#16Pledges: Reporting on gender-based violence

Day 13 of 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence





News Research Content Editor Sivu Tywabi of South Africa: I pledge to place on the forefront of the public broadcasters news diary all the gender-based violence (GBV) cases that have not been reported on, but, are in court.


GBV is horribly underreported in a country where we have a second pandemic, femicide, more often than not at diary meetings these kinds of stories are dropped in favour of politics, economics and breaking stories of the day. The travesty of this is the fact that these stories are never returned to and this means the wider population gets to miss out on the urgency of gender based violence and reporting it.


As I am tasked with placing possible news stories for coverage, I have taken it upon myself to make sure that such stories reside on the news diary.


More often than not editors cite GBV fatigue and the gruesomeness of the nature of the story as a reason to not prioritize their coverage.


From my end, the little I can do is to ascertain that the said stories make it to the diary and are there all the time even if they don't get covered but they are a sore point on the diary until they are considered for news coverage.