Reporting on violence against women in the Global South

Chapter 1 introduces the aims and theoretical frameworks underlying this edited collection, which subsequently examines how legacy and social media report on violence against women in 11 Global South countries, including in Southeast Asia (Indonesia), Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico), sub-Saharan Africa (Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa), and the Middle East and North Africa (Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen). Building on the globally impactful work of #MeToo founder and United States (US) activist, Tarana Burke, this collection offers a genealogy of how violence against women has mostly been reported by journalists located in the Global North, before #MeToo emerged in 2006. It focuses on this movement’s revitalization as a hashtag in October 2017 through to its proliferation in the COVID-19 era. Although the United Nations (UN) highlights that violence against women is a universal problem, Chapter 1 demonstrates that this violence is reported unevenly between the Global North and Global South. The chapter also introduces the ensuing nine chapters in the collection, highlighting how journalism studies from the Global North that examined the #MeToo movement mainly focused on sexual harassment and relied on a backing of white perspectives, middle-to-upper income, and cisgendered Western feminist discourse. Given that sexual harassment is just one part of the sexual violence continuum, Chapter 1 argues that women in the Global South have mostly been ignored in mainstream media reportage regarding violence against women. The chapter calls for their stories to be amplified through an intersectional lens and for a solutions-driven journalism narrative to be determined.