York Times coverage fed into and perpetuated this broader discursive current (Ferrell, 2013; Phillips, 2016; Chagnon, 2014b).

Such discourse encourages racist stereotypes and cultivates xenophobic fears of foreign societies framed as barbaric and violent (Said, 1979). It also provides a moral rationale for Western imperialism. It is easy to see how the extended conclusion can be drawn that liberating women is a justified intervention in countries enabling “backward” cultures. Intervention and conquest, seen through such a lens, constitute a beneficent process whereby societies become more advanced and peaceful.

Centuries ago, Orientalist logic served the ends of colonial empires (Said, 1979). Today, it serves to justify economic and military interventions by neoliberal Western states like the United States. To the point, Orientalist discourse relating to VAW was a key tactic used by the George W. Bush administration to justify war in Afghanistan following the attacks of September 11, 2001 (Ferguson, 2005). Bush and members of his administration made the explicit claim that U.S. military forces were freeing Afghan women from brutal sexism.

The invasion of Afghanistan and other military forays are perhaps the most explicit and concrete examples of how this Orientalist discourse functions, but it surely works in myriad ways to serve the interests of Western neoliberalism. For instance, the invasion of Afghanistan opened markets for Western corporations. The inclusion of Afghan women in such markets was often claimed as liberation from patriarchal domination, what one might call “market-as-liberation” logics (Eisenstein, 2010). Moreover, the near continuous warfare waged by nations such as the United States and UK in the Middle East sustains war industries dominated by megacorporations such as Halliburton (Pieterse, 2004). The argument here is not restricted to the “War on Terror” either, but regards a broader imperialism, in which neoliberal states exert their will across the globe through an economic–political–military complex.

As discussed above, some have dubbed this variety of Orientalism, “Orientalist feminism.” When it is associated with Western imperialism and capitalist accumulation, Orientalist feminism not only excuses the actions of neoliberal states, it also fosters the notion that they are progressive, and even feminist, entities. This is a fine hegemonic trick, as it allows state violence to masquerade as feminist action, despite the copious destruction it wreaks on women in the global south.

To summarize these implications, the patterns identified in the findings section indicate that media coverage contributes to an Orientalist binary regarding VAW. Coverage that positions the criminal justice system as an interested and active responder to VAW, along with reduced coverage indicting mainstream U.S. culture in the etiology of violence, feeds into a belief that Western society is progressive in combatting gender violence. Conversely, coverage indicting Islamic culture in acts of rape and domestic violence positions those societies as deviant or violent. This fosters support for two key features of the neoliberal state—reliance on the criminal justice system and imperialism that opens markets and fuels war industries. In this way, such discourse integrates feminist insights in a wider discourse that garners support for power vested in a state that is increasingly, if differently, patriarchal or “masculinized” (Wacquant, 2009).

Conclusion

I began here by acknowledging the important progress won in the struggle against VAW, but also asking if it had negative unintended consequences. This analysis departed from previous feminist work that exposed how Western media contribute to a racist cultural climate, which view Islamic societies as culturally backward. Findings were consistent with previous research in that a cultural lens is decreasingly applied to VAW in the West, while it is increasingly applied to such violence abroad. This disparity is coupled with a dominant criminal justice narrative that implies the system is actively combatting the issue.

Adding to previous work on this topic, this study shows that, despite important contributions, liberal feminist critiques about VAW have also served the interests of the neoliberal state by providing cover for state violence projects. In the context of media coverage, liberal feminist critiques have been integrated into a larger discursive framework that supports neoliberal governmentality, particularly as embodied by the criminal justice system.

That articulation between crime discourse and neoliberalism opens up important questions for future study. Most importantly, one might interrogate some of the inferences drawn here in light of the increasing popularity of rightwing populist politics across the West, as exemplified by events such as the Brexit vote, 2016 U.S. election, and resurgence of political parties like France’s National Front. Media reporting surely articulates with changing politics in novel ways, and such political changes likely affect characteristics of media content as well. In some sense, the lessons of this study may be lessons of the past. But, we must learn from the lessons of the past to avoid serving the interests of emerging oppressions.

Footnotes

Appendix A

Table A1.

Coding Framework for New York Times Data.

Variable	Description
ID	Number
DATE	Date of article
PUB	Publication outlet
Author	Article author
HEAD	Headline
PASSHEAD	Did article have passive headline (Y/N)?
Page	Article page number
#wrds	Number of words in article
Arttyp	Type of article (news, editorial, etc.)
Basicstory	Basic summary of story
Crimtyp	Type of crime (rape, femicide, etc.)
V/O relations	Relations between victim and offender (married, intimate partner, stranger, etc.)
#vics	Number of victims in incident
#offenders	Number of offenders in incident
Injuries	What were injuries?
Weapons	Notes on weapons
Location	Location of incident
Drug/alc dummy	Were drugs/alcohol involved?
Drug/alc string	Notes on drugs/alcohol
Fr dummy	Was forensic reporting employed?
Forensic string	Notes on forensic reporting
Vicblame dummy	Was victim blaming present?
Vicblame string	Notes on victim blaming
Racialization	Notes on racializing discourse
Class cue	Notes on class status cues
Story frame	What was the story frame?
Competing frames?	Were there competing frames (Y/N)?
Competing frame note	Notes on the above
Explanation string	Notes on explanation of incident
Consequences string	Notes on discussion of consequences from incident
Backlash dummy	Was backlash present (Y/N)?
Backlash string	Notes on the above
FA/MOJ dummy	Was there a false accusation or other miscarriage of justice?
FA/MOJ string	Notes on the above
TRO dummy	Was there a temporary restraining order mentioned (Y/N)?
Policy string	Notes on policy discussions
Other notes	Other notes
Pro-fem dummy	Was there pro-feminist discourse (Y/N)?
VAW dummy	Is the crime identified as gendered (Y/N)?
For news dummy	Is this news about a foreign nation (Y/N)?
College dummy	Is this news about a college campus (Y/N)?
Victim #	Number ID for individual victim
Vicnam	Victim name
V/O relation	Victim–offender relations
Vicage	Victim age
Vic race	Victim race
Vic class	Victim class
Vic notes	Other notes on victim
Vic pubfig	Was the victim a public figure?
Vic pubfig string	Notes on the above
Vic crim history dummy	Did victim have criminal history (Y/N)?
Vic crim history string	Notes on the above
Offender #	Number ID for individual offender
Offname	Offender name
Off age	Offender age
Off race	Offender race
Off class	Offender class
Off pubfig dummy	Was the offender a public figure (Y/N)?
Off pubfig string	Notes on the above
Off crim history dummy	Did offender have criminal history (Y/N)?
Off crim history string	Notes on the above
LE/Military/Official	Was the offender law enforcement, military, or a public official?
Offnotes	Other notes on offender
Source #	Number ID for individual source
Source # w/in story	Number for source within story
Source code	What type of source was this? (Law enforcement, prosecutor, academic, etc.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Nicholas Chagnon

Notes

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