ABSTRACT
Scholarship on news and journalism about gendered violence, including rape, sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and sexual harassment, has fit generally under the larger project of examining news framing and understanding the functions of news in constructing reality as well as reflecting and supporting dominant ideologies. This chapter considers where the key areas of continued potential improvement remain, and what changes will contribute to a more helpful and less constrained treatment of gender violence. Cultural ideas related to race and rape created deliberately as a strategy of racist targeting of black men, who during the period of Reconstruction could be killed for a mere accusation of interest in a white woman have continued to circulate throughout the decades since. The focus on extreme cases is especially problematic when the subject is rape or sexual assault, because of the historical legal and social definition in the US that considered only violent stranger rape as a legitimate crime.
