"The War Against Women": Media representations of men's violence against women in Australia

Abstract

This article explores the way in which one Australian newspaper represented men's violence against women and children in a series called "The War Against Women" in 1993. Notwithstanding widespread media coverage of men's violence, "The War" series responded with a shock-of-the-new reaction to statistics and reports indicating wide-spread domestic violence and sexual assaults in Victoria, Australia. The article comments critically on the newspaper's discursive construction of the problem of men's violence and its attempt to represent that violence as a war.