Ideal Victims and Familiar Strangers: Non-Intimate Femicide in South African News Media

ABSTRACT

Most female homicides are perpetrated by an intimate partner, but this is not reflected in news media coverage of the murders of women, which tends to focus on killings committed by family members, friends, neighbours, co-workers, and strangers. Nearly 60% of South African media coverage of female homicide profiles non-intimate killings. This study looks at multiple-year news coverage of 284 incidents of non-intimate femicide that took place in South Africa between 2012 and 2013, and compares narrative content and news frames used to report non-intimate femicides with those frames most commonly found in media coverage of intimate partner violence. This analysis reveals conspicuous differences between how the “problem” of femicide is reported and understood depending on the status of the victim and her relationship with the perpetrator, and how this distorts the reality of who is at risk of becoming a victim and who is to be feared as a perpetrator.

KEYWORDS:

• Murder
• femicide
• news
• media effects
• framing
• gender
• South Africa
• Global South

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Between 2013 and 2017 (the study period) certain news platforms deleted or changed their online archives, which meant certain texts that had been logged were no longer available. The texts were included as entries for the respective incidents, but their content could not be examined.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of the Witwatersrand.