Media Reporting on Sexual Violence and Harassment in Nightlife Entertainment Spots in Slovenian Urban and Rural Areas

Abstract

The article aims to present research findings of Slovenian media reports about sexual violence and harassment in nightlife entertainment spots in Slovenia. The analysis included articles between 1 January 2014 and 30 June 2020 in Slovenian media publications Delo, Dnevnik, Vecer, 24ur, and MMC RTV SLO. The collection of relevant articles, which followed the keywords sexual violence, harassment, and rape, returned 90 results. We conducted the analysis using the program MaxQDA 2020, XLSTAT Statistical Software for Excel, and SPSS. The most frequent terms used in the researched articles were rape drug GHB, police, court/law, Ljubljana, and acts referring to inappropriate, prohibited, or criminal acts. Results revealed that the analysed sexual violence and sexual harassment topics are underrepresented in studied media. Besides, the reporting was focused on the most severe cases of sexual violence and rape drugs, and sexual harassment was rarely mentioned. The analysed articles most often reported the sexual violence and harassment related to nightlife venues in urban areas. Rural areas were mentioned only in 4.4% of the analysed articles. Besides the frequency and the number of articles, other differences in reporting between urban, suburban, and rural areas occurred (e.g. reporting style and coverage of news). In 57.8% of articles we observed professional and objective reporting. Sensationalistic reporting was noticed in 38.9% of articles, shown as one-sided reporting, nonverification of facts, e.g. reference to rumours, missing sources of information, and use of different linguistic means and stylistic procedures (e.g. conversational language, jargon, irony, and exaggeration). Most of the headlines (65.5%) were naming-informative, showing the reader an insight into article`s topic.