Why News Coverage of Violence Against Women Fails—and How Journalists Can Fix It

Violence against women and girls touches nearly one in three women worldwide, according to UN Women figures cited in a new conceptual analysis published in Frontiers in Communication. Yet the way news outlets report on this global public health and human rights crisis may be quietly sustaining it. Communication scholars Leandra H. Hernández of the University of Utah and Stevie Munz of Utah Valley University argue that news coverage of gender violence is itself a wicked problem—one that defies simple solutions and requires journalists to fundamentally rethink how they frame, source, and contextualize stories about violence against women.

The concept of a wicked problem originated in the 1970s to describe social challenges like poverty and urban decay that governments could not easily define, measure, or solve. Wicked problems are fundamentally unique, lack a linear timeline or exhaustively describable set of solutions, and are often symptoms of other problems. They are systemic, ambiguous, complex, and conflictual. Hernández and Munz contend that violence against women and girls fits this profile precisely: it is sustained by intersecting cultural, institutional, and structural conditions that no single policy, campaign, or newsroom guideline can untangle. Scholars have applied the wicked problem framing to domestic violence policy cascades, workplace sexual violence in Australian mining, and violence against queer communities, each time finding that solutions must address systemic and cultural shifts rather than isolated incidents.

Against this backdrop, the researchers trace decades of scholarship showing how news coverage of gender violence repeatedly falls into damaging patterns. Foundational work by Meyers demonstrated that news representations construct women and victims as deviants worthy of condemnation rather than focusing on perpetrators. More recent analyses of UK newspaper coverage of domestic violence found techniques that blamed victims, sexualized violence, and invoked discourses of deserving or undeserving victims. Australian studies of high-profile sexual assault cases revealed how routine journalism practices—the inverted pyramid method, quoting strategies, and story structuring—objectified victims, minimized their experiences, and framed violent acts graphically and salaciously while emphasizing negative impacts on accused perpetrators.

Content analyses reinforce these trends across contexts. In Indonesia, more than half of nearly 700 news articles about violence against women and girls failed to reveal the social roots of gender violence or provide informational support for survivors. Australian research found that news coverage infrequently situated violence within broader social contexts, rarely included information on how and where to seek help, and disproportionately emphasized law enforcement and criminal justice spokespersons over survivors, advocates, and educators. By using episodic framing that depicts violence as isolated events, the authors argue, journalists distance such acts from the structures that perpetuate them, contradicting public health discourses that position gender violence as systematic and rooted in patriarchy, male dominance, and misogyny.

To counter these patterns, Hernández and Munz review existing gender-sensitive reporting principles, including checklists that ask who sources are, whether double standards and stereotypes appear, whether loaded language sways opinion, and whether stories are contextualized. Yusuf’s do and don’t principles urge journalists to provide relevant background information, balance representation of men and women as sources, mention the social roots of gender violence and society’s responsibility, and include local contact information for support organizations. UN Women’s guidance on gender and age-sensitive media reporting adds recommendations on survivor-centred representation, intersectional lenses, journalist training, and dedicated spaces for human-rights-related news. The authors note that thematic framing—which links violence to larger social and structural contexts—raises audience awareness and promotes social response in ways episodic framing cannot.

Building on these guidelines, the scholars advance space-making as a praxis-based framework for more humane and socially responsive journalism. Originally conceptualized in critical communication pedagogy, space-making encourages people to see the world differently and challenge status quo conceptions, deeply held beliefs, values, and ways of thinking. Applied to journalism, it asks reporters to examine how their reporting practices reproduce inequity, connect individual cases to systemic conditions, and create opportunities for survivors and communities to exercise voice and agency. Space-making intentionally foregrounds cultural context, structure, and intent as a starting point, calling on journalists to reflexively interrogate how their practices recreate discursive violence in covering gender violence.

The framework draws on ethical witnessing, which involves three points of interaction: the agent who bears witness, the utterance or moment itself, and the audience who witnesses. Peters describes witnessing as an intricately tangled process raising fundamental questions of communication—truth and experience, presence and absence, death and pain, seeing and saying. Tait and others argue that bearing witness provides a rationale for journalistic practice because it should incite public response, an ethos of response-ability that encourages shared responsibility for the suffering of others. Feminist media witnessing networks, as Rentschler documents, create crucial spaces of justice for victims and survivors, bolster their credibility, and facilitate social change by connecting coverage to social movements and networks of care.

To illustrate how space-making operates in practice, the authors analyze news coverage surrounding the 2021 murder of Gabby Petito, who was reported missing during a trip with her fiancé Brian Laundrie. The case received hyperfocused media attention and saturated public discourse, amplified by social media, documentaries, and armchair investigators. A content analysis found that the disappearance of women of color around the same time resulted in fewer words per story, fewer stories, and less coverage overall compared to Petito’s disappearance. The authors contend that this hyperfocus on a young white woman washed out other news stories and dominated headlines at the expense of coverage of violence against women of color, trans women, and other minoritized communities—a phenomenon known as missing white woman syndrome. They stress that Petito’s case should have been covered, but that articles could have linked her story to other cases of missing women of color, highlighted structural factors that obscure resources dedicated to finding missing women, and utilized thematic framing to call attention to social causes of such violence.

Space-making builds on intersectionality as a guiding analytic, drawing on Crenshaw’s seminal work to uncover complex, systematic prejudices related to race, ethnicity, class, ability, gender, and religion. The authors point to investigative journalists like Kent Patterson, who revisits stories of violence against women because the issues are not just a headline for one day, and Connie Walker, who stresses that women are more than the violence inflicted upon them. Journalism about gender violence, they argue, should balance coverage of violent acts with larger conversations about resistance, change, and anti-violence efforts, honoring the strength and resilience that survivors hold.

Ultimately, Hernández and Munz conclude that reflexive, relational, and intersectional reporting can strengthen journalism’s democratic role, improve representations of gender violence, and support collective witnessing and social change. They acknowledge critiques that existing media guidelines face questions of development, acceptability, uptake, and effectiveness, particularly in local contexts and across all forms of media, and that gaps persist between academic scholarship and practitioner implementation. Still, they advocate for space-making as one praxis-based solution that responds to Sustainable Development Goals on gender equality and peace, justice, and strong institutions. While their approach is influenced by US journalistic concepts and case examples, they contend there are meaningful implications for international contexts, and that journalists, practitioners, and scholars alike can utilize their training in discourse, structures, patterns, and systems to address wicked problems and enable social change.

Subject of Research: Media Ethics and Communication Research

Article Title: Wicked problems, gender violence, and media ethics: Reflections on improving journalistic coverage of violence against women and girls

Article References: Hernández, L. H., & Munz, S. (2026). Wicked problems, gender violence, and media ethics: Reflections on improving journalistic coverage of violence against women and girls. Frontiers in Communication, 11, Article 1759634. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1759634

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2026.1759634

Keywords: journalism ethics, gender violence, media framing, intersectionality, wicked problems, Gabby Petito, witnessing, Wicked, problems, gender, violence, media