Media reporting on Harvey Weinstein tells you a lot about why men get away with sexual violence

Tabloid misogyny is dog-whistle solidarity for abusive and dangerous men

Harvey Weinstein has been accused by a number of women of sexual assault and rape (Getty)

The case of Harvey Weinstein has had varying coverage in the press but perhaps the most stunning comes from the UK tabloids. Today both The Sun and The Daily Star ran the story of decades-long alleged mass sexual abuse adjacent to semi-pornographic imagery on their front pages.

Page 3 might be gone but many mainstream media outlets still continue to sexualise and dehumanise women. From using words like “romp” in lieu of sexual assault, to breaking the news of a woman's murder at the hands of her partner with a full-page image of her in a bikini, the tabloid press has a signature style and it hasn't changed since the 1970s, back when a man could still legally rape his wife, and women weren't allowed bank accounts in their own name.

On the one hand they denounce the actions of men like Weinstein, and on the other they openly encourage the very same perceptions of women as nothing more than objects for male sexual use. This attitude is what enables abuse of women to proliferate – it’s what enables the abuse of high-profile men toward vulnerable women to proliferate.

The UN Commission on the Elimination and Prevention of all Forms of Violence Against Women and Girls – otherwise known as the Istanbul Convention – outlines clearly that the media plays a vital role in forming attitudes towards women and, as such, should refrain from “presenting them as inferior beings and exploiting them as sexual objects and commodities”.

A subsequent report into how effectively the resolution was being implemented stated: “The media provides a conducive context in which violence against women and girls (VAWG) flourishes, by reinforcing myths and stereotypes... violence in some newspapers is eroticised by juxtaposing stories of VAWG with semi-naked or scantily clad women”.

By connecting sexually objectifying imagery with reports of rape, violence and sexual abuse, the seriousness of such news is diminished, sexualised and sensationalised.

When Reeva Steenkamp was murdered by Oscar Pistorius in 2013, the Sun and the Daily Star illustrated the news with various spreads of the victim in her lingerie. Last year both the Scottish Daily Mail and the Metro published reports into an inquest tasked with uncovering sexual abuse with crude details of the alleged victim's sexual history, a practice which is particularly harmful since it suggests that evidence of any crimes committed against the complainant should be thrown into doubt on account of past sexual relations.

The National Union of Journalists guidelines advise that when reporting on cases of sexual violence journalists should “take care not to imply that a survivor of gender-based violence might be somehow, even partially, to blame for the violence she has experienced”.

This advice exists for good reason; the Crown Prosecution Service concedes that myths about rape and sexual violence are consistently brought into the jury room and form an obstacle to obtaining convictions. Rape conviction rates in the UK remain incredibly low, with only 5.7 per cent of reported rape cases ending in a conviction.

So why do we keep seeing coverage like this? The answer is very clear: the men who edit these papers simply want another salacious opportunity to entertain their readers on the morning commute, and they have no one to answer to. They don’t care about the messages they are sending, or the fact that by sexualising women and belittling abuse, they are contributing to rape culture.

The bodies that govern newspapers in the UK in the interests of the public have shown themselves to be unconcerned by this phenomena time and again. In 2012 countless women’s groups and charities such as the End Violence Against Women coalition (EVAW), Eaves and Object were invited to submit evidence to the Leveson Inquiry on press abuse in the UK.

The evidence they collated is filled with examples like the above and collectively they called on the inquiry to look at the way the media in Britain reports on violence against women, including victim-blaming and the perpetuation of myths about abuse, and how the press objectifies and degrades women.

Leveson’s final report concluded that the tabloid press has “a tendency to sexualise and demean women” and that this “has a broader impact on the perception and role of women in society”. He recommended that any future press regulator should have “the power to take complaints from representative women’s groups” and, further still, that the Editors’ Code enforced by that regulator should be amended to “reflect the spirit of equalities legislation”.

These recommendations were welcomed by women’s groups and charities. Such changes, they said, were especially relevant given “the endemic nature of violence against women and girls in our society”.

However the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) replaced the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) on 8 September 2014, and despite Leveson’s recommendation, will not for the most part accept complaints about newspaper conduct from groups or organisations, unless the concern relates to a general point of fact or the organisation is formally representing the person who has been the subject of media coverage.

This renders women's organisations unable to fulfil one of their main purposes: to be the voice for women who are voiceless. Forcing people to come forward as individuals minimises the seriousness of the infraction, and refuses to recognise the devastating systemic effects of sexism in the media.

The Editor's Code of Conduct, which is overseen by a committee that until recently had Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail as its chairman, still has precisely no guidelines in it regarding the appropriate reporting of violence against women. Women's groups continue to raise their concerns about this omission at the committee's yearly public consultations, to no avail.

The arbiters of these social institutions; IPSO, The Editor's Code Committee, the newspaper editors who curate the content, and the photographers who snatch "upskirt" shots of famous women for their front pages, currently get to decide whether we as women, victims, and survivors, are afforded humanity, or whether the violence enacted on us is simply another form of light sexual entertainment for the masses.

Is it any surprise that a man like Weinstein was reportedly able to maintain a reign of terror over the women of Hollywood, largely unchallenged, for years? We don't punish men who sexually demean and abuse women – we barely even disapprove. We make light of sexual abuse. We elect those who condone it as President. Tabloid misogyny is dog-whistle solidarity for abusive and dangerous men, and it needs to stop.