The ABC reported that 26 year old Junior Fayiah Carlos was arrested and charged with the murder of a 19 year old woman, but they forgot to mention his existence in the headline.
Invisible perpetrators are a constant in FixedIt. It matters because headlines are supposed to be a short summary of the article and when the article is about violence men commit or are accused of committing, the headline is not telling the story, it’s erasing the story.
We see dozens of headlines every day. In social media feeds and scrolling through news site home pages but we only click through to read the details of a very small percentage of them. The information we pick up from the headlines we see but don’t notice still goes into our ideas about the world and what happens in it.
If all the violent crimes committed by men were reported in the active voice with the perpetrators and their crime as the subject of every headline, it would be overwhelming. Because it is overwhelming.
But we are journalists and it is not our job to erase the truth so our audience is not made to feel uncomfortable. Our job is to describe what is happening in our society. And the sad truth is that around 90 percent of violent crimes are committed by men. Avoiding this fact doesn’t make it less true but it does make it much more difficult to address the underlying cause.
FixedIt is an ongoing project to push back against the media’s constant erasure of violent men and blaming of innocent victims. If you would like to help fund it – even $5 a month makes a big difference – please consider becoming a Patron
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