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Media's coverage of the 16 days of activism against gender-based violence
The Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe
January 2011

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In commemoration of the global 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, MMPZ undertook a monitoring exercise over the 16 days to December 10th, 2010 to assess how the Zimbabwean media were playing their role of informing and educating the public about the 16 Days' campaign and the problems society faced in relation to gender-based violence.

MMPZ's findings exposed deficiencies in reporting this issue and the need for improvement.

The government media carried 56 stories related to gender-based abuse. Of these, forty-two appeared in the official papers, while the remaining 14 featured on the national broadcaster, ZBC.

Although these media appeared to have given the subject wide publicity, most of the stories remained qualitatively shallow.

For instance, 30 of the government papers' reports were simple court cases on sexual, physical and other forms of abuse. The issues they raised were rarely followed-up to assess the impact of such problems on the victims and society at large. In 29 of these reports males were reported as being the offenders. The remaining one was about a female offender.

Only 10 of these media's reports were based on gender awareness campaign activities by gender-based civic groups, although eight of them were self-generated. The other two originated from sources outside these media. They comprised articles by Magdalene Mathiba-Madibela, head of SADC's Gender Unit, and Mary Wandia, the Regional Women's Rights Coordinator for ActionAid in Kenya.

While the Chronicle, Sunday News (28/11), and The Manica Post (3/12) carried reports on the launch of the campaign, they did not follow up the story. The Herald and The Sunday Mail ignored the launch of the campaign altogether, although they did publish four reports that referred to it in later issues. Two of them were in the papers' entertainment sections and made reference to the campaign in passing. One was a news feature on the history of 16 Days of Activism tucked away on page nine of The Herald (5/12), while the remaining one was in the "In-Depth" section of The Sunday Mail (28/11). It was on a campaign by women organisations for the removal of Population Services International (PSI) billboards, which they viewed as portraying women as "sex objects" and "major transmitters of HIV/AIDS". One of the controversial billboards carries the message: "Small house yako haina vamwe vadiwa here? Pafunge! (Does your girlfriend not have other lovers? Think about it)".

The coordinator of Young Women's Leadership Initiative, Rudo Chigudu, said: "The message being put across by the billboard is doing nothing but perpetrate violence against women. What picture of a woman is being portrayed by that billboard? Are we saying that women are promiscuous? Are we trying to defend men's actions, that they too don't have a responsibility to be faithful?"

Against Gender-Based Violence, the media did not view the arrest and detention of seven women in Mutare for wearing tight leggings as a human rights violation. The police said it constituted "indecent exposure" (The Manica Post, 3/12) and "paraded" these women "around the city during a public awareness campaign against rape".

MMPZ condemns the police behaviour, including its perception that such kind of clothing exposed women to sexual assault.

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