In the current media globalization, the amount of time one spends with it has increased. In the meantime, different mass media contain considerable amounts of violence that have led to a combination of scientific intrigue. Violence has become the foundation of many films, TV movies, and action series. In fact, violence is often synonymous with “action”.
Media representations create an impression of events rather than an accurate, objective, factual record of what took place. Distinctions between action and reality become blurred. Africa is usually conceptualised in thoroughly negative terms such as crime, poverty, and other social ills as a result of the media focuses upon famine, disease, civil war and corruption that have created a thoroughly unbalanced picture. Africa’s association with endless cycles of war and violence has added to this embedded image of Africa.
There are many actions that constitute domestic violence that are not defined as crimes, such as forced isolation, verbal abuse, stalking and economic abuse. Indeed, domestic violence is very complex issue because it is often not just a one-off event, but rather a series of events, or a continuous pattern of abuse, where violence exists as a continuum with one serious violent incident at one end, to ongoing and multiple abuses at the other. This pattern of abuse is not recognised in most of the African criminal law, which tends to isolate individual incidents. In addition, most crimes of domestic violence are not reported to the police for fear of intimation, shame, fear of not being believed, self-blame, or fear of retaliation.
This research investigates the media coverage of violence, reviews the available literature on this issue and surveys the media and journalism students in the University of Cape Town perception of domestic violence in their society. It is indeed a case study that does not reflect the whole social fabric, yet it can certainly offer a window of self-perception and social conflict in South Africa.
