Quite a lot has been made of The Courier Mail’s ‘Bride & Seek‘ headline that ran on the front page of the Queensland newspaper last Wednesday. It referred to Stephanie Scott, the school teacher from Leeton who we now know, tragically, was murdered.
20,000 Australians were offended enough to add their signature to a Change.org petition seeking an apology from The Courier Mail.
Does that represent a critical mass? No. Would you write it off as negligible? Probably not.
The newspaper upset people. It was undoubtedly printed before Scott was known to be murdered. It would have gone to the printers on Tuesday evening, hours before police confirmed that a suspect had been arrested for Scott’s murder on Wednesday morning.
Does that render it appropriate or sensitive? I’d argue not. Was it known that the likely situation was not of a runaway bride but a victim of crime? One News Limited journalist confirmed to me that the very real suspicion conveyed by police in Leeton on Tuesday night was foul play. But even if it wasn’t, even if Scott was merely missing, was the headline respectful to the individuals involved? To Scott? To her family? To her fiancé?
What if the reaction to the headline wasn’t, as suggested in one national newspaper today, merely feminists “having it in” for the editor? What if the reaction wasn’t, as suggested in a weekend paper, a horde of citizens happily interpreting the copy in the least charitable way?
What if people are just generally fed up with the media treating people – victims of crime or otherwise – as collateral? What if the reaction was borne out of a genuine desire to see a little more respect delivered? A little leadership? Particularly in the realm of crime.
What if men and women – feminist or otherwise – recognise that no newspaper headline anywhere exists in a vacuum and that ‘bride & seek’ simply plays to the lowest common denominator? What if men and women who expressed their distaste at the headline did so not because they want to cast any single editor or masthead as the villain or the victim, but because they have had enough?
Because they recognise the broader context and they want better. What if they recognise that we have a problem, that the headline is both symptomatic and emblematic of?
Australia now equals the UK for the number of women that are killed each week by men, yet our population is one third of the size of theirs. This is not a hypothetical problem. It is real and as the Canberra bureau chief of The Australian Phillip Hudson observed today it is an emergnecy that desperately requires leadership.
Does “Bride & Seek” create violence? Does it cause death? Is it a contributing factor to domestic violence? Of course not.
Did it trivialise the life of a woman who was killed? Yes.
Had the newspaper apologised first thing on Wednesday morning such a characterisation would be unfair. But it didn’t and it still hasn’t. As Lucia Osborne-Crowley wrote last week:
“This headline feeds into an arguably complacent culture surrounding violence against women. Drawing parallels between a violent epidemic and a playful game encourages the notion that violence against women is neither particularly serious nor particularly pressing.”
Violence against women is both serious and pressing, and yet the public response to it is neither. Without leadership from those in power it is likely to remain that way. Luke Ablett captured the resulting frustration from many Australians here: Another woman is murdered and we are telling women not to walk in parks?
A newspaper headline that trivialises a woman’s life is a lightning rod for criticism because it represents the bigger problem. Here we have an entity with power that is not just unwilling to use that power to demand better, but effectively it’s permitting the worst.
Newspapers are in a privileged position: they can demonstrate leadership, they can influence the agenda, they can set the tone for public discussion. The week before The Courier Mail demonstrated a willingness to do that. It ran cover image of a white ribbon, symbolising the fight against domestic violence, accompanied by the words “domestic violence is not a political football” and, in larger text, the words, “stop it”.
And yet, the very next week, when faced with the disappearance of a young woman, during a time when the rate of women being killed in Australia is accelerating, it seemingly abandoned that leadership. And that is what I reckon people have had enough of.
Maybe Australians are particularly sensitive right now. Maybe that’s because they’re sick to death of violence against women being trivialised. Can you blame them?