Media plays an enormous role in forming opinions on gender issues and women’s rights as well as sensitizing the public towards such important topics as gender based violence (GBV), educating the society on the causes and consequences of GBV, positively or negatively contributing towards forming the stereotypes regarding the women’s rights.
However it is with regret that gender issues, violence against women (VAW) and domestic violence which constitute one of the most actual realities of the day to day lives of many women in Azerbaijan are not among the frequently addressed topics in the country’s media. While looking through the national media outlets we can observe that media is more oriented towards publishing only news of sensational character about above-mentioned violence cases. The numbers of any journalist investigations, analyses and interviews are very limited.
Combating Gender Based Violence in Azerbaijan Project (UNFPA) organized three day training course on “Media coverage of gender based violence: principles and standards” aimed at increasing the journalists’ awareness on GBV and providing the journalists with important theoretical and practical knowledge that has the potential to play an enormous role in improving the quality of stories regarding GBV and women’s rights. The organizational support for the conduction of the training that was held on December 4-6, 2009 was rendered by the local NGO “Guzaran”.
During the three day training the representatives of mass media were provided with comprehensive information on GBV, its causes and consequences, the level of GBV in society, its negative impact on women, men and children; role of media in forming opinions regarding GBV and women’s rights in society; adhering to the principles of anonymity and sensitivity while reporting on cases of GBV; the United Nations Convention on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; etc. A total of 17 journalists representing national and local media agencies attended the training.
Overall, the training consisted of two sections. The fist part of the training aimed at providing the participants with background information on general gender issues while the second section was predominantly oriented devoted to media coverage of gender issues.
Upon the training completion an evaluation was held among the participants. All journalists emphasized that the Azerbaijani media has allocated very little space to gender and GBV issues. According to more than half of journalists (88 percent), gender issues are interesting only for a certain group of audience. 30 percent of the participants attributed this to the level of the importance of the topic, 35 percent to the priority areas identified by the editors, and the remaining ones linked this to the preferences of the audience. Only 23 percent of training participants said that they had seen any journalist investigation or comprehensive material on this topic in the media. Same number of journalists stated that they reported at least 2-3 news regarding GVB issues per month, while 41 percent reported this issue once in 3-4 months. The rest did not even remember if they ever reported any GBV cases. 47 percent of respondents could not mention any journalist in the Azerbaijani media specialized in gender issues versus 23 percent saying that journalists reporting on general human right issues cover gender topics too. According to the rest of the audience, the specialization was not of importance and the journalists could report on everything. Finally, 77 percent of participants emphasized the need for various organizations specializing in gender issues to improve collaboration with media to increase journalists’ knowledge on this topic.
Taking this into account the CGBV PCU plans to conduct more coordinated activities with mass media representatives in the third project year.
