The anatomy of a ‘high-profile’ rape case
A large number of rape cases are reported in India. Why, then, do some gather more media attention than others?
Stories about rape are published in the Indian news media with depressing regularity, but most do not make much of an impact: they take up minimal column inches and, following a bland reporting of the ‘incident’, they sink without a trace, with no follow-ups on arrests and convictions.
But there are exceptions, the so-called ‘high-profile’ cases. These are stories that are picked up by a wide cross-section of the news media and followed up far more diligently. There are detailed news reports, updates on the progress of the case, and op-ed writers jump into the fray with their take on the matter.
So, what makes some cases ‘high-profile’? How are these cases treated differently by the news media?
For insights into this, I looked at the coverage of six cases (see tables 1 and 2) from this list of high-profile incidents complied by the Washington Post. I then looked at online archives of The Times of India and the print archives of The Hindu to trace how these cases, from 2003 onwards, were reported.
For comparison, I also looked at the reporting patterns of two cases that did not receive much media attention: the gangrape of a 19-year-old in Ahmedabad and the sexual assault of a schoolgirl by her teacher. These ‘low-profile’ cases, incidentally, were characterised by harrowing details in the first instance and an underage victim in the second, indicating perhaps that the severity of the crime alone is not enough for the media to be sufficiently invested in a story.
There were two primary trends in the reporting of ‘high-profile’ cases. One, for each of these cases both newspapers published detailed articles. The victim’s profile, her whereabouts before the attack, details of the assault itself, and, in some cases, what the victim did after the attack were all mentioned in the very first article. Two, for four out of the six cases, one of the newspapers (in some cases, both) published at least five follow-ups in the week immediately after the attack. All three remaining cases were followed up until the perpetrators were sentenced. In the two cases that did not receive much media attention, not one follow-up was published.
But, why did the media decide that these specific cases were worth following up at all? Below I list thre explanations.
Public outrage over ‘people like us’ being victimised
The victims in five out of the six ‘high-profile’ cases tracked were English-speaking women living in urban areas. This arguably contributed to editors deeming these as being of greater significance to — and these cases gaining greater attention from — the urban, educated, English-speaking public. People the readers could identify with more (people like ‘us’, in other words) were being attacked and the news was relevant to them and their concerns. Newspapers catering to this section of the population, therefore, gave these cases wider and deeper coverage.
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The 13 December 2005 rape and murder of a BPO employee in Bangalore on her way home from work led to larger conversations on women’s safety with respect to the workplace, and news articles facilitated this narrative. The rape of a software engineer in Pune in October of 2009 took years for the courts to adjudicate — the conviction came eight years after the attack — but the media did not lose scent of the story. This case also brought back to the forefront issues of women’s safety in the IT and BPO sectors as the victim was raped after work. Similarly, the gangrape of a physiotherapy intern in December 2012 in New Delhi sparked protests demanding safety for women in India almost immediately after it was reported and remained in the news until the accused were convicted.
International ramifications
In three out of the six high-profile cases, the survivors were foreign nationals. The international ramifications in these cases led to increased attention from the media as well as law enforcement, thus making them more ‘newsworthy’.
Politics and sexual violence
While I did not map the follow-up reporting patterns of two high-profile cases — the 2004 rape and murder of a woman in Manipur allegedly by a group of Assam Rifles men and the 2018 rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Kathua— they are worth mentioning here. Both these cases became extremely politicised and thus had a longer shelf life in the media. The 2004 case led to widespread protests demanding the repeal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). In the 2018 case, the alleged perpetrators were policemen and retired officials who garnered the support of the Hindu Ekta Manch, an organisation with political links. This brought to the fore religious tensions because the victim was Muslim, and led to protests across the country demanding protection for women against sexual violence.
Going beyond high-profile cases
It is clear that certain factors — journalism scholars tend to explain these in terms of ‘news values’, as put forward by Johan Galtung and Marie Ruge in a seminal paper in 1965— galvanise the media to zoom-in on certain cases. The question then is: how can the media effectively report cases that do not seem ‘high-profile’? I have two suggestions.
To begin with, the media can follow up stories more diligently. If updates are provided in the weeks following the crime, people pay attention to them — which, in turn, could help in the process of justice. However, if a case is covered once, in a tiny column tucked away in the middle pages of a newspaper, it’s extremely easy to forget it.
Secondly, the media could talk more about the rape culture in India. Reports on rape statistics are infrequent. The media seldom even talks about the small steps being taken to combat the issue. As a result, awareness of rape as something that is deeply rooted in the way we think about women rarely plays on the mind of readers. Thus, the news media needs to make a key shift from merely covering high-profile rape cases to treating the phenomenon of rape itself as a high-profile issue.
