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A history of sexual assault reporting in The Age, 2011-2020
This thesis examines Australian print media representations of sexual assault against women and teenage girls in Melbourne’s The Age print newspaper between 2011 and 2020. It is grounded methodologically in cultural history theory and historical newspaper analysis. This decade witnessed significant social and political events relating to sexual assault and violence against women and their children in Australia that attracted significant media reporting, such as the national Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013-2017), major reforms to the state of Victoria’s rape and sexual assault laws, the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence (2015-2016) and the global #MeToo Movement (October 2017). A textual and visual analysis of The Age provides meaningful historical insight into how sexual assault was represented and narrativised within an Australian mainstream media outlet during the 2010s. By investigating The Age’s reporting, I demonstrate how the newspaper shaped certain meanings and narratives about sexual assault. I illustrate how individual stories from victim-survivors were utilised by The Age to educate readers’ understandings around the issue of sexual assault against women and teenage girls in Australia. I argue that The Age’s concern and interest in sexual assault against women and teenage girls in Australia was conditional, contradictory and highly gendered throughout the 2010s. By historicising the recent national conversation on sexual violence against women and girls (2021), I demonstrate the role Australian print media outlets played and continue to play in platforming and mediating sexual assault discourses during the early twenty-first century.
Principal supervisor: Professor Susan Broomhall
Co-supervisor: Professor Joy Damousi
External supervisor: Dr Jessica Lake