“The War Against Women”

This chapter explores the way in which one Australian newspaper represented men’s violence against women and children in a series called “The War Against Women” in 1993. Notwithstanding widespread media coverage of men’s violence, “The War” series responded with a shock-of-the-new reaction to statistics and reports indicating widespread domestic violence and sexual assaults in Victoria, Australia. The chapter comments critically on the newspaper’s discursive construction of the problem of men’s violence and its attempt to represent that violence as a war.