Former UG Master’s student, Jordan Fairbairn, and UG sociologist Myrna Dawson published research this month examining Canadian news coverage of intimate partner homicide in Feminist Criminology. Drawing from Fairbairn’s Master’s thesis research, the article analyzes all male-perpetrated intimate partner homicides reported in three daily newspapers in Toronto, Canada within two separate time periods (1975-1979 and 1998-2002) to explore if and how this coverage has changed over time. Results suggest that, in more recent years, news coverage is more likely to report a previous history of intimate partner violence and less likely to employ news that excuses or justifies the perpetrator’s actions. However, coverage continues to employ victim-blaming news frames and to portray intimate partner homicide as an individual event, in part, through the absence of the voices of violence against women organizations, researchers, and service providers as legitimate authorities in both time periods. The authors concluded that news coverage still fails to encourage social and political responses to violence against women in intimate relationships that emphasize the need for social structural changes focusing on gender equality. Fairbairn is currently a PhD student in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. An adjunct professor at Carleton, Dawson is co-advising Fairbairn’s PhD research with Dr. Aaron Doyle.
