Depiction of Violence Against Women in Leading English Newspapers of India: A Study

Violence against women is a global phenomenon and print media in India focuses on such occurrences from time to time. The recurring forms of such violence are Sexual Harassment, Domestic Violence, Dowry Violence & Death, Rape and Female foeticide & Infanticide. The present study focuses on atrocities on women as covered in Indian newspapers and tries to evaluate the attitude of the Indian Print Media towards such issues. Quantitative evaluation of specific issues of atrocities against women as reported in newspapers has been attempted. While doing so content analysis with the help of both discrete data analysis and metrical data analysis are performed to investigate the coverage of the issues in the newspapers. The results show that all the newspapers are uniformly consistent in giving very little coverage to these issues. In comparison among issues, it has been found that some issues like rape and sexual harassment get more coverage than other issues. The sociological perspective of the findings has been elaborated.