Shakuntala Rao. Journal of Mass Media Ethics. Volume 29, Issue 3, July-September 2014.
Introduction
The most striking feature of India’s media system when viewed from an external perspective is its size and complexity. While the growth of the Indian media was limited during India’s postcolonial phase (1947-90), a series of reforms instituted beginning in 1991 have fostered policies that favor increased private investment and a switch from a socialist to a free-market economy (Athique, 2012; Rajagopal, 2009; Thussu, 2006). These reforms have led to significant changes in media ownership and content, as well as the evolution of new styles of journalism. The establishment of at least 300 all-news cable networks and the continued growth of sunrise industries such as information technology and mobile telephony have inundated the market with cheap tools for newsgathering and information dissemination (Mehta, 2008; Rao, 2009). India, the world’s largest democracy and host to the world’s largest media, however, is also perhaps the least studied by media scholars and policy makers. The dramatic changes brought about by globalization and liberalization have not resulted in a concomitant uptick in the number of in-depth analyses or researches into the ethics of the Indian media’s journalistic practices; this failure to engage with difficult subject matter has been especially prevalent in the Indian media’s coverage of rape and sexual violence. By examining the ethics of journalistic practices in the aftermath of one particular instance of rape that took place in Delhi, India, on December 16, 2012, I argue that the media coverage of rape in Indian television news has been narrowly focused on instances of sexual violence against middle-class and upper-caste women and has tended to exclude any discussion about such forms of violence as poor and lower-caste segments of the Indian population might experience. The globalization of the Indian media, like the rest of the country’s economy, has benefitted the rich and middle-classes by providing them with a public forum—a forum from which the poor are habitually and deliberately excluded. The prevalence of shame among rape victims is evident in journalistic practice and in the coded language of journalism ethics. If inclusiveness, human dignity, and the ideal of providing space to multiple voices are to be considered as ethical precepts for global media, India’s television news media fail to be inclusive in its portrayal and reporting of sexual violence and therefore perpetuate a “pro-affluent bias” (Drèze & Sen, 2013, p. 266).
On the evening of December 16, 2012, a 23-year-old woman and her male companion boarded a private bus plying a route through Delhi, the bustling capital of India. The woman, a physiotherapy intern, was raped by a group of men aboard the moving bus. She was beaten and mutilated with an iron rod. Battered, naked, and bleeding profusely, she and her male companion were left at the side of a highway in Delhi, where they were found by a passer-by. After undergoing emergency treatment, the woman died from her injuries 13 days later.
While no research has yet considered the relative amount of media coverage the case received, it was clear from early on that this rape had caught the public and the media’s attention. Beginning on the morning of December 17, students, activists, housewives, labor union members, and men and women from all walks of life began to gather at Jantar Mantar and India Gate, two major architectural landmarks in Delhi, in protest against police inaction and to demand safety for women. As thousands gathered, raising banners and chanting slogans over the next several days, police used tear gas, lathi or batons, and water cannons in an effort to disperse the protestors. Images and footage of the oftentimes violent confrontations between armed police personnel and protestors received wall-to-wall coverage. The initial response was swift, as the government shut down Delhi’s underground public transportation system and declared areas of the city to be “out of bounds” (Rao, 2013). Protestors were arrested en masse and police imposed a dawn-to-dusk curfew in certain areas. While the protests lasted about two weeks, the media coverage of the rape and its aftermath continued over the following two months.
Violence against women in Delhi in particular, and in India more broadly, is pervasive and omnipresent. There are some regional differences, with North India topping the charts in rapes, domestic violence, and female feticides; Delhi has frequently been referred to as the rape capital, with 706 reported rapes in 2012, even as activists assert that the majority of rapes go unreported (The Hindustan Times, 2013). Conviction rates for crimes of sexual violence are near zero—one person was convicted of rape in Delhi in the year 2012; he received a prison sentence of three years, light by Western standards. The majority of accused rapists are simply ticketed and released. Despite activist campaigns and legal reforms, the likelihood that a rape trial will end in conviction has declined from 44% to 26% since 1973 (The Hindu, 2013). With more than 24,000 reported cases in 2011, incidences of rape in India saw a 9.2% rise over the previous year (International Business Times, 2013). More than half (54.7%) of the victims were between the ages of 18 and 30, and over 17% of the total number of reported instances of rape in the country occurred in Delhi. Anderson and Ray (2010) estimated that, in India, more than 2 million women go missing every year—a process that begins in utero, with sex-selective abortion, and that is followed by a life marked by violence, inadequate access to health care, inequality, neglect, malnutrition, and a general lack of attention to their personal health and well-being.
While rape is common, the coverage of sexual violence and rape in Indian media historically has been limited (Drèze & Sen, 2013, p. 226). One positive consequence of the December 2012 rape has been the attention it helped draw to the prevalence of sexual brutality in India, and to the fact that even known instances of violence against women tended to receive scant attention in the past. “As newspapers reinvented themselves as rape-reporting vehicles,” wrote Drèze and Sen, “many of them across the country have been devoting much space, often several pages every day, to report of rape gathered together in a way they never had been before” (p. 227). Television news stations broadcast interviews of police and politicians, aired longform programs on the issues of women’s safety and security in the capital, and endlessly covered the protests and presented the details of the incident. Feminist scholars have written at length about the prevalence of rape in Indian society—for instance, describing the incidents of mass rape during the partitioning of India in 1947, during which at least 100,000 women were raped, or the events that transpired in 1972 during the war of Bangladesh, when another 200,000 women were reportedly raped by the Pakistani army (Butalia, 2000). “Rape is a unique crime,” wrote Bhattacharjee (2008), “for the society in India inflicts more suffering on the victim than on the perpetrator” (p. 23). Indian laws have been unclear about “sex without consent” (p. 31), often blatantly ignoring or condoning sexual violence against wives and family members. Questions of honor, retribution, and revenge, especially when there are differences in caste, have traditionally defined rape in the Indian mind; women’s sexuality often has made them targets during periods of unrest, in the face of political vendettas, or as a measure of personal revenge. Except in rare instances, such as the December 2012 rape, the Indian media have rarely sought to address the pervasiveness and complicated matrix of rape in Indian society.
India’s New Media Landscape and Journalism Ethics
After India gained its independence from the British in 1947, Indian print journalism evolved in an unfettered environment, whereas Indian broadcast media quickly became a casualty of postcolonial state control (Rao, 2008). Television as a technology had been present in India for close to 40 years, but because of the myopic approach of policymakers, its growth was stunted for the first 17 years following the country’s independence (Saksena, 1996). Doordarshan, the state-operated, public-service television broadcaster and the only station allowed to broadcast news, began its modest operations in 1959. With no competition, Doordarshan’s programming remained dull, non-commercial, and focused largely on educational programming. As with the rest of the economy, Indian media underwent an extensive transformation in the early 1990s.
In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the government of then-Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao faced a fiscal crisis that forced the introduction of policy changes with an eye toward relaxing the restrictions placed on multinational corporations seeking to operate within India. In turn, such companies were quick to invest in the Indian media market. It was an onslaught from the skies that had a radical impact on the changing Indian media landscape, with the arrival of international satellite-based television (Pelton, Oslund, & Marshall, 2004)—in particular, the 1991 debut in India of CNN International (CNNI) as the young network covered the first Gulf War. A few months later Hong-Kong based Star TV, a subsidiary of News Corporation, began broadcasting five channels into India using the ASIASAT-1 satellite. Between 1991 and 1995, several Indian, satellite-based television services were launched, most prominent among them being Zee TV and Sony TV. As a result, the Indian broadcast media economy underwent a dramatic change. The sale of television sets increased at a nominal rate of 13.9% during the period 2005-2010, a period that saw India emerge as the third-largest cable TV-viewing nation in the world, after China and the United States, with more than 150 million cable TV-viewing households by the end of 2011 (Hawkes, 2012). In addition to the widespread and expanding access to broadcast media, newspaper circulation in India has remained robust, with approximately 330 million copies of various publications sold daily. A staggering 900 million people, or about 75% of the population, have access to mobile phones, a figure second only to China. There are an estimated 65 million Facebook users and 35 million Twitter accounts (Parthasarthy, Srinivas et al., 2013). India has entered an era of intense media saturation, as consumers are increasingly able to access global and satellite television, the Internet and social networking services, and the ever proliferating new media and technologies that are co-constructing and disseminating major events as they unfold.
Media entities in India enjoy enormous freedom and are not required to toe any government line. The varied media entities often reflect a great deal of diversity in their reporting, both about India and abroad (Ravindranath, 2004). While generally maintaining a “hands-off” approach toward the press, the Indian government has encouraged the establishing of codes of ethics to apply to the media. In 1976, the Parliament in India introduced one such code, called the “Parliamentary Codes,” which purported to define for journalists and newspapers their social and moral responsibilities (Ravindranath, 2004, p. 12). The Press Council of India (PCI) was established in 1966 with funding from the state and was envisioned as an autonomous, nonofficial, statutory body comprised of political appointees, journalists, and editors. Its code of conduct addressed issues of accuracy, fairness, privacy, obscenity, vulgarity, suggestive guilt, violence, social evils, riots, and sensationalism. Times of India, the largest English-language newspaper in the country, evolved its own code of ethics in 1996 and to date remains one of the only newspapers in India to have done so. Ironically, Times has also been subject to heavy criticism for its perceived role in promoting a culture of “celebratory media … dominated by breathless gossip about cricketers, billionaires and Bollywood stars and point-scoring among the political elite” (Drèze & Sen, 2013, p. 263). The News Broadcasters Association (NBA), an independent and privately funded group, has developed a “Code of Ethics and Broadcasting Standards” for electronic journalists working at cable news networks. Although many codes of media ethics exist, ethics is not a widely discussed topic among journalists and media professionals. Rao and Johal (2006) found in their research that Indian journalists might be familiar with the various codes but have had no or few opportunities to discuss ethics with colleagues, editors, or owners. While journalism and media education in India has exploded over the past two decades, with numerous public and private universities now offering two- or four-year degree programs in journalism and communication, ethics education remains absent. There is no ethics training for new employees or professional development opportunities for young journalists entering the workforce, even at the elite and well established media houses.
The PCI code, titled “Norms of Journalistic Conduct,” is the most comprehensive and widely recognized code of ethics that Indian journalists are expected to follow (Rao & Johal, 2006). The 111-page code makes no direct reference to covering or reporting on rape or sexual violence and provides no guidelines for discussing such topics. A subsection under the discussion of the right to privacy simply states that “reporting crime involving rape, abduction or kidnap of women/females or sexual assault on children, or raising doubts and questions touching the chastity, personal character and privacy of women, the names, photographs of the victims or other particulars leading to their identity shall not be published” (Press Council of India, 2010). This clause issues a directive to the media not to publish the name of rape victims but does not give journalists any guidance or directive on how to write about and report on sexual violence against women. In comparison, the code does provide a lengthy and explicit list of “Dos” and “Don’ts” on how to report about AIDS, communal violence, and politicians, judges, and other public figures.
Method
The analysis draws on 38 face-to-face interviews of television news journalists conducted by the author in Delhi for three weeks following the December 16, 2012, rape. The 27 men and 11 women interviewed worked for various broadcast news organizations, all headquartered in Delhi, including Zee News (Hindi), ABP News (Hindi), Times Now (English), NDTVx7 (English and Hindi), CNN-IBN (English), Aaj Tak TV (Hindi), IBN-7 (Hindi), Sahara Samay Rashtriya (Hindi), Loksabha TV (English and Hindi), and India TV (Hindi). They ranged in age, industry experience, and seniority, but as a group had worked in television for, on average, 10 years. Potential interviewees were formally contacted, in most cases via introductions made by third parties. The participants were informed at first contact of the general topics to be covered in the interview. These included, but were not limited to, discussions about the ethics of media coverage of rape and issues surrounding discussions of sexual violence in the broadcast media. In one case, in addition to conducting a face-to-face interview, I was also able to shadow the interviewee while he/she attended news conferences, talked to sources, and wrote and edited stories. The participants were guaranteed anonymity in any published work to arise from the interviews, and pseudonyms therefore have been used. Interviews were conducted in both English and Hindi. Using Deuze’s (2005) method of thematic and discourse analysis, I grouped and categorized themes or repertoires as represented in the responses. I closely examined the similarities and differences noting major themes across multiple responses. I discuss these themes and provide interview extracts where pertinent. I do not suggest that everything each interviewee said is to be understood as objective truth or a definitive statement applicable to all Indian journalists, or to Indian media as a whole. The scope and purpose of this research is to provide a partial analysis of the ethics of covering rape and sexual violence in India’s rapidly expanding and increasingly globalized news media.
Findings
Rape, Social Leniency, and Ethical Habits of the Newsroom
Well known Indian journalist and women’s rights activist, Ammu Joseph (2008), wrote:
Mainstream media coverage of rape over the past quarter of a century has generally conformed to a predictable pattern: long spells of routine reports regularly, if randomly, culled from police handouts, broken by brief periods of intensive and extensive coverage catalyzed by one or more cases that happen to grab the imagination of the media and the public—usually in that order. (p. 262)
Many of the journalists interviewed for this study were in agreement with Joseph’s analysis that India’s television news media have been negligent in covering sexual violence in a meaningful way, though not in covering crime more broadly. One oft-cited reason was the notion that society tolerated and condoned such violence:
J.A.: The problem is much deeper than just reporting about rape. It is [also] about apathy, collective disregard for women … rape, violence, battery, female discrimination is just tolerated.
S.P.: There is pre-existing social leniency towards rape. As long as that exists, the news media will follow society’s lead.
Social leniency, S.P. further explained, is “society’s chalta hai [indifferent] attitude towards violence against women.” S.P.’s comment resonates with contemporary research on women’s lives in India. While India’s economic growth rate has been impressive, the benefits have been distributed in remarkably unequal fashion. Some failures have been huge, especially when it comes to women’s lives—for instance, the ongoing and widespread malnourishment among women in general, and particularly among female children. Gender-related indicators are abysmal even when compared to other South Asian countries like Nepal and Bangladesh, and far worse than in other BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) countries. A cursory look at the World Bank report on World Developmental Indicators (2013) points to one of the lowest female-male ratios in the world (940 to 1000), a high mortality rate for females between the ages of 1 and 4 years, one of the lowest rates of literacy among women (74%, compared with 88% for men), and the lowest proportion of females to have attained a secondary education (27%, compared with 50% for men). Official statistics on rape are limited and incomplete, and there is the widespread assumption that rape in India is vastly unreported given the shame associated with being the victim of rape (I discuss this further in the following section). If we consider only those incidents reported to the police, the incidence of rape in India in 2010 was 1.8 per 100,000—among the lowest reported such rates in the world (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2013). “One cannot be sure if India has a special rape problem,” wrote Drèze and Sen (2013), “but all the evidence suggests that India has a huge problem with making rape a seriously monitored and reported issue” (p. 228). Such low reportage of rape can be juxtaposed with attitudes toward rape and rape victims. According to a survey conducted by Sakshi (Kapur, 1998), a Delhi-based NGO active in gender issues, 74% of judges surveyed believed that “preservation of the family” ought to be a principal concern for women even in the event of sexual violence at home; 51% believed that women who stay with abusive husbands are “partly to blame” for their plight; 68% felt that “provocative attire was an invitation to rape”; and, 55% felt that the “moral character of the victim” was relevant (p. 44). To what extent these opinions explain the fact that daily occurrences of rape and sexual violence are disregarded by the political class, judiciary, and media is a topic deserving of further investigation, but it can be said with certainty that it points to the general devaluation of women in society and that gender relations continue to show no signs of significant improvement when it comes to mortality rates, literacy, and employment. As one journalist asked, “Indians routinely kill the girl child in uterus [through sex-selective abortion], how do you think they are going to treat her when she is walking the streets?”
When asked why rape and sexual violence had not been a topic of focus for India’s television news media, journalists pointed to several pervasive and enduring habits surrounding ethics that prevailed in their newsrooms, which can be summarized as competition and what sells. Given the intrinsically competitive nature of private media, many journalists observed that media outlets desperately try to out-do one another in their reporting and timing of scoops, their ability to break news. This is particularly true in media-saturated Delhi. This competition puts pressure on editors and producers to take shortcuts, and they fall back on well tested clichés without giving thought to the subtle implications of what they broadcast. While some rape cases have received in-depth coverage—such as the 1996 rape and murder of Priyadarshini Mattoo, a law student—many others, if reported at all, have been reported with little followup, background, or context. One journalist noted, “Newsrooms have been dominated by men and these [men] have never seen rape as news that will sell.” Another journalist, who had earlier been a newspaper reporter before becoming a cable television news anchor observed, “The deadline-every-second approach to television news drives journalists to depend on old habits, rather than taking the time to think out the careful, unique approach each story deserves.” Studies of media in western nations have shown not only that crime stories sell more newspapers and draw larger viewing audiences than any other type of news (except war), but that violent crime is even more effective at winning the attentions of readers and viewers (Bennet & Manderson, 2002; Cuklanz, 1996). While Indian news channels have become increasingly focused, as Thussu (2007) has noted on “cricket, cinema and crime” (p. 595), the lack of rape reportage suggests, as one woman journalist observed, that “everyday rape has never been considered newsworthy.” All the journalists interviewed as part of this research vigorously critiqued the ethics of their news organizations’ habit of unquestioned dependence on what sells while also noting that reporting on day-to-day sexual violence against women has never been viewed as a story likely to sell in the media marketplace. There seems to be an inherent and implicit contradiction in journalistic practices: a belief, on one hand, that crime sells, but rape and sexual violence against women, on the other hand, does not deserve in-depth or investigative coverage.
All the journalists agreed that the December 2012 rape had garnered media attention of a sort that no other rape case in India had received in recent history, although they were divided as to why. Several stated that audiences were disgruntled with the lack of security for themselves and women in public places; more than half thought that the case received so much media attention because of the large number of middle-class people who took to the streets to protest against the evident corruption of police, politicians, and the judiciary. U.S. and T.A.’s comments, respectively, exemplify the two main lines of thought:
U.S.: [The media] showed the frustration that people have been feeling for a long time, [over] the lack of public transportation and a lack of security … A woman cannot get on a bus without being killed, what kind of a society is this?
T.K.: Corruption of the system is the problem, not [rape]. The justice system is broken. The police does not file an FIR [First Information Report] when you go to the station, they do not believe the victim, they want bribes to file a case against the rapist, and then it will take [the] court another 10 years to hear the case. We covered the story because people were finally rebelling [against the system].
The interviewees agreed that it remains difficult to predict whether this case will prove to be a turning point in bringing about substantive changes in the judicial system, in social attitudes toward women, or increased and ethically conscious media coverage of rape and sexual violence. One journalist observed, “I tried to be ethical by showing in my news program everything that is lacking—safety, women’s rights, good public transportation, lights on the streets, vigilant police force, empathy among politicians … ” What the coverage did achieve, journalists agreed, was to highlight the deep vulnerability of woman to rape and harassment in modern Indian society.
Who Is Raped Matters: Caste and Class Prejudices
In recent literature on media ethics, issues of inclusiveness and human dignity have rightly taken center-stage. A media focused on inclusiveness and human dignity, rooted in the values of care and compassion, would see humans always in relation to one another, existing interdependently within communities rather than as atomized, independent individuals or as collectives of individuals (Wasserman, 2008). Advocating for ethical protonorms for global media, Christians and Nordenstreng (2004), Couldry (2012), Ward (2005), and others have suggested the inclusion of a plurality of voices to ensure an ethical media. If one takes inclusiveness and human dignity as important precepts of ethical media practices, it is clear from the responses of the journalists interviewed for this research and the content they produce that television news media in India are non-inclusive.
Analysis of their responses has shown that the journalists interviewed do not believe television news in India to represent the poor and the untouchables, or dalits, nor do they see it as giving voice to or providing adequate coverage of poor victims of rape and sexual assault. Critics have argued that, even with increased social mobility and economic prosperity, improvements in access to education, and the continued growth of towns and cities, caste has remained entrenched in modern Indian society (Hasan, 2002). Understood primarily as status groups, castes in India are ranked in relative terms of honor and purity. The caste system is comprised of three upper castes (brahmin, kshatriyas, and vaishyas) and an amorphous fourth group of sudras (agricultural workers or those who live off the land). All others have been alternately called antyaja (outcastes or untouchables) or dalits. A metaphor for oppression, caste has been important to the consolidation and continuation of the hierarchy of power in postcolonial India. The upper castes have continued to exert near-complete control over the country’s political, educational, economic, social, and media arenas. A number of recent studies have underscored the virtual absence of dalits, tribal peoples, and other disadvantaged communities in the media, among corporate ownership, in judicial institutions, even in cricket, the Olympics, or on polo teams (Bonner, 1990; Drèze & Sen, 2013, pp. 220-221). A survey of 315 editors and other leading members of the print and electronic media in Delhi found that not one of them belonged to a lower caste. In fact, about 85% belonged to a small coterie of upper castes that, in total, constitute only about 16% of India’s total population; more than half belonged to the Brahmin caste (“Upper castes dominate media,” 2006). In answering the question, “How unequal is India?” Drèze and Sen identified caste, class, and gender as three interlinking factors that combine to prevent a significant proportion of India’s population—up to 600 million individuals—from accessing adequate opportunities for basic education or health services. Pointing to the literacy rate of dalit women as an example, which increased from near zero in 1901 to only 12% in 2010, Drèze and Sen concluded, “the social norms and value systems underlying historical inequalities of class, caste and gender are still alive, even if their manifestations are moderated by modern laws, norms and institutions” (p. 215).
A brief look at rape coverage preceding the December 2012 incident points to news stories such as “BPO employee murdered and raped” (September 2012, NDTVx7), “MBA student raped” (2009, Aaj Tak), and “Rape of medical student unsolved” (2010, Times Now). Such stories, according to journalists, imply that a rape is considered news only when the victim is a member of the English-speaking, urban, upper-caste and middle-class, someone who works at a call center, for instance, or who is attending medical or business school. As with past rape victims who then became the subject of national media attention, the December 2012 Delhi rape victim, too, was an aspiring member of the city’s middle-class. The inequity that permeates Indian society does much to color who is seen as a rape victim and, thus, is deserving of media coverage:
K.R.: We should not be selective about condemning rape. But we don’t seem to have anger over rapes of dalit women, no anger over rapes of women from Kashmir and [the] north-east, no candle light march or taking over of the capital when the Dhaula Kuan gang rape happened.
K.R. is referring to a 2005 report of a gang rape that took place in the area of Dhaula Kuan, in northwest Delhi, in which a 20-year-old Delhi University student was abducted by four men and raped in a car. The victim was from the state of Mizoram in northeast India; northeast Indians historically have been marginalized and discriminated against because of their cultural and linguistic proximity to China and because of the local prevalence of Christianity. The region has also been subject since 1958 to the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), which has given the Indian military enormous discretionary power ripe for abuse, as is evident in the frequent accusations levied against the military of rapes and killings. One journalist referred to the practice of “crime and the city journalism,” in which a crime and its victim’s story is only worth covering when the target audience in large cities believes that it “affects people like us,” while crimes against the poor, powerless, and distant receive little attention and are “off the media map”:
M.H.: I was so disgusted [by the lack of coverage of the rape of poor and dalit women] that I did a call-in show called “Rapes Outside of Cities Don’t Matter.” I got responses from many viewers, on social media and on the website. Overwhelmingly, people agreed that who is raped matters the most.
While M.H. and several others pointed to the middle-class audience’s critique of the media’s inadequate coverage of rape of poor and dalit women, those same journalists were quick to point out that they often worked under enormous pressure to please Indian television’s mostly middle-class audiences, who they saw as being more interested in watching their own troubles and desires reflected in media content than those of the poor, rural, and lower castes:
L.T.: … rape in the rural areas, especially by upper-caste men of lower-caste women, is common. How many time has my news channel done a story or you have seen one on [a] national channel about that silent tragedy? [It remains] an unreported story
Another journalist, who had worked in a local newspaper in a small city in North India before becoming a television reporter in Delhi, said, “One sarpanch [village headman] told me, just [as a] matter of fact, we use rape to punish lower-castes. We believe that is the justified form of punishment. Do you think I will be able to broadcast that story on any of the metro [Delhi] channels? The attitude [in the city] is who cares what a chota mota [small time] sarpanch thinks? But India lives in those villages and that story is missing.”
Ethical media reportage on rape and sexual violence would require a complete reorientation of the television media’s journalistic practices. It would require a greater sensitivity to and knowledge of the depth and pervasiveness of exclusion in Indian society based on one’s gender, class, and caste. India’s rapid economic and media growth has led to rapid affluence in urban areas. This has benefitted a small percentage of the population, to which the globalized television news media caters. The December 2012 rape rightly highlighted the lack of safety for women in Delhi, but this case alone cannot be seen as indicative of increased awareness of and ethical media reporting about women’s lives as a whole.
Covering Shame Culture
Much has been written about shame culture, and the cross-cultural and disciplinary efforts at understanding shame have spanned psychology, gender studies, and social anthropology in an effort to understand how shame impacts the lives of women across the globe (Fessler, 2004; McCormick, 2010; Smith, 2010). There are a number of culture-specific reasons why a woman might feel ashamed or guilt-ridden, but the violation of the body ranks as one of the most common (Benedict, 1992; Thapan, 1997). Shame can be a powerful indicator of a person’s role in society; for instance, one can feel shame for failing to meet a minimal standard of social acceptability, over fear of exclusion from a particular social group, or at being perceived as an outcast (Lewis, 1992). Research on shame culture in India has been minimal, with even less written about the emotive nature of shame for women. Some Indian feminists have suggested that shame culture in India is perhaps best signified by the fact that women are barred from accessing public places (Ghosh, 2008). As became evident in conducting the interviews—and was a view held by both male and female journalists—women expect public spaces to be unsafe for them, which contributes to an unspoken cultural assumption that women who step out of homes can be subjected to shaming, humiliation, and violence. One woman journalist described the restrictions she has faced in pursuing a career:
M.P.: I face unwanted looks, touches, and gestures from getting on a bus to go shopping. I am careful never to make eye contact with strangers, never smile at anyone, keep my mobile phone and a small knife with me, do not go out at night … [In Indian culture] women are part of home and family, so there is nothing wrong with confinement. Home is safe, roads are unsafe. Men, on the other hand, belong outside …
M.P.’s description fits well with Ghosh’s (2008) analysis that “men do not fear everyday encroachment on their bodies and personhood” (p. 242) the way women do when they are in public places. The exclusion of women from public spaces leads to an assumption that eveteasing (a euphemism used by the Indian media to describe the sexual harassment of women on the streets), rape, sexual assault, and other forms of violence are inevitable outcomes of women’s illegitimate desire for freedom and equality. No research has yet been conducted that has examined the role of the media in shaping or perpetuating shame culture; the journalists interviewed mentioned several ways in which shame culture has influenced television reporting of rape.
Some journalists believed that the media had been highly critical of religious leaders, bureaucrats, and politicians, many of whom sought to blame the rape victims themselves, thereby contributing to their public shaming. Three weeks after the December 2012 rape, Cabinet Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal told reporters that the protestors ought to be punished and that women ought to “stay at home at night.” Within an hour, Sahara Samay Network had broadcast a news segment titled, “Sexist netas [politicians] must go home,” in which anchors and experts critiqued Bansal’s comments. For the next two days, news channels broadcast interviews of Bansal while reporters and anchors peppered the minister with hard-hitting questions such as, “Has the government given any directive that women not work at night?” and “Are you saying that Delhi police will no longer provide safety for women who work at night?” Journalists pointed to growing awareness among women and victims—often aided by a large number of non-governmental organizations—of their rights and access to media. One journalist with his own morning talk show on a cable news network said:
A.D.: [In] every instance [on my show] I have debated with politicians or religious [men] who make outrageous statements like [a] rape victim should marry their rapist or what was she wearing or why was she was outside with an unmarried man. It is an ethical duty of journalism to show what these men are saying [and] what they think about women.
While the insensitive comments of politicians and religious leaders were thereafter subject to loud critiques in the media, the majority of journalists interviewed agreed that shame remains a powerful emotion that pervades the discourse and rhetoric of rape and influences the kind of media reportage the crime receives. Some interviewees believed that the sensationalism associated with rape coverage made women the focus of the crime rather than the perpetrators and, thus, perpetuated a culture of shame for victims. The images associated with the broadcasting of such stories included grainy images of a woman sitting in a corner with her face covered or blurred (CNN-IBN), a woman draped in a white cloth, often associated with widowhood (Aaj Tak), or a woman sitting on a hospital bed with her face covered with a dupatta or scarf (India TV). Writing about coverage of rape in Indian newspapers, Timmons (2012) observed that “almost inevitably, the art to go with a story about rape depicts a shamed woman.” These images signified, as one journalist noted, that “[rape] is a woman’s problem, it is your fault you got raped, and shame is on you.” The wall-to-wall coverage of the news about the rape did not show gangs of drunken men grabbing a woman and assaulting her, as happened in the neighboring state of Haryana soon after the Delhi rape, or men luring a young girl with candy so that they could sexually assault her, as happened in Delhi earlier that year, or as Timmons (2012) suggests, “even a more generic drawing or photo of a looming and lecherous man or group of men.” The PCI’s code of ethics was also criticized by some of the journalists:
S.R.: Even [journalistic ethics] codes talk about women’s chastity. Rape is violation of chastity, it is a shame for the woman to lose her chastity but codes don’t give guidelines or details about how media should cover [rape].
Further, when you consider chastity to be the moral guiding principle, shame, a number of journalists suggested, was the inevitable emotional outcome. Journalistic ethics codes, according to some interviewees, must move away from such patriarchal and antiquated perspectives and toward more progressive language that asserts women’s rights in public places and gives journalists guidelines as to how to cover and discuss gender-based rights and freedoms rather than continuing to present the topic in language that can have the effect of victimizing women for asserting those rights.
Discussion
Key to evolution of global media ethics has been its emphasis on protonorms and a plurality of approaches, which have included the recognition and inclusion of differences, the general sacredness of life, and human dignity (Ward, 2013). The nonrecognition of human dignity is particularly exemplified by conditions of dire poverty, social marginalization, and hopelessness and one in which societies deny people a flourishing life (Nussbaum, 2011). If we are to apply such principles as a means to guide media practices around the world, much needs to change in the Indian television media’s journalistic practices. This research was based on analysis of interviews conducted with journalists in the aftermath of a single rape case and shows that the ethical practices of the television news media in India is in need of significant change when it comes to covering rape and sexual violence. Several interviewees suggested that, historically, rape and sexual violence against women were not deemed newsworthy, describing a general disinterest in and indifference toward rape as news. When rape was covered, oftentimes the victim’s caste and class affiliation, rather than the severity, frequency, or nature of the crime, determined whether the story was considered newsworthy. Journalists acknowledged that the rape that occurred in Delhi in December 2012 received significant media coverage, but they did not foresee that the coverage would lead to changes in the way rape and sexual violence would be covered by the television news media in the future. The ethical habits of the newsroom, the journalists suggested, were influenced by their single-minded focus on what they thought would best sell to their urban, middle-class, and upper-caste audiences rather than the poor, lower-caste, and marginalized, groups that are not considered a part of India’s media map. While more research remains to be done into the connection between journalistic practices and shame culture in India and elsewhere, journalists interviewed by the author were consistent in stating that the television news media both countered and perpetuated the portrayal of rape victim as a shamed woman. Some journalists vocally critiqued the ongoing victim shaming in which politicians, religious leaders, and bureaucrats had engaged; others stated that the news media continued to bring shame to the victim by focusing on her rather than the perpetrators.
News stories about India both in the domestic and international media for much of the last two decades have focused on the country’s economic achievements. India’s record in pioneering democratic governance while maintaining the largest, most vibrant and free media in the world, a key part of a functioning secular state, has been cause for much celebration. Within this transformation, however, is also the story of a fundamental failure. The quality of life for the majority of women in India, when measured in terms of physical safety, access to food, sanitation, water, literacy, and health services, remains among the worst in the world (Pidd, 2012). There is little coverage in the television media about issues facing the rural, poor, and lower-caste segments of India’s population, especially in comparison to the enormous amounts of attention given over to the concerns of the new middle-class. The dominant subjects covered by the media are fashion, gastronomy, Bollywood, and cricket—subjects that hardly concern the more than 600 million Indians who currently survive on a subsistence living (Drèze & Sen, 2013, p. 266). There are bits and pieces of coverage that depict such large-scale deprivation, but coverage of the lives of the deprived is astoundingly limited when considering the Indian media as a whole. The issue of deprivation and denial of human dignity that Indian women face is linked to their experiences of rape and sexual violence. The patriarchal bias against the raped woman is fully in place and evident in the treatment meted out to the victim by the police, the criminal justice system, and the media.