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ANYONE HERE BEEN RAPED AND SPEAK ENGLISH: PART 1
Posted by Charlotte on March 9, 2010
Tags: AmnestyUK, feminism, Harriet Sherwood, International News, Jenny Wood, Kat Banyard, Samira Ahmed
Amnesty UK held an event on Monday night as part of the Wisewords festival, both to celebrate women’s writing and self expression and to raise the profile of their media awards.
The event, Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?, was moderated by feminist Kay Banyard with a panel including Samira Ahmed of Channel 4 News, Harriet Sherwood, international news editor of The Guardian, and Jenny Wood, the features editor at Look! Magazine. The event info promised to explore ” Why .. media stories about women’s rights tend to focus on issues relating to their sexuality such as rape, sexual slavery, trafficking, child bearing (whether old or young) or prostitution [instead of] … women’s labour rights, freedom of speech or women imprisoned for their political beliefs”
Kat Banyard set the scene for conversations on women giving the real picture of where women sit in society today: resolutely near the bottom.
The panelists took turns to enlighten us on their perspectives, Samira Ahmed spoke of three forces which lead to what the public see the people you get on TV; the editorial line and the stories chosen. The people you get, Ahmed explained, need a combination of having something to say, and being the right people to say it, it seemed to me that there was a certain degree of luck concerned in this process to date particularly when men in the newsroom refused to admit they operated with any bias.
I was shocked to hear from Jenny Wood that Look! Magazine has run an international story spot since inception, which has remained when other spots have been changed and grown. SHe created a strong defence for ‘women’s magazines’ who’s audience may not read the international news stories but still wish to connect with the issues espoused there, Look! have, Wood says, covered a range of gritty subjects including honour killings and endemic rape in Congo. It was an eye-opening viewpoint coming from a ’soft’ publication.
Harriet Sherwood cut to the chase on international reporting stating that overwhelmingly the majority of international news correspondents are men and issues from a deeper interest in the tactics of war and terror than women’s lives and lack of available access to women to hear their stories counted against a diverse report sheet. Focus, she said is put onto the presence of women in images in the paper to create an equal balance, but without women’s voices this is a hollow effort.
The session then broke into a Q&A and I fear it lost its international focus drawing more on domestic surface issues, placement of stories on news websites; portrayal of women in power as hysterical and the objectification of women.
All very important issues, but except for one question about the framing of women as mothers I felt we missed an opportunity to discuss international news reporting and the portrayal of women as victims and soft news stories. For this reason I will be attempting to follow up that thread with the panelists this week, starting with Samira Ahmed.
Tags for this post:AmnestyUK, feminism, Harriet Sherwood, International News, Jenny Wood, Kat Banyard, Samira Ahmed