Violence Against Women in English Press of Pakistan; A Content Analysis of Daily Dawn Newspaper

Abstract

Women have always been victims of male dominant society and are being represented in media throughout the globe. The representation style and policy in global media is different in that every country has its own media laws concerning the representation of issues in the media – print, electronic and so forth. Thus, this research is aimed at investigating the news coverage about the issue of women violence in daily Dawn – an elite newspaper of Pakistan. Also, this study is conducted to analyses the representation of violence against women in the newspaper. To attain these objectives, content analysis method was employed to analysis and to investigate to know how this issue is being represented. November 2019 edition was selected to observe the issue. The units of analysis observed in this study were; frequency, placement, violence reason, violence place, violence type, and violence method. The frequency of news reported throughout the month was 18. Majority of the news were reported from Punjab – a province of Pakistan. The type of violence reported to have done to women was mostly gang rape. Few of the units could not be observed because the news reported were too shortly that could not fulfil the need of this study and it is a common adage; “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” and this style of too short coverage is not coping with what the theory of uses and gratification was developed for The newspaper has not picked any singly issue befallen Sindh and the issues have  largely been bang up to date in Sindh province. The newspaper should revise its coverage policy and style of representation.