"Woman hurt in sex attack — Don't walk in city alone at night", "Intruder sat on naked woman", "Woman jogger brutally bashed" — just a few examples of the lurid accounts of violence against women featured almost every day in the only widely and cheaply available daily newspaper in Darwin, the NT News.
The reports follow a standard format: a sensational and terrifying headline followed by a minutely detailed report of the attack — more like a soft-porn/horror movie script than news journalism — then an authoritative comment from police warning women against "dangerous" behaviour, such as walking alone or talking to strangers.
Sometimes they include a description of the attacker and a police phone number to contact.
These "news stories" do nothing to address the real problem of violence against women. They do nothing to empower women or increase their safety. These articles promote fear amongst women.
By concentrating on what a woman was doing immediately before an attack — whether jogging alone or drinking alcohol — media reports imply her behaviour contributed towards the attack.
The command "Don't walk alone at night" encourages the idea that women who do are at fault if they are attacked. Ignoring the fact that many women have no choice but to walk alone at night, the reportage denies that women should have the right to go wherever they want, whenever they want, and be safe from violence.
The NT News, like most mainstream newspapers, never analyses the systemic causes of violence against women. With no systemic analysis, the reader is left to think that the violence is an inevitable product of particularly sick and violent men and careless, irresponsible women.
The NT News never gives extensive coverage to campaigns by women against misogynist violence. Reclaim the Night attracted 150 women in Darwin last year — but no front-page headline for that.
Although most women who have been attacked report to rape crisis centres (or other feminist-based services) before or instead of the police, it is only the police that get quoted in the NT News.
For many women, particularly indigenous women, the police are perpetrators of violence — the media coverage of these violent attacks is almost non-existent.
Further, the NT News's sensationalised scare-mongering ensures that women are afraid of leaving the home. It is intended to push them back into their houses and into dependency on male partners.
But it is at home, and within traditional "families", that women are most likely to experience violence. The overwhelming majority of attacks against women are perpetrated by someone known to the victim — often by a family member.
This is the worst aspect of the NT Times', and most newspapers', coverage of "violence" against women — by encouraging women to identify the family as a "safe" place of refuge from the "dangerous" outside world, they help to perpetuate the worst violence against women. They inhibit women's ability to live their lives free from fear of violence.
Misogynist violence is encouraged by the sexist attitudes cultivated in a brutalised society — attitudes which view women as existing for male pleasure and comfort.
Mainstream media, including the NT Times, constantly reinforce sexist images and ideas. The NT News contains an inordinate number of "articles" which are actually photo-captions of scantily clad women, and the resident cartoonist is renowned for his outrageously sexist representations of women.
It's time for women to win our right to safety. We will only do this by rebuilding a mass women's liberation movement which fights against every manifestation of sexism.
A good place to start would be decrying the sexism and hypocrisy of the mainstream media and supporting alternative, feminist publications such as Green Left Weekly.
BY RUTH RATCLIFFE
[The author is the Darwin organiser of the socialist youth group Resistance.]