Leveraging the potential of media data for the study of violent crime: Homicide Media Tracker Part 1
By Dr Nechama Brodie
Obtaining reliable, standardized and rich data about homicides is a challenge that faces researchers all over the world. Because we can’t study societal violence in a laboratory, or see each murder ‘when it happens’, the data we are able to gather has to be measured through surveillance of its after-effects. To do this, we often use statistics and information supplied by police, courts, hospitals, and even mortuaries.
In many countries, however, official information about violent crime such as homicide or unlawful killing may be limited or unreliable. This can be because of inadequate administrative resources, but it frequently includes broader issues with police and justice systems. These range from regional variations in the definitions of crimes to the systematic erasure of or failure to report crimes against certain groups of people. This problem is more prevalent, and frequently harder to resolve, in high-crime and low-income countries.
Crime data is usually anonymized before it can be shared with the public or academic researchers, to protect the privacy of victims and perpetrators, and to avoid any prejudicing of ongoing police or judicial actions. Whilst this is ethical and appropriate, it means that the information provided to us from official sources tells only part of a large and usually complex story about where and how violence takes place and who it affects.
Why study homicide coverage in the media?
Although media reports on crime are mostly anecdotal (offering insights into a single event based on eyewitness accounts or limited statements) they have the potential to help fill in some of the ‘missing’ pieces, and add depth or breadth to what information is available.
Homicide is typically one of the most-reported crimes in terms of police cases (many instances of other crimes, including violent crimes, go unreported). The seriousness of the offense means that such killings may be more ‘newsworthy’ than other types of violent crime, and are covered in the media more frequently than others. This does not mean, though, that all homicides get covered in the press. In countries with extremely high rates of violent crime, only a small proportion of murders even make it to the pages or screens of news reports. News coverage varies depending on the type of crime, who the victim was, and who committed the crime. Data indicates that less than 20% of female homicides or femicides in South Africa get reported in the press, while over 70% of (white) farm murders receive coverage. Currently, we do not have data on how many homicides overall are covered in the media.
“Media coverage can provide a rich resource of homicide data over time, which allows us to study how crime and perceptions of crime have changed.”
Studying homicide coverage in the media is important because it not only tells us more about (some of the) crimes that were committed, but it also tells us about the societies in which those crimes took place. It tells us how communities felt about certain types of victims and perpetrators, and what kind of judicial processes (if any) were conducted and concluded.
Media coverage can also provide a rich resource of homicide data over time, which allows us to study how crime and perceptions of crime have changed. For example, the concept of ‘domestic violence’ meaning intimate partner violence at home didn’t really exist as a formal, broadly accepted psychological concept until the late 1970s, and it took even longer before it became recognized by various countries’ legal systems. When we study news reports from different times, we can see how this societal and legal change was expressed in news reports.
Media reports about crime have a number of inherent limitations and are not a single solution to the data challenges, but they offer an important and also publicly accessible resource which, when collected and studied in the right way, can be used to add consistent and relevant information to what we know.
More knowledge means we have a better chance of understanding violence as a global and local phenomenon, which can help us identify strategies for resolving and preventing violence.
Introducing the Homicide Media Tracker
The Homicide Media Tracker is a project by Dr Nechama Brodie to create a digital tool that will enable collection and enhanced digital curation of homicide-in-media data from multiple media sources. Currently under development with funding from the SAGE Concept Grant, the Homicide Media Tracker will allow researchers to build and retrieve information about homicides, media coverage of homicide, and/or the relationship between homicide incidence and media coverage.
For example, the Homicide Media Tracker could be used to retrieve data on specific types of victims (e.g.child homicides, murders of sex workers, family killings) either during a defined period or over extended periods of time. It can also be used to look at specific categories of crime, such as homicides that were committed in the course of home robberies, or homicides involving firearms.
Violence and policing researchers might use the data to learn more about where murders take place. Police data often only record the station where a murder was reported, or the closest street corner, rather than the actual murder location. News stories could supplement this data and provide important information about the types of homicide locations – an empty field, the victim’s house, and so on. News coverage can also provide data on arrests and court cases, which would allow us to track the outcomes of criminal incidents such as whether the perpetrator was convicted, and what type of sentence they received.
Using this same information, we can also observe changes in media coverage over time, such as whether coverage of a particular issue increases or decreases with time, and how the language used to describe certain homicides had evolved. In the case of South Africa, for example, media-sourced data can be used to show how black homicides and white homicides were covered differently during the apartheid years.
about
Nechama Brodie is a journalist, author and academic based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a PhD in journalism from the University of the Witwatersrand, where she is also a part-time lecturer. Her research work focuses on homicide in the Global South, integrating media sources with statistical and epidemiological data to gain new insights into interpersonal and criminal violence. Her latest book is Femicide in South Africa published by Kwela Books.
Keep an eye out for Part 2 of this series for more details on how the Homicide Media Tracker will work, the type of data it will be able to collect, and how this data can be put to use.