The Hindu : Kerala / Thiruvananthapuram News : More fairness in reporting of women’s issues sought

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Nov 20, 2007
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Kerala

Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram

More fairness in reporting of women’s issues sought

Staff Reporter

Media should formulate a policy, says women’s panel

Violence against women getting little space: D. Sreedevi
Panel’s media monitoring cell holds first meeting

Thiruvananthapuram: The print and visual media should formulate a women’s policy so that issues which involve or affect women are handled in a fair and judicious manner, the Women’s Commission has suggested.

Briefing the media on the activities of the Commission’s Media Monitoring Cell that has been constituted, Commission Chairperson D. Sreedevi said here on Monday that the media was more focussed on sensationalising issues involving women.

The media needed to change its attitude in the manner in which women’s issues were reported.

Often, incidents where women played a negative role are given a lot of prominence. Larger issues like the increasing atrocities/violence against women, suicide tendencies among women or the disappearance of young girls were either ignored or handled in a perfunctory manner by the media, Ms. Sreedevi, said.

She said the Commission planned to hold a meeting of news editors/bureau chiefs to discuss these issues. The 12-member media monitoring cell of the Commission held its first meeting here on Monday.

The committee observed that a lot of soft-porn magazines and books, obviously targeted at the young, were available cheaply in the market. A lot of titillating material was also being given much legitimisation by the so-called health magazines, the committee observed. The committee will examine these issues and submit its recommendations within a month.

The Women’s Commission also wanted schools to organise awareness programmes so that the children were not led astray by the explicit material that now reached them through mobile phones and the Internet. Ms. Sreedevi stressed that parents needed to be more aware of the dangers that lurked in the cyber world that could harm children and said parental monitoring of children’s activities on the Internet was necessary.

Home computers should be placed only in a common space, she said.

The Commission also wanted the police to intensify raids to check the proliferation of porn books and material and to ensure that these did not reach children.

Action sought

Ms. Sreedevi said that hoardings and bill boards that portrayed women in a lewd manner had come up in many parts of the city. The police should take action against those who put up such material and the local bodies should not give permission for the display of such material.

Commission Member T. Devi and Director G. Shantaram, among others, were present on the occasion.

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