Media Sexism

Jim Hood Excerpts

Wednesday 12th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hood. Few things are more important than ensuring that every member of our community feels safe in their own home, workplace, community and school. Sadly, for far too many women and girls in the UK, that is simply not the case, and there is strong evidence that media sexism is playing a significant contributory role.

I want to start by outlining some consequences of the fact that objectifying women has become so normalised in our society, before exploring the extent and nature of media sexism, as well as what action is required. The shocking facts are that here in Britain 60,000 women are raped every year. Two women a week are killed by a partner or ex-partner. Sexual harassment in our schools, communities and workplaces is routine. In Brighton and Hove, which is home to my constituency, an estimated 11,000 women experience physical and emotional violence every year, and last year more than 2,700 women experienced sexual assault.

The city’s new strategy for prevention offers valuable insights into the way in which violence is normalised—

[Mr Jim Hood (in the Chair)]

Order. Can I tell the hon. Member that there are standards of dress that Members must comply with, both in the House and in Westminster Hall? I ask her to respect that and to put her jacket back on, which she was wearing when she came in, please.

[Caroline Lucas]

I will of course comply with your ruling, Mr Hood, but it strikes me as a certain irony that in this place people can get copies of The Sun. Perhaps I can even show you what is in The Sun. In eight places in this House—

[Mr Jim Hood (in the Chair)]

Order. I am not commenting on what the Member may wish to say in the debate; I am only addressing the appropriate means of dress. If she does as I asked, she can carry on with her speech.

[Caroline Lucas]

Thank you, Mr Hood. I was simply going to say that it strikes me as an irony that this T-shirt is regarded as an inappropriate thing to be wearing in this House, whereas, apparently, it is appropriate for this kind of newspaper to be available to buy in eight different outlets on the Palace of Westminster Estate. That is why I have written to the Palace asking for them to be withdrawn, and for them not to be on sale until page 3 is removed.

I was describing a violence against women strategy in Brighton and Hove and was about to quote from it. The city’s new strategy for prevention offers real insights into the way that violence is normalised, saying that

“violence against women and girls is a continuum: it is the basic common characteristic that underlies many different events in women and girls’ lives, involving many forms of intimate intrusion, coercion, abuse and assault, that pass into one another and cannot always be readily distinguished, but that as a continuum are used to control women and girls. Many women and girls learn to discount and minimise forms of violence and abuse both as a way of coping but also because much of it is normalised.”

This is not just about extreme cases. It is an epidemic, with the symptoms identifiable at an early age. A YouGov poll for the End Violence Against Women coalition found that more than 70% of 16 to 18-year-old boys and girls said that they routinely heard sexual name-calling towards girls at school, and even more disturbingly that one in three girls said that they experienced “groping” or other unwanted sexual touching at school. A National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children study reveals that almost half of teenage girls believe that it is acceptable for a boyfriend to be aggressive towards a female partner, while one in two boys, and one in three girls, believe that there are some circumstances in which it is okay to hit a woman or force her to have sex.

The point I want to make this morning is that none of that is happening in a vacuum. We have to recognise the impact of wider culture, and today I want to focus on just one aspect of that: the objectification of women in the media. Women have been degraded, belittled and served up as sex objects in some of our daily newspapers for many years, despite the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women repeatedly identifying the links between the portrayal of women as sexual objects and attitudes that underpin violence and discrimination against women and girls.

The Government-commissioned “Sexualisation of Young People” review found that evidence suggests a clear link between consumption of sexualised images, a tendency to view women as objects, and the acceptance of aggressive attitudes and behaviour as the norm. The American Psychological Association reports that viewing media that portray women as sex objects leads people to become significantly more accepting of gender stereotyping, sexual harassment, interpersonal violence and rape myths.

The scale of the sexism that pervades our media was highlighted last year by women’s groups, including the End Violence Against Women coalition and OBJECT, which gave evidence to the Leveson inquiry and later published a report called “Just the Women”. It examined how domestic homicide cases are reported as “tragic” one-off incidents, rather than as part of a well understood pattern of behaviour; how rape cases in some papers are routinely placed next to pictures of half-naked women; how cases of forced marriage or “honour”-based violence are explained in terms of culture or religion, or almost anything except violence against women and girls; how news reporting upholds myths about sexual and domestic violence, often implicitly blaming women for violence committed against them, or eroticising such violence; how images and stories that sexualise and objectify women are normalised; and how women, particularly those in political office, are frequently vilified and infantilised by the media.

Lord Justice Leveson’s response concluded:

“The evidence as a whole suggested that there is force in the trenchant views expressed by the groups and organisations who testified to the Inquiry that the Page 3 tabloid press often failed to show consistent respect for the dignity and equality of women generally, and that there was a tendency to sexualise and demean women.”

I am not suggesting that the media are solely to blame, but their objectification of women goes some considerable way towards explaining why prejudicial attitudes to women are so deeply entrenched and normalised.

A few months ago, inspired by the brilliant Everyday Sexism and Everyday Media Sexism campaigns, I asked constituents to help me gather evidence of the problem. I have since joined forces with women’s groups in Brighton and Hove to launch the Spot the Sexism campaign, which is a month-long campaign dedicated to sharing experiences of how women are portrayed in the media.

I would like to give a sense of just a few contributions that I have received so far. More are coming in, and I hope that the Minister will agree to a meeting later in the year, as some of my constituents would very much like the opportunity to talk about their experiences.

Let me start with a Mail Online story about Britney Spears that appeared on 8 March—ironically, on international women’s day. It opens like this:

“Like many women Britney, who has a net worth of nearly $200 million dollars, appears to struggle to find the right bra…On this occasion Britney ‘booby trap’ appears to be caused by a lack of support—and a sure sign that she needs to use some of her earnings to splash out on some correctly sized lingerie.”

The website used eight photos of the singer to make its point.

On the same day, the website also carried this headline about a Girls Aloud singer: “Being on tour certainly suits you! Kimberley Walsh shows off her tiny hourglass figure in a clinging white dress”. The story was illustrated with three virtually identical photos of her in the said dress. The spurious news element in both pieces was presumably that two women had bothered to get dressed before leaving the house, but the subtext is that they are worth nothing more than the content of their wardrobes or the shape of their bodies.

The frequency with which women’s looks are used to undermine them was underscored by a Telegraph piece that irritated another of my constituents. It was about the Conservative candidate for the Eastleigh by-election, in which far more was said about her appearance than her policies—specifically, the fact that the journalist decided that she must have been airbrushed in the billboard posters because the real-life version looked tired and harassed, rather than sleek and happy. Another constituent cites every single story in the so-called sidebar of shame in the Mail. The irony, of course, is that that is part of the content aimed directly at women.

The Daily Mail comes in for more criticism than most, including for the way that it is still struggling with, as one constituent puts it,

“the right—or is it the wrong—age to have a baby.”

She is referring to the endless stream of articles critical of women having children later in life, as well as of those having them too young, or of working mothers, or those who stay at home. The articles accused women of being too old for IVF and quizzed career women who have “failed” in their so called “duty” to produce offspring.

Another constituent sends this example of media sexism, saying:

“The Sun’s leery front page on Reeva Steenkamp a fortnight ago was particularly outrageous. They wouldn’t print a picture of a recently murdered man in his swimming trunks, one hopes.”

A constituent who complained about a BBC trailer for a children’s TV programme, in which girls are shown answering phones and applying makeup, while boys are shown operating cameras and reading the news, got this reply:

“I can assure you that the trail certainly wasn’t designed to perpetuate any negative gender stereotyping…However, I fully recognise your concerns about how girls are shown throughout the trail. To that end I’d like to assure you that I’ve registered your concerns on our audience log…The audience logs are seen as important documents that can help shape decisions about future programming and content.”

Well, the message does not seem to have got through. I myself was incensed to see even a trailer for BBC Parliament, that august channel, use clips of exclusively male politicians—there were 12 politicians, all of them male—to depict the cut and thrust of politics. I wonder what message that gives to any young girls or women who might be considering going into politics.

Then, of course, there is page 3—a symbol of the fact that pictures that are illegal on workplace walls because of equalities legislation are still allowed to be featured in our newspapers. Sexually objectifying images that would be restricted on broadcast media before the 9 pm watershed are printed in national newspapers that are not age-restricted and are displayed at child’s-eye level. Defenders of page 3 argue that adults should be able to choose to look at images of topless women and that anyone who does not like it does not need to buy The Sun. As the nation’s most popular newspaper, The Sun is seen by about 7.5 million people every day, according to market data. Many have not chosen to view those images, but they cannot be avoided, whether they have been left lying around in cafés, on the bus or in the pub. That means that children in particular are at risk of being exposed to page 3.

These are a few examples of how page 3 helps to normalise the objectification of women’s bodies—and the consequences. A schoolgirl wrote to the Everyday Sexism project, saying that the boys in her school hold up page 3 in the corridor and mark the girls out of 10 as they walk past. A teacher who asked the class to bring in newspapers for art class had to explain why there was a naked woman in a so-called newspaper. A mother who took her six-year-old daughter to a café for a treat and found page 3 lying open on a table was asked, “Mummy, why isn’t that lady wearing a top?” A father felt outraged that a man was looking at page 3 while his three-and-a-half-year-old daughter was having a haircut. None of those people buys The Sun and none wants to look at images of topless women in newspapers, yet they had little choice.

As Lucy Holmes, founder of the wonderful No More Page Three campaign, says,

“We are all affected by Page Three whether we buy it or not, because we all live in a society where the most widely read paper in the country makes ‘normal’ the idea that women are there primarily for men’s sexual pleasure.”

The answer is not to “turn over”, as the Prime Minister has suggested. Turning the page on inequality, prejudice, harassment and violence does not make it go away. Nor is the fact that some page 3 models say that they feel empowered by men looking at their bodies any justification, because many more women are disempowered by the objectification of their and other women’s bodies. Lucy Holmes says that we

“see page after page of men doing all of this stuff, like running the country and achieving in sport, and then there’s an image of a woman standing there in her pants.”

The impact on young girls’ self-image is especially worrying, as has been recognised by Girlguiding. It is supporting the No More Page Three campaign with this message:

“We need to get used to the idea that women are not for sale.”

In common with the No More Page Three campaign, I do not think that women’s breasts are acceptable daily content for a family newspaper. For that and a whole host of associated reasons, I join the campaign in calling on the paper’s editor to consign page 3 to the rubbish bin, where it belongs. To date, public pressure has secured the most public sign from the proprietor of The Sun that the paper might scrap page 3, but the clock is ticking and we still have not seen any concrete action, so I think that if page 3 still has not been removed from The Sun by the end of this year, we should be asking the Government to step in and legislate.

There are other areas where the Government could act as well. The National Federation of Retail Newsagents issued updated guidelines on displaying adult or top-shelf titles in December 2012. The Government could, as a small but important step, consider whether to make those guidelines mandatory, rather than voluntary as at present. It could also extend them to a wider range of publications to ensure that young women in particular are better protected from page 3-type images. Hon. Members may know that there are also currently moves to hold supermarkets and newsagents to account under equalities legislation for stocking publications that degrade women. I hope that the Minister will look at that as well.

Women’s groups such as the End Violence Against Women coalition also argue that newspapers and magazines that are not age-restricted should always be suitable for wider audiences—in other words, audiences that include children and young people. That means that all content, including advertising, must be suitable for children to consume if they choose to buy the publication or if they should come across it unawares. The groups recommend that sexual material, such as images of nudity and/or language of a strong sexual nature that are not justified by the context, is not printed in newspapers or magazines that are not age-restricted. Those principles already exist for broadcast media, and I am interested in what the Minister thinks about introducing some consistency.

Crucially, we also need the wider media culture to change. We could start by ensuring that the new editors’ code of conduct, introduced in the wake of the Leveson inquiry, has a much stronger clause on the definition of discrimination, in line with equalities legislation designed to protect people from violation and with the Government’s international obligations on equality. People with expertise in equality should be an integral and permanent part of drawing up and overseeing implementation of the code. That would help to deliver media that better reflect their audience. Half of us are women, yet there is still a notable absence of women presenters and journalists. It is the case that 72% of “Question Time” contributors are men and 84% of reporters and guests on Radio 4’s “Today” show are men. Just 18% of presenters over 50 are women—that is evidence that women are battling against media ageism as well as sexism.

It is not just TV that is the problem. Researchers have found that from July 2011 to June 2012 women wrote less than one third of the articles in the Daily Mail, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian and only 26% of the opinion pages. Only one national newspaper is edited by a woman, and there has only ever been one instance of a woman editing a daily broadsheet newspaper in the UK. That was 15 years ago when Rosie Boycott became editor of The Independent for just three months, from January to April 1998.

Women are fighting back with wonderful initiatives such as The Women’s Room and HerSay to promote women experts on a range of topics, yet in a media culture that degrades women as standard, they are swimming against the tide. We need media that feature women in all their diversity as well, rather than media that inadequately reflect women’s roles and contributions to society, yet that, too, is an uphill struggle when the industry is dominated by men.

A Women in Journalism analysis of UK newspaper front pages from 2012 found that not only were more than three quarters of the stories written by men but that men also dominated the news stories themselves. Of all those quoted or mentioned by name in the lead stories, just 16% were women. The analysis also found significant differences in the roles that named men and women played in news stories. For example, three quarters of so-called experts were men and 79% of so-called victims were women. Women are twice as likely to be quoted in their capacity as celebrities and 10 times as likely to be featured as victims when compared with men. If it is true that a picture is worth a thousand words, the photos that make the front pages—not just page 3—of our newspapers also tell us a great deal about media sexism.

Women in Journalism’s analysis further underscores how much men dominate the news agenda and examines the particular function that women fulfil for newspapers. Although there are generally strong news-related reasons for the appearance of most images of men on a sample of front pages, the same cannot necessarily be said for the women who feature. It cites as an example the Middleton sisters, for whom

“the wearing of a new hat or new dress could be enough to prompt a lead front page picture, in a way that would be unlikely to be the case, say, if Prince William or Harry stepped out in a new tie.”

An improved code of conduct needs to go hand in hand with ensuring that the proposed new regulatory bodies are fit for purpose. That means that the post-Leveson regulatory frameworks need to institute and include a statutory body with proper women’s representation on it and full rights for third parties and groups to complain about prejudicial treatment in the media. That is essential if the press is to be held accountable through fair public scrutiny in line with its own press code.

Sexualised and sexist representations of women in the media provide a conducive context for violence against women and girls; it is one in which such violence flourishes. Earlier, I cited the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. I welcome the fact that the Government have this year joined other member states at the UN Commission on the Status of Women in making a formal commitment to act. It has specifically promised to

“promote balanced and non-stereotypical portrayals of women with a view to eliminating discrimination against and the exploitation of women and girls and refraining from presenting them as inferior beings and exploiting them as sexual objects and commodities and instead present women and girls as creative human beings, key actors and contributors to and beneficiaries of the process of development”.

That is a very worthy and positive objective, and I look forward to hearing from the Minister what practical action the Government will be taking to that end to confront media sexism. I should also like to know whether he agrees with me that it is a sexist anachronism that The Sun is still available so widely across the Palace of Westminster Estate and whether he will join me in taking action to try to get rid of it. I hope that the Minister will lend his full support to the measures that I have outlined today.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Vaizey]

If the hon. Lady will forgive me, I am not planning to join her campaign to keep The Sun out of the Palace of Westminster. As I said, it is a matter of choice whether people read The Sun and I do not think that campaign would be appropriate. I have only three seconds left, so I congratulate her on this effective debate.

[Mr Jim Hood (in the Chair)]

I suspend the sitting until 4 pm, as the 2.30 debate has been cancelled.