Week Eleven Blog

This week in class we discussed issues of women criminals in the media and issues of domestic violence.

In the Chesney-Lind article entitled Media Misogyny:Demonizing 'Violent' Girls and Women" she delves into issues concerning the misrepresentation of women in the crime culture. For the most part, women are underrepresented in crime-related media because women commit significantly less crime compared to men. The issue was raised about our cultures sudden awareness and preoccupation of female criminals that occurred as a result of the rise in crime rate in the country. At first, researchers believed that there was a sharp rise in women committing violent crime, when in actuality, there was not a statistically significant increase. People started to think that women were rebelling as a result of the feminist movement in the 1970's, which led to the increase in crime. As a result of women becoming increasingly involved in society sharing equal opportunities of employment with men, that they were also engaging in the same type of violent criminals behavior that we would normally just see coming from males. There was also an increased awareness of girls in gangs, and the kinds of behavior that was occurring shocked many people. Women who committed violent crimes were seen as crazy and psychopathic where as men do not receive as much of the blame for the crimes they commit, and instead causes are placed on bigger systemic/environmental factors. I think that the ways in which the media represents male and female involvement in criminal activity is skewed. The media was dramatizing women's violence and making it look like a bigger social problem than it actually was at this time in our nations history.

Cathy Bullock and Jason Cubert's research article discusses the media's representation of domestic violence fatalities in Washington state, and analyzes how these cases are portrayed and the kind of ideas and attitudes about domestic violence that they convey to people in society. They described different characteristics of domestic violence, how the news media portrays domestic violence using a quantitative content analysis and a frame analysis which i found particularly interesting. There were five research questions that they were hoping to answer after conducting this study which looked into the newspaper and the type of content that was in the articles covering domestic violence. They were trying to look into patterns of physical/psychological abuse in the relationship, and whether or not it was an isolated incident or a long history of abuse involving a psychological dimension. Domestic violence can be a controversial, and touchy subject not only for the members involved, but for the legal system and law enforcement. When reporting domestic violence issues, police are more concerned with logistics (who, what, when, where) and the facts about the crime whereas sociologists, psychologists, and journalists are more interesting in the relationship between the couple, the context in which domestic violence occurred, and what led up to the occurrence. Most of the time, the status of the victim is female, and the perpetrator is male. Much of the blame is placed on the victim for the domestic violence occurrence as the instigator of rage in the other person, or doing something to provoke them. When a domestic violence fatality is reported, it is seen as any other type of normal crime such as murder, when it is not. It was found in content analysis that domestic violence was not specifically stated in the articles, but was left up to interpretation by the reader. The perpetrator was often exonerated. I thought it was interesting that the media takes a somewhat detached and shallow look at domestic violence cases and the issues surrounding it. In the future law enforcement and the news media can pay more attention to domestic violence and the complexity of the causes and what steps should be taken in order to ensure help for victims of domestic violence, and possibly prevent the maturation of these patterns of physical/psychological abuse in relationships that can be fatal.

The film Enough, is a look into the entertainment media's portrayal of domestic violence in society and how they try to sensationalize it. I thought this movie was interesting the ideas it projects about women being able to fight back in they are the victims of domestic violence. The way in which the perpetrator in this movie was portrayed was not exactly accurate. Most of the time, victims of domestic violence see the impending events coming, because there has been a slow and steady pattern of physical and or psychological abuse building up over time. Rarely do we see a perpetrator who seems perfectly normal on the outside, all of sudden attack his partner. The important question to look into here concerning this movie is whether or not this film raises awareness about domestic violence in the real world, or if domestic violence is used as a backdrop for an interesting narrative of a women's well deserved redemption?

I was looking up issues of domestic violence in the news media and found this interesting story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/nyregion/barbara-sheehan-who-killed-husband-is-found-not-guilty-of-murder.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=domesticviolence
The story is of Barbara Sheehan who was recently exonerated for murder of her husband, claiming that she shot him 11 times in self defense. Legal experts said the verdict was a vindication for the "battered-woman defense." Barbara Sheehan explained her history of abuse that she went through with her husband, and how it led up to her action in self-defense. According to New York's self defense laws, her actions of lethal force are justified when the threat to a person's life are imminent. Concerning this case, we cannot be 100 percent sure that she was acting in self-defense because we were not there, so we have to take her words, and any witnesses words as the truth. However, Ms. Sheehan was found guilty of possessing the second weapon after she continued to shoot her husband after he was no longer a threat. This story of domestic violence is just another example of the blurry lines between self-defense and murder and how hard it is for a jury to make a decision when it comes to a case like this. There is a lot more gray area and less black and white, and you have to take in a whole host of factors when looking into cases of domestic violence fatalities such as the situation in which it occurred, substances that might have been involved, history of abuse and violence, and whether or not the victim of domestic violence acted in self-defense in this case.