Re-Constructing Violence against Women and Children in the Written Media:Canada and Romania’s Cases

1. IntroductionAn international study made by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2006 has found that violence against women committed by their live-in spouses or partners is a widespread phenomenon, common in the developed and emerging world, as well as in rural and urban areas (WHO, 2006). In interviews with nearly 25,000 women at 15 sites in 10 countries, the researchers found that rates of partner violence ranged between 15 percent in Yokohama, Japan, to 71 percent in rural Ethiopia. At six of the sites, 50 to 75 percent of women said they have been subject to moderate or severe violence at home. As demonstrated, violence by an intimate partner is a common experience worldwide.The present article denounces the preeminence and widespread of violence against women and children in the entire world and focus on two countries: Romania and Canada and its treatment in the written media. Despite the fact that these countries seem to have little in common regarding their economic, social and political life, the phenomenon of violence against women and children could display some similar characteristics. An international comparison might shed new light in this area, pointing out the similarities and the differences in to develop new practical ways to create awareness and to prevent violence.The paper's main objective is to identify the commonalities and differences among journalists' styles of re-constructing the acts of violence against women and children in Canadian and Romanian newspapers.2. Theoretical frameworkWe use as the starting point the social constructivists' perspective, more exactly the thesis which contends that human knowledge is constructed from language and words that give meaning to human experience and objective reality in concert with their social, political, and cultural environments (Greene, 1994; Payne, 1997). According to this thesis, the individual constructs his/her own meaning of the real world based on shared norms, values and experience. Green (1984; 115-116) suggests that: Culture thus is not recognized as a monolithic stereotype of groups of people. Attempts to draw broad cultural pictures of people's do injustice to any particular individual who does not match this stereotyped version of a culture.From a communicative point of view, the social constructivist framework guided us to see language as a system of symbols that allows to represent the world, which is not external to it, but a product of the interpretative repertoires used by people in the search to understand realword facts and events. Different interpretative repertoires can construct different versions of the same event. In the same vein Willing (2001:95) gives the following examples:A newspaper article may refer to young offenders as 'young tear-aways', while a defending lawyer may describe his or her client as 'no-hope-kids'. The former construction emphasizes the uncontrollability of young offenders and implies the need for strict parenting and policing, whereas the latter draws attention to the unmet psychological and educational needs of young offenders and importance of social and economic deprivation.In the case of media and violence the focus of social constructivists' research understands and explain the media's role in primary defining a social event as in a given society. In this case it is argued that the news-making process is not random, and many variables influence the type of information the public receives.A question is at stake here: What determines how crime and violent news are constructed? The answer at it is not a simple one, and it has been the subject of intense investigation. Despite the varying perspectives or emphasis, it is agreed that the construction of crime news serves purposes other than the factual (or statistical) portrayal of crime that is most relevant. In a series of studies in the late 1980's Ericson et al. (1987, 1989, 1991) argued that media representations of crime serve the purpose of constructing and reinforcing a sense of order which serves a range of institutional and cultural interests. …