Media Storm - S3E2 Safety or status? Migrant women and domestic abuse - with Janey Starling

Episode Date: May 18, 2023

On the 29th April 2021, the Domestic Abuse Bill became law. Many called the Bill 'landmark', or 'transformational'. Others called it discriminatory. Why? Because migrant victims with insecure status have ‘no recourse to public funds’ - meaning they cannot access refuges, income support and other state benefits to help them escape abusers. Meanwhile, 'hostile environment' legislation is used to threaten them into silence. The result? Many migrant victims of abuse are stuck in a catch-22: stay with their abuser, or face destitution and deportation. The bill's shortcomings have been put to the government. But in 2021, an amendment was rejected that would extend protections to all migrant women. Two years on, Media Storm speaks to survivors of immigration abuse, and those still fighting for legal reform, to see the real-life results of this omission. We are joined in the studio by Janey Starling, award-winning feminist activist, writer and co-director of gender justice organisation Level Up, to discuss what the media can do better when reporting on domestic abuse. Janey spearheaded the UK’s first media guidelines on responsibly reporting domestic homicide, which are now backed by all press regulators and multiple newsrooms - find them below! Speakers:  Somiya Basar @BasarSomiya Elizabeth Jiménez-Yáñez, Latin American Women's Rights Service @elizajiya @lawrsuk Nicole Jacobs @CommissionerDA Dr Hannana Siddiqui, Southall Black Sisters @hannanasiddiqui @SBSisters Janey Starling @janeyjstarling @we_level_up @levelup_uk With thanks to Heard heard.org.uk If you are a victim of domestic violence, you can call Refuge for free on 0808 2000 247 Sources: Media guidelines for reporting domestic homicide https://www.welevelup.org/active-campaigns/media-guidelines-domestic-abuse/  Safety before Status: The Solutions: https://domesticabusecommissioner.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Safety-before-status-The-Solutions.pdf   UK police referred victims of domestic abuse to immigration authorities https://www.thedetail.tv/articles/uk-police-forces-referred-thousands-of-migrant-victims-of-crime-to-immigration-authorities Southall Black Sisters respond to Domestic Abuse Bill https://southallblacksisters.org.uk/news/the-struggle-continues-sbs-responds-to-gov-rejection-of-amendments-to-protect-migrant-women/  Get in touch Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/mediastormpod or Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mediastormpod or Tiktok https://www.tiktok.com/@mediastormpod like us on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/MediaStormPod send us an email [e-mail] check out our website https://mediastormpodcast.com Music by Samfire @soundofsamfire.  Media Storm is brought to you by the house of The Guilty Feminist and is part of the Acast Creator Network. Become a member at https://plus.acast.com/s/media-storm. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Matilda, I want to start with a little quiz. I love quizzes. Yeah, this quiz may not be as fun as other quizzes because of this week's topic. Why are our quizzes never fun on this show? Because we talk about the news. But this week's topic is domestic abuse and yes, it is a heavy topic. And I think because it is such a heavy topic, some people tend to shy away from it. And some mainstream media outlets don't always report very well on it.

And maybe that's because we often focus on individual cases and forget to frame domestic abuse in its wider context. So on that note, the quiz. I'm ready. How many women experience domestic abuse in their lifetime? One in seven. In the UK, it's one in four women will experience domestic abuse and globally that rises to one in three.

I actually thought I was overestimating, or surely. How often is a woman killed by her partner or ex-partner in the UK? Once a week. It's actually every three days. Oh, Helena, this is not a fun quiz. I know, and actually this might shock some people, but 94% of women are killed by a man they know,

and we'll have more on that later. Last question. Promise. Promise. How many domestic abuse-related calls do the police in England and Wales receive every hour? 20 an hour It's actually a hundred calls A hundred an hour

I mean that's so many Considering probably For every call that is made How many calls aren't made Yeah exactly According to the crime survey Of England and Wales in 2017 Only 18% of women

Who had experienced partner abuse In the last 12 months Reported that abuse to the police And there's so many reasons Why people don't trust the police Or feel like they can't report Their abusers to authorities and today we're going to focus on a major reason for that,

which is a form of domestic abuse that is often glossed over, and that's immigration abuse. And who does that mostly affect? That mostly affects domestic abuse victims and survivors with insecure immigration status. In the UK, that means maybe they've had an arranged marriage, come from a different country, and they're on a spousal visa,

or they're on a student visa and stuck in an abusive relationship. So it relates to people who don't have, legal individual immigration status. So are essentially being forced to stay with their abusers or risk destitution and deportation. I've come across this a lot in immigration reporting and then perpetrators of domestic abuse can use a victim's insecure immigration status against them and essentially exert further abuse on them or threaten them with deportation. Exactly. And the government, well, as recently as a year ago, they voted against amendment. to ensure equal protection for migrant women.

But as so often happens with topics that are this heavy, alongside the heaviness, it also comes with stories of resistance, perseverance, and hopefully change. I'm off to speak to migrant women about their stories and people fighting to ensure the government puts safety before status. And I'll see you back in the studio with a very special guest to discuss everything around this media storm. Since lockdown began,

cases of domestic abuse sadly have thawed. Sabita Fanwana, Yasmin Bega. Sorry, police said that they are confident the tragedy is an isolated incident. Why didn't you just leave? The advice, wave down a boss. Does putting the responsibility on boys create a blame culture, though. Welcome to MediaStorm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. I'm Helena Wadia.

And I'm Matilda Mallinson. This week's investigation. Safety or Status, Migra Women and Domestic Abuse Hi, Helena. How are you? I am quite content in my own self. I'm sleeping well and I'm sleeping a lot. Well, I'm Somia Bessar and since now that I have got my daughter, I have become a full-time mother and it's been very, very long since I was this.

This is Somia's story. I got married fairly young. I was only 19 years old. I wanted to study further. My objective in life was to pursue an education. But coming from a very, very conservative family in India, my parents are not otherwise. So for them it was, oh no, no, she has to be only enough educated to be able to qualify for a good marriage. It was an arranged marriage. only seen my ex-husband for about five minutes. So it wasn't like we had any courtship going on. I did a protest. My parents did not acknowledge that protest, but I did try,

if I have to put it plainly. But I failed. What was the marriage like? After marriage, it was a completely different world for me. He would tell me things like, oh, you think I haven't seen women. I have seen many women and you're not good looking enough. You're not sexy enough. So the only objective was to use me as a conduit to have babies. And there was no love. There was no attachment. There wasn't any empathy towards me. No sympathies. Often I was told I was so stupid. I was so immature. I didn't know anything. I had never traveled out of my country. I had never seen anybody outside my community. Initially, I was not even allowed to work.

When I started working, it was in the family business, but not for a salary. A lot of my time was only dedicated to my children and to his business. So you were essentially cut off from any financial independence. Do you feel like he made it so that you were relying on him? I am pretty sure that was the reason why, because it does give him the upper hand to make a decision, to have that control over me. People are cruel. They'll say, why didn't you leave earlier?

I'm like, no, I couldn't because I was locked up in a house. I wasn't allowed a telephone for five years of my marriage. I wasn't allowed to speak to my parents. I wasn't allowed to have friends. I was completely, completely alienated from my previous support network in a different country with language barriers. And how did they expect me to overcome that? people have no understanding of what it was to endure that,

what it took for me to liberate myself out of that. So it's been difficult as a result of what I had to endure very early in the marriage and also during the time of my divorce. And for the past eight years, I have been working very, very hard to fight for my right as a mother, to give them the support and the love I could. And I have been denied that. And only now, after almost eight years, I have my daughter back with me. A judge recently ruled that Somia should have custody of her daughter.

However, her two sons are still in custody of their father. My sons are older. They are 18 and 17. So, I mean, he has alienated them from me. He can work on the children. He can say things to him. He's still usual. He'll tell him things that are not even real and they would believe him. and that has severed my relationship.

Sadly with my sons, I hope one day they will see the truth. Somia's legal battle to get custody of her three children is extremely long and complicated. And at every stage, Somia's ex-husband used her insecure immigration status against her. The children had only seen him as a constant for the past few years and therefore the judge decided that the children could continue living with her dad, because in the UK I didn't have, for one, legal status, too, I didn't have any money. And that was when no recourse to public fund comes into a picture. No recourse to public funds means that many women on certain visas

or with insecure immigration status like Somia are prevented from claiming most forms of state benefits, including housing benefit, without which it is difficult for women fleeing domestic abuse to access refuge accommodation. Women who are applying for indefinite leave to remain in the UK and who are victims of domestic abuse can apply for the domestic abuse destitution concession which provides three months of financial support to help a woman get to safety.

However, often applying for indefinite leave to remain takes far longer than three months. It means these women are stuck in a limbo, a catch-22, in what has been described by leading charities in this space, as a two-tier system. So what is the government doing? Well, two years ago, the Domestic Abuse Bill became law.

Before it passed, there was a recommended amendment to the bill to lift no recourse to public funds and grant migrant women equal protection. It passed in the House of Lords. The state must not be the facilitator of domestic abuse. But the government rejected this amendment, which begs the question, Why? My name is Elizabeth Jimenez-Janez. I'm policy and communications manager on violence against women and girls at the Latin American Women's Rights Service.

The Latin American Women's Rights Service has been leading the step-up migrant women campaign since 2017 to help migrant women in situations of domestic abuse. Elizabeth says the government's failure to protect them is directly linked to their immigration policies. I mean, in the last years, we've seen more the extension of the hostile environment policies. The government narrative around migration, it's not around humanity, it's around exclusion, it's around closing doors, for safe routes, and this moves forward to the increasing vulnerability of women experiencing violence, who are seen through the lenses of immigration control. The only thing you have to do is to ensure that someone who has undocumented status is deported. And what we say is that,

it's really concerning because you are missing the opportunity to understand how domestic abuse and other forms of gender-based violence operates when immigration status is part of the picture. The hostile environment combines with austerity and it combines with local authorities being bankrupt. So when you come across someone who has no recourse to public funds for a local authority, the easiest thing to say is, I cannot help you. You don't have rights. The threat of immigration control means some women feel they have to choose between staying with an abuser or being deported. One woman who were calling Sarah for her protection left Pakistan for an arranged marriage to a British citizen in the UK. She was tied to her husband through a spousal visa and he abused her for their five-year relationship.

So he keep on saying that like if you don't do this, the only option is he can go back home. I remember at some point towards the end of the relationship, he did show me some calls making to home office as well, kind of saying that, look, I've reported you. So there was a lot going on in those times as well. Like, it was just that cycle of one after another incident. If you don't have a network or people or family telling you, that's not acceptable. You just get on with it. You kind of think there is no way out of it. Sarah's husband was reported to the police through a third party.

And that's when her immigration status was questioned. and people kind of say oh when you're out of the relationship things will get better but i was like that's where the things gave way more worse there was a lot of difficulties with civil divorce issues with immigration as well and i think the hard part was that when you actually like being lived six seven years and then you have to wait for one application to kind of decide that either you're going to be part of this society or just have to leave and go back everything there is no end to it like it were just ongoing cycle to be honest this is the first time i actually talking to someone about my experience. I was just the kind of thing that if my experience

helps someone to get their voice and things will get better, as long as you come out as more kind of like as a compassionate person, I don't think so. You lost much and that's how I see as well. Kind of say that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. So who is holding the government to account? As well as charities, Nicole Jacobs was appointed in 2019 as the first domestic abuse Commissioner for England and Wales. Among other responsibilities, the Commissioner can hold both agencies and government to account

in tackling domestic abuse. I went to meet her at her office in London. Why do you think the government rejected the amendments to lift no recourse to public funds? You know, I think it requires making a political stand. I would also say there was a real willingness this on the part of government to take on board the messages. But they said at the time,

we don't have enough information. We are not really sure where this is leading us. If we were to go in that direction, the government itself said we need to prioritize safety before status. We've now called our policy reports in our office that. So what we're trying in our office to do is really hold government to those commitments and those statements. We're obviously not there yet. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner and her team have created a 31-page report called Safety Before Status, The Solutions. The report is in partnership with the London School of Economics, who will provide an additional 80 pages of research. Nicole says the report provides groundbreaking new evidence on how the government can improve support for all migrant victims and survivors of domestic abuse, and it sets out concrete, costed proposals. government ministers are required to respond to the commissioner's recommendations within 56 days.

We're now at a point where we're two months overdue our government response. It's not a great start to the use of the powers for our office. No one would come to a domestic abuse shelter, refuge accommodation service unless they absolutely needed to. There's no exploiting of that service. So we need government to trust that if they, they were to lift no recourse, that of course those services are very geared towards really only allowing people who really need to be there. And so that needs to be all survivors, not just ones who have the right status.

It's not just the Domestic Abuse Commissioner who feels that they have provided the government with the evidence they asked for. Southall Black Sisters, a leading anti-violence against women organization, who works specifically with helping women with no recourse to public funds, say the issue is ongoing. I spoke to Hanana Sadiqi from Southall Black Sisters. They've had plenty of evidence all along for many years, in fact. We did a pilot previously.

We've also provided other evidence from our own services, so did other organisations. But, you know, these arguments have not really worked well with this current government. We do think that the government is being discriminatory. We do think that they have essentially a racist approach. to migration. And they don't want to be seen as soft on immigration, despite the fact that they also say that migrant victims are victims first and foremost. When the government rejected

the amendment to lift no recourse to public funds, they did provide funding to Southall Black Sisters to run the support for migrant victims scheme, also known as the pilot project. But campaigners say it's not enough. The pilot gives money to women to pay. their rent and subsistence for themselves and their children for a period of up to three months whilst they enter a refuge or other type of safe accommodation and try to regularise their status. The money is not sufficient. It's not sufficient because it doesn't give enough money for a lot of women to enter a refuge where the rents might be too high, for example.

And it doesn't give it long enough. You know, 12 weeks is not long enough for many women to enter a refuge. resolve their problems for the lease of an abusive relationship and get their status to stay in the country. So we have asked the government to increase the amount of that is paid and for how long. I wonder sort of how the funding was received. Did you see it as a positive step that the government knows something has to be done about this issue? Or did you see it almost as application? Well, it was application because, you know, We had asked for legal reform, and what they offered us was the pilot scheme instead,

and that delayed the legal reform. A key part of the legal reform that campaigners and the Domestic Abuse Commissioner so desperately want is a firewall between immigration enforcement and public services to ensure survivors of domestic abuse can safely report their experiences of abuse without fear of immigration enforcement. Why is this so important? A Home Office document showed that between April and December 2020, a quarter of domestic abuse victims referred by police to immigration enforcement

were served with enforcement papers, meaning they faced deportation. Similar stats show that in the past two years, there have been more than 400 migrant women victims of domestic abuse reported to the Home Office. Here's Elizabeth from the Latin American Women's Rights Service again. Immigration enforcement doesn't have any safeguarding role because the main role is to enforce immigration legislation and rules. We might not agree with their responsibility, but that's the role, right? So what it's creating, it's a two-tier system in which migrant women won't be reporting to the police ever. They might endure really severe abuse before coming forward.

And in some other cases, they might never do it because the risk is really. really, really high. So what we are saying is to the police and to other institutions is you're missing the opportunity to tackle violence against women and girls for this particular group by prioritizing immigration enforcement. The Domestic Abuse Commissioner strongly supports the Firewall 2. Nicole, you've handed your report in. There's a lot of waiting. How do you feel about the future? How likely do you think it will be that a firewall will be implemented? Well, I'm hopeful. I mean, I wouldn't have been working in this area for all these

years if I wasn't that type of person, I mean, because it's daunting. But I'm hopeful because I know it's right. I'm hopeful because I've seen many, many leaders in debates, support these kinds of measures. I think decision makers have what they need now to make these decisions in a positive direction. One woman who could have benefited from the firewall is Adriana, who was supported by the Latin American Women's Rights Service. Adriana doesn't speak English. This part is voiced by an actor. My name is Adriana. I'm from Brazil and I've been in the UK for 10 years.

For many of those years, I've experienced several forms of domestic violence, including physical, economic and sexual violence. My ex-partner often used my immigration status to threaten me to stay with him. When he talked about deportation, I was scared, terrified. I didn't want to be separated from my children. I didn't know what to do or where to look for help. As he refused to apply for my status, ultimately, I became undocumented. I contacted social services, but they just labeled me as the Brazilian, who is illegal and can't have access to public funds here in London.

They often told me they could not help me because I couldn't access state support. That's how they saw me. They would treat me as the one without rights at every meeting and wouldn't try to solve my situation. I was afraid to go to the police. I didn't have many friends. I believed that he could call the police and deport me any time. As a result of the lack of support,

I had to ask him to return to his home. I didn't have anywhere to stay anymore. The abuse grew worse. In my experience with domestic violence, I believe that the government should listen and pay attention to organizations that help all migrant women and those with children too. I know how they feel, how I felt,

the fear of deportation. These women have to be given an opportunity because it is not their fault. Let there be respectful understanding and especially for all these women. While campaigners wait to hear the government's response to their evidence, how can we use these women's stories responsibly? And what role does the media play in our attitudes towards domestic abuse? That takes us back to the studio. Just before we move on to our studio chat, if you, like us, find the news a lot right now.

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You can subscribe to The Know today by visiting www.the knowmedia.co. Welcome back to the studio and to Media Storm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. Today we are discussing domestic abuse and how it is portrayed in the mainstream media and with us is a very special guest. She is an award-winning feminist, activist, writer and co-director of Gender Justice Organisation Level Up. She has spearheaded the UK's first media guidelines on responsibly reporting on domestic homicide, now backed by all media regulators and many newsrooms, she is Janie Starling. Hi. So good to see you. How are you?

I'm good. I feel like it's always important to check in with each other before discussing a topic this heavy. We just heard my investigation into the failure to protect women with insecure immigration status from domestic abuse. And part of what we heard through the stories of these women is that domestic abuse is not always physical. But if you looked in the mainstream media, you may not always see that. Do you think that the mainstream media often fails to portray domestic abuse as anything other than physical? As a society, we fail to understand that domestic abuse is a public health problem.

And actually so much of domestic abuse is about power and control. And that's psychological. Obviously, these things are less easy to put in a picture. You can't take photos of someone constantly belittling their partner. somebody checking their partner's phone, having access to their emails. And their end goal, ultimately, is to have total control over another person. Can you just explain what you mean by we failed to see domestic abuse as a public health issue? I'm looking at this through the lens of media reporting.

And I think what's really interesting is that there are very strict media regulations on the reporting of suicide, for example, because we've established as a country and the media knows that it has, a preventive duty when it comes to suicide. The media understands that if they report on, for example, a celebrity death, well, they're not allowed to report the methods used or excessive detail because they could influence people to take their own life. However, the logic doesn't extend to fatal domestic abuse. You know, every week two women are murdered by a partner or ex-partner in the press. Too often, it's reported as this out-of-the-blue isolated incident. Rather than situated contextually in a society where a lot of relationship norms are quite unhealthy and when

it comes to domestic abuse there will be potential victims who might recognize oh well my partner's really controlling my partner's threatened to kill me so if we fail to see it as a public health issue then we fail to take a preventative approach exactly and actually yeah when I think about okay what what stories have I seen in the media about it the examples that jump to mind our names everyone knows. It's Sabina Nessa and Sarah Everard. These are women who were killed by violent male strangers. And what I can't think of are many examples of women being killed in the far more common circumstance where they're being killed by someone they know. Why do you think that the media only shows those more extreme and unusual circumstances

and not the everyday dangers that maybe we need to be more alert? to. It's such a good question. The media is cause and consequence of our cultural understandings of what violence looks like. And I think we do have this quite skewed stranger danger narrative of gendered violence. You know, many of the cases we see in our rolling news every single week are women who are murdered by the men who they've been married to for 10, 20 years, have families with. What we need to be looking at is coercive behaviour, jealous attitudes, possession. Articles that accurate and responsible can save women's lives. Talking about context, often in the media and very often in headlines,

and we will obviously get to this a little bit later. We also hear the framing of excuses. We hear it was mental health, it was lockdown, it was drugs, it was alcohol. And I suppose my question is, how can we report on those important contexts without using them as an excuse for violent behaviour? Remembering that domestic abuse is about power and control, is the number one thing to keep in mind.

And ultimately, yes, like lots of people struggle with their mental health. You can struggle with mental health and not kill your partner. What's really sad is it does reinforce stigma against people who do have mental illnesses, who do have substance use issues, when actually we really need to separate them because criminologists have long established that domestic homicide, fatal domestic abuse, someone killing their partner is the end point to a sustained period of coercive control. You know, there's a brilliant criminologist called Professor Jane Moncton Smith, who has mapped a progressive eight-stage homicide timeline.

The number one thing is seeking to possess a partner as property rather than an individual in their own right. So it's about control, and in most situations it's about male control of women. In all situations, it's about male control of women. Okay, so let's talk about what that actually looks like in the media. One of the most sensitive areas of reporting on domestic abuse is imagery. The template seems to be a large, centred photo of the perpetrator and a small insect photo of the victim. There's something so disturbing about it.

Can you explain what that is? I've been working with victims' families for almost a decade now, and I think the number one thing they all say is they want the newspaper reporting on their loved one's death to be a memorial for the victim and not propaganda for the perpetrator. And too often what we see is when journalists are kind of in a misguided way

trying to hold the perpetrator accountable, they prioritise the killer. And actually, this is a public record of someone's life and death and the victim too often becomes a footnote in their own death. We also see image editors kind of make these composite pictures

of the victim and the perpetrator side by side. That's so jarring. It's really inappropriate and it's really insensitive to the victim's family. I think some journalists might feel like they are holding perpetrators to account because they're splashing their pictures across the front pages and saying, you know, isn't this person so awful? What would you say to that? Accountability is on the terms of the victim. You know, honour her life, honour who she was as a person before her life was taken from her.

And there's also something to be said, I think, about the images that are selected. Some papers, unfortunately, sometimes trawl through the victim's social media. I wonder if you've seen that a lot in your work. We've seen it time and time again, and it's one of the most distressing things that families talk about. When you've lost someone you love, you're already in like a free fall of grief and you've lost total control. You're trying to figure out, you know, coroners and funerals and child care arrangements. and police proceedings and to provide the police with an image of your loved one

to put out to the press and then find out that, oh no, a journalist has decided to go through your nephew's Facebook account to find a picture of your now-deceased sister at a party five years ago because she was wearing a mini-dress. It's just one of the many ways that the press has historically violated dead women's dignity.

One of the examples I can also give is a Muslim woman called Runeim Uday who was murdered with her mum by her again partner who she'd left and the picture that the family issued to the press was one of her sitting in a restaurant wearing her hijab that was not the picture that ended up being disseminated across the media what had happened is a journalist at one publication had drawn through her Facebook and found a picture of her without her hijab

no no that's what has happened so they broadcast a photo of her without her hijab Yes. Actually makes me want to cry. That's such a violation. I think that headlines are often where a lot of the mishaps happen. You don't have to look far to find headlines on these topics using terms like jilted lover or hubby. What that does is it frames these incidents in a romanticised narrative.

You mentioned Professor Jane Moncton. Smith. So she wrote murder, gender and the media, right? Yeah, she did. And the research in her book also shows that men who are convicted for killing their partners, if they use the term love in their trial, they are more likely to get lighter sentences. Do you think that editorial decisions, like headlines using terms like jilted lovers, risk feeding into the hands of the perpetrators? Absolutely. One of the number one cultural problems that we have around domestic abuse is that these are acts of love, which is crazy. It's crazy to think that murdering someone is an act of love. But some of the articles that triggered this campaign back in 2017-18 were very much along those lines. I've got a couple of them here. So hubby guilty of murdering his wife over row over her lesbian interest. jilted lover stole M4 rifle and executed estranged wife her mum and pet dog when she refused to rekindle what what publications are these from they're from across the spectrum i wish i could tell you that it's

it's from tabloids but it's not it's not and i think the second thing i'll say is that these headlines always hinge the murder around a woman's actions her lesbian what was there after her lesbian trist or after a row i think one of the most disturbing things that i've heard throughout the course of working with families is work closely with brothers called Luke and Ryan Hart, whose mum, Claire and sister Charlotte were murdered by their father in 2016. Now, when the police seized their father's computer, they found preceding the murders. He had been searching for articles online of men who had killed their families. He was seeking justification for what he was about to do and he wanted to know how he would be reported on and he found a lot of validation. He found a lot of, you know, what he was

feeling actually being justified in the press. So it is really important to remember that there could be future perpetrators reading your report and finding sympathy for their cause in your reporting. And I don't think any journalist would ever intend that or want that. But without sensitivity and without understanding, it happens. Talking about newsroom behavior. Yeah. The biggest trap that newsrooms fall into that comes up in every media storm episode, it's the impact of the fast-paced news cycle. So the demand for kind of instant news means that often reporters are just grabbing stories from newswires, changing a few words and slapping it up on the website as quickly as possible. I wonder how that plays into this issue of domestic abuse reporting. There's such a

trade-off between urgency and accuracy. So at the beginning when a woman's been found dead or a man has been charged, there are very scant details. But the problems come when journalists try to fill in the gaps in information quite recklessly because they want to be the first to break the news. And what we see then is journalists going to interview a neighbour down the road, journalists taking a picture of the house and putting it online. You know, we see these invasions into privacy and ultimately too many soundbites from neighbours who did not know the true character of that relationship. I think the most important thing that journalists have to remember is that dead women don't get the right of reply. So ultimately it's your job.

to provide balance. It's your job to ensure impartiality. Reporting a defence narrative is not impartial. We have got a few more examples. I don't think we're going to be sure of content here. So it is time now to take a look at some of the stories making headlines on this topic. Usually when we're looking for headlines, it takes me a little bit longer. But unfortunately this time, it was quite quick actually. Yeah, the worst the media is, the easier our job is. Yeah, it was actually slightly depressing. But here we go. So first up is this from The Times. Disbelief at kind and gentle fiancé linked to murder of primary school teacher Morel Sturrock. By the way, David Yates, the kind and gentle fiancé this article is talking about, murdered his

partner, Morel. There are so many quotes that we could discuss in this article that focuses so much on the murderer's character. And we're just going to highlight a few quotes. Yates, the former frontman with the Glasgow heavy metal band Nocturne Wolf, gave up his dream of becoming a professional rock star to start a family. Dave was the human equivalent of a golden retriever. Friends of Yates insist he was utterly dedicated to his partner. Why does the mainstream media feel the need to eulogise violent men? I wish I knew the answer to that question.

I wish I knew the answer to that question. I think there is a more beginning. curiosity around murder and people who kill, you know, this headline is interesting because in one respect, it's important to understand that men who murder their partners are not monsters, they're not kind of fairy tale creatures who are so evil you could spot them a mile of. They are people who are able to manage people's perceptions of them outside the home in order to disguise their behaviour inside the home. But the issue with this report is the way that it completely

overlooks her entirely. It's all about him. And then there's two measly little paragraphs at the end about Morel and who she was and what she did. And as you mentioned before, dead women don't get right of reply. And on Media Storm, that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to make sure that these marginalised

and minority groups get their right of reply. And this article just fell into every single pitfall there could possibly every single one we've discussed. There's active speculation that really toes the thin line of what is journalism. They, referring to Friends of Yates, are convinced he had acted while suffering from a psychotic episode. Others speculated that he may have suffered delusions after trying a new form of medication or stopping taking prescribed treatments. This is wild speculation on the cause of his violent actions,

speculation that drives toward this is out of the blue and couldn't possibly have been a pattern of behaviour or a pattern that society sees all the time. There was a line about how David Yates had been doing some voluntary work. How is that relevant, if not just to give sympathy towards him? It's not relevant and I think something... To find voluntary work who hasn't done some sort of voluntary work in their life. Also a quote that I read out at the beginning,

which was how Dave was a... the human equivalent of a golden retriever, the Times had quoted a close friend. That close friend may be entirely unfamiliar with their relationship because if this abuse hides in plain sight, if we can't see this controlling behaviour because it's not so obvious, it's not a bruise showing up on her skin, then how will this close friend even know? And so by quoting this close friend's analysis as a credible source, the Times is feeding this idea that if you can't see it, it's not happening. Abusive partners can charm anyone.

Natalie Heming was murdered by her partner in 2016. Her family have described her partner who murdered her as someone who could sell ice to Eskimos. I mean, selling ice to Eskimos is an inherently manipulative thing to do. True, true. Very true. And ultimately, we don't know what happened between this couple. We will never know. We will never know what her experience was,

what happened in the days and the hours preceding her death. But what we do know is that charming, gentle, kind, couldn't do enough pillar of the community, people who are perfectly capable of murder. We need to be able to really interrogate the patterns that are going on here if we have any hope of preventing these deaths from happening. The second headline we want to look at today is from The Daily Mail. PC, who could have stopped Cousins, is online porn star.

This article is about Samantha Lee, a former metropolitan police officer. Now, in March of this year, Wayne Cousins, who is the at the time serving police officer who kidnapped, raped and murdered Sarah Everard. In March, he also pleaded guilty. to three counts of indecent exposure, two of which happened at McDonald's drive-thru. Now, allegedly, the MET police failed to properly investigate evidence

that it was him at the time. In particular, one officer Samantha Lee is facing a disciplinary hearing that could amount in dismissal, but the complication is she was previously actually suspended when the police found she had an only fan's account and she resigned upon that suspension.

If anyone doesn't know what OnlyFans is, it's essentially a social media platform that is often used for pornographic content creators. So this is a complicated one because, yes, obviously, the MET needs to face scrutiny if they didn't properly investigate evidence. But the way that the male has chosen to tell this story, it falls into a trap that actually we're going to look at

because we have an episode on policing coming up where we speak to serving police officers about whether and why they think all these issues are so entrenched. Where it demonises an individual rather than looking at institutional problems, isn't there an argument that this story is essentially like, oh, hey, here's a man that, you know, violently sexually assaulted and murdered a woman,

but here's a woman who failed to catch him because she was too busy prostituting herself off. Like what kind of culture around male violence against women does this create? To me, it's not about, you know, blaming a woman for his behaviour because a culture of corruption within policing exists regardless of the officer's gender. But what this does is conflates sex work and indecent exposure. I don't think that the male would have run this story if she didn't have an only fan. There's a tone and a theme of sex within this that completely deflects away from abuses of power. Indecent exposure is not motivated by, you know, sexual desire. It's about power

and control and humiliation. And it's an act of violence. I think it's just a very salacious article that does not do justice to the issue at hand. I mean, is it necessary to splash our only fans' pictures across papers? Because it wasn't just the male that did that, many other mainstream media outlets put up her OnlyFans pictures. I think often, you know, with sexual assault, people hear sexual and they don't hear assault. We need to be focusing on an act of violence rather than anything to do with sex. Also, this little insert here, we could have saved Sarah. I just thought was so... What's that going to do to a family member reading that? I don't know.

Yeah, it's awful. I think that, yeah, we've had enough for one day. Janie Starling, thank you so much for joining us on MediaStorm. Just before you go, do tell us where people can follow you and do you have anything you want to plug? I just want to plug Level Ups Media Guidelines, which are hinged around a four-part acronym Ada, A for accuracy, I for images, D for Dignity and A for Accountability. Our guidelines are available online. If any journalists are listening, please do follow them. They're so easy to use and ultimately are a tool for better reporting because,

better reporting will save women's lives. If you're someone who's listening who really cares about this issue, we have a petition to the press regulator. Over 26,000 people have signed it so you can add your name to the petition. And obviously, wherever you see articles like this, please just report them and complain to editors because they do respond and they will change the article. But it will take all of us firefighting to push for that cultural change. We will put links to that petition and relevant resources in the show.

show notes. So have a look at the description if you're interested. Thank you. And just quickly tell people where they can follow you. On Twitter, it's at we underscore level underscore up. And on Instagram it's level up underscore UK. Thank you for listening. Our next episode on medicinal cannabis and whether it's privileged access through privatised healthcare is leaving low income patients to self-medicate on the black market. We'll be out on the first of June. MediaStorm wherever you get your podcast so that you can get access to new episodes as soon as they drop. If you like what you hear, share this episode with someone and leave us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps more people discover the podcast and our aim is to have as many people as possible hear these voices.

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