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The news media play an important role in influencing public perceptions and raising awareness of an issue. This research analyzes media framing of child/forced marriage through an examination of six US national newspapers over a ten-year period. It probes how narratives are constructed based on issue perception, blame attribution, and protagonist perceptions. It finds that print media has afforded increasing coverage to minimum marriage age legislation in the US. Mediated by advocacy organizations and survivors, the discourse surrounding child marriage has used a thematic frame as a legal issue with the onus on the state to amend laws facilitating child marriage. Forced marriage of adults has been framed as thematic too, but regarded as a cultural imperative. This culturalization of violence prevents forced marriage from being recognized as gender violence. Thus, while the thematic framing is laudable, the type of thematic framing matters, especially concerning blame attribution and the perceptions of protagonists, to fully comprehend this form of gender violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problematisation of a social phenomenon is a political process that both constructs the problem and, in doing so, suggests possible remedies and occludes others. Based on the first-ever comprehensive analysis of 129 UK university policies to address Gender-based violence (GBV), we examine how the 'problem' of GBV is conceptualised in institutional policies. We explore three interconnected themes: the nature of the 'problem' that is constituted, analysing whether GBV is explicitly acknowledged and constructed narrowly or broadly; the place of gender and its intersection with other social relations of power in this problematisation; and the implicit ways in which GBV is constructed as an individual or a social problem. We also examine the implications of such constructions for imagining possible responses to GBV. In doing so, this article contributes to academic debates on the conceptualisation of GBV, while offering original insights into how such conceptualisations are materialised within institutional policy and regulatory frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Upskirting' – the non-consensual taking and/or dissemination of intimate images taken surreptitiously up a skirt – is a relatively new addition to the repertoire of men's violence against women and girls. Recently, it has received considerable media and public attention in many countries and some academic scrutiny. This systematic review explicates how scholars construct upskirting as a matter for academic inquiry and a social problem that requires remedy. Four research sub-questions address how scholarship constructs: the problem of upskirting; perpetrators of upskirting; victims of upskirting, and remedies. Five bibliographical databases were searched, yielding 26 sources that met the inclusion criteria. Most of the studies (16) and most of the earlier work are from the discipline of Law. Other studies come from a combination of Criminology, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Psychology, Social Work, Sociology, and Computing. The predominance of legal scholarship has created a framing of upskirting which constructs it as an individual sexual act, for purposes of sexual gratification, as gender-neutral, as the act of aberrant individuals, and scrutinises the act of taking the photograph. By contrast, scholarship from other disciplines is more likely to locate upskirting as highly gendered behaviour in the context of gendered relations of power, and of violence against women and girls, and to consider both the act of taking the photograph and its dissemination online. We argue that future research ought to: approach upskirting as a form of violence against women and girls; be empirical and intersectional, and engage with victims and perpetrators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]